‘NOW’S the time’
Black arts advocate aims to educate
Clottee Hammons is an artist, activist, second-generation Arizonan and community builder. In many ways, she has continuously provided to a community that has taken a lot from her. Hammons grew up in downtown Phoenix on the northern edge of a redlined neighborhood between Washington and Monroe streets. Redlining was a nationwide practice that denied mortgage loans and other services to people who lived in certain communities. It disproportionately affected people of color. And although Brown v. Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, racism pervaded nearly every aspect of Hammons’ life since she was born in 1953.
“Phoenix was and has always been a very segregated city,” Hammons said. “I’m old enough to have seen the transition from when Black people were Negros to when we became Black and African American — and all the ramifications that came with that.”
Hammons has felt those ramifications heavily, and she recounts them from a young age.
When she attended St. Mary’s Grammar School at age 8, she watched as her younger brother was dragged into her classroom and beaten by a teacher in front of his peers.
At age 15, she recalls selling chocolate bars with a high school friend. When she approached a man to sell one, he spat in her face.
And as a freshman at Arizona State University, she remembers driving through Scottsdale and being stopped by a policeman.
“I had to get out of the car. He threw me down. I weighed less than 100 pounds. I was thrown on the ground and I was crying. A big policeman put his foot on my back and pressed down with his weight, and he told me to stop moving and I was surrounded,” she said. “I was just grateful to be alive.”
‘I had enough of Arizona’
In 1971, Hammons began studying fine arts at ASU, but continuously felt let down by racist policies and courses dominated with “white subject matter.”
Hammons moved to California to pursue a different career path in technology in 1980.
“One of the reasons I left Arizona was that I could not take the racism. You hear all of your young life to follow the rules and to give it your best. My family told me very early in life, your best is gotta be five times better than the white kid’s best,” Hammons said. “With all of those things in mind, I had enough of Arizona. And so I moved to California.”
She earned an associate degree in electronics from Heald Institute of Technology in 1988, but said the work environment at her job in data communications was “draining” and “maledominated.” Ultimately, Hammons decided to return to her home state.
“It was a feeling of ‘I’m back to this place that never loved me.’ I know that nothing really has changed,” she said. “But I came back anyway, and I tried to find other Black people, tried to find Black events. I was almost like a politician on the campaign trail where everywhere I see Black people, I run after them shaking hands.”
‘I promise you will learn what schools will not teach’
With a fervent drive to pursue the arts and bring attention to the lack of Black inclusivity within them, Hammons set off on her lifelong journey of collaborating with others to promote Black artists and correct the narrative of civil rights issues in Arizona.
Hammons is the founder and creative director of Emancipation Arts, which she formed to bring attention to Black artists in Arizona.
Through Emancipation Arts, she curates exhibitions featuring Black artists and history, creates and promotes visual art and raises awareness about Black issues with the mission of honoring enslaved ancestors.
She facilitates the Emancipation Marathon, an annual literary event in which volunteers read works aloud in honor of the victims of slavery in the United States.
Her motto? “I promise you will learn what schools will not teach.”
This year, the 24th annual Emancipation Marathon took place the weekend of June 19, or Juneteenth. Prerecorded videos of readings were made available on Emancipation Arts’ Facebook page and Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts’ YouTube channel.
The literary marathon is divided into four categories of slavery in the United States: the definition, the law, the human condition and the legacy.
“It’s a different type of Juneteenth celebration, and I don’t want to detract from any other celebration that people want to attend. This is a commemoration of those victims of American chattel slavery,” Hammons said. “People from the community, all ages, all walks of life, they read something that I give them that they’ve never known before. And when people come away, they’ll tell me ‘I never knew that,’ and they want to learn more.”
‘There’s a calling that she has’
Neal A. Lester, a professor of English at Arizona State University who teaches African American literary and cultural studies, frequently reads at the Emancipation Marathons and has known Hammons for nearly 20 years.
“There’s a calling that she has, which is not just an intellectual exercise, but rather something that develops out of the core of her own identity. She’s an artist, but she’s also a person who knows history,” Lester said.
Since Hammons started Emancipation
Arts in the mid-1990s, she has created opportunities that she was deprived of as a young artist.
“I created (Emancipation Arts) to raise the profile of Black artists in Arizona specifically, and I work in collaboration with lots of arts organizations and individuals,” Hammons said. “I curate exhibitions that provide an opportunity for Black artists. I do community engagement and present performances. I’ve done workshops for young people going into college so that they can deflect student debt. These are ongoing projects that have sprung out from direct collaboration.”
In October 2019, “The Spillover Effect,” an interactive cultural series looking at the psychological effects of police brutality, premiered at Modified Arts in downtown Phoenix. Hammons helped curate the exhibition.
“The spillover effect is the psychological effect on Black people when one of us is murdered by police,” Hammons said. “I got four outstanding artists that remarked that visually. The exhibition was at Modified Art, and I could walk up and down the street and hear people talking about it.”
Hammons also curated “The Great Migration: Indiscernibles in Arizona,” a traveling exhibition focused on Black migration to Arizona. The gallery was on display at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change Innovation Gallery at ASU before the new coronavirus pandemic caused the facility to close.
“Very few people can operate in those multiple arenas, the arts arena and the activist arena. And she’s been able to navigate those pretty spectacularly,” Lester said.
‘Now’s the time’
Hammons is the granddaughter of a
Ninth Cavalry Buffalo Soldier who was stationed in Fort Huachuca in 1920.
Her mission is driven not only by personal experience but by a deeply rooted connection to her ancestors.
“I have to think of myself as a modern African woman whose history has been obscured. So I turn around, and I look as far back as I can. I name those names of the ancestors that I know, and I share it with my children and anybody else that’s willing to do it with me,” Hammons said.
As protests continue to fill streets nationwide amid a renewed focus on the Black Lives Matter movement, Hammons has a strong message for those wondering what they can do to effect change.
“The murders and the brutality have always been with us, and they are a vestige of American chattel slavery. When you sit in the classroom as a child and you do not see yourself reflected anywhere, and then you get out of that school, and you realize all of the things you could have been learning, resentment builds up. And sometimes it spills over into things like the protests that we’re seeing now,” she said.
“If your child’s school has no Black history in its curriculum, now’s the time for you to scrutinize it and push for more expansive and more appropriate teaching . ... If you’re marching alongside a Black person, and you have never sat down and had a cup of coffee with somebody Black, now’s the time.”