0:01

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

0:03

a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

0:12

and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy

0:14

V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.

0:16

Today we have another figure who was

0:19

involved with the Harlem Renaissance but

0:21

has not become nearly as well known

0:23

as a lot of her peers. Olivia

0:26

Ward bush Banks was a writer who

0:28

also supported writers and artists.

0:30

I mean she didn't shouldn't have a lot of a ton of money

0:33

to do that with, but with the means that she had,

0:35

she tried to support other people. She

0:37

also hosted salons, she taught drama

0:39

courses, and she was well known enough

0:42

during her lifetime that when she

0:44

was mentioned in society columns

0:46

and articles about activities that she was involved

0:49

with, people wrote about her in a

0:51

way that suggested that the readers of the

0:53

newspaper or the magazine or whatever would

0:55

already know who she was. But

0:58

as of right now, most of more

1:00

recent writing about her has not

1:02

been things like a full length biography

1:05

or a historical analysis

1:07

in the form of a book. It's been

1:09

more like PhD dissertations

1:12

and the introduction to a

1:14

collected edition of her work that

1:16

came out at this point thirty

1:18

years ago as part of a series

1:20

on nineteenth century black women writers.

1:23

In addition to the things that I've already

1:25

mentioned, Olivia A. Ward Bush Banks was also

1:28

a social worker and a single mom

1:30

and tribal historian for the Montaucket

1:32

nation at a time when that nation had

1:34

just been stripped of its lands and

1:37

its recognition in New York, all

1:39

of which we are going to talk about today. Olivia

1:42

Ward was born on February eighteen

1:45

sixty nine in sag Harbor, New York,

1:47

on eastern Long Island, and she

1:49

was the youngest of Abraham and Eliza

1:51

Draper Awards three children. At

1:54

various points in her life, she wrote autobiographical

1:57

statements that describe her parents and

1:59

their ancestry. In one,

2:01

she says, quote both parents possessed

2:03

some Negro blood, and we're also descendants

2:06

of the Montauk tribe of Indians. And

2:08

in another she describes her father

2:10

as quote a mixture of Portuguese,

2:13

East Indian and Negro. This

2:16

is more of a clarification or a

2:18

richer level of detail, rather than

2:20

a contradiction. A lot of the first

2:22

enslaved Africans who were taken to

2:25

this part of North America had been

2:27

captured from Spanish and Portuguese ships.

2:30

The people aboard had often been trafficked

2:32

through the Cape Verde Islands off the

2:34

western coast of Africa. These

2:36

islands were a primary port in the slave trade,

2:39

and they were under Portuguese control. The

2:41

montauk At nation is described in many

2:43

historical documents, including ones

2:46

by Olivia herself, as the montauk

2:49

That was the name that was more commonly used until

2:51

about the nineteen nineties. This

2:53

is an Algonquian speaking nation related

2:56

to other indigenous nations on the eastern

2:58

end of what's now Long Island, and as well

3:00

as nations from what's now New England, including

3:03

the Peacott and the Narraganset. These

3:05

nations spoke different Algonquian

3:08

dialects that were mutually understandable,

3:10

and the Montaucket nation seems to have spoken

3:12

one that was similar to the Mohegan Pequot

3:15

language. A written vocabulary

3:17

was recorded in the late eighteenth century,

3:20

and by the nineteenth century only a few

3:22

members of the Montaucket nations still spoke

3:24

it. It is, however, one

3:26

of the Algonquian languages that's part

3:28

of the Algonquian Language Revitalization

3:31

Project Today. Sag

3:33

Harbor had some parallels to the community

3:35

in and around New Bedford, Massachusetts

3:37

that we talked about in our episode on Paul Cuffey.

3:40

Although he was born more than a century

3:42

before Olivia Ward was, both

3:45

were originally home to indigenous nations

3:47

who shared their whaling knowledge with European

3:49

colonists. The resulting whaling

3:52

industry in both places was exploitative,

3:54

often extremely exploitative, but

3:57

it was also possible for people of color to

3:59

attain more wealth and status than they

4:01

could in most other industries. The

4:04

Ward family had historically been part

4:06

of this industry, and Olivia's father lived

4:08

with another family that was a key part of it,

4:11

starting when he was about fourteen. Another

4:14

similarity between sag Harbor and New

4:16

Bedford, as well as some other parts of New

4:18

York and New England, had to do with demographics.

4:21

Europeans arriving on what's now Long

4:23

Island enslaved indigenous people

4:26

there, particularly indigenous men. Indigenous

4:29

men were also more likely to be killed

4:31

in warfare, both warfare

4:33

between indigenous nations and warfare

4:36

against Europeans simultaneously.

