The Slave Theater (New York, USA, 2012-2013)
Lech Szporer, The Slave Is Not For Sale Juneteenth Reenactment, New York, USA, 2012, photographic print (limited edition)
The Slave Is Not For Sale Juneteenth Reenactment (New York, USA, 2012-2013)
On June 19th (Juneteenth), 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, accompanied by 2,000 federal troops, stood on a balcony in Galveston, Teas, and read aloud: “All Slaves Are Free.” On Juneteenth, 2012, a banner was unveiled from the rooftop off the Slave Theater on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, NY, which read: “The Slave Is Not For Sale.”
Reenacting Juneteenth on the façade of the historic Slave Theater in the midst of a property dispute between the rightful community owners (a father and son, both of whom are formerly incarcerated) and an aggressive police-enforced gentrification apparatus seemed necessary as a way of visualizing the multilayered histories taking place on Fulton Street.
From colonialism, slavery, and the stigma of criminality to notions of property and the imbalance of power dynamics between the state and local community activists, we see the racial implications behind gentrification in the utter disregard for an historical site for black activism and the will of a community coming together to save The Slave Theater in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant.
Lech Szporer, The Slave Theater Group Meeting, NY, USA, 2012, photographic print (limited edition)
School Against Prison: Free Bed Stuy (New York, USA, 2012-2013)
Social change comes through public scholarship.
In collaboration with Free University, the Von King Cultural Arts Center, as well as over 20 local community organizations and businesses, we hosted a day of celebration in commemoration of Juneteenth (Abolition Day). Aside from fun activities for children and their fathers, such as music and arts stations for the kids, and an anti-bullying speak-out for teens, we worked with criminal justice reform field trainers from the community to create an outdoor School Against Prison with a curriculum of teach-ins on issues such as: the school to prison pipeline, immigration rights, debt and prison, post-prison expungement legislation, abolitionist landscapes, alternatives to incarceration, community control, as well as know-your-rights and cop-watch trainings.
Photographs of Free Bed Stuy courtesy of Robert Pluma
The Slave Theater Community History Project
An audiovisual archive of the Slave Theater was compiled, including its history, its socio-aesthetic and historical relevance, and its ultimate demise. The Nomadic Slave Theater archive centers around the story of Judge John L. Phillips (aka the Kung Fu Judge) as the pioneering black philanthropist of Bedford Stuyvesant, his community-building efforts with the founding of the Slave Theater and Black Lady Theater as center of art and political discourse, as well as the historical implications of the Pan-African movement in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 90s.
