Mixed Race Studies

A stone for the Chief: Black Anchorage leader who passed as white honored with memorial

Alaska Dispatch News
Anchorage, Alaska
2015-10-29

Mike Dunham, Play & Arts & Entertainment Reporter

From left, Corey Todoroff, Jim Vignola and Lex Patten of the Anchorage Fire Department unveil a new grave marker for longtime Anchorage Fire Chief Thomas Bevers, who passed away in 1944, during a ceremony at the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Bevers was also notable for co-founding what would become the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous festival, and for being a black man who passed as white. Loren Holmes / ADN

The 1930 Anchorage census tells us this about Thomas S. Bevers: He was 39 years old, male, married, white, a veteran of the World War and the city’s fire chief.

But his final resting place was unmarked until Thursday, when an honor guard from the Anchorage Fire Department unveiled a headstone for him at a ceremony in the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.

As his job title suggests, Bevers was more important than the average roustabout hoping to strike it rich — or maybe just get by — in the far-off territory of Alaska. He arrived in Anchorage in 1921 and served as a volunteer fireman. The ladder wagons were pulled by horses and the pumps were worked by hand.

By 1930, he was in the front ranks of city leaders, a man of property, a landlord, a partner in a major fur farm on 10th Avenue. He became involved with civic causes that included building a new hospital and Merrill Field. His ongoing business ventures ranged from establishing the Fairview neighborhood (originally Bevers Subdivision) to part-ownership of the Buffalo Mine near Chickaloon.

He was a member of the Anchorage Boosters Club who loved to give visitors tours of Anchorage while extolling its possibilities. Most famously, he co-founded the Fur Rendezvous winter festival.

Anchorage Fire Department Chief Thomas Bevers in the 1930s Courtesy Anchorage Fire Department

In 1922 Bevers became the first paid fireman in the city. He retired from the position of chief in 1940 and ran for city council in 1941, winning the office with 772 votes.

In October 1944, during a duck hunting trip on the north side of Knik Arm, he went to bed and quietly died of a heart attack. An editorial in the Anchorage Times lamented, “Anchorage (has) lost one of its best friends and leaders.”

He had no immediate family in the territory. The 1940 census listed him as single. Officials summoned a sister in Virginia to come and claim the body.

Upon her arrival, his friends and business partners did a double take…

Read the entire article here.

“Brillo head,” “Don King,” “Sideshow Bob”: It took me years to embrace the hair that white people scorned

Salon
2015-11-28

Sarah Enelow

Growing up, everyone thought they could “fix” my hair. I believed them, and paid the price.

I was 16 and had been in the bathroom for two hours working on my hair. My tools were scattered all over the sink: a brush with bent-up bristles, a dozen barrettes and ties clogged with clumps of my torn-out hair, a spray bottle of water, loads of leave-in conditioner, and various gels and serums for “damaged” hair with names like Frizz Be Gone.

That month’s Seventeen magazine lay open to a tutorial on creating an “effortless” up-do, modeled by a cheerful blonde, but what I saw in the small mirror hanging on a nail above the sink was an ungainly afro whose tight, wiry, dark brown curls had been ripped apart. My eyes were red from crying and my skinny arms were exhausted from being held above my head so long.

I shoved the butt of my hand into the mirror—it went pop as shards of glass fell into the sink and a thin stream of blood ran down my forearm. I got myself a Band-aid, cleaned up quietly, pulled my hair back into a low bun, and retreated to my room. If I left my hair in that bun long enough, it might be semi-straight when I took it out, so long as it never got wet again, but that wasn’t feasible. When I started growing my hair out around age 8, I didn’t realize I had to de-tangle it daily in the shower, so one morning I woke up with fat dreadlocks and had to get them cut out…

Read the entire article here.

‘We have a right to determine how our histories are told’: An interview with poet Toni Stuart

Goldsmiths University of London
News
2015-11-25

Sarah Cox

On Thursday 3 December the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (CCDS) and Centre for Feminist Research host a spoken word performance by Toni Stuart: poet, festival organiser and educator, recently named on the South African Mail & Guardian’s list of inspiring young South Africans. Toni is also a Goldsmiths graduate, completing her MA Writer/Teacher with us this year as a 2014/2015 Chevening Scholar. We caught up with her to find out more about her work and Goldsmiths experience.

Toni was first introduced to Goldsmiths by friend and fellow poet Raymond Antrobus while he was studying for his MA Writer/Teacher here. Raymond was also taking part in our Spoken Word Educators Programme (SWEP), working with school children to develop their confidence, self expression, oral communication and literary skills.

Invited in to teach for the day at the school where Raymond was based, Toni got a taste for what being poet-in-residence was like and also learnt more about our MA – a course taught by the Departments of Educational Studies and English and Comparative Literature.

“It sounded like exactly what I wanted,” she says. “A course that allowed me to develop my creative writing and teaching practices simultaneously, with a specific focus on developing my own pedagogy and ‘poetry syllabus’. I don’t know of any other course like it in the world. And, the SWEP – started by Peter Kahn and now with Jacob Sam-La Rose as director – is the only one of its kind in the world as well.”

After her performance at Goldsmiths this December, Toni and her audience will be taking part in a discussion circle exploring the use of stories as medicine. As a 32-year old mixed heritage South African woman poet, she believes her work – and that of her generation – is to heal the wounds that they have inherited from their parents’ generation and from the past.

“Sometimes these wounds are apparent and we’re able to address them directly, other times they are unconsciously passed down through many generations,” she says. “My experience of working in the NGO sector in the past, and in the arts sector now, is that self-care is fundamental if we hope for our work to have a meaningful impact in our communities, and, that in order for our work to be sustainable we need to ensure we are taking care of ourselves first…

Read the entire interview here.