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make high sums at auction. For instance, a copy of The Book of Mormongiven by Joseph Smith to his black servant Isaac L Manning, has made $20,000, and the humble Bible, used by the slaves of the Revolutionary War patriot Samuel Townsend, was sold for $9,000. It has been estimated that today there are more than 50,000 collectors of Black memorabilia across the USA. Some trace this surge of interest back to the publication in the 1970s of Alex Haley’s Roots, a narrative of African-American slavery, and the TV series based on it. Others point out that as Black Americans have become wealthier, they have naturally sought to regain their heritage in a tangible way. It is certainly true that some of the best paid figures in entertainment and sport in the USA are African-Americans, while institutions such as New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harvard University, Duke University in North Carolina, Emory University in Atlanta, and the University of Virginia, now have the funding to develop their collections. Some have archives devoted to particularly significant Black figures in American history.

African-Britannia

There are far fewer collectors of Black memorabilia in the UK. Auction houses may handle this material, but items are not placed in a separate category as they are in the US. Manuscripts, books and ephemera relating to Black history are included mainly in sales of Travel, History and Literature. According to a UK Sotheby’s spokesman most of the material is from a European perspective, and often relates to British foreign policy and includes journals of British sailors patrolling the Slave Coast and letters relating to the slave trade in Africa. In July 2006, for instance, they will be selling some letters by General Gordon on the suppression of the trade in the Sudan. There is far less material, in any case, partly because the abolition of slavery was not

the long-standing burning issue it was across the Atlantic. Slavery ended in all British possessions in 1807, thanks largely to William Wilberforce and his associates. And possibly because of this and because segregation has never been an issue, the black consciousness movement in the UK has never produced the prodigious variety of both creative and polemical material that it did in the States. Nevertheless, Britain does have its own Black heroes from the 18th and 19th centuries and these certainly attract a good deal of interest from collectors. One of the earliest figure in the antislavery movement, for instance, was Olaudah Equiano (1745-97), also known as Gustavus Vassa who was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child, but having

The pioneer abolitionist Frederick Douglass supported Phillis Wheatley’s work in his North Starnewspaper

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Left: an 1865 letter from Frances Titus, aka Sojourner Truth, sold for $10,000; below, Frederick Douglass’s second volume of autobiography

Frederick Douglass, for instance, has major archives at Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis, and at the Library of Congress, while a research centre for Martin Luther King is housed at Stanford University. Institutions such as the Getty, the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Washington, buy portraits of celebrated African-Americans and memorabilia associated with them. One of the moving spirits behind this burgeoning market is Wyatt Houston Day, a white musician who founded the classical rock fusion band Ars Nova in 1968, and who married an African-American. A keen collector and a bookseller since 1981, he has a library of more than two thousand volumes, most of which relate to African-American history. Day told Rare that the idea of an auction of AfricanAmericana had come to him back in 1995 as a way of making material, which had up to then been appropriated by a handful of dealers in modern firsts, available to a wider public. He explained that a few of his African-American friends had complained about what they felt were arbitrarily high prices placed on material they had considered ‘theirs’. The proposed auction would, he believed, ‘level the playing field’. People would bid what they felt they wanted to pay, and over time reasonable ‘market value’ would be established. After a successful interview with the then president of Swann Galleries, George Lowry, a plan for regular sales was established. The first sale took place in 1996, and most of the high sums quoted in this article were realised at these sales over the past ten years. Day tells that the majority of collectors of AfricanAmericana are people of African descent. He is also keen to
Young,Gifted and Black

been a slave to a Royal navy captain and a Quaker merchant, bought his freedom. As a sailor he travelled the world and on landing in London became involved in the movement to abolish slavery. He published a powerful indictment of the

trade, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of Human Species. This tract is extremely rare, but his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olau Quiano, or Gustuvas Vassa, the African, which appeared in 1789, became a best seller and is slightly easier to find. Equiano was lionised in 18th century London, but in 1792 ended up marrying a spinster of Soham in Cambridgeshire, where he died in 1797. Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) is thought to have been born a slave on a ship crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the West Indies. He worked as a child slave in Greenwich, but persuaded the powerful Montagu family to employ him as their butler, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster. Sancho composed music,

