By Samantha Antrum
Two Black History Month exhibits have embraced this year’s theme for Black History month, African Americans and Labor, putting on display the many contributions Black people have made in Westchester County and across the country.
“History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship,” on display at the New Rochelle Public Library, and “Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open,” on display at Bethany Arts Community in Ossining, have each highlighted ways in which Black people have built and bettered their communities while exploring how those contributions continue to impact us today.
According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which founded Black History Month, the theme “focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.”
‘History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship,’ an exhibit at New Rochelle Public Library
Set in downtown New Rochelle, “History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship” explores the Black businesses of a once-thriving Lincoln Corridor.
“That community, originally, it was integrated,” said Linda Tarrant-Reid, who is the curator of the ‘History Restored’ exhibit and the executive director of The Lincoln Park Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that preserves and educates people about the Black history of New Rochelle.
“It had Jewish families, Italian, Irish and Black (families),” she said. “And then after the war, they built the housing projects, as they did across the country to house returning veterans.
“Eventually those projects in New Rochelle, Hartley Apartments (now known as Heritage Homes), they became predominantly Black as the white families moved out and were able to purchase homes.”
As a result of this exodus and redlining, Tarrant-Reid said, Black-owned businesses began to spring up. Recreational businesses, like billiards parlors, snack shacks and restaurants, came first. Then came establishments like beauty parlors, barber shops and funeral homes, like the Barney T. McClanahan Funeral Home on Winthrop Ave., which is still in operation today.
Tarrant-Reid used photographs from the Library of Congress’s digital archives and the Henry Ford digital archives along with photographs she took herself to tell the stories of some of the Black-owned businesses of the area and across the United States.
“All of the things that we’ve been taught, that we didn’t own anything, we don’t do anything,” Tarrant-Reid said, “Not true. This exhibit puts in front of people, in photographs, how Black businesses grew.”
‘Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open,’ an exhibit at Ossining’s Bethany Arts Community
While “History Restored” focuses on Black-owned businesses, “Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open” explores Black people’s contributions – locally, nationally and internationally – to a variety of other industries.
“I was a little tired of the February special, where we get Martin, Malcolm and Rosa on the wall with a few posters,” said Joyce Sharrock Cole, who’s Ossining’s village historian and the curator of the exhibit.