$2.3 Trillion For Afghanistan And $0 For Black Folk

… dollars at all to help African Americans in our own country recover … and present racial animus and racism is a crime against … as the racial animus and racism itself. It is an … “Victory Abroad.” But even then, racism dictated that Black folks had … RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News

Ads bashing Ron DeSantis jet use, ‘MAGA field’s extremism’ hit Milwaukee for GOP debate

As Republicans converge on Milwaukee for the first presidential debate, Democrats and an anti-Ron DeSantis PAC are flooding the zone with paid media to welcome them.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and DeSantis Watch are running a spate of billboard and digital ads in Cream City blasting the “MAGA field’s extremism” and the “failing economic record” — their words — of Florida’s Governor.

While Donald Trump leads national polling by double digits, much of the attention Wednesday is on DeSantis, who holds a distant second-place spot. Unlike the former President, DeSantis will appear on the debate stage at the Fiserv Forum with seven other GOP candidates.

DeSantis Watch’s digital ads will focus on the Governor’s penchant for private jets and insurance industry-aligned fundraising alongside Florida’s high costs for renters, ailing insurance market and nation-leading inflation.

Ahead of his presidential campaign, the cost of DeSantis’ full-time security and travel increased by nearly 60% to $8.86 million, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“While the rich get richer under Ron DeSantis and corporate profits skyrocket, working Floridians and seniors can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads and groceries on the table,” DeSantis Watch Communications Director Anders Croy said in a statement.

“Ron DeSantis may have cashed in on his position as Governor to access the finer things in life, but everyday Americans can’t afford the private jet lifestyle he loves to enjoy.”

View one of two similar ads below.

The DNC is running static billboards on Interstate 43, Interstate 794 and Interstate 94; a mobile billboard circling an area between Westover and Haymarket from 3-11 p.m. CDT; and a plane that will fly over Milwaukee from 4-8 p.m. CDT.

They’ll highlight, among other things, Florida’s skyrocketing housing and health care costs, ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and new education laws that have led to book bans and changes to how African American history is taught.

Of the Republican candidates taking the stage, DNC Co-chair Cedric Richmond said, “They’d rather ban books than assault weapons and you will hear them double down on that tomorrow as they continue to appeal to the MAGA base. The real threat — and I think the theme you’ll see tomorrow — is that no one will stand up to the consistent efforts by them to undermine democracy.”

View the DNC ads below.

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Biden’s campaign is taking a cheekier tack by leaning into the “Dark Brandon” meme, an ironic response to the coded “Let’s go Brandon” insult of the President that Republicans adopted in late 2021.

The campaign’s “Dark Brandon creative,” consisting of four identically designed pieces featuring Biden’s laser-eyed internet alter ego, will cycle through multiple programmatic billboards within a mile radius of the debate site.

The goal is “slamming the MAGA field’s extremism and drawing a contrast between their out-of-touch agendas and the Biden-(Kamala Harris) administration’s record of delivering for the American people.”

View the Biden campaign ads below.

The first Republican presidential debate airs live on Fox News Wednesday from 9-11 p.m. EDT.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces ‘The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism’

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be hosting New York’s first art museum survey of the Harlem Renaissance art movement since 1987. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will encompass 160 works of art across a range of mediums.  Spanning paintings, sculpture, and on-paper works, the pieces included in the forthcoming exhibit work together to explore the comprehensive ways in which Black artists depicted everyday life in the 1920s through the 1940s in the new Black cities that arose in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood as well as Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration.

Opening on February 25 2024 at The Met, the exhibit is slated to feature works from Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring. The works of the aforementioned artists will be showcased against the contrasting portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein and Ronald Moody. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is currently scheduled to run through July 28, 2024.

As indicated in the above Instagram post, a majority of the works on display are sanctioned from the archives of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum and Howard University Gallery of Art.⁣⁣ The oil on burlap work showcased above, entitled “Woman in Blue, is by William H. Johnson and dates back to 1943.

Access to the exhibition is included with museum admission. For full ticketing details, visit The Met’s website.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Ave,
New York, NY 10028

Elsewhere in the art space, check out SOLDIER’s “Passport” Series, which sets the immigration system straight.

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the governor thinks

… experiences of all Americans — including Black Americans — who shaped our history,” Harris … students about the history of African Americans, including the “enslavement experience,” … of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual … RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News

Dave the Potter’s Mark on History

From the trenches of the Antebellum South, enslaved potter David Drake (ca. 1801-1874), otherwise known as “Dave the Potter,” constructed hundreds if not thousands of functional pots while working on plantations and in factories in Edgefield, South Carolina, a region now famous for its ceramics. Dave was heralded for his enormous storage jars and for writing on his pots.

