Crispus Attucks High School basketball champions: A celebration deferred?

Oscar Robertson during Crispus Attucks High School’s 1954-1955 championship season. Image from Oscar Robertson’s personal scrapbook. Courtesy of the Crispus Attucks Museum and the IUPUI University Library.

The Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, like most monuments, has multiple meanings. For many people, gathering at the Monument is a way to come together as a community and celebrate.  So when a celebration that typically occurs at the Monument is cancelled, the absence itself also sends a signal. An incident in March 1955 involving the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument led basketball legend Oscar Robertson, then a high school junior, to conclude, “They don’t want us.”

In basketball-crazy Indiana, the winners of the boys high school state tournament were like princes. Traditionally, the team met their adoring public at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument for a short ceremony and then went on a parade winding through the downtown streets. Crispus Attucks High School was Indianapolis’ first championship team since the tournament had begun. Oscar Robertson naturally expected that the Attucks Tigers, like those champions he had admired before, would receive the royal treatment.

Coach Ray Crowe (center) with other teachers, administrators, and mentors at Crispus Attucks High School in June, 1956. Image from the Indianapolis Recorder Collection. Courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

Crispus Attucks High School opened in 1927.  It was established as part of the city’s effort to segregate the schools by race; all African Americans were to attend Crispus Attucks no matter where they lived in the city. Over the decades, the students and teachers made the institution an example of African American achievement.  By the 1950s, as historian Aram Goudsouzian writes, the high school and its basketball team were at the center of a larger struggle for African Americans: “how to achieve black consciousness and pride while participating in a larger society on an even footing.” The Crispus Attucks basketball team began the 1954-1955 season with the goal of reaching the finals.  The season before,  Attucks under Coach Ray Crowe, fell to tiny Milan in the semifinals and watched as Milan ultimately won the state championship.

In 1954, the Crispus Attucks Tigers fell to Milan in the semifinals. Image from the 1954 Crispus Attucks High School Yearbook (page 43). Courtesy of the Crispus Attucks Museum and the IUPUI Library.

In 1955, however, Crispus Attucks was dominant and steadily advanced through the tournament. On March 19, 1955, Crispus Attucks met Gary, Indiana’s Roosevelt — another African American school — in the Butler Fieldhouse.  Fans from all of Indianapolis’ high schools cheered the “Flying Tigers” as they defeated Roosevelt and become the city’s first boys team to win the state championship.  After celebrating on the court, the team crowded onto a fire truck.  Mayor Alex Clark and the city police led the procession, which included buses full of Attucks’ supporters, down Meridian to Monument Circle, where fans waited to greet the champions.

After a brief stop, during which the mayor gave Coach Crowe the key to the city, the procession went up Indiana Avenue before ending at a huge celebratory bonfire at Northwestern Park (now Watkins Park).   Robertson writes in his memoir, “Something was wrong. I knew the traditional parade route. I’d seen other champions go south, take a route that led downtown and through the heart of the city.”

Crispus Attucks cheerleaders at a basketball game in March, 1955. Image from the Indianapolis Recorder Collection. Courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

Earlier in March, the Indianapolis superintendent of schools decided that a “mammoth victory celebration” in Northwestern Park would replace the traditional parade if Attucks won the state championship. Some fans saw the bonfire in the park as an opportunity for African Americans to celebrate in their own neighborhood, not far from Crispus Attucks. Some players were so dazzled by the win that they scarcely noticed what was happening. Oscar Robertson, however, was pained by the assumption that African Americans would have rioted if the Tigers’ fans had celebrated downtown.

“We weren’t savages. We were a group of civilized, intelligent young people who through the grace of God had happened to get together and win some basketball games. We’d just won the biggest game in the history of Indianapolis basketball.

“They took our innocence away from us.”

Robertson describes leaving the bonfire and returning home. When his father noticed his dejection, Oscar told him “Dad. . . They don’t want us.”

