THE ACTIVIST COLLECTOR, Lida Clanton Broner's 1938 journey from Newark to South Africa

207pp., b/w & colour illus., map, hardback, Newark Museum of Art and Rutgers University Press, Newark & New Brunswick, 2022

ISBN: 9781978836150

Lida Clanton Broner (1895–1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, spent nine months in South Africa in 1938, where she met South Africa’s Black intellectual elite, including leaders of South Africa’s freedom struggle, gave lectures at Black schools on “race consciousness and race pride”, and acquired over 150 objects, ranging from beadwork and pottery to mission school crafts. Some of these objects, together with her diary, correspondence, scrapbooks, and hundreds of photographs with handwritten notations, are now held in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art.

“Christa Clarke’s The Activist Collector, a triumph of archival research and art historical scholarship, is a revelation of the astonishing degree to which symbolic and spiritual connections to South Africa were shared by African Americans at every social level as much as a century ago. Clarke’s work demonstrates in stunning detail that consciousness of Black African culture and politics and truly ‘Pan-African’ artistic sensibility were not merely embraced by exemplars of the African American intellectual elite, but were much more broadly-based, and shared across black social classes. In stunningly insightful analyses of the collection of art objects that Lida Clanton Broner gathered as she engaged in a one-woman campaign for black liberation throughout apartheid South Africa almost a century ago, Clarke has resurrected from the archives a story that reveals the power and magic of courage, imagination, and the belief that the battle for freedom must be pursued one speech and one art object at a time.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University

"This extensively researched volume, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, is an important contribution to scholarship. At the same time, the book’s engaging narrative style, with its generous inflections of Broner’s voice and its portrayal of her 'spirited and independent personality and outspoken opinions', has the potential to keep broader audiences cheering for this activist collector. Clarke’s writing conveys Broner’s wit and tact without varnishing her occasional tourist faux pas. It showcases her networking among prominent political leaders, intellectuals, and other 'New Africans' - the growing Christian and educated Black middle class of South Africa - while acknowledging her affection for and interest in those from rural areas who were uneducated and who followed traditional belief systems. These qualities make Broner an everywoman: fascinating and formidable, but also human, relatable, and entertaining. A trailblazing Black woman’s legacy and voice are now recorded, undoubtedly able to inspire Black women still on today’s literal and figurative picket lines and on a mission." Women's Art Journal

Christa Clarke is an independent curator and art historian. Previously she was senior curator of Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum of Art. Her books include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), African Art at the Barnes Foundation, and Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection.