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Village honors efforts of six Black leaders By ANDREW FRANCIS afrancis@liherald.com
Stu Goldman/Herald
Denton Watson, Vashti Burke, Donnetta Cumberbatch, Ladonna Taylor, Michael Gordon and Frank White received special recognition for their service in and around Freeport.
Freeport residents, community leaders and Nassau County officials crowded into the program room of the Freeport Recreation Center on Feb. 26 to celebrate Black History Month and the contributions of the village’s own Black community members. The event was hosted by village administrators and the FreeportRoosevelt chapter of the NAACP. The celebration was titled “Still We Rise: A Century of Black History,” and featured presentations, musical performances and speakers. The highlight was the presentation of community Black History Month awards for notable service to communities within the Village of Freeport and beyond. The honorees were Vashti Burke, Donnetta Cumberbatch, Michael Gordon, Ladonna Taylor, Denton Watson and Bishop Frank White. Burke, the music facilitator for the Freeport school ConTinueD on paGe 10
Library celebrates global Harlem Renaissance art By ANDREW FRANCIS afrancis@liherald.com
T he F ree por t Memorial Library closed out its Black History Month celebration on Feb. 25, when art historian and professor Dennis Raverty was invited to discuss the vibrant African American art scene during the Harlem Renaissance. Raverty spoke about the contributions of several African American artists from the early 20th century and the often-complicated context these artists lived in and how they portrayed that in their work. The library program, titled
“When Harlem was Hot,” was initially slated to be an in-person presentation, but was moved online via Zoom due to the blizzard that occurred earlier in the week, impacting Freeport and much of the surrounding region. Still, over 20 devices tuned in to the discussion. Tanisha Mitchell, a librarian at the Freeport library, stated that the presentation was held in conjunction with the 2025-26 Arts Season at the library, dubbed “Modern Arts in the 20th Century,” which intersected with Black History Month. Raverty, a retired associate professor of art history at New Jersey City University, detailed
during the presentation that one of his specialties in art history is West African art. Since the beginning of his professional life, however, Raverty noted that recognition and inclusion of art from the Black Diaspora was largely missing from history books. “It wasn’t until 1992 when art history started to commonly include Black artists,” Raverty lamented. Raverty explained that this pattern of exclusion for Black art precedes him and even the Harlem Renaissance artists he spoke of from the 1920s and 1930s. The only mainstream art of Black people in Western cul-
ture typically resulted in caricatures that intended to exaggerate or insult Black faces and culture, and Black artists could rarely break into the white-dominated intellectual art society. Raverty described Black artists as later taking the position of “we’ve been taken out of history, so we’ll put ourselves back into history.”
One of the key points of Raverty’s talk was that he believed the ter m “Harlem Renaissance” inadequately portrays the widespread movement and impact of Black urban life. He stated that the term “New Negro Movement,” which had been used more commonly in the past, is more ConTinueD on paGe 3