4:39

Most of the enslaved Africans that were brought

4:41

to the area were men, so there were more

4:44

African men, but more Indigenous

4:46

women. White Europeans

4:48

considered both Indigenous and African

4:50

people to be a race apart, so it was common

4:52

for Indigenous and African people to marry

4:55

and to have children, often Indigenous

4:57

women to African men. By

4:59

the time Olivia Ward was born, just a

5:02

few years after the US Civil War, many

5:04

people of color in the area had biracial

5:07

or multiracial ancestry.

5:09

When Olivia was about nine months old,

5:11

her mother died and her father moved

5:13

to Providence, Rhode Island with her and her siblings.

5:16

According to family accounts, Abraham Ward

5:19

was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter

5:21

day Saints, and in the years just

5:23

before Olivia's birth, he had also had another

5:25

wife named Anne. There

5:28

are census records that seemed to back up

5:30

the idea that Abraham was in a polygamous

5:32

marriage, but otherwise we don't

5:34

have a whole lot of detail here. However,

5:37

there is some interesting speculation about

5:39

how Latter Day Saints beliefs about Native

5:42

Americans being descended from a lost

5:44

tribe of Israel might have affected

5:46

him, including potentially influencing

5:48

his decision to join the church. So

5:51

after this move to Providence, Abraham

5:53

remarried in eighteen seventy one, and

5:56

sometime after that, Olivia was sent

5:58

to live with her maternal aunt, Maria

6:00

Draper, and her aunt

6:02

had an enormous influence on her.

6:05

Mariah taught Olivia about their indigenous

6:07

heritage and took her to pow wows and other

6:10

gatherings, including on the Shinnecock

6:12

Reservation on Long Island. Olivia

6:15

described her aunt as making sacrifices

6:17

for the sake of other people, which had kept

6:19

her from being able to get an education for

6:21

herself. But Olivia

6:24

credited Mariah with making sure

6:26

that she got a useful practical

6:28

education. In some accounts,

6:30

this involves studying nursing during high

6:32

school, and in others, Olivia trained

6:34

to be a seamstress. In spite

6:36

of that focus on a practical education,

6:39

one of Olivia's great loves from high school

6:41

was drama. Her teacher was

6:43

named Miss Dodge, who ran the Dodge School

6:46

of Dramatics. Dodge taught

6:48

something called behavior drama, and

6:50

at this point no one has unearthed clear

6:52

documentation about exactly what that meant.

6:55

Olivia's own notes are pretty sketchy,

6:57

and they reference emotion and

7:00

interpretation of texts. Dodge

7:02

thought Olivia was talented enough to give her

7:04

private lessons, and Olivia went on to

7:07

teach this method in her adult life

7:10

as a theater kid. I am incredibly

7:12

curious about exactly what behavior drama

7:14

was. For sure. Part of me is like

7:16

I bet I could piece this together like backwards

7:19

engineer it through like um acting

7:22

classes I did in college, for sure. In

7:26

eighteen eighty nine or eighteen ninety,

7:28

when she was twenty or twenty one, Olivia

7:31

Ward married Frank Bush, who was

7:33

a tailor from South Carolina. They

7:35

went on to have two daughters, Rosa Olivia

7:37

and Marie, but this wasn't

7:40

a happy marriage for reasons

7:42

that aren't really clear. The family moved to Boston,

7:44

and when they got there, Frank started working as a

7:46

janitor. That would have been a lot less

7:48

lucrative than working as a tailor. By

7:52

Frank and Olivia were divorced, and although

7:55

Olivia continued to go by Olivia

7:57

Ward Bush after this, she just

8:00

sscribed this time in her life as quote

8:02

extremely unfortunate. Her

8:04

next few years were hard. She was

8:07

a single mother raising two daughters, and

8:09

because of her race, she was considered only

8:11

for low paying and often physically

8:14

demanding or demoralizing work. She

8:16

moved around, including living with her aunt

8:18

Maria from time to time, just trying

8:21

to make ends meet. When she started

8:23

writing, it was with the hope that she might

8:25

be able to earn some extra money to support

8:27

her family. We will get more

8:29

into that after a quick sponsor break.

8:41

Olivia ward Bush's first book

8:43

of poems was simply titled Original

8:45

Poems, and it was published in Providence,

8:48

Rhode Island. In it

8:50

was dedicated quote with profound

8:53

reverence and respect to the people of my race,

8:55

Afro Americans, but the poems

8:57

in it also draw from her indigenous hair

9:00

as well, including the poem

9:02

Mourning on Shinnecock. This is

9:04

the first poem in the collection, and in it,

9:06

a narrator looks out over a grand

9:09

and wondrous spectacle of hills,

9:11

a leafy grove, corn fields,

9:13

a sea, before ending

9:16

quote all morning hour, so

9:18

dear, thy joy, and how I longed

9:20

for thee to last. But in thy

9:23

fading in today brought me an

9:25

echo of the past towards this. How

9:27

fair my life began? How pleasant was

9:29

its hour of dawn, but merging

9:31

into sorrow's day. Then beauty

9:34

faded with the mourn. We don't

9:36

know for sure whether Olivia Ward Bush was

9:38

active in the Temperance movement, but

9:40

the second poem in this book, titled

9:42

Treasured Moments, suggests that she

9:44

at least had a favorable opinion of it.

