Blackwell’s imagination was stirred again at St. Cyprian’s—an Episcopal Church that her mother Beulah Carter and five other women founded in 1919, the year of her birth. The young Catherine, whose mother was a social worker and father a Detroit barber, was the first baby baptized at St. Cyprian’s, where she now serves on the vestry. As a youth there, Blackwell was enchanted with stories of missionaries in Africa and returned home one Sunday declaring she would become one.
Despite growing up in Detroit, Blackwell recalled that she did not have a black teacher until after the 12th grade. With her mother’s support, she refused to be placed in the home economics track at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, insisting on college prep classes instead.
But before she could consider where her dreams might lead her, Blackwell had to confront some obstacles at home.
Blackwell attended the Episcopal college Saint Augustine’s in North Carolina—her first foray into the South of the late 1930s—where she threatened a boycott of a Raleigh shoe store for refusing to serve her in the front of the store. After two years, she transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and completed degree work in social work, following in her mother’s footsteps.
But when she returned to Detroit, she soon shifted her career toward education and immediately began to accent her classrooms with her passion for Africa.
“When I realized that our youngsters knew nothing about our heritage and history, I decided that I had to learn more myself and I went to Africa,” she recalled. “When I told my mother that I was going, she said ‘you will fulfill a dream of your grandmother.’”
In 1960, Blackwell made her first trip to Africa—a three-month journey that covered eight countries. She was hooked and has returned with students and teachers more than 60 times.
In late January, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit opened an exhibit called “The Storyteller’s Hat: African Art from the Teaching Collection of Catherine C. Blackwell.” The exhibit title comes from the straw hat from Ghana that Blackwell wore when she prepared to tell one of her famed African tales to her elementary school classes. She still causes a stir among the pre-school through 8th graders when she drops in on the Detroit Public School named in her honor: The Catherine C. Blackwell Institute of International Studies, Commerce and Technology.
The exhibit at the African-American history museum, which continues until June 1, is an intimate collection of Blackwell’s African art. A school teacher and principal who retired in 1992, Blackwell never claimed to be a curator of the finest in African art. Her pieces—many of over 500 are gifts from the people she visited—fall into the category of folk art: baskets, clothes, drums and children’s toys.
Blackwell tells the story of the slit drum, and, on a day near the end of March when high school students on a field trip were fortunate to find Blackwell in the museum strolling among her relics, heads began to turn in her direction.
“It’s not just art for art’s sake,” she explained to a group of pre-college students visiting from Cincinnati. “It all has meaning. It was important how the wood was selected to make a drum. They didn’t just go to the lumberyard ... or take an axe and cut the branch off. They had communication with that branch. It was absolutely a part of the carving. What they felt about it and what came to them was all in the piece that they carved.
“The drums can send a message for miles,” said Blackwell, whose retirement from the classroom is clearly in name only. She once said she didn’t really retire from teaching, only from getting paid for it.
“The drumming might be of someone’s death or it might be that they are being invaded. It’s like what you’d find in the newspapers today.”
She turns to one of the young men, and then another and another, eager to put to them the question that was once put to her in the years when so many doors were shut. “Where are you going to college?” she asks as if she’s calling the morning roll. “Where are you going to college? Where are you going to college?”
When they recite their choices—USC, Notre Dame, Ohio State—she gently suggests, “What about Howard University?”
Blackwell moves to another part of the exhibit where she attracts the attention of a group of school girls from Ypsilanti. She unwinds a tale from a village near Pink Lake in Senegal where she encountered a young boy playing with a homemade toy made of little more than wire and string. She offered and he accepted two dollars for it. A short time later, when Blackwell circled back through the village, she found the lad in tears. His older brother, who actually made the toy, laid claim to the fee. Blackwell was able to negotiate a 50/50 settlement before bringing the artifact home—and adding it to the exhibit.
“What are you going to be?” she asks abruptly, listening carefully as each girl imagines what might lie ahead.
For Blackwell, the exhibit of her memorabilia and the many ways it connects with the stories of Africa and her own life has less to do with looking back than one would imagine. It’s all about unlocking the potential for the future and what stills lies ahead.
It’s a lesson the teacher, Catherine C. Blackwell, knows well; it’s insight she bestows with ease in her continuing mission to teach students about Africa.
So what lies ahead for the teacher herself? At 88 years of age, she’s planning trip number 66 to Africa.
Detroit, MI