The Harlem Renaissance tour

Greetings from the other side of the Atlantic. The coming 3 weeks a delegation of the Black Archives will be strolling through New York and Washington DC to investigate the hidden history of black radicals Otto and Hermie Huiswoud and to get some inspiration and insight from different cultural institutions.😌😌
Otto Huiswoud was born in Surinam and Hermie in British Guyana. Both of them became engaged in radical political circles in Harlem before and during the Harlem Renaissance so we had a great start of our trip with the Harlem Renaissance walking tour. It was amazing to walk through the streets were many historical figures and many of my personal heroes once walked and worked. We visited the place where Marcus Garvey held his first public meeting, the block where Malcolm X gave his first speeches and the place where Langston Hughes wrote his poems.😍😍😍 These are also the streets where the Huiswouds radicalized and became part of an international anti-imperial and anti-colonial revolutionary movement but the tour guide had not heard of them yet, which is not a suprise as their story has remained hidden for most peopel for a long time.

#Day 1​

The coming days we will be talking to archivists, curators and scholars and we'll be visiting institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library which holds an exhibition about the Black Power movement now. There are several institutions who have decades of experience in documenting, archiving and exhibiting black history and cukture in the US and we are just getring started in Amsterdam. Our research will be used for the exhibition we aim to launch in November this year. We will blog/vlog via the website, the first one is coming up soon. You can still support our crowdfunding campaign via Apura. (For the record, none of the crowdfunding funds will be used for this research trip). Donate via Apura.​


Oh yeah, we have some free time to do some sightseeing and visit nice places as well...any tips for must see's, do's and eat's are welcome 👌🏾👌🏾
#TheBlackArchivesOnTour
#Delegatie
#Inspiration

​By Mitchell Esajas, July 29th 2017