9:47

She characterizes temperance activists

9:49

as quote women with hearts true

9:51

and strong, who dared to face a

9:53

great evil, who dared to contend

9:56

against wrong. Several

9:58

poems in this book celebrate figu years from

10:00

Black history, including Christmas Addicts,

10:02

who also had both African and Indigenous

10:05

ancestry. We really don't

10:07

know much about Christmas Addics's

10:09

biography, but he's believed to have

10:12

liberated himself from enslavement before

10:14

becoming the first person to be killed at the Boston

10:16

Massacre on March five, seventeen seventy.

10:20

Her poem Christmas Addicts describes

10:22

him boldly striking the first blow

10:24

as other Bostonians shrank

10:27

from duty. It ends quote

10:29

then write in glowing letters, these

10:31

thrilling words in history, that

10:34

Addics was a hero. That Addics

10:36

died for liberty. A hero

10:38

of San Juan is about the Black infantry

10:41

and cavalry units known as the Buffalo

10:43

Soldiers at the Battle of San Juan Hill during

10:45

the Spanish American War. This

10:48

poem frames the battle as helping to liberate

10:50

Cuba from Spain. Quote, they fought

10:53

for Cuban liberty on Wuand's Hill.

10:55

Those bloody stains mark how these

10:57

heroes won the day and added

10:59

honor to their names. Of

11:01

course, there is a much bigger story to

11:03

the Spanish American War than just this poem,

11:06

and we should note that there are some complexities

11:08

to the greater story of the Buffalo Soldiers,

11:11

since earlier in their history they were also

11:13

part of the warfare against indigenous

11:15

nations during the United States Western

11:17

Expansion. Yeah, that's one of the reasons

11:20

that even though I've had the Buffalo Soldiers

11:22

on my list for a long time, I haven't figured out quite the

11:24

best approach for it. This

11:26

book, containing ten poems in total,

11:29

was generally well received, and some of

11:31

the poems were reprinted in other publications,

11:34

including in the Boston Transcript. In

11:36

a letter, Paul Lawrence Dunbar

11:38

told Olivia that he liked it very much

11:41

and that quote there is a high spiritual

11:43

tone about it that is bound to please.

11:46

For the next few years, Olivia Ward Bush

11:48

continued to write. In about

11:50

nineteen hundreds, she became assistant

11:52

drama director for Robert Gould Shaw

11:55

Community House, that was a settlement

11:57

house in Boston. We talked

11:59

about the settlement house movement in our previous

12:01

episode on Jane Adams. These

12:03

were organizations intended to improve

12:06

the lives of the poor and working class

12:08

by providing things like childcare,

12:10

education, and social support with the people

12:13

doing network living in the neighborhood

12:15

they were serving. It's probably

12:17

during this time that Bush began doing social

12:19

work. A pamphlet on her that was published

12:22

by the n double a CP in about nineteen

12:24

twenty describes her as one of the

12:26

most prominent social workers in Boston.

12:29

During these years, Olivia started supporting

12:32

her aunt in addition to her two daughters.

12:34

Her aunt, at this point was getting much older, and

12:36

she also started working as the tribal historian

12:39

for the Montaukeet Nation. It's

12:41

not clear exactly when she started this work,

12:43

but she continued until about nineteen sixteen,

12:45

and as we said at the top of the show, this

12:48

was a critically important time for the preservation

12:51

of Montaukeet oral histories and cultural

12:53

knowledge, because in nineteen ten, the

12:55

New York Supreme Court had declared

12:58

the Montauk tribe extinct, stripping

13:00

them of their lands on Long Island. So

13:03

we need to back up a little bit to explain this

13:05

decision. In the late seventeenth

13:08

century, the Montaucet Nations sold land

13:10

to the proprietors of the village of East

13:12

Hampton, negotiating the rights

13:15

to live on and use that land in perpetuity.

