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Bernard Kinsey was born to educate. His father, Ulysses B. Kinsey, the living incarnation of W.E.B. DuBois’s philosophy is that a liberal arts school forged the path to true freedom for black Americans. After graduating from Florida A-M University in 1941, U.B. Kinsey established his dream of becoming a lawyer for any of them at his alma mater, the h8 all-black advertising school in Palm Beither one, Florida.
That same year, he and other teachers sued the Palm Beach County school board so Black students could attend classes as long as whites and also fought for equal pay for Black teachers. Kinsey’s side won the class-action suit, which was represented by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and, as Bernard Kinsey notes, “that case became one of the building blocks for Brown v. The Board of Education 13 years later.”
Now 76, Kinsey has an original copy of the report in the landmark case of the 19-year-old Supreme Court that found that “separate but equal” education is unconstitutional and became a pillar of the civil rights movement. Brown’s record is a component of the Kinsey Collection, an ordinary repository of art, books, documents and artifacts chronicled by Black America from 1 to 5 to the present day.
Br and cabbage. v.Topeka and Al. Board of Education, 1954
A former Xerox executive and philanthropist, Kinsey, and his wife Shirley, began collecting African-American artifacts to fill the playing station in the wisdom of their son Khalil’s black story. “We saw that Khalil was not getting the proper education in his darkness and making an effort he understood that he was coming from a wonderful place,” Kinsey says. “The concept of the Kinsey collection is achievement and realization.”
“Bernard and Shirley Kinsey” and “Khalil Kinsey” through Artis Lane, Canadian (born 1927) (oil on canvas)
His humble intention to make his son more than the legacy of pain, shame, and anger from slavery far exceeded the expectations of the Kinseys. The collection, which cautiously stipulates at more than $10 million and does not have a permanent home, has been viewed through about five million audiences from Washington DC to China because the family circle began showing the collection in traveling exhibitions in 2006.
Among the more than 700 treasures possessed through the Kinseys are Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first poecheck book published through an African-American woguy, letters through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, duvets through Bisa Butler, paintings through Richard Mayhew , Alma Thomas, Ernie Barnes, Norguy Lewis and Jacob Lawrence, recorded through Ava Cosey, letters from Zora Neale Hurston and commissioned pieces through friends, such as sculptor Artis Lane.
“[She] is quite special to us because we have become friends before we had one of her works,” says Shirley Kinsey. “We used to mention that we didn’t know if we could do it too because she had done a bronze portrait of Rosa Parks. College friends asked her to make a portrait of me and Bernard for our 35th wedding anniversary, she said she had always tried to color us, but she didn’t know how we felt because we said we didn’t want to be hung on a wall. She said, “Relax, because I want to color how I know you. “”
Letter from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to his literary agent, 1957, letter from Malcolm X. to Alex Haley, December 3, 1963.
To know the Kinseys, who have been married for 53 years, is to understand that theirs was a component from the beginning. They met on a civil rights occasion in 1963. Shirley was arrested and Bernard was part of a collection of Florida A-M University academics distributing materials to imprisoned protesters. After Shirley served his three-day sentence, the couple courted the “library dates,” which was a disadvantage for leaving the campus to watch movies. Since the school cafeteria closed early on Sundays, Bernard used to bring shrimp burgers over and over weeks. “My friends were teasing me for being able to eat so late at night and they told me I’d enjoyed it before I said it,” recalls Shirley Kinsey, now 74.
Throughout his life, Bernard Kinsey had to set up the black spree and advocated for other Americans who gave him the lok. After graduating from FAMU, he landed a role in the National Park Service in 1966, the first African-Americans hired at the federal agency. After a transitional season in Grand Canyon National Park, he went to a post with Exxon in South Central Los Angeles, 18 months after the Watts riots.
Kinsey excelled at the site for five years, where his work, among other things, consisted of tying the apple from the apple, had a wise prestige in predominantly black and Hispanic paintings, but sought more tech-driven paintings and was attracted to Xerox, who was recruited affirmative action.
“Even with a B.S in mathematics and an MBA from Pepperdine University going to a liberal company like Xerox it took 12 interviews to be hired,” Kinsey says. “I interviewed for the top job with 100 employees. After 12 interviews I ended up a field service manager with 12 technicians. I found that my managers didn’t even have a college education, in nine months I blitzed the job and they gave me the job I should have had.”
