ABHM Book Club, MIAD & MCHS Proudly Present: All That She Carried By Tiya Miles
We are excited to announce that the America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) Book Club continues in the new year with a special selection in partnership with the upcoming Growing Resistance exhibit at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD). At the next virtual meeting on Thursday, January 25th at 6 PM we will discuss All That She Carried by Tiya Miles, also in partnership with the Milwaukee County Historical Society (MCHS), who will help lead the discussion and connect the book to the exhibition and to museums, more broadly.
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About the ABHM Book Club:
America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s founder, Dr. James Cameron, was an avid reader and inspiring writer and educator. To this day, he is the only known survivor of a lynching to write and publish a memoir about such an experience. In his honor, ABHM created a book club in November of 2020 to bring together a community of all backgrounds to learn about and discuss our collective past, modern manifestations of racism, and how we create racial repair, reconciliation, and healing for a better future.
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About All That She Carried:
In a display case in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture sits a rough cotton bag, called Ashley’s Sack, embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gave this sack filled with a few precious items to her daughter, Ashley, as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival as well. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
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About Growing Resistance:
Opening on January 18th at MIAD, Growing Resistance: Untold Stories of Milwaukee’s Community Guardians showcases everyday voices of resistance and resilience around environmental injustice from some of Milwaukee’s most historically underrepresented neighborhoods. The community guardians are residents/citizens, block leaders, elders, organizations, grassroots groups, and sometimes youth. This work is drawn from over 10 years of partnership between university and community experts to co-create more representative histories of these neighborhoods. These stories include accounts of urban growing, food, housing and green space from the North and Northwest Side of Milwaukee. How might sharing these stories through a variety of artistic forms expand what is heard? Growing Resistance foregrounds local community voices through dance, photography, sculpture, environmental sound, painting, interviews, poetry, video, architectural models and much more, while asking how we might better disseminate these stories and grassroots actions of resilience – voices that are often erased in the archives or ignored in the media.
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