Instead of a parade, the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce promised to create a scholarship fund for a worthy Attucks student. African American businesses, clubs, and fraternities hosted celebrations for the team.  However, weeks after Attucks’ victory, some fans held out hope that there would eventually be a downtown parade, or at least a “city-wide banquet” but those events did not materialize.  An editorial in the Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s African American newspaper, expressed disappointment at the lack of a festive “tribute” to the victors.  The writer warned the city fathers that because “the city’s first state champs’ happen[s] to be a Negro Team” there was “the possibility of misunderstanding that the ‘no parade’ decision might somehow [be] connected” with the issue of racial discrimination and prejudice. For many in Indianapolis, the lack of a festive event for the deserving champions indicated that despite assertions to the contrary, Indianapolis remained divided — by race, class, and neighborhood.

The 1955 Crispus Attucks championship team with Coach Ray Crowe (third from left). Image from the Indianapolis Recorder Collection. Courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

In 1956, Crispus Attucks won its second state championship, and was the first boys champion to have an undefeated season.  As the commentary in the Indianapolis Recorder indicated, it appeared that a new tradition, at least one relating to Attucks champions, was in place.  The victory motorcade, led by the mayor, took the same route as it had in 1955, including looping around Monument Circle before heading to Northwestern Park.  “The trip around the circle was only an acknowledgement of the right the Tigers, as victors, had of going that way.”  The paper claimed that the police discouraged any white fans who wanted to participate in the bonfire from venturing into the park.

For the many of the players and fans, nothing could diminish the pride and excitement of Crispus Attucks basketball.  Yet, in telling ways, the brief celebration at Monument Circle indicated that truly equal treatment had not arrived in Indianapolis.

—Modupe Labode

The victorious Crispus Attucks Tigers after winning their second consecutive state basketball championship, March 17, 1956. Photograph by William Palmer. Courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

Images from the Crispus Attucks yearbooks and Oscar Robertson’s personal scrapbook are courtesy of the Crispus Attucks Museum and Program of Digital Scholarship at IUPUI University Library.  For more images, visit: http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/CAttucks

Images from the Indianapolis Recorder are courtesy of the Program of Digital Scholarship at IUPUI University Library.  For more images, visit: http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/IRecorder

Postcards as primary documents

One-cent 1898 series United States postage stamp depicting Benjamin Franklin.

In May 1898, the one-cent stamp changed the game. The United States Congress passed an act to lower the cost of sending privately printed cards, which had been collected as souvenirs by tourists at popular resorts and world expositions, to the same postage as government cards. In “Wishing They Were There: Old Postcards and Library History”, library historian Bernadette Lear describes how the change in postage from two cents — as much as sending a first-class letter — to one cent meant Americans were purchasing and mailing almost a billion postcards annually in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Visual manipulation of landscape images in early postcards was minimal during this time (1900-1910), according to geographers Karen De Bres and Jacob Sowers. Postcard publishers like the Detroit Publishing Company hired professional photographers to capture civic landmarks such as the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Thanks to advances in printmaking, typography and paper making, German printers often transformed these images into colorful illustrations for wholesale. Check out and compare the similarities of the two images below.

The Detroit Publishing Company's photograph of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, c1904. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A card addressed to "Master Karl Kroeger" in Batesville, Indiana. The postcard was printed in Germany and postmarked on December 12, 1906.

Karl, why don’t you write me a letter? When I first turned to postcards as a potential primary source for research, I imagined travelers disembarking from Indianapolis Union Station, buying a card from a pushcart vendor, and recording their first impressions of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument for family members back home. Yet as I scoured digital archives and auction listings for insightful messages, only one visitor mentioned the “view” in brevity: “I saw this monument.” (Yes, but what did you think about it?)

