How to be Intelligent

Quilt from Acacia Collection

I met Carroll Greene at the Unitarian Universalists Church of Savannah. He was a gentle intelligent humble man. As so many with Carroll he made me feel I was his best friend. We were on an antiracism team together. I through the years began to piece his significant career together. He had come to Savannah as a consultant and found the area so rich with unexplored African-American heritage he stayed. He had worked with the Smithsonian Institution and many African-American heritage museums. But besides our enlightening conversations my fondest memory was a dinner he had invited my family to. I had never been to his home before, a brownstone on Oglethorpe Street. I had heard a lot about his Acacia Collection and he wanted to show me it. I had not realized the collection was resting all through his house when I had brought my six year old son. He had prepared us a good and comfortable meal that we ate surrounded by his collection. The whole time I watched over my son to make sure he did not break any of his beloved collection.
After we ate he took us around the room and showed us various pieces that were one of a kind. Many of the items had been made by slaves or Blacks who lived during reconstruction times. He says they were the art of making-do. While the slaves and free blacks did not always have much they took what they had and made practical but beautiful objects. Baskets made of soda bottle tops, used matchstick art, carved canes, corn shuck and reed storage baskets, and other objects were part of the collection.
I had been so engaged in his collection and the stories he told about each item that I had forgotten my son. So I looked around the room worried but luckily he had fallen asleep on the sofa. Carroll seeing this took off of a clothes rack a quilt he only a few moments ago had said was over a hundred years and made by a master quilter and tucked my son in covered by this precious quilt. When I protested Carroll smiled at me and said, ’These items are beautiful but they are also made to use.’ It was then I realized the greatness of the man who stood before me.
I was later to know the quiet radicalism of Carroll. He was at the forefront of the reclaiming of the black history and promotion of black history museum and cultural center movement. In 1967, he co-curated "The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800-1959" with Romare Bearden (of Harlem Renaissance fame) at the College of the City University of New York.  He would later describe in another Romare Bearden’s exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as “an affirmation, a celebration, a victory of the human spirit over all the forces that would oppress it.”
The next year he began a fellowship in Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, where he played a role in adding to the museum's collection of African American artifacts. The radical idea he had was that there was a continuity of crafts, folklore and art of slaves and free persons in the United States from their heritage from Africa. While this may seem a no brainer today it was not necessarily so in the sixties.
He made two contributions while at the Smithsonian Institution. He published the book American Visions, Afro-American Art. He played a vital role in adding to the museum’s previously meager collection of African-American artifacts. He conducted oral history interviews with such noted African-American artists as Jacob Lawrence. The second thing he did was to go throughout the United States, cataloging museums dedicated to African American heritage. Savannah’s own Virginia Kiah Museum was one of the museums being cataloged. This cataloging of the museums was the first attempt to recognize the emergence of an attempt to preserve and recapture a history that had been previously ignored.
Carroll also was a mentor to various Black artists. Keith Cardwell, is a freelance photographer and curator. He was the first British photographer whose works were shown in Castro's Cuba. Carroll Green and I talked for hours and hung out together. He was Mr. Cool. My Cuban portfolio owes so much to his generosity of ideas and sense of humor. Another artist who he impacted was Jonathan Greene. Greene wrote extensively of the Gullah artist Jonathan Green, whose work he called “the most ambitious artistic expression of Sea Islands culture ever successfully undertaken.”
Carroll was also the founding director of the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, Maryland. The museum continues today. On its website it says it is ‘the State of Maryland’s official museum of African American heritage, the Banneker-Douglass Museum serves to document, to interpret, and to promote African American history and culture (particularly in Maryland) through exhibitions, programs, and projects in order to improve the understanding and appreciating of America’s rich cultural diversity for all.’
In 1988 Carroll came to Savannah to collect and study African-American heritage in our coastal region. While here Greene curated several shows at the Beach Institute in Savannah. His most prominent curatorial work which you can still visit was the Ulysses Davis Folk Art Collection. He was honored for that work with the W.W. Law Legacy Award.
While he was here he increased his collecting he was a founding member, curator, and executive director of the Acacia Collection of African Americana, which he formed in 1989. He was the driving force behind the Acacia Collection, a wide-ranging assortment of African-American artifacts including arts and crafts, furniture, pottery, musical instruments, quilts and tools. Part of the collection was displayed for years at the Owens-Thomas House slave quarters here in Savannah. Today the collection is held by the Slave Art Museum in Charleston.
Carroll died in 2007 here in Savannah in his home. Savannah’s famed Dr. Walter O. Evans, one of the nation’s foremost collectors of African-American art, said that Greene “was extremely important. He was a giant in the field, a leading proponent of African-American art long before it was a fashionable thing to do. He was someone whose opinion I deeply respected.” He was also a giant of a man who never lost his touch of humanity.
 
 
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Carroll Green