becoming

In Black Ink (IBI) is a publishing-arts initiative that provides opportunities to communities that
have been disenfranchised historically, and presently. IBI seeks to create spaces where the
intergenerational stories about Minnesotans of African heritage can be shared, documented,
and archived.

How does a community become the narrator of their own stories? How do we craft our own images and share them with the world?

Maya Angelou stated, “Never let another man create your world, he will always make it too small.” In the case of people of African descent and other Indigenous and BIPOC communities, there is seldom a place made for us to exist, not just in our communities but in the world. This is true even in our own imagination.

According to Rondo resident, educator, and artist Ericka Dennis, most children she meets don’t know the real story of the historic Rondo neighborhood.

Dennis currently works as a Family Liaison at Barack Obama Elementary School in the Summit University neighborhood. Her job is to facilitate parent education and school programming, to connect families with resources, to mediate concerns, and to develop community connections.
She said, “While most of the students where I work, including Black children, could tell you there’s a summer festival in the neighborhood called Rondo Days – they couldn’t tell you what the celebration is about. They don’t understand what was lost here back in the 1960s.”

Old Rondo was once a thriving mix of African American churches, businesses, schools, and homes for more than 100 years. When construction of I-94 began in 1956, its path was drawn to cut right through the middle of the Rondo neighborhood, where approximately 90% of the St. Paul’s Black population lived.

In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a Ted Talk about the danger of a single story.

As a child in Nigeria, she wrote about what she had read in other stories, which primarily featured white American or British characters. Her characters were also white and drank ginger beer, something Adichie had never tasted. But soon she found characters of color, and her stories began reflecting her own experiences. From that she discovered what we lose by hearing from only one point of view.

Tina Burnside doesn’t want people to think that George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police was an isolated incident. Co-founder of the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery, she sees it as part of Minnesota’s history of systemic racism.

“A lot of people were surprised by George Floyd’s killing, and we want people to know it didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said Burnside, a journalist-turned-attorney. “Even though Minnesota has this history of being a progressive state, there is a lot of racial discrimination and disparity that has happened to African Americans.”

Rekhet Si-Asar is a literary and visual artist, publisher, Minneapolis school psychologist and the Executive Director of In Black Ink (IBI) a statewide publishing arts initiative located in St. Paul, MN. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, South America, she grew up in New York where she completed a specialized degree program at the High School of Art and Design before pursuing her BA and Educational Specialist (Ed.S) in child/school psychology. Rekhet recognized early on the integral role education held in saving the world, and the ways in which Black students were often discriminated against – she reports feeling that she and her peers were considered second-class citizens in schools, regardless of their histories or talents. In 1998, Rekhet and her husband started a small publishing company with the intention of developing a curriculum that reflected the diversity found in school systems. Ten years later, when her husband’s mother passed away, Rekhet was struck by the number of stories lost in her mother-in-law’s transitioning. She wanted to create a space for authentic Black narratives; a way for the diversity of heritages and identities present in Minnesota to be shared. “The less you know someone, the less space you have to care for and love them… People don’t know each other’s stories. We need to do better.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks knew the value of Black publishers as both marketers and, importantly, an empowering social and cultural construct. Which is why, in 2002, she turned down a lucrative deal to stay with Harper & Row, going instead with Black publishing companies Broadside Press and later, Third World Press.