Gary Historic Preservation Commission Meeting 11/13/19 3pm Good afternoon everyone!! My name is Dr. Telethia Denise Barrett. I am the Chair of the Housing, Neighborhood Development, and Historic Preservation Transition Committee for our Mayor-Elect Jerome Prince. I would like to first thank our President Patricia Brown for taking the time to talk to me at the library and tell me all the Beautiful Stories of the history of our city. Her stories sparked my interest. I wanted to know more about what she does and how I can learn more about what she knows. This desire to learn more from her has brought me here where I am looking forward to being her apprentice. I look forward to learning your wisdom and knowledge of our history through your stories I can't wait to hear them all. I have worked with the NAACP in Johnston County North Carolina. I was the chair of both Communications and Civic Engagement and co-chair of religious affairs. One thing that I took great pride in is recording and documenting by video the stories of Johnston County Civil Rights victories and civil rights violations. Those videos changed lives are preserved online to this day. To tell you a little bit about me, I am a proud Gary native. My roots here are in Faith Arts and entertainment. My auntie Gwendolyn Calmese Wright, a playwright. and my second cousin, Booker Griffin are both Gary historic figures. My auntie wrote and performed plays throughout Gary that took her all the way to
Broadway in New York City. Her work and name is preserved in the Gary Centennial volt. My cousin Booker Griffin was a community activist, columnist, radio host, publicist, and political figure. After the riots in Los Angeles in 1965, as a community activist, he wrote programs to empower and rebuild the community. He was a volunteer for Robert F Kennedy's presidential campaign. he worked as a publicist for Motown and Don King for the famous Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fight in Zaire. This is not just my history it is the history of our great City Gary, Indiana. I know there are many historic stories waiting to be told by people sitting right here in this room. There are other stories that we must discover and display. In my mind, our Collective stories right now, are fragmented and they need a place to come together to tell a whole story, forming what I believe is a beautiful collage of Art and history to be displayed and preserved. Science has confirmed creative healing through the Arts is profoundly effective. It rewires neural paths in the brain that makes us smarter happier and better communicators. The Arts eases pain, depression, lessens the need for medication, gives a sense of strength, and makes way for more creativity. The Arts are defined as anything that takes skills to cultivate, be it gardening, music, Language, Dance, singing, painting, sculpting, writing, creating bills, and laws. It's the act of taking an idea or thought and bringing it into operation, bringing it into existence. This also means art and history have life and are Life Giving. Art as history is thought provoking and mind shifting.
I study and teach Hebrew and Greek in the Bible. I love learning about the etymology of words. The Hebrew letters are works of art but each letter contains history. Art has an artificer or a maker, that art becomes an artifact and is used to display history. It is also used to define and empower a people. In the Bible the Ark of the Covenant was an artifact of laws. It held the testimony and the living word or art of God. This literary creation governed an entire Kingdom. It was given to be a memorial recited on a yearly basis. The Hebrews were commanded by God to tell the history of the people and to recite the laws given to them by their God. Wherever the law or the people stood it became a monument of inspiration. The Arts used under an oppressive government can be dangerous. Such as the story of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3:15 the scripture reads, Now when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe, and all kinds of music, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image I made, very good. But if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace. The Arts are powerful, they can be used to empower or enslave. This is why having control over the display of Arts and history is so powerful. It has the power to cultivate Minds. In order for there to have been a transfer of power between Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and the kingdom of Judah, there was a change of IMAGE and literature. A change in mind or thought. A change in arts displayed and taught. Under the new government you learned their language and customs and received new names. We today know this as colonization, in history it’s known as hellenization or the process of enslavement. That would mean the ability to create, display, learn and teach the Arts of literature, dance,
music, and painting was dangerous and had to be stopped. But through this stance of three Hebrew boys, God remained God. A transfer of thought is how Adam and Eve lost their positions It is time we preserve our testimonies. Its our history. It's time that we Preserve Gary, IN rich history and Black History. It's time to create books of Gary Indiana history and Gary Indiana black history. The Black migration, The story of Midtown, Roosevelt the first African-American School in Gary, the creation of Motown. The effects of redlining, white flight and how it affected our City's economic independence. Preserve the history of out Great leaders, athletes and artists coming out of Gary. It's time to print our own books, create our own curriculum, create curriculum that can be shared with other schools who desire to learn black history told from black historians, and black experience, its time to create our narrative, it's time to empower us and heal us through the healing Power of Creative Arts and our history. Dr.Telethia D. Barrett