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ABSTRACT
In this article, I bring together the archive of institutional activism of Niara Sudarkasa in the U.S. and the posthumous impact of activist and public administrator Marielle Franco. The 1970s historical sources show Sudarkasa’s institutional solidarity with students and faculty in the creation of one of the first Africana Studies departments in the U.S. Reading them, I articulate an ethos for the curation ‘715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back,’ a public digital art gallery comprised of art and history found in the DAAS Papers (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) housed in the Bentley Library’s digital and physical archives. The analysis of the primary sources is guided by an engagement with the ‘Marielle Effect,’ generating a historical parameter for Abolitionist solidarity between American, Brazilian, Latin American, African American, Diasporic, and ally scholarly communities. The discussion of these parameters is embedded in my discussion of the concept of pacification, a phenomenon of colonial and post-colonial policing that survives through the perpetuation of an extra-judicial policing impetus articulated along race, identity, legality, and sexual legitimacy of subjects.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Elizabeth James, Librarian at the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan and Brian Williams, Assistant Director and Archivist for University History at the Bentley Historical Library for insight and guidance with the DAAS Bentley Papers archive.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This is a well-documented phenomenon being currently discussed inside and outside academia. See Steinberg, Stephen. Counterrevolution: The Crusade to Roll Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Movement, Citation2022 and Bowers, Rick. Spies of Mississippi : The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement. National Geographic, Citation2010.
2. The International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences’ entry for the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ (Morris, Citation2001) reads as such:
This mass movement was organised by southern Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s with the goal of overthrowing legally enforced racial segregation known as the Jim Crow regime. The Civil Rights Movement was initially triggered by the antisegregation action of Rosa Parks and led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As the movement developed, it involved hundreds of leaders and thousands of participants. These leaders and participants used massive non-violent direct action to disrupt the Jim Crow regime in order to force white segregationists and the federal government to dismantle the system of racial segregation.
3. The Home page on the movement’s website describes the organisation and its cause as such:
Movimiento Cosecha is a national, non-violent movement fighting for permanent protection, dignity, and respect for all undocumented immigrants. [They] are a network of immigrant leaders, families, and workers running local and national campaigns. Across the country, [they] are organising our communities to mobilise in the streets and fight for what we deserve: permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants (www.lahuelga.com).
4. In the ‘About Us’ section of their website, the goals and philosophy are stated as.
We believe that communities have the power and wisdom to create collective forms of abundance, care, and accountability grounded in human dignity and liberation. We believe the Criminal Punishment System needs to be radically and systemically transformed, and that conflict and harm should be handled through well-funded community-based resources, independent from the carceral state. Our community demands seek to name and move towards transformative goals while putting forth immediate steps for the Prosecutor’s Office that align with those transformative goals. In these demands, we use the word ‘diversion’ to refer to community-led services and resources that are disconnected from systemic punishment and state control (liberatedontincarcerate.org).
5. The language of the ‘About Us’ section of MAPS’ website provides background for the origins of the group as well as how it understands itself in broader Abolitionist contexts.
[MAPS] is a group of Abolitionists organising in solidarity with the imprisoned against the violence of incarceration. [They’re]joining a nationwide fight to end the prison and police systems that pose a constant threat to our communities. [They] formed in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Kinross rebellion in order to do anti-repression and media work. The 2016 riot at Kinross was one of the largest prisoner protests and uprisings in Michigan in decades. MAPS was born through the process of organising together with the Kinross rebels against the MDOC (michiganabolition.org).
6. A statement from the Office of the Vice President for Communications at the University of Michigan issued a statement on September 10, 2020 entitled ‘Updates on the GEO Discussions’ Citation2020 in which a list of compromises reached between the University and the Union are listed after the strike ended. The Office also maintains a URL with a ‘key issues’ page on the strike is itemised and headed by the following entry:
The Graduate Employees’ Organization, the labour union representing about 2,000 graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants across the University of Michigan’s three campuses, voted Sept. 16 to ends its strike. GEO members returned to work Sept. 17. The vote ended a strike that began Sept. 8, following weeks of discussions with university officials over a wide range of issues, some of which related to U-M’s plans for a mostly remote and hybrid fall semester prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Other issues were unrelated to the employment status of union members
7. The University instituted a committee to further evaluate the impact of the millions of dollars it invests on Campus Police each year. The budget rivals that of Rackham Graduate School in its entirety. See “Updates on GEO DIscussions”
8. See Stanev, Mariane. Sovereign Noise in Times of Peace: An Abolitionist Transimperial Cultural History of Pacification in the U.S. and Latin America. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, Citation2022.
9. One of the primary sources I located in the DAAS Bentley Papers addresses a Brazil-U.S. talk advertised by Prof. Lockard on The Michigan Daily in the 70s. It shows the importance of advertising the event to the community beyond University walls to Dr. Lockard, and forwards global coalitions with anti-racist scholarship and art.
10. The Sudarkasa archives themselves offer a crucial connection to Latinx archives and Latinx Studies, as Dr. Sudarkasa spent much of her career in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, compiling a local archive of Black and Indigenous history of the region.
11. The limits of institutional archaeology in the question of understanding policing injustice are not that we should not study the institutions themselves, but that they should not be understood as a perfect archival receptacle of how we have created the culture of policing.
12. In an online exhibit, ‘The History of Race at UM’ hosted by the Library at the University of Michigan, the role of BAM in the history of the University is expressed as such.
Activism
Black Student Union Takeover
On April 9, 1968, the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s burial in Atlanta, the newly formed Black Student Union took over the Administration Building (now the LSA Building) and chained themselves inside for five hours, demanding more funding for African American students and African American faculty hires. After a long talk with President Robben Fleming, the lockout ended. They joined a trend at colleges nationwide demanding the addition of black studies to universities’ curricula. One outcome was the establishment of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies in 1970 (https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits).
