Art and politics at Henry Street: culmination of the USA book launch tour

The USA tour is now over. It culminated at the Henry Street Settlement where I was in conversation with Dana Mills, currently writing on Rosa Luxemburg and an expert on dance and politics, enabling a rich discussion of Sylvia Pankhurst as a political artist. One of my favourite moments was reading an extract from Sylvia's manuscript which describes her visit to the lower East Side, entering a house full of "a bewildering number of kindly women" where she was taken to a Passover meal in:

"the great dining room, with its well-polished brass and copper and its two dark polished tables, laid, with little white mats and shining glass and silver, for the evening meal."

"The great dining room" at Henry Street Settlement with two menorahs and a samovar in front of a portrait of Lillian D. Wald, Settlement founder and friend of Sylvia Pankhurst.

In the book I argue that this was the dining room at the Henry Street Settlement. That was the room we were speaking in and when I invited the audience to look around the room there were gasps of recognition.

"a bewildering number of kindly women". Above, Alice Lewisohn, who founded the avant-garde Neighborhood Playhouse at the Henry Street Settlement and became a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst, recalls the atmosphere at Henry Street.

"with its well-polished brass and copper"

"and its two dark polished tables"

This was also the room in which one of the meetings that formed the NAACP was held. Many of those in attendance - W.E.B. DuBois, Lillian Wald (founder of the Henry Street Settlement), Henry Moskowitz, Oswald Garrison Villard - were in contact with Sylvia Pankhurst, indicating again her emphasis upon linking up struggles against different forms of oppression.

Henry Street meant a great deal to many people in the audience, some had attended theatre there, others recalled their grandparents taking piano lessons. This testifies to what Sylvia Pankhurst felt was so important about Henry Street (and the Hull House settlement in Chicago): that as well as recognising the very great need for economic change in deprived communities, these places understood and fought for everyone to have access to culture - to art, dance, music, literature and drama. And it was this approach that had turned the young Sylvia Pankhurst, as an aspiring artist, into a socialist. She later recalled her sense of injustice that her own childhood was so very different from that of most children in her native Manchester:

"Those endless rows of smoke-begrimed little houses, with never a tree or a flower in sight, how bitterly their ugliness smote me! Many a time in spring, as I gazed upon them, those two red may trees in our garden at home would rise up in my mind, almost menacing in their beauty; and I would ask myself whether it could be just that I should live in Victoria Park,and go well fed and warmly clad, whilst the children of these grey slums were lacking the very necessities of life. [. . .] there were were moments when I had an impulse to dash my head against the dreary walls of those squalid streets." (Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, pp.125-6).

Inspired by the more radical figures in the Arts and Crafts movement, especially William Morris, Sylvia saw art as a part of the struggle for a better world:

"I would be a decorative painter; I would portray the world that is to be when poverty is no more. I would decorate halls where people would foregather in the movement to win the new world, and make banners for the meetings and processions." (Pankhurst, Myself When Young, p.267).

Sylvia Pankhurst: art and politics

Henry Street, then, was the perfect place to end the tour. The tour itself consisted of launches in:

The Duende Bar, at Silo City in Buffalo, NY State
Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry in Cleveland, Ohio
City Lit bookshop in Chicago, Illinois
Milwaukee Central Library, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas
Red Emma's bookshop, Baltimore, Maryland
Henry Street Settlement, New York City, NY State

Speaking at Henry Street with Dana Mills, 2 July 2019. Photo: Cecilia Whalen.

There's still a lot more material, stories and history from the tour that I'll continue to post on the blog in the coming days.  For now, I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who so generously put me and Morgan up during the tour, everyone who hosted the launches and managed the sales, everyone who attended and provided such interesting discussions - not only about the past, but about what we must do to change the present. I hope that this book will help inspire us today.