African American Culture

You know you are entering a different world when you see the heavy cordless iron that requires a fire to heat it sitting atop a wooden ironing board covered with a bed sheet used as an ironing pad at the Howard County Center of African American Culture. For those who can remember manual eggbeaters and other hand-held tools hanging from the wall, this is a step back in time. For some, emotion comes with seeing the white wooden kitchen cabinet that held someone's dishes in the early 20th century.

You know you are entering a different world when you see the heavy cordless iron that requires a fire to heat it sitting atop a wooden ironing board covered with a bed sheet used as an ironing pad at the Howard County Center of African American Culture. For those who can remember manual eggbeaters and other hand-held tools hanging from the wall, this is a step back in time. For some, emotion comes with seeing the white wooden kitchen cabinet that held someone's dishes in the early 20th century.

Four Virginia cities -- Portsmouth, Hampton, Norfolk and Newport News -- have joined forces to offer the year-round African American Heritage program, which features landmarks, festivals and tours celebrating the region's African-American culture and history. Portsmouth offers tours of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1857 by a congregation of slaves and freed blacks, along with September's Umoja Festival, featuring tastes, sights and sounds of African-American culture.

The viewers stand transfixed, leaning in again and again for a closer look as they inspect 32 panels of photographs that capture both the everyday and the celebratory moments in the lives of Howard County's early black families. Many pull out their cellphones and snap a shot of a relative or someone they know. The exhibit they scrutinize illustrates the tightly interwoven stories of African-Americans who settled in the county from the late 19th century to the mid-1900s, some as many as 90 years before Columbia had even begun to appear.

The Howard County Center of African American Culture celebrated the grand opening of its adult research library at Howard Community College this month. The collection contains more than 3,000 materials, including books, periodicals, videotapes and sheet music. The collection had been housed at the center's facility on Vantage Point Road, which also houses a museum with artifacts donated by Howard County residents. Wylene Burch, director and founder of the cultural center, started collecting books 40 years ago to teach her two children about their heritage.

An interview with Brenda Zeigler-Riley, coordinator of the Book Ends book club of the Howard County Center of African American Culture. What book are members reading this month? We're reading "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison. This will be the second time for the group, as a whole, reading "The Bluest Eye." It's the first book that the club ever read, and we've been around since 1994. Which books have members liked? "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler - wonderful book. Well, [members have liked]

Wylene Sims Burch, director of the Howard County Center of African American Culture Inc. (and a former elementary school teacher), believes no child should ever be left behind. So when the center puts on its fifth Talent Showcase to Spotlight Howard County Youth on Saturday, each of the 25 children who submitted an application will have at least a moment in the spotlight. "It's up to the child. If the child will come in and rehearse and perform their activity and they wish to be on the show that day, we encourage them," Burch said.

Harriet Tubman was the leader of the underground railroad who masterminded the escape route from the South for many slaves.Matthew Henson was an explorer recruited by Adm. Robert E. Peary to make the expedition to the North Pole.Kunte Kinte was a slave whose family's story was chronicled for millions of Americans by the late author Alex Haley.These three people are part of Maryland's rich African-American heritage, and state officials want the world to know."We are trying to market Maryland to the African-American market," says Marilyn Corbett, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Economic and Employment Development (DEED)

The small collection of 41 pieces of art standing behind the glass doors of the Art Gallery of Howard Community College in Columbia is the first of its kind as far as the arts community can remember.Though the types of art represented -- oil paintings and watercolors, woodcarvings, acrylics and photographs of everyday subjects -- can be found at museums and galleries all over the county, the community college exhibit marks the first time African-American artists who live in Howard County have had their own show.

This supplement marks the seventh annual Black History issue to appear in The Baltimore Sun. This year's theme is preserving African-American culture, and precedes the celebrations that begin throughout the country tomorrow. In Maryland, activities commemorating black history will include African dancing, music, exhibits, movies and lectures. Joining in these celebrations will be the Baltimore Art Museum, the Walters Art Gallery, churches, colleges, schools, community organizations, fraternities and sororities.