13. Since 2018, the word ‘presente’ has become synonymous with public outrage over the political assassination of Marielle Franco. Shot from close range, Franco was assassinated by an unknown gunman the night of March 14, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. She was an outspoken critic of militarised policing in Rio de Janeiro favelas, and specifically of the Rio de Janeiro policy of pacification.
14. The title of the work translates as ‘The Reduction of Favelas to Three Letters.’ The Marielle Franco Institute (institutomariellefranco.org/en) is beginning to work on an English-language version of the work in the coming years.
15. The History Makers website hosts a series of audio tapes of interviews with Dr. Lockard. The following titles are contained In tape 4: ‘Jon Onye Lockard recalls his trip with History Maker Margaret Burroughs for the National Conference of Artists in Suriname’’Jon Onye Lockard talks about travelling to Suriname with the National Conference of Artists’ (thehistorymakers.org/biography/jon-onye-lockard-40).
16. For brevity, here I omit the technical specifications of the gallery as can be found in its original form, alternate labels, and additional considerations on style, project maintenance, etc.
17. The fires at the House on 715 on Haven Street and Lockard’s personal studio, as well as the fires in Lohr House were deemed accidental. It is, however, our responsibility to understand even accidental fires in the material context of racialised forms of territorial policing in Southeast Michigan. Lockard’s suit against Ann Arbor Art Fair challenging racially discriminatory practices against him and his work, as well as the fire of the Detroit Riot in 1968 alongside these accidental events bring back the question of longevity, cross-generational labour, and the importance of public-facing work in continuing the work Abolitionist thinking, which challenges directly the colonial carceral social fabric. The question of the territoriality of this kind of racial thinking understood in a colonial critique of pacification highlights how 715 Haven Street and Ulysses Grant House can bring the moment of Abolition in conversation with the creation of the space of the University in a planetary context of the territorial and cultural practices of pacification.
18. ‘To be located’ here in this intersection of primary historical research and art gallery curation indicates a pragmatic intersection of oral history and artistic liberty in recreating objects, creating a pressing critical question about authenticity in digitally rendered objects.
19. For the digital display of primary research documents, some sources can be labels themselves, and link to written secondary labels, or to create further object links in the future. In other words, because of the blend of historical and artistic objects and research that composes the gallery content, objects can be both explanation and question in how they are hyper-linked.
20. Karenga, Maulena. ‘Kwanzaa and the seven principles: Willing and the well-being of the world.’ Los Angeles Sentinel, December 27, p. A-7 Citation2007 in Brown-Manning, Robyn.,Lockhart-Carter, Sharon.,T. Morgan, Jr., Avon ‘Somebody bigger than you and I’: The African American healing traditions of camp minisink. Genealogy. Citation2021
21. In a 2005 interview with The History Makers website, Prof. Lockard talks about going to Suriname in the 70s with his students (Tape 4: Interview with The History Makers). As a Latin Americanist and Brazilianist scholar whose work is indebted to and conversant with Africana studies and Black scholarship, I would like to note the existence of still unindexed files that pertain to the DAAS Art Archives as an international solidarity archive. James Lockard and several of his students travelled to South America to foster artistic and intellectual connections in the Diaspora. In this document, I cite again the role of Elizabeth James in recalling this expedition as I inquired about sources that hinted at such international allyship pathways from sources I did locate. For instance, there is a newspaper announcement from the Michigan Daily where a lecture on U.S.-Brazil artistic solidarity in the Black community is linked. These sources form an important link with sources from the mid-2000s onward, where under Frieda Ekotto’s leadership, DAAS strived to invite and support international scholars and arts that challenged the meaning of traditional definitions of art and Black art.
22. When I approached Elizabeth James with the video file, she shared with me the fact that other scholars had not been aware of its existence for a long time, but that as an alumna of the department, she knew something the archive’s sources themselves could never have yielded: This footage may well have been taken by the camera owned by Lockard himself. It is thrilling to imagine that future researchers may dedicate their work to locating and compiling other tapes that may be in existence. At the moment, the Kuumba murals unveiling footage and this bit of institutional memory from Ms. James offer the first step in that archival journey. Here I briefly reflect on the interpretative potential of these materials at large. Taking footage of the different artistic initiatives fostered by CAAS/DAAS faculty and students, as well as members of student groups like BAM was more than a matter of record-keeping. In addition to the material memory and its direct implications in the establishment of representation of Black and ‘ally’ art, taking footage is also a means of protection. During the course of my research, I have, as many before me have, been confronted with the unsolved matter of how many fires CAAS and DAAS addresses went through in the 70s. Though the fires have been deemed accidental, it is impossible not to note how many of them there have been, and how many of them targeted Black Art on campus. Having a camera ‘on’ during a civic gathering of art in these circumstances, may have been a direct tactic to protect student, faculty, and public members in attendance against violent counter-demonstrations on campus
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Mariane A. Stanev
Mariane (Mari) A. Stanev completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2022. She is currently working on a manuscript project that compares stories of land encroachment of BIPOC communities in Latin America and North America leading up to the 19th century’s Abolition process and the making of the modern nation-state. The main research question of the manuscript will be a contemporary one: What are the limits and possibilities of contemporary transversal solidarity in a global Abolitionist future? Her research and methodology for this and future projects are ballasted in an ongoing commitment to digital public art galleries and Abolitionist thinkers. The analysed stories emerge from a combination of literary and primary historical sources on the displacement and attempted elimination of communities from Center-West and Southern Cone South America and the American Midwest. This current project lays the groundwork for future engagements with the digital frontiers of contemporary cartographies of Abolition in the age of the metaverse.