13:18

But it's clear the residents of East Hampton

13:21

hoped that they would eventually have that

13:23

land unconditionally. Later

13:25

agreements that the Montaukeet Nation

13:28

and East Hampton negotiated increasingly

13:30

restricted indigenous people's rights

13:32

and land access. Then, in

13:35

seventeen fifty four, the trustees

13:37

of East Hampton got representatives from

13:39

the Montaukeet Nation to sign an agreement

13:42

that the Montauckets would not marry Africans

13:44

or people from other indigenous

13:47

nations. The same agreement

13:49

gave the town the rights to prosecute

13:52

anyone of African descent or

13:54

from another indigenous nation who tried to

13:56

settle there. The trustees

13:58

rationale for this was twofold.

14:01

On Long Island and elsewhere, white

14:03

residents worried that if indigenous people's

14:05

welcomed people of African descent

14:08

into their communities, then those

14:10

communities would become a haven for people

14:12

who had liberated themselves from slavery,

14:14

or would inspire slave uprisings,

14:17

and it was also about trying to keep

14:19

them on Talket population from growing or

14:22

even maintaining itself. Intermarriages

14:25

were common among the indigenous nations of this

14:27

region. They helped each nation maintain

14:29

its own population while also strengthening

14:32

social and political ties among the nations.

14:35

The agreement signed in seventeen fifty four

14:37

meant that the Montaukeets were allowed to marry

14:40

only among themselves, but their

14:42

population was just too small for that

14:44

to be sustainable. Shortly

14:46

after the Revolutionary War, after

14:48

decades of warfare and increasing

14:51

conflict with East Hampton and pressure

14:53

from the town's trustees, a group

14:56

of Montaukeets who had converted to Christianity

14:58

moved to Oneida Land in New

15:00

York's Mohawk Valley, establishing

15:03

the Brothertown Nation. This

15:05

was a Christian community built on an alliance

15:07

of multiple Algonquian speaking indigenous

15:10

nations, and it excluded people of African

15:13

ancestry. There's some suggestion

15:15

that at least some Montaukeets had

15:18

adopted some of the same anti black attitudes

15:20

that were held by most Europeans, and

15:23

that some of the people who had signed that

15:25

agreement back in seventeen fifty four

15:28

were the same ones who then left to

15:30

establish the Brothertown Nation. The

15:32

Montaukeets who remained on Long Island

15:35

after this included people who didn't want

15:37

to convert to Christianity, people

15:39

who had African ancestry, and people

15:41

who just did not want to leave their homes.

15:44

In some cases, this divided families,

15:47

was some moving to Brothertown and some

15:49

staying behind. But again,

15:51

the hope from East Hampton was that everyone

15:54

in the Montaukeet Nation who had no

15:56

African ancestry would go, which

15:59

was not what happened. Bent Another

16:01

side to this is that, in the view

16:03

of the people of East Hampton, Montackets

16:06

who had African ancestry were not

16:08

indigenous. They were black, and

16:11

black and indigenous were mutually exclusive,

16:14

and by the eighteen hundreds, the trustees

16:16

started using that idea to argue

16:19

that the Montaukeet Nation no longer existed

16:22

and no longer had the land used

16:24

rights that they had negotiated back starting

16:26

in the seventeenth century. By

16:28

the late nineteenth century, Montaukets

16:31

living on eastern Long Island we're facing enormous

16:33

hostility from their white neighbors. In

16:36

eighteen seventy one, the nation tried to incorporate

16:38

to get on a more equal legal footing, but

16:41

that effort failed in the face of opposition

16:44

from East Hampton. Newspaper

16:46

coverage from this time was full of racist

16:49

stereotypes, and it continually characterized

16:51

the Montaucket Nation as dying out.

16:54

Seemingly every time a member of the nation

16:57

died, there would be newspaper articles

16:59

about the so called Last Montauk.

17:01

In eighteen seventy nine, the East Hampton

17:03

Trustees filed a petition to partition

17:06

Montauket Land, which a judge approved,

17:09

and the next year, the same judge approved

17:11

the sale of the land that totaled about

17:14

ten thousand acres. Developer

17:16

Arthur Benson bought it for a hundred

17:18

and fifty one thousand dollars. Benson

17:21

wanted to work with railroad developer Austin

17:24

Corbin to extend an existing railroad

17:26

line to Montauk Point, but his

17:28

purchase of the Montaukeet Nations land

17:31

wasn't enough for him to do that. The

17:33

Nations still had a lease dating

17:35

back to seventeen oh three giving

17:38

them on Tuckets the rights to live, hunt

17:40

and fish on the land in perpetuity,

17:43

really a lot like their earliest negotiations

17:46

with European columnists had done decades

17:49

before that. So Benson and Corbin

17:51

brought in the East Hampton town assessor,

17:54

Nathaniel Domini to try to coerce

17:57

the Montaukets off the land. Dominie

18:00

to people, telling them they would be allowed

18:02

to return to the land whenever they wanted,

18:05

even though he knew that was false. Some

18:07

people were offered and accepted as little

18:09

as ten dollars for their homes,

18:12

but others refused to sell. Domini

18:15

made increasingly lofty promises, things

18:17

like lifetime annual payments or

18:20

paying for an education for people's children.

