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Cream-crackers, cubes of cheese and free flowing Cabernet Sauvignon: in this typical art gallery-esque style began the Opening Reception of The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany photography display in the James W. Palmer III Gallery on October 1. This ceremony is part of a series of events happening on campus about African American Civil Rights and Germany in the 20th Century.
The curators of this exhibition are Maria Höhn, associate professor of history at Vassar College, and Martin Klimke from the Heidelberg Center of American Studies (HCA) at Heidelberg University and the German Historical Institute (GHI). They claim three goals: to collect documented information on a little known branch of the African American civil rights history, to make these documentations available to whomever wants to learn from them, and finally, to initiate the growth of “scholars, teachers, and students” who engage in studying the stories of the American Civil Rights movement in a more globalized sense.
This NAACP J. E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award winning project, which is a collaboration of the HCA and Vassar College, describes itself as a “digital archive, oral history collection and research project.” Recounting the experiences of the nearly twenty million African American Soldiers who have served tours of duty in Germany since 1945, the project aims to give their voices a forum, and in doing so hopes that people understand that the African American Civil Rights Movement transcended the political boundaries of the United States, and proliferated beyond the oceans.
It is said that African American GIs in Germany found that their rights of “equality” and “democracy” better realized than in their own country: “[For African American soldiers], but especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom. [They could] go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date who they wanted, just like other people’ says United States President Barack Obama in Darsden, Germany, after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp on June 5, 2009.
Once the Civil Rights Movement found its incipience in the 1950s, African American GIs conducted sit-ins in Germany, and thereby played a fundamental part in propagating these rights. These efforts augmented post Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Berlin in 1964 and the Angela Davis’s solidarity campaigns in both East and West Germany in the early part of the 1970s, at which point African American GIs intensified their collaborations with German student activists to combat racism at all levels.
These research findings were very well received by faculty and non-faculty alike, but there was one trend that is notable, and that is that there were very few students who presented themselves. But it also seemed as though the curators did not intend on hosting students in the first place: the presence of wine as a beverage is a strong indicator of this. However, the few students that were in attendance were there in full spirit and had a lot to say.
“I’ve only seen the first few exhibits, and I think it’s interesting because I don’t really think of African American outside the U.S.” says Asseffash Makonnen ’12, Vice President of the African Students Union here at Vassar. She continues, “So [my] initial reaction is ‘wow, they’re the same as African Americans in the U.S.!’”
Hopefully this event and the series that are to follow of its kind this week are just the beginning of many such collaborative efforts that continue to generate awareness and interest in the untold facets of American history.
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