Highlighting African heritage stories during Newport’s Gilded Age
Newport is considered America’s first “resort community,” where wealthy families flocked to from cities like Providence, Boston, and New York to vacation, start businesses, and promote social causes during the Gilded Age (1865-1915), which helped shape the vibrant culture and economy that define the area today.
A poignant, lesser-known part of that history is what African heritage families brought to it. “Gilded Age Newport in Color” is an exhibit that debuted March 15 at Rosecliff mansion in partnership with the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, highlighting African heritage stories during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Four gallery spaces will be filled with more than 150 objects ranging from photographs, handbills, business cards, and news clippings to furniture, clothing, jewelry, and ceramics. The exhibit will be broken up by theme, with portraits and profiles in one area, a section on recreational and sporting clubs in another, and a section on political activism and social groups in another.
“The Gilded Age was a time of great achievement for African heritage people,” said Theresa Guzmán Stokes, director of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society.
Visitors will learn about influential entrepreneurs like Mary Dickerson, a dressmaker who opened one of the first Black-owned shops on the mansion-lined Bellevue Avenue, and Reverend Mahlon Van Horne, Rhode Island’s first legislator of African heritage.
“And these are just some of probably 30 examples that I could give you of people who were using that time period as a way to advance a community politically, socially, in business — in all ways that you possibly could,” Guzmán Stokes said.
Many of these stories are traditionally told in isolation, Guzmán Stokes said, and the exhibit at Rosecliff aims to paint a fuller picture of Black prosperity in Newport during the Gilded Age.
Many African heritage individuals arrived in Newport as doctors, teachers, and hospitality entrepreneurs. They started sporting, bike, and fishing clubs. Many also started social groups to push forward social and political causes, like ones that fought for anti-lynching laws.
“You get a real sense of how they wanted to be interdependent in the community,” Guzmán Stokes said. “They weren’t trying to integrate into the white community. They wanted to be interdependent with the white community.”
Guzmán Stokes has been particularly drawn to stories of social activism among women.
“They formed social clubs so that they could be involved in what was being done,” she said. “They had a voice, and I’m sure they went home and told their husbands exactly how they should vote.”
Black women of Newport’s Gilded Age decided what their lives would be like, “and it wasn’t just being wives and mothers,” Guzmán Stokes said.
Women set up early child care programs for each other and founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.
“You had women like Christiana Carteaux Bannister, who supported her husband’s work as a painter, but was well-known for her social activism and her ability to network with people,” Guzmán Stokes said. “She was a force to be reckoned with.”
The exhibit, which is included with admission to Rosecliff, will run through June 30, which is “perfect timing,” Guzmán Stokes said, as it will attract summer visitors as well as locals.
“More importantly, though, we wanted this for Rhode Islanders to come and understand what was going on,” Guzmán Stokes said.