18:23

He didn't follow through on a lot of this, and

18:25

he probably never intended to. These

18:28

negotiations were also illegal

18:31

since they went through individual tribal members

18:33

rather than the nation as a whole. In

18:36

eight the Montaucket Nation hired

18:38

a lawyer, and Benson's lawyers

18:40

again put forth that argument that

18:42

the Montauckets were black and not indigenous,

18:45

and therefore were not protected by that

18:47

seventeen oh three lease. This

18:50

argument worked from a couple of angles.

18:52

One was the one drop rule,

18:54

which was the idea that a person with even

18:57

one drop of so called African

18:59

blood was black, and the other

19:01

is the idea of blood quantum, which

19:03

is basically the idea that a person has

19:05

to have a certain amount of so called native

19:08

blood to be considered indigenous.

19:11

Different indigenous nations have all

19:13

had their own concepts of what it

19:16

means to be indigenous and what it

19:18

means to be a citizen, but

19:20

broadly speaking, the one drop

19:22

rule and blood quantum are

19:24

both ideas that originated from

19:27

European colonists and their descendants

19:30

in order to define who was white,

19:32

who was black, and who is indigenous,

19:35

usually in a way that's discriminatory and

19:37

restrictive. Court rulings

19:40

and appeals went on for years

19:42

in the effort to remove the Montaucket nation

19:44

from their land, ultimately

19:46

winding up before the State Supreme Court.

19:48

In nineteen ten, State

19:51

Supreme Court Judge Able Blackmar issued

19:53

a ruling that even though the New York State

19:55

Constitution forbade the sale of

19:57

indigenous land. The law that

20:00

only applied was the Dongan Charter, which

20:02

dated back to sixteen eighty six and

20:04

had given the City of Albany the exclusive

20:06

right to negotiate with Indigenous people.

20:10

Yeah, for some reason, the only provisions of the

20:12

Dongan Charter that he was really focused on still

20:14

being in force were these these

20:16

ones, the ones that related to people

20:19

taking the Montaucant Nations land. Blackmart

20:22

also stated, quote, there is

20:24

now no tribe of Montauk Indians. It

20:26

has disintegrated and been absorbed into

20:29

the massive citizens. If I may use

20:31

the expression, the tribe has been dying for many

20:33

years. There were a

20:35

number of Montaukeet people in the courtroom

20:38

when he made this statement. I saw

20:40

numbers ranging between twenty five and seventy

20:42

five. The Montaukeet Nation appealed,

20:45

but this decision was upheld in nineteen fourteen.

20:48

So Olivia ward Bush was acting as

20:50

the Montaukeet Nation tribal historian

20:53

in the wake of all of this. We'll

20:55

talk some more about this towards the end of the episode,

20:57

but for now we're going to pause for a sponsor

20:59

break. Unfortunately,

21:10

I don't have a lot of additional detail about

21:12

Olivia Ward Bush's work

21:15

as the Montaka Nations tribal historian.

21:17

But her second book, Driftwood,

21:19

was published in nineteen fourteen. This

21:22

one was dedicated to her aunt Mariah. Some

21:24

sources list this book is having twenty five

21:26

poems and two prose pieces, and the

21:29

others say twenty four and three, probably

21:32

because one of the pieces is an anti

21:34

lynching essay titled Hope that also

21:37

includes some verse. This

21:39

book is arranged into sections that

21:41

have an ocean theme, and

21:43

in the introduction she talks about watching Italian

21:46

children gathering driftwood, thinking

21:48

about, quote, what a joyous sight it

21:50

would be as they sat around the evening fire.

21:53

And I imagined that the firelight streaming

21:55

through the windows would brighten up the way

21:58

of some weary homeward travel. In

22:00

a letter to Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

22:03

she also said she'd called it Driftwood

22:05

because the pieces in it were quote,

22:07

bits of experiences cast up

22:10

on the shore of my life. This

22:12

volume contains a poem titled

22:14

to the Memory of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

22:17

Dunbar had died in nineteen o six, and

22:19

this poem has been compared to Phyllis Wheatley's

22:22

On the Death of the Reverend Mr George Whitfield

22:25

for its subject matter and its tone and language.

22:28

Driftwood also includes poems to Abraham

22:31

Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and William

22:33

Lloyd Garrison. The poem

22:35

Carney the Brave Standard Bearer is

22:38

about Sergeant William H. Carney of

22:40

the fifty four Massachusetts Regiment,

22:42

who was the first black man to be awarded

22:44

the Medal of Honor for his actions that

22:47

was at the Battle of Fort Wagner. After

22:49

being shot several times and seriously

22:51

wounded, Carney carried the American flag

22:54

to the fort, planted it, and held it upright

22:56

until help arrived. It's actually

22:58

possible that Bush had met Carney.

