Kathe Hambrick has an unabashed love for the widely strewn history of her people—the African Americans of the rural South.
As founder and curator of the River Road African American Museum, Hambrick embarked on a quest five and a half years ago to collect and reassemble the shards of rural River Road African-Americans’ past. With no public funding, Hambrick created the only African-American museum in the country that focuses on rural communities.
"So many of our people have moved away,” she said. “After the second world war, you see a big migration from the rural areas. We are just trying to preserve what's left of our rural culture and educate our children and people around the world. So much has already been lost."
The museum has spawned an eclectic mix of housed artifacts and relics—art work, letters and documents, photographs—bits of unearthed history and the remnants of a large African-American population of the past and today.
The museum's repository is so extensive that only one-fifth of it is now displayed in the lone building at Tezcuco Plantation. During these last two years, Hambrick's board of directors has acquired (through purchase or donation) four important buildings, which will multiply the museum's locations and collections.
The Africa Plantation of Modeste (circa 1830s), the Romeville Schoolhouse (circa 1930s), the True Friends Benevolent Society Hall of Donaldsonville (latter nineteenth century) and the Do Right Benevolent Society Hall of Dutchtown are all being relocated to new sites.
The Do Right building has been moved to a four-acre site in Darrow, where a sculpture garden and park will be established and where art and history workshops for children will be held.
Donaldsonville will be the primary location of the other three buildings, each on adjacent lots.
"We think Donaldsonville is an excellent location for our main facility. Donaldsonville is being revitalized; plus, it is a city that is already sixty-five percent black. It was even the first city in the country to elect a black mayor," Hambrick said.
The True Friends Benevolent Society Hall in the heart of Donaldsonville's historic district is the oldest extant Benevolent Society building in the state. It was used as a hall for receptions, dances and political congregation. A protest rally was organized there when Martin Luther King was assassinated.
"It was also a meeting place for Garveyites," Hambrick noted, referring to the followers of Marcus Garvey, a turn-of-the-century civil rights activist, originally from Jamaica, who wanted to lead blacks back to Africa. Louisiana was one of his most supportive states.
The Donaldsonville project is being planned to revive cultural events as well as to provide another site for exhibits.
"We will feature musical performances, along with exhibits on rural musicians, at the True Friends Hall. We are hoping to bring back the memory of musicians who played out here and at this hall," she said.
That list of former patrons includes Worthia "Showboy" Thomas, whose grand-nephew donated all of Thomas's instruments, photographs and original sheet music to the museum this year.
Memorabilia of Thomas and of any rural jazz musician from the South is being sought and will be housed permanently in the True Friends Hall. Rural jazz research and exhibits are unprecedented, Hambrick said.
Hambrick already has scheduled three live performances there, including shows by Xavier Professor Michael White and his jazz group, The Original Liberty Band. She is working closely with Joyce Jackson, LSU ethnomusicologist, to catalog jazz musicians, living and dead, who have played along the rural River Road.
The Africa Plantation, once owned both by Dr. John Lowery of Plaquemine and by Leonard Julien, inventor of the sugar cane planter, will function as a house museum. A four-thousand-square-foot, two-story structure built by freed slaves, the Africa Plantation, with 450 acres, was bought by Lowery in 1919. Lowery employed more than two hundred people yearly there.
The Romeville Schoolhouse was chosen because of its importance in educating black farmers and their families in the 1930s, Hambrick said. The four-room building, roughly 4,500 square feet, is one of the few remaining schoolhouses of its kind, she said.
"There's a story to be told here because many people who learned in these one-room schoolhouses later went on to college and to professional careers," she said.
The Slavery Issue
An enthralling picture in the museum shows a black man with layers of scars on his back, an encrustation of crisscrossed welts branded there like some kind of cruel grid.
This painful legacy is not one that can be forgotten, and the museum's slavery exhibit, remaining at Tezcuco, will double its space, thanks to grants from the state museum and the state Legislature.
"Any question you might have about slavery, sugar cane and rice, plantation life, the South, the Civil War, will be answered here," Hambrick said.
Already there are three bronze statues of black female slaves, each carved in a stoic yet stately pose. The artist, Linda Vauters, is now sculpting a fourth woman—a sugar cane slave—who will be the centerpiece of the Darrow sculpture garden.
The three existing statues depict a cotton picker, a washing woman and a woman holding a well bucket with a baby strapped to her back.
"There is so much dignity in the faces of these women. This is the one (washer woman) I want to be the size of the Statue of Liberty, on the river road," Hambrick said with a grin, then added: "Well, I would at least like to have her life-sized."
This year, Hambrick's quest for an authentic cotton sack climaxed in the small town of Waterproof, Louisiana, where a cotton farmer gave her a nine-foot sack that holds one hundred pounds of cotton—the average weight picked by a female slave each day.
"I went everywhere looking for a cotton sack. I even had people from Texas come in here and say, 'I'm gonna send you a cotton sack;' people from Mississippi: 'I'm gonna send you a cotton sack,'" Hambrick said with a laugh. "Well, the day it was declared that black people didn't have to pick cotton anymore, we must have burned every cotton sack in the state because you cannot find one today, I guarantee you."
Art exhibits will be moved to the Romeville Schoolhouse in Donaldsonville. Those exhibits will include the work of Malaika Favorite, a native of Geismar now living in Atlanta who contributed murals painted on pieces of tin roofing. Favorite was the first black woman to attend integrated schools in Ascension Parish.
The acrylic mural, the museum's latest addition, renders tropically colored scenes of family life. Favorite also painted the portrait of the legendary River Preacher (formally named George West), whose peripatetic baptisms and gentle preaching up and down the Mississippi River led some people to believe he was homeless (he actually had a house in Prairieville). But his essence is as nomadic as his life was.
"He died out on the river road, from old age. They found him there," Hambrick said. The River Preacher's life remains cryptic in spite of memories and pictures, and that is a blessing; African Americans are graced with yet another story to tell.
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