Always Was

Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) became the first feature film directed by a Black American woman to receive wide theatrical release in the United States. The film depicted a Gullah family on the Sea Islands of South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century, used Gullah language, and employed a non-linear, image-driven narrative structure that had no equivalent in American independent cinema.

Dash had developed the project for over a decade and was turned down by multiple funders, including PBS, before completing it through the American Film Institute and other sources. The film received no major studio distribution; it screened initially in art house circuits. Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album “Lemonade” acknowledged Dash’s film as a direct visual influence - an attribution that introduced Dash’s work to a vastly larger audience 25 years after its release.

Malcolm X served as a minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam from 1954 until his public split with Elijah Muhammad in March 1964, following his suspension after comments on the Kennedy assassination and his private discovery of Muhammad’s extramarital affairs. He founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in June 1964, modeled on the Organization of African Unity, and made two trips to Africa seeking recognition of African-American civil rights as a matter of international human rights before the United Nations - a strategy that, if successful, would have subjected the United States to international accountability mechanisms it had evaded.

He was assassinated on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York by members of the Nation of Islam; the FBI and NYPD had informants in the room and had been warned of specific assassination threats and did not act on them. New York State in 2021 granted posthumous pardons to two of three men convicted of his murder, acknowledging that the evidence against them was insufficient.

Julian Abele trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was the first Black American to receive a diploma from that institution. Returning to the United States, he worked as a designer for the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, where he was responsible for the design of a substantial portion of the firm’s output - including the entirety of Duke University’s West Campus in Durham, North Carolina (begun 1924), whose Gothic revival ensemble of stone buildings is considered among the finest examples of collegiate Gothic in the United States.

Abele’s authorship of the Duke campus was denied by the firm and by Duke during his lifetime: he was refused entry to the campus as a Black man during the segregated era and did not receive public acknowledgment from Duke until 1986, when an inquiry by students and faculty established his design role.