23:01

He lived in Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts,

23:03

after the Civil War. This book also

23:05

includes pieces that are more like poems

23:07

of protest. One of them, titled

23:10

Unchained eighteen sixty three,

23:12

celebrates the abolition of slavery, before

23:14

the tone shifts to quote free

23:17

indeed, but free to struggle, free

23:19

to toil unceasingly, not of

23:21

wealth, not of possession, was their portion

23:24

iano free. The same

23:26

year that Driftwood was published, Olivia

23:28

Award Bush married Anthony Barrell

23:30

Banks in Boston, and then the

23:33

following year, bush Banks was part of the city's

23:35

demonstrations against d. W. Griffith's

23:37

film Birth of a Nation. This

23:40

was part of ongoing protests

23:42

all over the country, as black communities

23:44

called for the film to be banned not

23:47

just for its racist depictions of black

23:49

people and its celebration of the Ku Klex

23:51

Klan, but also for its potential

23:53

to incite racist violence. All

23:56

of our episodes overlap a little, so

24:00

you remember we mentioned Griffith's in our

24:02

Todd Browning episodes. I also feel

24:04

like, as was the case with the Schaumberg collection,

24:07

feeling like a tour of previous episodes

24:09

of Stephye Miss and History Glass.

24:11

A lot of her poems feel like topics

24:14

that should be familiar to folks that have been listening

24:16

to the show for a long time. Bush

24:19

Banks organized a protest that took place

24:21

on April nineteen fifteen

24:23

and brought together about eight hundred black women

24:26

at twelfth Baptist Church in Boston's

24:28

Roxbury neighborhood. This

24:30

was described as the largest gathering

24:32

of black women ever assembled in the city

24:34

at the time. Although bush Banks

24:36

herself could not attend it because she was

24:39

sick. At this and other protests

24:41

around Boston, people called for Birth

24:43

of a Nation to be removed from the city and

24:46

for Boston Mayor James Michael Curly to

24:48

be recalled. Curly had

24:50

previously banned the production of a play

24:52

that, like Birth of a Nation, was based on

24:55

the novel The Klansman, but he

24:57

had allowed the film to be shown. Black

24:59

women and in Greater Boston also established

25:02

a Protective League Quote for the Maintenance

25:04

and Protection of our Civil Rights, and

25:06

bush Banks was elected as its president.

25:09

In the face of this and other demonstrations,

25:11

the Massachusetts legislature passed

25:14

the Sullivan Bill, which banned

25:16

amusements that were believed to create religious

25:18

or racial prejudice or to incite

25:20

riot. But when the Censorship

25:22

Board evaluated Birth of a Nation after

25:25

the law was passed, it ruled that the

25:27

film was quote not at all objectionable.

25:31

In the end, Birth of a Nation played in Boston

25:33

for more than six months, with more than three

25:36

hundred and sixties showings, and today

25:38

this film is cited as a major

25:40

factor in the rebirth of the Ku Klux

25:43

Klan. In nineteen fifteen, bush

25:45

Banks's last published poem came out

25:47

in nineteen sixteen. This was

25:50

on the Long Island Indian, which was

25:52

published in the Montaukat Nations Annual

25:54

Report that year. This poem

25:56

draws from tropes and language for Indigenous

25:59

people that were in place at the time, while

26:01

also expressing a sense of grief.

26:04

Quote now remains a scattered

26:06

remnant on these shores. They find

26:08

no home here and there, in

26:10

weary exile, they are forced through

26:12

life to Rome. The only

26:15

play that bush Banks published came

26:17

out a year later. This was a Sunday

26:19

school play called Memories of Calvary

26:21

and Easter Sketch. But other than these

26:23

two publications, the poem and the play,

26:25

we really don't know much about her life between

26:28

nineteen fifteen and nineteen twenty.

26:30

It seems that after marrying Anthony Banks,

26:32

she eventually moved to Chicago, where he got

26:34

a job as a pullman porter. In

26:36

about ninety the n double A

26:38

CP printed a pamphlet about bush

26:40

Banks, headlined lecturer, social

26:43

worker, writer. It included

26:45

quotes from people like Paul Lawrence Dunbar

26:47

and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, as well

26:50

as publications like The Chicago Plain Dealer.

26:53

In it, she's described as a forceful

26:55

and magnetic speaker, a remarkable

26:57

writer and quote possessed of a leasing

27:00

personality, a sympathetic nature,

27:02

with a broad mind and high ideals.

27:06

At some point, bush Banks started splitting

27:08

her time between Chicago and New York.

