While people of all races will note February as Black History Month with a variety of activities, Charles Smith works year-round to highlight the contributions of African-Americans to our country. He also encourages his black brothers and sisters to assume leadership roles that will address problems he believes plague the African-American community.
Smith, a Vietnam veteran, does this with lectures at the African-American Heritage Cultural Center and Black Veterans Archives, an indoor-outdoor museum that contains large and small and riveting sculptures he creates.
The center is located in an unlikely spot, a tiny one-story frame house at the northeast corner of Kendall and North in an unincorporated area just east of Aurora.
The structure is more than a cultural center; it also serves as Smith’s home, which he owns.
Like the homes around it, it is post-World War II era; unlike the other homes, which blend into one another, the 350-square-foot structure creates a lasting impression on anyone who stops or just drives by.
The house is barely noticeable at first, because the entire yard is filled with large sculptures-Smith himself can’t even keep track of them-with just enough ground space to walk among them. He says there are more than 100 sculptures.
Smith built the indoor-outdoor museum, stone by stone, concrete block by concrete block, wood beam by wood beam.
The sculptures, Smith admits, are not supposed to elicit oohs and aahs from visitors. The more likely reaction is a gasp, whether it comes when viewing the 2 1/2-foot-tall sculpture of a naked black boy bent over so he can serve as a footstool for his master, which was common during the era of slavery in this country, or when viewing his 30-by-15-foot Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which he designed to honor the 7,226 African-Americans who died in Vietnam.
He has included among his sculptures well-known leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as others he considers important in the history of African-Americans but who are not as well known. Henry “Box” Brown is one of those people. Brown escaped slavery by shipping himself north in a box.
The history of African-Americans is traced in Smith’s yard, from “Slave Ship,” a depiction of the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown, Va., in August 1619 to a sculpture depicting Rodney King, who was beaten by police in California.
Although the major exhibits are outside, inside are more sculptures, smaller pieces that fill the tiny living room. One sculpture depicts two black people sitting on a park bench reading news accounts of the murder of a black child.
The sculptures are against a backdrop of walls that Smith has finished in a combination of stone and plaster.
It is also inside that he stores records regarding African-American veterans who died in Vietnam.
While it is difficult sometimes to tell where the outdoor sculptures end and the house begins, it is also difficult to tell what is the museum and what is Smith, because not only are the sculptures all Smith’s creations, the present-day interpretation is Smith’s, which he delivers to visitors in a voice loud enough to fill about a dozen houses such as his.
“The problem we have today is that there is no black leadership,” he shouts. “During the ’40s, during the ’50s even, we could look to whites (as the cause of) our problems, but when Martin Luther King Jr. died, black leadership died.”
He says that because there is no black leadership, there is no one to serve as a positive role model for black youth.
He delivers his message to anyone who wants to visit the museum. Smith says it is his desire to share the history of African-Americans, both the glory, such as those who served in Vietnam, and the shame, such as the number of African-Americans who have murdered other African-Americans.
“With all the museums we have in Aurora,” he says, “there is not one which depicts the contributions of African-Americans to this country.”
Smith completed his first sculpture, “We Shall Overcome,” a black Vietnam soldier on his knees, in 1986, after a back injury forced him to leave his job as a counselor for the Illinois Department of Rehabilitation Services and go on permanent disability.
“I have no formal art training,” he says.
Smith was born on Nov. 22, 1940, in New Orleans, where he lived until he was about 14 years old. When his father died, his mother moved to Chicago, where he lived for many years before moving to Maywood, then Bolingbrook and finally Aurora.
He studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. As a volunteer, he counsels through Open Door Ministries, which provides services to jail inmates, and is the national executive director of the Afro-American Veterans Association. He is also an ordained minister with a degree from the Virgil Black Training Academy. He served as a Marine Corps infantryman in Vietnam.
How does he choose his materials and his subjects?
“It is divinely inspired,” he says.
Smith is not simply trying to chronicle the lives of African-Americans in the United States. He views his museum as an educational institution.
While he wants anyone and everyone to visit, he especially is targeting African-American youth, because, he says, unless they learn from past mistakes, the future will not improve.
“I’m single and don’t have any kids, and don’t care much for them,” he says, “but somebody has to stop the killing of our children. Look at the numbers. It’s not America’s problem; it’s not a white problem; it’s a black problem. That’s not what we fought for.”
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Smith’s viewpoint, don’t believe his statement about not caring for kids. When a group of children show up at the museum, to which admission is free, his eyes light up, and not only are the children captivated by Smith, he is captivated by the children’s curiosity, according to Revin Fellows, the volunteer education director of the museum.
“No matter what the age, he keeps those children totally engrossed,” Fellows says. “I’m a teacher, and I’d give anything to hold kids’ attention the way he does.”
Smith’s program extends beyond the tours. Next summer, for instance, he will offer a hands-on program for African-American youth, a two-week program in which boys will learn something about the construction trade. Jerry Lyons, a journeyman carpenter from Aurora, will teach the program, concentrating on familiarizing the youths with the use of tools. “We hope to instill in the youth that they need to learn a skill or a trade,” Lyons says.
