It’s drawing number 200! On this auspicious occasion, I’ve posted this tribute to the jazz composer and pianist Eubie Blake. The drawing depicts a local piano player who I actually came across on Oakland public access. He was actually playing “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” the Cole Porter standard. In this drawing, though, he is playing “I’m Just Wild about Harry” by Eubie Black and Noble Sissle. The sheet music in the background is for the same song.

Thanks for taking this ride with me. I hope you enjoy the next 200 drawings.

8-Rock

His style of dress was, like, totally new school–American Apparel t-hirt, True Religion jeans, and some kind of Cole-Haan-looking sneaker things; but everything else about this guy–his shades, his neatly trimmed facial hair, his pose, and the expression he wore on his face, said Old School Cool.

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This drawing is a bit of a beta test. I’m playing a few games with borders and the stroke feature in Photoshop, just to see what happens when I combine different colors. I thought I’d pick a drawing that’s fairly straightforward, just so that the border could take center stage. I guess I could call this the 1001 Black Men: Silly Sunday edition.

Hope you’re enjoying your memorial day weekend,

8-Rock

This drawing was created in memory of George Armwood, the last African American to be lynched in the state of Maryland. On October 16, 1933 Armwood, a mentally disabled young man of 23, was accused of attempting to rape a 71 year-old white woman. He was arrested the same day. Two days later, on October 18, 1933, Armwood was forcibly removed from the jail where he was being held and a mob of more than 1000 people tortured and lynched him from a tree near the home of a local judge. The following description of what came to be known as the Princess Anne Lynching is an excerpt from a longer account from the Maryland State Archives:

Immediately after the mob found Armwood hiding under his mattress, the noose was tightened around his neck. Armwood was dragged out of the jail, beaten, stabbed, and kicked as the crowd tied him to the back of a truck and look for an appropriate location to lynch him. At first, the mob wanted to use a large oak tree near Judge Duer´s home, but opted to use a tree found on ninety-one year-old Mrs. Thomas Bock´s property who lived nearby. Armwood´s ears were cut off and his gold teeth were taken out before the mob raised and dropped his lifeless body from a branch above the ground. Once it was clear that Armwood was dead, the mob dragged the body back to the courthouse on Main Street in downtown Princess Anne, where the body was hanged from a telephone line and burned. After the body was extinguished, the corpse was moved and left in Hayman´s Lumber yard until authorities gathered it the following morning.

—Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series): George Armwood

The Armwood lynching caused a national outcry against lynching, from people of all races. Despite the national outrage around this horrifying event, though, it was two years before a small number of alleged participants in Armwood’s murder faced a grand jury. None were indicted and, to this day, no individual has been convicted for participating in the lynching murder of George Armwood.

8-Rock

I was driving through San Francisco’s financial district last week, taking a familiar shortcut to Lombard that allows me to bypass all the ugliness at the intersection of Market and Van Ness. It’s always interesting to watch the faces in this part of the city. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the ability to look neither present nor absent and neither happy nor particularly unhappy is a skill that the city’s financiers have cultivated deliberately. Is it part of the skillset required when one is dealing with the uncertainties of today’s financial markets? Is it something akin to a poker face at the card table? Whatever the source of this unique talent, the man in the drawing seemed to have mastered it. I had a chance to study his movements while I was stopped at an intersection, and I must say that I was quite impressed with his ability to stop at the appropriate traffic signal and then to cross when the signal changed in his favor, all while seeming to stare off into space at something far in the opposite direction. Today’s bankers may have may caused some major damage to the national economy, but they sure can cross the heck out of a street.

8-Rock

Just a simple drawing of a guy I saw standing outside the American Steel warehouse and studio space on Mandela Blvd. His gaze seemed so full of sadness; or perhaps it was just an intensity of another sort. In any case, I was fascinated and I knew I would have to put him in a drawing.

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Ahh, spring, when a not-so-young professor’s heart calls her back to the graduate library at the University of California, Berkeley. This is the student who was sitting across from me in the microfilm room. I don’t know exactly what was on the reels he was reviewing, but I know it very old  and I know it was in French.

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This drawing is but another tribute to the combat sports I love so much. The line of Jack Johnson images at the top of this drawing is just a reminder that all U.S. boxers of African descent are in some way in debt to his bold and precedent-setting career. In more ways that I can indicate here, today’s Black American boxers are standing in his shadow; and somewhere he is watching as today’s fighters negotiate that delicate line between brutality and grace, a line so often drawn in black and white.

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Saw this man strolling past the coffee shop this afternoon. His placid expression as he made his way past the stores and restaurants on my side of the street epitomized the unhurried pace of a weekend well spent.

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There are a couple of stories behind this drawing. The first is something of an admission. This drawing was not made recently, nor does it does it depict people I’ve seen around the Bay Area. I actually made this drawing in September of 2000, while I was on a research trip to Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. On that particular trip to New York, I stayed at the Millenium Hilton Hotel, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. From my window I had a perfect view of the twin towers, and on each of my three mornings there, I would lay in bed for a while, staring at the silver-gray towers against the bright blue sky.

Imagine my shock when, just 12 months later, the towers were gone and the Miillenium Hilton was so severely damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers that it was rendered uninhabitable.

The other story behind this drawing is the theme. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between today’s incarcerated men and women of African descent and the history of anti-Black racism and oppression in the U.S. Over the last 10 or so years I have done any number of drawings depicting incarcerated Black men whose numerical identification tags indicate a specific year linked to a specific incident in African American history. This is one of the first of these drawings, which I created in my hotel room while waiting for a friend to meet me for lunch. For the purposes of this blog post, I have replaced the years that used to be on the ID tags with the name of the blog and the number of the drawing (8-Rock/191).

I’ll return to my more current drawings tomorrow. In the interim, I hope you’ll enjoy this moment of nostalgia for the world before 9/11/2001.

8-Rock