Similarly, when Lear set out to explore the lives of library patrons through her collection of postcards, she found they rarely discussed the library. Rather, postcard senders “talked about splitting wood, canning peaches, and getting their tonsils out…” instead of the libraries they were building or the books they were reading. Lear explains that until 1907, the entire back side of a postcard — the “undivided back” — was to be used only for addresses. Thus the postcard most often carried brief messages, such as a travel updates or just a quick hello. Guy Atkins at Postcardese, a blog devoted to messages on old postcards, offers a different rationale based on the very public nature of postcards: Did the awareness that others beside the addressee will read the message influence what was written?

A blossoming friendship between pen pals in Indianapolis, Indiana and Florence, Italy. One hundred and eight years after it was first postmarked, the card was sent back to Indianapolis from an eBay seller in Italy.

So how do historians feel about postcards? Ady Milman argues that the mass reproduction of an image — such as a view of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument from the southeast quadrant of Monument Circle — defines a destination and reinforces perceptions of a place. To this day, images can contribute to the success of tourist destinations. Lear suggests, however, that because postcards were often idealized representations of how the creator wanted the space to look rather than how it actually appeared, postcards should be treated as culturally constructed documents. In a literature review, De Bres & Sowers note that historians have considered postcards as “kitschy ephemera, media not to be trusted, tourist marketing devices, or realistic depictions of American life.”

Yet if we are lucky enough to have a postage date, a publisher’s trademark or other stylistic clues to help us estimate a rough date for a postcard, we have a starting place to learn what regular people were thinking about the places they visited and lived. Though I was initially disappointed that David in Guilford was  informed about the new chestnut tree in the park, rather than social or racial conventions of the time, I realized that these seemingly trivial messages are still important. In contrast to newspaper accounts and printed souvenirs that exalt the impressive feat of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, visitors and citizens of Indianapolis at the turn of the century had other things to talk about.

—Maggie Schmidt

Presenting Indianapolis

Roman numerals installed in Monument Circle for Super Bowl XLVI. Photo credit: Adam Becker.

Super Bowl XLVI has finally arrived. As an Iowan, I’ve grown accustomed to cornfields and churning combines as B-roll filler for nationally-televised college athletics or political events in my home state.  These images not only project messages about the landscape, but also about the people who live there.

Here at Monument Circle Project we are interested in the monument as a symbol of Indianapolis, and with an international audience tuning in there has not been a better week to see this in action. The monument has served as a backdrop to the bikini-clad Shaquille O’Neal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the 96-ton Roman numerals installed on the south side of the Circle. From television spots to print media, the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument has been at the center of the spectacle.

In particular, the crowning statue of Victory — a 38 ft. bronze statue cast in a Chicago foundry in the early 1890s — has taken her place in the limelight.

The Richmond Times in Richmond, Virginia, reported that the "tallest shaft in the world" was nearing completion on October 22, 1893.

Victory was sculpted by George Brewster (1862-1943), whose winning design entry pruned the expansive wings of the architect Bruno Schmitz’s original sketch — thought to be too wide for windy days — to a small, American eagle headpiece. The Richmond Times declared that Victory, modeled from the lower half of one Cleveland woman and the top half of another, was “free from conventionalities and is original as well as American in treatment.”

Victory was unveiled this past December as the star — literally — of a promotional poster by Indiana artist Walter Knabe for the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee. The Indianapolis Star reported that the poster “was part of an effort to infuse as much culture into Indianapolis Super Bowl festivities as possible.”

At the unveiling of the poster, Knabe commented that “the concept was to create the celebration around the event and the city and what was the perfect celebratory piece? Of course, the monument.”

Chris Chase of Yahoo Sports quipped in response: “The statue, ‘Victory,’ is from Indy’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument. As I said above, it looks cool, though I doubt anyone outside Indianapolis, or those who read this news story, could have identified it.”

Beyond the Super Bowl Host Committee, local reaction to the commemorative poster was not as positive. One member of a Facebook group called Designers (and fans) Against Superbowl Indianapolis Poster wrote, “… I don’t know who approved this and said, ‘Oh, yes! I love it! Totally embodies Indianapolis!’ This is not a good representation of Indianapolis. This is NOT art.”