During the nineteenth century, life on some plantations revolved around pottery making: Jugs, jars, pitchers, and kitchen wares were generally made by hand, by the enslaved in the rural South. Most of the potters at this time, those who were enslaved as well as the white laborers who were not, did not inscribe or mark their work in any identifying way. Dave was different. He signed his name on the walls of his pots. He engraved markings, for example, such as forward slashes and circled X’s that may have been a way to keep inventory, or that hearkened to ancestral roots. Dave also wrote dates, the location where he fashioned the pots, lines of poetry, and Christian proverbs. All of these practices set him apart.

Beyond the imprints Dave intentionally made, his pottery bears other hallmarks of its time and origin: it is made of alkaline-glazed stoneware, which dominated the “Edgefield District,” as it was known, during Dave’s life. More specifically, alkaline is a type of ceramic glaze adopted in the South during the Colonial Era. Stoneware is the type of clay the pottery is made from, using local white kaolin clay and water from local sources like the Savannah River in conjunction with high kiln temperatures used in firing. Such stoneware was produced throughout the South, all the way down to Texas.

Storage jar by Dave the Potter
Storage jar by Dave the Potter via JSTOR

In North America, pottery making likely started in the Southeastern region around 4500 BCE. Archeologists have found remains of functional pottery across the coastal and shell-midden regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where, writes Liz Tracey for JSTOR Daily, “mounds of shells tossed from consumed mollusks are found, sometimes with pottery, clothing, and plants mixed in.”

Before the Civil War, “the American pottery industry was dispersed geographically and struggled to compete against those greater economies of scale enjoyed by British manufacturers,” writes Christopher C. Fennell in The Archaeology of Craft and Industry. Yet, as plantation owners increasingly needed large vessels to store food and water for the enslaved, and to meet similar needs at surrounding plantations, they enlisted the enslaved to answer the demand. In doing so, they created the southern hubs of ceramic manufacturing—like Edgefield—that we know today. Dave Drake was one such laborer, Fennell writes, “owned by Harvey Drake and worked at a number of the Landrums’ potteries.” Indeed, Drake was a business partner of Abner Landrum, a plantation owner in South Carolina who also ran the local newspaper, Edgeville Hive.

Dave the Potter is said to have been born on a plantation in North Carolina, and shuffled between several enslavers in South Carolina before settling in with Lewis Miles in the Edgefield District from about 1849 until he gained freedom in 1865.

Around 1815, Landrum set up pottery factories in the Edgefield District, originating what is now famously known as Edgefield pottery. The working village—made up of twelve factories—likely benefited from an illegal slave transport in 1858 that “delivered 170 newly captive Africans to the Edgefield District,” writes Fennell. At that time, the transatlantic slave trade forbade importing Africans to be enslaved in the US.

Jill Beute Koverman explores the many unanswered questions surrounding Dave’s life in “The Ceramic Works of David Drake, aka, Dave the Potter or Dave the Slave of Edgefield, South Carolina.” Who taught him to read and write? Did he somehow teach himself? If so, how exactly?

What historians do know, they have pieced together through robust scholarly research and excavations. Dave was one of roughly seventy-five enslaved African and African American men and women who worked as a potter, or “turner,” in one of the potteries active in this area at the time. In Dave’s case, he did so for about six enslavers who were related to each other. In addition to Drake, Landrum, and Miles, they include Reuben Drake, Jasper Gibbs, and possibly the Reverend John Landrum. In the 1870 US Census, Koverman notes, there is documentation that Dave took on Harvey Drake’s surname after he was emancipated.

Dave is featured, along with some one hundred and fifty other enslaved potters, including Fortune Justice, Pharoah Jones, Shep Davis, and Mariah Day, in Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, an exhibition to open in late August at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, in Ann Arbor, having previously been hosted by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Next winter the show will open at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.

“[Dave’s] archive is incomplete, and some stories are speculative,” says Ethan Lasser, co-curator of the exhibition. “One pot is signed by ‘Mark and Dave.’ That could be his son, but we don’t know. He likely had a wife and children who were auctioned away in the 1850s based on a poem of his and inventories—there are some facts about his family that we can cobble together.”

Lasser points to one verse in particular that suggests Dave may have had a family: “I wonder where is all my relation/ Friendship to all—and every nation.”

Compared to the work of his contemporaries, Dave’s was epic. In general, the storage jugs in the Hear Me Now exhibition hold about three gallons. By contrast, Lasser notes, Dave’s hold twenty-five, twenty-eight, or even thirty gallons.

Stoneware storage jar by Dave the Potter, 1852 via JSTOR

Dave’s pottery is remarkable in other ways too. “His writing was a public affair, vaunted by the same slave-owning class that so vehemently prohibited slave literacy,” writes Michael A. Chaney in an article in African American Review. He cites verses Dave inscribed:

“A storage jar from 1858 with two inscriptions contains a couplet (‘when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to Get a peace,— ‘) as well as a lengthy dedication: ‘this Jar is to Mr Seglar who keeps the bar in orangeburg for mr Edwards a Gentile man—who formerly kept Mr thos bacons horses’.”