27:11

Over the nineteen twenties and early thirties,

27:13

she wrote Aunt Viny's Sketches. This

27:15

is a collection of twelve sketches featuring

27:18

two characters. One of them, Aunt

27:20

Viney, is in conversation with the other,

27:22

who's Miss Ali. Aunt Viney

27:24

speaks in black dialect, offering

27:27

up folk wisdom, humor, and commentary

27:29

on things like the Great Depression, the

27:31

community of Harlem, New York, and various

27:33

issues of the day. Bush

27:36

Banks submitted these to a radio station,

27:38

and she started the process of filing for copyright

27:40

protection on them, but it doesn't appear that that process

27:43

was ever completed, and these pieces

27:45

weren't published during her lifetime. In

27:47

the hands of white writers in the early

27:50

twentieth century, these kinds

27:52

of dialect characters tended to be racist

27:54

caricatures that reinforced damaging

27:56

stereotypes of black people. But

27:59

Aunt Viney is assertive, confident,

28:01

and wise while not being formally

28:04

educated. This is one of the earliest

28:06

examples of this type of dialect character

28:09

written by a black writer. Langston

28:11

Hughes first introduced his character

28:13

Jesse b Simple about six years

28:16

later. During these years

28:18

that were split between Chicago and New York, bush

28:20

Banks also wrote a three act play

28:23

titled Indian Trails or Trail

28:25

of the Montauk. Today, only

28:27

the cast list, a synopsis, and

28:29

a few scenes have survived. Most

28:31

of the characters in the play are Indigenous,

28:33

with their names drawn from indigenous languages

28:36

from northeastern North America.

28:39

This play reflects on the nineteen

28:41

ten court decision that we discussed earlier,

28:43

but in the play it ends with the Montacict

28:46

Nation's land being returned to them.

28:48

This play was performed at Booker T. Washington

28:51

High School in Norfolk, Virginia, probably

28:54

sometime in the nineteen twenties, as well as

28:56

when bush Banks took a tour of the Southeast.

28:59

Many of a audiences were predominantly

29:01

black, and the play essentially served

29:03

as an introduction to indigenous

29:05

issues for non indigenous black people.

29:09

Fans of the play included Maggie L.

29:11

Walker, who was the first black woman in the US

29:13

to charter a bank in ninety

29:16

nine, bush banks daughter, Rosa Olivia,

29:19

died at some point that two

29:21

of them had become estranged and they

29:23

hadn't been able to reconcile by the time of

29:25

her death. By the late nineteen twenties,

29:28

bush Banks had become well known and well

29:30

respected in both Chicago and New York,

29:32

including becoming a prominent figure in the

29:34

New Negro movement also known

29:37

as the Harlem Renaissance. She

29:39

was friends and colleagues with figures like Paul

29:41

Robeson, W. E. B. Du boys

29:43

A, Philip Randolph, Julia Ward

29:46

Howe, and County Cullen. She

29:48

also taught drama in both Chicago and

29:50

New York, in public schools and in

29:52

enrichment programs. In Chicago,

29:55

she established the bush Bank School

29:57

of Expression, which was a performance

29:59

and meeting space for dance, drama, and

30:01

visual arts, and she also hosted

30:03

salons in her home. In

30:06

nineteen thirty six, a society

30:08

column in the Pittsburgh Courier, which

30:10

was featuring happenings in New York,

30:13

called bush Banks quote the grand

30:15

Dame of the Literati, saying

30:17

quote, there was a time when her

30:19

salon was filled of a Sunday

30:22

evening with promising young playwrights,

30:24

poets, novelists, and others fired

30:26

with the ambitions of youth. That

30:29

same year, bush Banks earned a teacher

30:31

training certification in New York and

30:33

she started teaching drama at the Abyssinia

30:35

Community Center in Harlem.

30:37

This continued until nineteen thirty nine.

30:40

Bush Banks's work at Abyssinia Community

30:42

Center was part of the Works Progress Administration's

30:45

Federal Theater Project. This

30:47

was a Depression era program meant to provide

30:50

jobs for out of work theater professionals.

30:53

It was disbanded in ninety nine

30:55

after a series of investigations

30:57

by the House an American Activities Committee,

31:00

which were brought on in part by the program's

31:02

effort toward racial integration and equality.

31:05

Yeah there were, also, of course, allegations that it

31:07

had been infiltrated by communist radicals,

31:10

as is pretty much the case with everything

31:12

investigated by the House on American

31:14

Activities Committee. Bush

31:17

Bank seems to have had an interest in religion

31:19

and spirituality throughout her life, including

31:21

an interest in the High Faith, which may have

31:23

influenced her work. She was

31:26

also a member of John Haynes Holmes

31:28

Community Church in New York City in the nineteen

31:30

twenties and early thirties. Towards

31:32

the end of her life, she converted to Seventh

31:34

Day Adventism. Her daughter

31:37

Marie and her granddaughter Helen, who she lived

31:39

with from time to time while in New York, had

31:41

also become Seventh Day Adventists.