The National Mall is being flooded with people taking part in what is billed as an annual "rite of cultural democracy" - the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This year's rite promises such things as absorbing stories of the African-American experience, told by the likes of North Carolinian Mitchell G. Capel, aka "Gran'daddy Junebug;" the distinctive music of Mexico's La Huasteca region, performed by Los Camperos de Valles; and the dynamic sounds of Only Men Aloud, 20 guys from Wales who mix folk songs, hymns and Barbra Streisand showstoppers with aplomb.

When retired teacher Wylene Burch started the Howard County Center of African American Culture in 1987, her vision was to preserve the stories of black county residents from the past and present. Now Burch, along with a team of staff members and volunteers, will continue to fulfill that mission with the renovation and reopening of the Columbia museum, which is made up of a library and thousands of donated artifacts from black families around the county. "Our main purpose is preserving the history of Howard County," said Burch, the museum's executive director.

The familiar flag, the dancing black woman and the enigmatic, questioning title are among the first things one notices about Doris Colbert Kennedy's exuberant, politically conscious painting So, How's the Harvest?, on view at the James E. Lewis Museum at Morgan State University. The flag, which billows in a great half circle from the top left-hand corner of the canvas down the woman's body to fall on the grass at the bottom, lets us know the image has a didactic purpose. It is, first of all, the drapery of art and artifice, like the heavy scarlet curtains that frame a baroque Madonna, or the billowing tri-color banner in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

Supporters looking to cement the standing of Baltimore's African American Heritage Festival as one of the region's premier summer events got the ultimate validation yesterday from Gloria Bartholomew: It's a big deal, she said, even by New York standards. The Brooklynite came down to Baltimore with her sister and brother-in-law so they could join her nephew, Walter Nanton of Chase, in what has become an annual rite for his family - sampling the food, hearing the music perusing the art and soaking up the history of their African-American and Afro-Caribbean heritage.

More than 350 years have passed since the first enslaved Africans, taken forcibly from their homelands and sold to people in a land thousands of miles away, set foot in Maryland. Beginning this weekend, their stories and the stories of their descendants - the men and women of African heritage who have lived, toiled, suffered, thrived and died in a land sometimes called the Free State - will be told in a gleaming new $34 million museum on the eastern edge of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Named for a pioneering black businessman and philanthropist, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, at 830 E. Pratt St., will open officially tomorrow.

At the conclusion of the noon Mass on Sunday at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, the congregation clapped and sang through a rousing rendition of "This Little Light of Mine." People from various racial backgrounds were involved. "Not unusual for us," said the Rev. Richard H. Tillman, pastor of the Columbia parish. The Mass was celebrated by an African-American priest, - the Rev. Raymond Harris of Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, in honor of Black History Month, one of many cultural events the church has held in the past three years.

Tourism, a field that has always relied on our fascination with history, is increasingly tapping into a desire to better understand our respective heritages. Witness the success of Ellis Island since that immigration landmark was refurbished in 1990. Likewise, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is opening to immense acclaim in Washington. With that in mind, what a great idea it was for Maryland economic development and cultural officials to devise an African-American tourism initiative for the state.

Tourism, a field that has often relied on our fascination with history, is increasingly tapping into a desire to better understand our respective heritages. Witness the success of Ellis Island since that immigration landmark was refurbished in 1990. Likewise, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is opening to immense attention in Washington.With that in mind, what a great idea it was for Maryland economic development and cultural officials to devise an African-American tourism strategy for the state.

The Howard County Center of African American Culture celebrated the grand opening of its adult research library at Howard Community College this month. The collection contains more than 3,000 materials, including books, periodicals, videotapes and sheet music. The collection had been housed at the center's facility on Vantage Point Road, which also houses a museum with artifacts donated by Howard County residents. Wylene Burch, director and founder of the cultural center, started collecting books 40 years ago to teach her two children about their heritage.

Wylene Sims Burch, director of the Howard County Center of African American Culture Inc. (and a former elementary school teacher), believes no child should ever be left behind. So when the center puts on its fifth Talent Showcase to Spotlight Howard County Youth on Saturday, each of the 25 children who submitted an application will have at least a moment in the spotlight. "It's up to the child. If the child will come in and rehearse and perform their activity and they wish to be on the show that day, we encourage them," Burch said.