By Joe Stumpe / The Active Age
The first history Gerald Norwood got interested in was his own family’s, and who could blame him?
Norwood’s grandfather, Henry, spent his childhood enslaved on plantations in North Carolina and southwest Arkansas. Following the Civil War, Henry and his older brother made their way on foot about 130 miles north in Arkansas, settling near Fort Smith.
There, Henry became a respected member of the community — a landowner, father of twelve and noted hunting guide in the then wild woods of northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma (not yet a state). To be one generation removed from slavery, his grandson knows, is rare.
Today, old family photographs, marriage and death certificates, sharecropping records and other documents are among Gerald Norwood’s prized possessions. But his collecting has grown to include many aspects of what’s sometimes called African Americana — documenting the triumphant as well as tragic aspects of black life in the United States.
Many of the objects are available, by appointment, to scholars and the public at Wichita State University’s Special Collections Library and Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.
“I was always interested in exposing people to new ideas and things they may not have come across,” Norwood said.
That includes a receipt (in British pounds) for transportation of a slave via ship; a slave badge or tag, by which slaves in Charleston, S.C., were hired out by their owners; production records for a planation, showing how much cotton each slave picked; and several letters of manumission granting slaves freedom.
It includes a contact signed by jazz legend Billie Holiday for a show in Toledo, Ohio, three months before her death; a letter from actor-activist Paul Robeson to historian Carter G. Woodson; an invitation to the 1893 Columbia Exposition sent by Frederick Douglass (“His DNA is in there,” Norwood said); letters from inventor George Washington Carver and more.
Norwood has also assembled a sizable collection of Wichita artifacts, including paintings done by Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel; currency signed by Azie Taylor Morton, a one-time Wichitan who later served as U.S. Treasurer during the Carter Administration; and local black educators, businesspeople, religious and community leaders.
Norwood grew up in Wichita near Central and Wabash, then a thriving area of black-owned businesses. He attended the all-black Dunbar Elementary School in the nearby McAdams neighbrohood centered around Ninth and Cleveland. Despite segregation, Norwood, whose father managed Midwest Sewing Center’s repair department, remembers the era fondly as a time when his teachers were neighbors and role models, and the neighborhood hummed with activity.
He went on to earn a degree in religion from Wichita State University and to spend a long career as an account manager with Xerox Corp. He and his wife, Rachel, an educator, have two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He’s served on the board of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum, among other community organizations, and put together a history of the Dunbar school called “It Took a Village to Raise These Children.” He’s a lifelong member of Progressive Missionary Baptist Church.
Norwood had collected glasswork, art and more before a chance find steered him toward African Americana: Perusing Wichita’s old Green Dragon Bookstore, he came across a rare 1896 edition of one of Booker T. Washington’s early books, a small collection of quotations and sayings called “Daily Resolves.”
“Uplifting” is how he describes the book, which contains well-known Washington sayings such as, “Education is only valuable in proportion as it is used.”
Washington, most readily associated with the Tuskegee Institute, was considered black America’s pre-eminent leader during the late 1880s and early 1900s.
Norwood subsequently acquired a postcard and two letters bearing Washington’s handwriting and signature. In one, dated 1877, Washington acknowledges a $25 debt to the president of an educational institution he attended. In another, he discusses matters related to the National Negro Business League, which he helped found in 1900 (and which survives as the National Business League).
The poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar is another famous African American whom Norwood has researched and collected materials on, including a 1903 letter in which Dunbar gives an Illinois college permission to reprint one of his poems. Heavyweight prize fighter Jack Johnson is another favorite subject.
Typically, in addition to first editions, Norwood looks for letters, memos and other ephemera associated with noted figures, the institution of slavery and other elements of the black experience. “I only collect original material,” he said.
Norwood clearly enjoys the process of collecting — what he calls “chase, discover, collect and possess.”
“Once you get into the habit of collecting, it’s kind of like a bad disease,” he said, smiling. “The only cure is death.”
Rather than specialize, his goal has been to collect in “politics, music, military, poetry, every area there is.”
“It shows how diverse African American history is, just like American history.”
Indeed, Norwood sees no difference between the two beyond divisions based on politics and prejudice.
For a lover of history like Norwood, the past is always present in some form, connecting us in unexpected ways.
In the course of his collecting, he’s attended reunions of Booker T. Washington’s family and helped bring Washington’s granddaughter to speak at the Wichita Art Museum in the early 1990s.
The twelve children of his grandfather, Henry, were all noted for their singing ability. Today, Gerald and Rachel sing in ARISE, a group that performs Negro spirituals.
ARISE, which is performing in Paris in February as part of Black History Month celebrations, has also performed in northwest Arkansas, where Norwood has twice gone to research his grandfather, who’s made it into several histories written about the area. What he’s learned is that Henry Norwood “was probably like a community organizer” for black residents of that area following Emancipation. “He reminds me of (President) Obama. He could read and write, he could interpret information for those that couldn’t. That’s one of the reasons he’s remembered there.”
And here.
Norwood said the purpose of his research and collecting is to share what he finds.
Collectors “just can’t keep it to themselves,” he said.
“It is the hope of such individuals to make an impact on the world by discovering who we have been, who we are, and who we can become.”
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Active Age