31:44

Olivia Ward Bush Banks died on

31:46

April eighth, ninety four, at the

31:48

age of seventy five. Most

31:51

of her papers are housed at the Amistad Research

31:53

Center at two Lane University in New Orleans.

31:56

Apart from the work that we've talked about in this episode,

31:59

plus a couple of their poems and essays,

32:01

most of what she wrote went unpublished

32:04

until and

32:06

then Oxford University Press published

32:08

her collected works. This was

32:10

part of the Schaumberg Library of nineteenth

32:12

century Black Women Writers, and it was edited

32:15

and compiled by her great granddaughter,

32:17

Bernice Elizabeth Forrest. As

32:20

of when we are recording this, the Montaucket

32:22

Nation is still not recognized by the State

32:25

of New York or by the federal government in the

32:27

United States. The

32:29

New York Legislature passed legislation

32:32

to recognize the nation in seventeen

32:36

and eighteen, and then

32:38

Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed

32:40

it each time. Legislation

32:42

has been reintroduced since twenty eighteen, including

32:45

this year. As of right now when

32:47

we are recording, legislation

32:49

has been referred to committee in both the

32:51

New York State Assembly and the New York

32:53

Senate. That's a frustrating

32:56

end. Do you have less frustrating listener

32:58

mail? It is a frustra rating and

33:01

I do have listener mail, and

33:04

this is just a funny thing to end

33:06

the episode on. This is from Carly. Carly

33:10

said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm so excited

33:12

to finally be reaching out to you guys. My name

33:14

is Carly and I'm a high school Spanish teacher.

33:17

I discovered your podcast a couple of years ago

33:19

when starting my masters and it has been a constant

33:21

companion throughout the years. At least once

33:24

a week I share a factor anecdote I heard

33:26

in an episode that is totally interesting to me

33:28

and may or may not be totally interesting to the

33:30

other person. I wanted to reach

33:32

out because on my way to school today I was listening

33:34

to the episode on William Rice. At

33:37

the point in the episode where William is trying to

33:39

start a high school in Texas and has met with the response

33:41

a quote stating that high school

33:43

was quote high salute nonsense.

33:46

I couldn't help but busting out laughing. It was

33:48

so funny to me to hear my career reduced

33:50

to such a silly little statement. I then proceeded

33:53

to giggle about it at regular intervals

33:55

throughout the day. I think

33:57

as we returned to beginning the school

33:59

you're in her, so many teachers held onto

34:01

the hope that things would be easier, which

34:03

has unfortunately not been the case. Teaching

34:06

in a mid slash post pandemic world

34:08

has brought on an entirely new,

34:11

unforeseen set of challenges that have been

34:13

pushing us all. Thank you for

34:15

bringing joy, learning, and a little silliness

34:17

through this podcast. That has been my favorite way to

34:19

unwind after a challenging day as of

34:22

late. Best carly ps

34:24

and sticking with the pet picks theme of your fan mail,

34:26

attached to pictures of mine and my fiance's

34:28

two for babies, Danny the Dog and Hank

34:31

the Cat. Danny

34:33

and Hank are very cute. Indeed,

34:37

Danny the Dog is on the couch, then

34:39

Danny the and the and the couch are both brown

34:42

and um and It's one of those situations where the

34:44

dog almost matches the couch, which is great,

34:46

and then uh and

34:48

then Hank the cat is under

34:50

what looks like Christmas tree, little

34:53

key cap present. It's very good.

34:56

I love this email. And I

34:58

also had forgotten in the interim

35:00

between recording that episode and when we got

35:02

this email that I had read or one

35:04

of us had had read this quote

35:07

about high school being high falutin nonsense.

35:10

So when I saw an email that had the subject

35:12

line high falutin nonsense, I had this moment

35:14

where I was like, Oh, I was

35:16

like, oh no, that's the

35:19

thing we said on the show. Um,

35:22

So thank you. I'm so

35:24

glad that that that quote

35:27

brightened your day. And thank you so much for sending

35:29

these pet pictures. If you

35:31

would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts

35:34

were History Podcast at I heart radio

35:36

dot com. We're also all over social

35:39

media at miss and History. That's where you'll find

35:41

our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

35:43

And you can subscribe to the show on

35:46

the I heart Radio app or wherever else

35:48

you get your podcasts. Stuff

35:55

you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart

35:57

Radio. For more podcasts from I Radio,

36:00

visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

36:03

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

36:06

H m

36:09

hm