Victory dons eye black for the Super Bowl issue of NUVO News: Indianapolis, Indiana's Alternative Voice.

While the artistic merit of the poster seemed to be the chief culprit of the complaints, I also wondered if critics were in some part responding to the overtly patriotic tone of the poster. Yet Joe Flint of the Los Angeles Times notes that the National Football League, like other sports organizations, has a long history of promoting “nationalistic fervor” for the beloved American pastime. With that in mind, the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument seems to be an appropriate symbol for the hosts of the championship football game, of which some have argued should be considered a national holiday. Whether locals feel it should represent the city, however, might be a different story.

If you could project one image of Indianapolis to the world, what would you choose, and why?

–Maggie Schmidt

How monuments create memory

Rudolf Schwarz, Oliver P. Morton and Reliefs, bronze and granite, 1907. Indiana Statehouse, Indianapolis.

We know that Indianapolis is dotted with statuary of statesmen and war heroes — the number of memorials is second only, it is often claimed, to Washington D.C. What purpose do these monuments serve to the public past and present?

Monument comes from the Latin verb monere, which means to warn or remind. Art historian Kirk Savage reminds us that monuments are inherently political because they claim to be about essential truths. They appear to have always been a part of our landscape and our heritage. Part of this has to do with the fact that since the Classical Age of the Greeks and Romans, those with political or military power have used monuments to create unifying narratives of historical memory and national identity.

Savage also notes that 20th century advocates of statuary — such as the one above of Indiana’s 14th Governor during the Civil War, Oliver P. Morton — emphasized the importance of portraiture:  in order for the public to emulate patriotic men who were thought to be makers of history, the public must be able to see the likeness of their heroes elevated and immortalized in stone.

The public demand for civic art increased as raw materials became widely available at the end of the 19th century. Limestone was the material of choice in Indiana. Pictured are craftsmen at the Indiana Limestone Company in Bedford, Indiana in October, 1929. Photo courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.

An interesting example of this phenomenon comes from The Minnesota Junior Journal, which was printed as a supplement to The Minneapolis Journal. At the height of public demand for civic statuary, three pages of essays written by school children were printed on December 21, 1901, in response to this prompt:

TOPIC: Monument Most Needed in the United States. Why? What Should It Be?

There is no way to read the contents of the entire mailbag, but nearly all of the essays chosen for publication focused on honoring “great” men and women who were thought to have contributed to the development or progress of the United States.  One essay in particular brings us back to the power of monuments to control and promote narratives of national identity and memory.

The Minneapolis Journal, December 21, 1901, Journal Junior, Page 2, Image 26. Image provided by the Minnesota Historical Society in Saint Paul, MN.

“War monuments to victory are trophies that not only keep us mindful of who won, but also assure us that the war was honorable.” — James M. Mayo in War Memorials as Political Landscape (1988)

Historian David Blight argues that a call for reconciliation between the Union and the Confederacy overshadowed the ideological divide — slavery — of the Civil War. In the decades following the war, as veterans aged, the rising themes of citizen sacrifice and “heroic nostalgia” — an idea that both sides were noble because they fought bravely and believed in their cause — influenced how the war would be commemorated. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a Union veterans’ association centralized in Indianapolis in the 1880s, persuaded the state legislature to appropriate $200,000 for the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. The organization was largely influential in the design of the monument, which was dedicated to the common soldier and the preservation of the Union.

A dying soldier at the base of the "War Group" on the east facade of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Photo by Jennifer Webb (Flickr user jflower74).