Many scholars suggest that Dave’s inscriptions represent a protest against enslavement. As art historian Aaron De Groft says in “Eloquent Vessels/Poetics of Power,” “The literature concerning Dave is not wide ranging, and this idea of protest has never been investigated. However, such an examination reveals that Dave’s work does not fit neatly within the regional pottery tradition, nor does it fit exactly in the broader tradition of pottery and stoneware as once believed.”

De Groft notes three attributes of Dave’s work as arguable evidence of his protests. One is the sheer size of the vessels. Another, perhaps the most obvious, is that he wrote on his pots. And finally, the content of his verses may be inferred to invoke protest.

Dave did not use the exact same text on each pot. In the first known example, from 1834, he inscribed the word “concatination.” On a second pot, in 1836, he inscribed “catination,” which may, Chaney says, connect the vessels. That said, there is no clear explanation as to why Dave the Potter signed his work at all.

Lasser suspects that Dave’s writings underscore the use of a “double voice.”

“On one hand, you can read his poems as innocuous or humorous,” Lasser says. “On the other hand, he goes into some of the cruelties of the system that he lived in. Dave participated in what we call ‘industrial slavery.’ He was participating in a large industry where he worked along with and side-by-side other enslaved potters.”

Twenty-Five Gallon Four-Handled Stoneware Jar by Dave the Potter, 1858
Twenty-Five Gallon Four-Handled Stoneware Jar by Dave the Potter, 1858 via Wikimedia Commons 

Hear Me Now includes contemporary ceramic work made by Black artists—a testament to the lasting inspiration the enslaved potters passed down to new generations.

In 1834, South Carolina “clamped down” on literacy of African Americans; the state passed a law forbidding anyone from teaching both the enslaves and free people of color how to read and write. However, the enslaved who were caught reading or writing were severely punished; authorities amputated fingers and toes. Some scholars believe that Dave was self-taught from learning the Biblical proverbs. “Religion and reading of the Bible was very common practice [during the nineteenth century], and [Dave’s] verses speak to that,” Lasser said. “He’s flaunting that law: authorship is an act of resistance.”

The old Edgefield District’s pottery derived from many cultures. Koverman writes that the combination of European, African, and Native American traditions were “blended with Chinese glazing and firing technology to give birth to the alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition.” Indeed, African-derived markings on pottery wares is the only proof for archeologists to know if a clay pot, for example, was made by an enslaved person. Dave’s markings are in addition to his proverbs; some archaeologists have argued that eighteenth century handmade pottery was, in fact, made by Native Americans, and not by Edgefield potters.

All told, Dave is credited with making thousands of functional pots from June 1834 through 1866. Hear Me Now includes the vessel considered his earliest work, the 1934 pot bearing the word “concatination,” and a shard, dating to 1866.

A jar by Dave the Potter, inscribed with the text, "I made this jar for cash, though it is called lucre trash"
A jar by Dave the Potter, inscribed with the text, “I made this jar for cash, though it is called lucre trash” via Wikimedia Commons 

Dave’s works are included in many collections; some are signed “LM,” indicating that he made them during the time that Lewis Miles was his enslaver. Others, such as one from August 1840, read “Edgefield District,” a rarity as Dave did not typically inscribe locations. Still other pieces feature a combination of “Dave,” a date, location, and the initials “LM.”

We treasure nineteenth century Southern pottery far more now than we did when it was made. It was not made by “skilled” craftsmen, after all. It was produced by the enslaved, a fact which lowered its value. Also, it was not made from refined porcelain. What’s more, it was used by the enslaved.

“To the owners of the great Southern plantations, such crude ware was common, to be banished to the kitchen and slave quarters, and, quite naturally, all Southerners of any pretensions to gentility followed suit,” observes John Ramsay, author of American Potters and Pottery. “The result was that the potters, with no inducement to make any but the plainest and cheapest ware, omitted the decorative touches which not only add to the charm of pottery, but identify many unmarked pieces.”

In contrast to the ordinariness of most Southern pottery, Dave and a few other potters pursued their own vision. “The work of such potters speaks eloquently to their aesthetic intent; their bold, carefully turned forms, neatly balanced rims and handles, and rich, flowing glazes are a delight to the hand and the eye,” writes Charles Zug. “Such men were true artists in a world that did not recognize their work, yet they persisted in moving beyond necessity to create works of enduring beauty.”

Demand for pieces from the Edgefield District declined after the Civil War, as the use of manufactured pots grew. “The Temperance movement, factory-made metal and glass containers, and improved methods of refrigeration and transportation all combined to put many potters out of business,” Zug observes.

Dave’s fame eventually faded after he passed away, Lasser says. Archeologists became interested in studying his work after two of his pots with “Dave” inscribed on both were discovered in Charleston, South Carolina, during a research trip in the 1930s.

Still Dave the Potter was not forgotten. In 2016, he was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame, Fennell says quoting the official record, “‘to recognize and honor both contemporary and past citizens who have made outstanding contributions to South Carolina’s heritage and progress.’”


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