appeared on the stage, and entertained many famous figures of literary and artistic London. The first African we know of to vote in a British election, he wrote a large number of letters, which were collected and published in 1782, two years after his death. He was thought of in his age as ‘the extraordinary Negro’, and to 18th-century British opponents of the slave trade he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans, then disputed by many. The best-known female slave narrative was The History of Mary Prince, West Indian Slave of 1831. The first life of a black woman to be published in Britain, her graphic descriptions of abuse captured the public imagination. Expect to pay £300 for this rare work. Voted number one in a list of the most eminent Black Britons, Mary Seacole, entered

the history books when she volunteered to attend the sick and wounded in Crimea and became so loved by her patients that she was dubbed ‘The Black Nightingale’. Having virtually bankrupted herself through her exploits, she was rescued (like Jeffrey Archer) by writing a bestselling autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, which enabled her to spend her declining years in relative security (when she died in 1881 she left £2,500). Oddly enough, for a supposed bestseller, Seacole’s memoir is hard to find today and it was only the chance discovery of an early edition in a second-hand bookshop in the 1970s that rescued her reputation from the obscurity in which it had lain for over a century. Thanks to Tony Aitman of Black Voices, Liverpool.

make the distinction between African-Americana, and Black Memorabilia, which he thoroughly condemns as ‘almost entirely a white product – the Aunt Jemima cookie jars, the little children eating watermelon etc’. Most of this tat is, to him, ‘hateful stuff – negative images produced by one race to reinforce stereotypical concepts of the other’. According to Day, many of the celebrity collectors keep a low profile, not so much because of concerns for security, but to deter vendors from making their lives a misery. “Once it becomes known that someone with a lot of money is a collector,” he says, “everyone and his uncle tries to sell them something.” But some famous collectors are more open about their collections. Bill Cosby, once the highest paid entertainer in the US, is known to collect Black art, and Oprah Winfrey doesn’t seem to mind how many TV viewers know of her passion for Black memorabilia, ‘hateful’ or not. She even asked her fans to send her examples of Black Angels (pictured, right), and was deluged with them. Whoopie Goldberg is another collector, as is filmmaker Spike Lee. Day also knows a couple of Hip-Hop figures, as well as actors and musicians, who collect. What he couldn’t tell us was whether these showbiz types sought after manuscripts and books relating to the African-American experience. One can imagine, however, that any famous entertainer interested in the more expensive material in these categories would use an agent. However, one collector was happy to advertise his taste for expensive acquisitions. This was businessman Mark Mitchell, who bought the record-breaking

Wheatley Poems. Moreover, it seems, most of the source material in Black History went to the wealthier scholars like Gates, who saw publishing opportunities in acquiring unique records of their cultural history. Today, according to Day, the collecting of cultural artefacts is, across the board, more prevalent among people of African descent than among their white counterparts. He also revealed that collecting among AfricanAmericans, whether books, art, photography or autographs, is less driven by the usual ‘collecting mania’ and is more concerned with ‘the retrieval of a lost, misplaced or wilfully destroyed or distorted history’. Although many AfricanAmericans may have begun collecting memorabilia, they have naturally moved on to books, photographs, prints and historical documents that chronicle their historical struggle. Previously, according to Day, this serious historical material was simply inaccessible. Now, thanks largely to the example set by Swann, other auction houses (including Sotheby’s in New York) have begun to include AfricanAmericana or Black History sections in their catalogues. The trend seems unstoppable among Black Americans as each new emerging manuscript or book adds to the story. As Philip Merrill, author of a guide to Black Memorabilia declares: “For too long the issue of slavery and other parts of AfricanAmerican history have been pushed under the rug... The more you are able to educate and expose people to the truth of the past, the better off we will all be.” R

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