A century later, the urge to selectively remember our nation’s history — or perhaps to selectively forget — continues to linger at Monument Circle. Indiana University Professor James H. Madison assisted in the development of the Colonel Eli Lilly Civil War Museum at the base of the monument in 1999. Madison’s reflections on the process of commemoration are worth reading in full:

“Many people worked hard to build that museum, and I’m proud of what we accomplished. But the process brought home for me the large degree to which some Hoosiers, even those who know a good deal about battles and camps, rifles and hard tack, boots and cannon, preferred silence about slavery and the war. I wanted to protest: it was a war caused by slavery—not sectionalism, not economic differences, not states’ rights, not different ways of life, and not Yankee aggression. It was about slavery—and slavery was about race. How could we not talk about this subject at the very center of the Civil War and of our history?” (Civil War Memories and ‘Pardnership Forgittin’, 1865–1913, p. 200)

“Those with political power within a given society organize public space to convey (and thus to teach the public) desired political lessons.” — Sanford Levinson in Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998)

This does not mean, of course, that the public has not historically been skeptical or resistant to monuments — quite the opposite, in fact, as we recently saw in Indianapolis. But what do we do if the ideologies our monuments espouse no longer reflect who we are as citizens? Legal scholar Sanford Levinson notes that changes in political regimes in European history resulted in the destruction of public symbols of power, followed by the erection of new monuments. But in the United States, the whole gamut of monuments from our nation’s history — the good and the ugly — have largely continued to exist. Fred Wilson’s proposal for E Pluribus Unum explored this tension before the project was cancelled. The monument to replace it will likely aim to tell a different story of African American history in Indianapolis.

Marcia E. Vetrocq, in a response to the termination of E Pluribus Unum, hits the nail on the head with the following question: “Should Indianapolis welcome a public artwork that embodies a critique of past neglect, or should it commission a public work that actually corrects past neglect?”

–Maggie Schmidt

On the flag in E Pluribus Unum

In the years since Fred Wilson  revealed his design for E Pluribus Unum, most of the discussion has focused on the “slave figure.”  However, I’ve been attracted to the flag which the repositioned man would have held in his hand. The image of a person raising a flag evokes ideas of staking a claim to territory. Flag-raising is often associated with war, conquest, sacrifice, or exploration. Think of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of Marines raising the United States flag on Iwo Jima or the planting of the U.S. flag of the flag on the moon.

African American Flag by David Hammons at The Studio Museum in Harlem on 125th Street in Harlem, New York. June, 2007.

As the Pledge of Allegiance declares, the U.S. flag symbolizes the nation’s values of “liberty and justice for all.” The tension between the nation’s values and actions make the flag attractive to artists. For example, curator Franklin Sirmans notes that David Hammons has regularly featured the U.S. flag in his art. His 1990 African–American Flag, in which the red, green, and black colors of Pan-Africanism replace the familiar red, white, and blue—is especially striking. The transformed flag is immediately recognizable even as its meaning remains elusive.

Fred Wilson's flag design for E Pluribus Unum. Image courtesy of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

The flag in E Pluribus Unum doesn’t directly reference the United States flag.  At a distance, it resembles a quilt or perhaps a textile woven on a narrow loom, such as kente cloth. But on closer examination, it is a flag comprised of other flags, those of African and Caribbean nations, as well as the flag of the African Union. The flag in E Pluribus Unum represents not a nation, but an idea of relationships among people and cultures. Many of the nations whose flags constitute the E Pluribus Unum flag were fundamentally shaped by the Atlantic slave trade; they are linked by the millions of people who were forced from Africa to the Americas. These nations are part of the African Diaspora.  Other flags represent members of the African Union.  Both the African Diaspora and the African Union suggest connections among people which cannot be contained by the nation-state.

The figure holding the flag appears to claim the land for the relationship which binds together the lands and people of the African Diaspora. This flag, in the hands of a black man, would have challenged viewers to consider the central place of the African Diaspora—and people of African descent—in the history of Indianapolis, and the United States.

—Modupe Labode

EPU project discontinued

On December 13, 2011, the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) held a press conference announcing the Indianapolis Cultural Trail’s termination of Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum.  The press release is available at the CICF website.  The Indianapolis Cultural Trail commissioned Wilson to produce this work, which was based on the figure of a freed man, in 2007. The Monument Circle Project blog was inspired by the proposal and despite the decision made by the CICF we will continue to explore questions raised by E Pluribus Unum.