He adds that through this program, he can be a positive influence on younger people.
Fellows also expects to begin teaching a life skills class for boys, and Smith offers a similar class for girls, which is taught by Aurora residents Mary Golden and Belvin Smith, who have done youth counseling. The course for girls will focus on domestic skills and positive self image, says Charles Smith, who is not related to Belvin.
The goal of all the programs, says Fellows, is to give black youth a positive focus.
Fellows, who teaches special education at Bardwell School in Aurora, admits that it took him some time to become a believer in what Smith was doing. “I used to drive by this house every day on my way to work,” he recalls, “and I couldn’t figure out what everything was.”
His students told him that the owner of the house was crazy. One day about a year and a half ago, his curiosity got the better of him when he saw Smith standing in the yard. He got out of his car and the two talked, and Fellows joined the cause. “It helped me to learn more about my heritage,” he says.
Smith knows people think he’s crazy. “They say that the man on the corner talks to the trees,” he says. “I don’t talk to the trees. If (people would) talk to me they’d know I’m not crazy.”
And talk Smith does, with a lot of hyperbole thrown in, on just about any topic he thinks is destroying the African-American population.
For example:
– “Handing out condoms to black youth isn’t going to solve the AIDS problem. Masturbation has to be the program until another program is out there. Show the faces of everyone who has died from AIDS. They’re black.”
Of course, that’s not true, but it demonstrates Smith’s emotion about the issue.
– On black organizational leadership, Smith says, “Everyone will tell you that 90 percent of those incarcerated are black. Yet where are the programs to bring them back? If white people don’t come up with a program, we don’t have one.”
Not everyone in the black community would agree with Smith’s views. “(Smith and the Urban League) have different views of what we should be exposing the youth in the community to in terms of culture,” says Theodia Gillespie of the Aurora Urban League, an organization that has served Aurora minorities for 18 years. “We are doing something totally different as far as dealing with the culture. We have two different ways of doing things.”
Since June, when the museum officially opened, about 20 groups-many from schools-have visited, including one from the Art Institute of Chicago and one from Aurora University.
IN ROADS Youth Leadership Academy, a private organization in Milwaukee that helps black male youths develop academic, social and work skills necessary for their future work life, twice brought groups of 70 boys to the museum last summer. Ronn Johnson, associate director of the academy, said the museum is not typical of what one expects to find.
We drove into the neighborhood,” he says, “and we were sure that we were in the wrong place; we were sure that there could not be a museum in the neighborhood.
“The teachers with me were just as shocked,” he says. ” It’s not a museum as most people would expect. But the boys loved it.”
So impressed were the boys, Johnson and the parents who accompanied the group, that a second trip was planned so that more boys could see the sculptures.
Darice Wright, co-owner and curator of Black Art Group International, an art gallery located at 1259 S. Wabash in Chicago, calls Smith’s art work powerful. “I was overwhelmed by the power, the rawness,” she says. “He is considered a folk artist, but no way is there the naivete of the folk artist in his work.”
Wright says Smith’s dedication to his craft is very evident.
One of her favorite Smith works, which is now at the Chicago gallery, is titled “Forty Acres and a Mule.” This post-Emancipation piece depicts a slave sitting on a stone. His hands and feet are still chained. It mocks the promise of the United States government to give each of the freed slaves 40 acres of land and a mule, she says.
She also says that Smith, unlike traditional folk artists, knows the value of his work. “There have been cases documented of dealers purchasing artwork from these artists at low prices and taking them back to the cities where they make enormous profits,” she says. “Smith realizes the value of what he is doing, and he prices it accordingly.”
“Forty Acres and a Mule,” for instance, is priced at $30,000, Wright says.
Currently “Forty Acres and a Mule” and several other sculptures by Smith are on display at the Chicago gallery. None has been sold, though Smith has sold his work other places.
Smith has found, however, that not all his neighbors appreciate his art, and a few years ago Aurora Township took him to court.
Aurora Township code enforcement officer Frank Hurtt says that about three years ago the township received complaints from neighbors about debris on the property. “He had concrete blocks as fencing, and neighbors were concerned that they could fall over,” he says. “There were other building materials on the property.”
Smith says that he was harassed because of the artwork, but Hurtt says, “We never had a problem with the artifacts.”
Hurtt says that the township took Smith to court only after officials failed to persuade Smith to clean up his lot. “We told the judge that the only remedy we were looking for was to have the property cleaned up,” Hurtt says.
The court sided with the township, and Smith cleaned up the property as ordered.
Hurtt says that the township continues to receive occasional complaints from neighbors, but he says that the township will not take any action on the artwork.
Smith’s property is also the occasional target of vandals. The windows of a pickup truck were shot out, and a car parked in his driveway was damaged.
Nevertheless, Smith hopes that one by one, just as he put the pieces of his sculptures together, he will win converts, that he will not only share the message of African-American history, but will convince others that education and positive leadership will solve many of the problems faced by African-Americans today.
And as long as the spirit moves him, he will keep sculpting.
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To tour the museum, located at 126 S. Kendall in unincorporated Aurora, call 708-859-0507.