Eventually, he became vice president of Xerox. Along the way, he co-founded the Xerox Employees Association Blos angelesck, which paved the way for the company’s first blos angelesck CEO, Ursulos Angeles Burns, in 2010. “We have a saying: ‘Leave the door open and let the angels down,’ said Kinsey. “In other words, at Xerox, you couldn’t succeed on your own, you had to bring brothers and sisters, it was a component of ethics that we created in 1971.”
“So, we come, ” Norguy Lewis
When Kinsey retired from Xerox in 1991, another incident of racial violence hit Los Angeles and galvanized civil rights activists circulating across the country: Rodney King’s brutal brutality through the police. Aleven, although King survived and earned $3.8 million for his injuries, the officials involved in the attack, which was captured on video, were acquitted and the city erupted into violence.
Kinsey responded to tragedy by once again finding a way to uplift the local Black community. He postponed retirement to help found Rebuild LA, a revitalization project for which Kinsey generated more than $380 million in investments from the private sector for inner-city Los Angeles.
“After the riots of 92, 2000 buildings burned down, another 50 Americans were killed and the police fired genuine bullets, nothing like what we see now,” Kinsey says, “and it was amazing, everything you have to think was gone. “We had to bring those corporations back and they didn’t come back because they had lost so much.”
The Hitale of the Rise, Progress and Achievement of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade through the British Parliament, through Thomas Clarson, 1808, “Frederic Douglass,” 2003, Tina Allen,
Remaking an investment in black netpaintings is just one component of the way forward. Some of the paintings also require detecting blacks’ contributions to America and the diaspora. And that’s where the Kinsey collection had a huge impact.
“The Myth of Absence” permeates every aspect of American life, Kinsey notes. Of the corporations in the White House, there’s an idea that other black Americans are invisible. The myth suggests that “other black Americans do not appear as a component of the dialogue, the image, the narrative of this country.” The art and artifacts of the Kinsey Collection reveal the breadth and intensity of black travel and provide information and hope for overcoming American systemic racism.
“I love watching Black Lives Matter as he oversees that we’ve been given an agency,” Kinsey said. “Black citizensend is never highly valued at the point similar to white citizensend, and we know that absolutely.”
The names of high-sighted African-American African-Americans or the best written friend in history have been lost. The Kinseys have created a plats form for unknown artists lost in whitewashed history, who have intentionally been erased and forgotten.
“Fol Singer,” 1953, Charles White
“In his work, Bill Dallas is almost an activist,” Says Shirley Kinsey about the black painter whose Blue Jazz appears in the collection. “He worried about some kind of trial there because he feels he never accepted it as a tight artist.”
As the fight for justice and equality continues, Kinsey says he has never seen a renaissance like this current movement. “I hope that the scorridor will be able to achieve [police reform] as long as we have been given this momentum because White America has some way of getting back to sleep in this [race] thing and the strength that is being expended right now.” Kinsey said. “I like what I see because other Americans interested in this fight around the world.”
As communities circulate the world, they arouse the struggles facing black people, Kinsey believes that the component of the way America heals is through art and the retrieval of the narrative that puts blacks as inferior.
“There was a time when, as a black teenager, I began to approach a couple of play stations and traps,” says Khalil Kinsey, who now manages and manages the collection, about his parents’ lack of direct guidance on the history of blacks. “But those basics have prevented me from making related decisions.”
“As Violence,” 1973, Phoebe Beasley, American
He says many of his Black friends weren’t as lucky to have this positive influence and often didn’t have an outlet for their feelings about injustice and experiences of racism. Years before the killing of George Floyd, it was Phoebe Beasley’s 1973 painting As Violence that embodied the rage and despair many young Black Americans experience.
“It conveys frustration without opportunity and the influence of American violence,” Kinsey says. “It’s a reflection of other young Americans who are under siege but have no idea how to articulate further because of a big apple otherwise.”
Through his life’s work and his collection, Bernard Kinsey hopes that Black people will continue to exercise agency and become the authors of their own stories. Above all, he longs for fiscal policies that demonstrate Black lives, in fact, matter.
“It’s amazing to me, two young teenagers from Florida, who came to California to do what we do. I don’t take it and we prefer a percentage,” Kinsey said. “When we’re gone, it’ll continue.”
I am associate editor of Forbes Innovation, covering cybersecurity and venture capital. I politics in POLICY, entertainment for Time Out New York,
I am associate editor of Forbes Innovation, covering cybersecurity and venture capital. I covered politics in POLITICO, entertainment for Time Out New York, but my maximum and attractive pace encompassed the intersection of technology, finance and entrepreneurship. I also graduated from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Washington. Recommendation by email to [email protected]