The first black art historian

Freeman Henry Morris Murray, born in 1859 to a Scottish father and a “mulatto” mother — to use the language of the time — in Ohio, is credited by art historian Albert Boime as one of the first to write and lecture about the ways African Americans were represented in art. Importantly, Murray’s work focused not only on derogatory imagery encased in stone and marble, but on the significant contributions from African Americans that were (and still are) missing from the memorial landscape. A promotional flyer for his book, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in the Interpretation of Black Art (1916), asks questions that are relevant to our discussion today:

“When we look at a work of art, especially when we look at one in which Black Folk appear — or do not appear when they should — we should ask: What does it mean? What does it suggest? What impression is it likely to make on those who view it?” [Courtesy of the Hackley-Lambert Family Papers]

Niagara Movement founders in 1906. Photo courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Murray, appearing on the far right in 1906 with co-founders of the civil rights Niagara Movement (including W.E.B. Du Bois in front), was 56 when he began research for his book. As a self-taught art critic, he wrote directly to American and European sculptors about the motives and inspirations behind their work.

Post-Civil War sculptures often depicted Emancipation as a gift to former slaves.

“… as bestowal; seldom or never as a restitution. Hence American art — and foreign art, too, it seems — usually puts it: objectively, ‘See what’s been done for you”, or, subjectively “Look what’s been done for me.” — Murray in Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, p. 136, (1916)

Thomas Ball, Emancipation Group, bronze, 1874. Lincoln Park, Washington D.C.

Among the many works Murry critiques is the representation of the freed slave at the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Though he cautioned African Americans to be wary of imagery that embraced certain characteristics  — “… the popular American conception of the African is the type exemplified by the more outlandish of the captives brought here from the Congo and Niger regions” [Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, p. 8] — his focus in Indianapolis does not concern facial features or the figure’s tattered clothing. Rather, Murray dismisses the positioning of the freed slave, who appears to him as an afterthought, a stagey addition to an already-saturated cast of allegorical figures by German architect Bruno Schmitz:

“… I feel an impulse to seize this ‘super’ by his dangling foot and slide him gently off into oblivion – or else say to him, as sternly as I can: ‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength… shake thyself from the dust; arise.’ You deserve a place at Liberty’s side, not at her feet. Assist her soberly to uphold the Flag, while others rejoice; for, but for your strong right arm the Flag would even now perhaps be trailing in the dust!” — Murray in Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, p. 128, (1916)

Dr. Kirk Savage noted in a presentation at the Indianapolis Public Library that the word “super” is meant as an extra person in a cast, or a window dressing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “super” as:

Noun:

• 2. archaic: an extra, unwanted, or unimportant person; a supernumerary.
• theatrical slang dated: an extra.

Bruno Schmitz, War Group, limestone, 1901. Indianapolis, Indiana.

Similar to the way in which contemporary artist Fred Wilson proposed re-situating the freed slave of E Pluribus Unum in a more active position, Murray envisioned the African American man on the opposite side of the monument, among Schmitz’ War Group:

“Yet in all of it we see no black man, though here, if anywhere — here where there is powder smoke — he would seem most fittingly to have a place, both for his honor’s sake and the truth’s sake: for we well know that in the war which these scenes represent — the war to save the Union and to make universal liberty in this land a fact — as in all others of this nation’s wars, the American Negro has been no ‘slacker.'” — Murray in Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, p. 125 (1916)

Murray set the type for 240 pages of Emancipation and the Freed on his home press.  He designed the covers, hand-stitched the binding of all 200 copies, and promoted the book with homemade flyers. If that wasn’t enough, Murray also spent his time as a teacher, civil rights activist, editor, writer, and founded several newspapers and businesses.

For more information on Murray, check out a bibliography entitled F.H.M. Murray: First Biography of a Forgotten Pioneer for Civil Justice, written by his great-granddaughter, Anita Hackley-Lambert. Additionally, Albert Boime engages Murray’s analysis in the final chapter of The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century.

–Maggie Schmidt