Happy Birthday Toni Morrison!

Posted on February 17th, 2012
by FUPress

Literary giant, Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931. Her novels have sparked the American imagination in libraries, homes, and classrooms across the country, and continue to influence generations of readers.

In the next few months we will publishing Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christiansë and I am reminded of the Contemporary American Fiction Class I took with Professor Jonathan Levin where I read Song of Solomon as a junior.

I unearthed my essay on Song of Solomon that I had long since forgotten. In it I stressed that Song of Solomon is a novel that stresses the importance that a traditional past has on a contemporary American. Morrison creates a novel that is filled with largely religious references that form a commentary on contemporary American society, which appears to be moving towards secularization. However, the main character, Milkman takes a journey that shows the reader that a contemporary individual cannot break with their religion any more than Milkman can break with his cultural and religious past because it is the past that completes him. Milkman takes a leap at the end of the novel in which he lives life to the fullest, because in that second between life and death, he is free. A beautiful and painful concept.

I think that Song of Solomon may be the only work I have read by Toni Morrison. There is a copy of Paradise sitting on a bookshelf. With our upcoming publication, I just might dust both off and immerse myself in the writings of Toni Morrison, with Professor Christiansë as my guide.

Katie Sweeney

Red Tails Takes to the Screen January 20th

Posted on January 9th, 2012
by FUPress

We’re excited to see Red Tails featuring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terrence Howard. Produced by George Lucas, the movie launches Friday, January 20, 2012 and promises to be a gripping story about the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots in the military, and were named for the town in Alabama where they were trained.

We like to think the movie was inspired by one of FUP’s bestselling authors—Alexander Jefferson. While Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free is one of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American pilot, it is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience behind barbed wire in a German prison camp.

Alex Jefferson was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. A Detroit native, Jefferson enlisted in 1942, trained at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, became a second lieutenant in 1943, and joined one of the most decorated fighting units in the War, flying P51s with their legendary—and feared —“red tails.”

Alex Jefferson writes what it was like not only to be an African-American pilot flying during WWII, but also what it was like being a prisoner of war in Germany. Jefferson was shot down in 1944, right in German territory. He was immediately taken captive by German soldiers and held in a POW camp for nine months. His memoir, co-written by Lewis Carlson, spares no details of his experiences fighting for a country where he did not have equal rights.

Alex’s story is vivid and personal. An unvarnished look at life as a fighter pilot and POW, it is also a look at race and democracy in American through the eyes of a patriot who fought to protect the promise of freedom—not only on the front lines, but also as he moved through the camps, air bases, and segregated streets of hometown America.

For more information on Red Tails visit or www.Redtailsfilm.com

James Johnston at Claymont Court Mansion

Posted on December 15th, 2011
by FUPress

Author James H. Johnston spoke at Claymont Court Mansion this past weekend. Claymont is one of a number of Washington family homes around Charles Town, WV. Johnston joined Walter Washington and Betsy Wells (Washington’s descendants) as part of an effort to educate and inform people of the rich history in Jefferson Country, West Virginia.

While Walter and Betsy highlighted the family history of the Washingtons in the area, Jim Johnston took a slightly different approach.

Betsy Washington Wells

Jim spoke about the Bealls, a prominent family in the area. The Beall family owned Yarrow Mamout, a slave that is the subject of Jim’s forthcoming book From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Through this historical account, Jim has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.

Walter Washington

Yarrow Mamout, the first of the family in America, was an educated Muslim from Guinea. He was brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah and gained his freedom forty-four years later. By then, Yarrow had become so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that he attracted the attention of the eminent American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, who captured Yarrow’s visage in one of his paintings.

Recently, the portrait of Yarrow Mamout has been sold by the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showing the continual impact that the past is continually brought into the present. The era of the Washingtons, Bealls, and Mamouts continues to stay with us.

For more information on the seminar, please click here.

Portrait of Yarrow Mamout Finds New Home

Posted on October 26th, 2011
by FUPress

To follow up on the news of the sale of Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Yarrow Mamout, our author, James H. Johnston talked to the Philadelphia Museum of Art about the acquisition. The painting is already on display, just inside and to the left of the front entrance. Fittingly, it is joined by Peale’s Self-Portrait in the Museum. The latter was a precursor to the artist’s larger work, The Artist in His Museum, which is owned by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and currently on display in a special exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington DC.

By the time he painted Yarrow, Peale was more than just a portrait painter. He was also a businessman, operating a combination natural history museum and art gallery in Philadelphia. In it were copies of Peale’s portraits of the first four presidents, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In 1818, the artist went in Washington, D.C. to get a painting of James Monroe to add to the presidential gallery in the museum. That is when he heard about Yarrow. Thus, Peale returned to Philadelphia with paintings of both president and former slave.

James H. Johnston’s book, From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family is forthcoming in May 2012. It will provide a great deal more about Yarrow and Peale and the friendship that developed between the two, which the Philadelphia Museum of Art suggests in its new exhibit. Johnston is also giving a talk December 4, 2011 on the Beall Family who owned Yarrow. It will be given at Claymont Court, Claymont Society, 667 Huyett Road, Charles Town, WV 25414.

Yarrow Mamout Portrait Sold

Posted on October 21st, 2011
by FUPress

This morning the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the portrait of Yarrow Mamout has been sold by the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Originally brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah, Yarrow gained his freedom forty-four years later. By then, Yarrow had been so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., he attracted the attention of Charles Willson Peale. The portrait was painted by Peale in 1819 and is the earliest known portrait of a practicing American Muslim.

Peale’s striking portrait captured the imagination of James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Johnston went on to research Yarrow and his descendants, finding that his relatives were notable in their own right. Yarrow’s son married into the Turner family, and the farm community in western Maryland called Yarrowsburg was named for Yarrow Mahmout’s daughter-in-law Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow. The Turner line ultimately produced Robert Turner Ford, who graduated from Harvard University in 1927. Their fascinating stories are told in Johnston’s forthcoming book, From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

The portrait was painted by Peale in 1819 and is the earliest known portrait of a practicing American Muslim.

Besides reconstructing the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations, Johnston puts a face on slavery and paints the history of race in America. Still fascinating Americans today, the portrait of Yarrow Mahmout is not just an historical artifact, but a journey that continues.

For more on Yarrow Mahmout’s journey, look for From Slave Ship to Harvard by James H. Johnston / 9780823239504 / $29.95 / MAY 2012