Clyde Edmond Fisher's Podcast
Welcome to Fission on Community Affairs, where we break down the complex world to local happenings. Each episode offers insightful conversations and analysis on everything from local government and development to social initiatives and neighborhood’s stories. Tune in for perspectives that illuminate the forces at play in our community and beyond.
Clyde Edmond Fisher's Podcast
Baltimore's Only Black American Museum
We dive into one man's work to create a historical cultural center for his community in East Baltimore. Berkley Stevens Thompson, commonly known as Frank in the Charm City, sits down with me to discuss his life-long journey with Black and African Art and the power he's found along the way. At age 80, Frank reminisces about the past, criticizes failures of the time, and raises a mirror for the future.
Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!Start for FREE
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
In a world that is constantly evolving, how do we create a community that thrives? How do we foster businesses that uplift and social developments that make a difference? Hello, I am Clyde Edmund Fisher and you are listening to the Clyde Edmund Fisher Podcast. On this episode, we are featuring Baltimore's only Black American museum, and our special guest is one of the founders.
Speaker 2:Well, Frank is my pen name. My name is Berkeley Thompson.
Speaker 1:Frank is an unusual creature who has had the foresight of bringing African and black arts and artifacts to the Charm City.
Speaker 2:I'm one of the founders of Baltimore's only black American Museum, founded in 1968, the year they killed Dr King.
Speaker 1:Frank is a unique man, full of humor and light. He just turned 80 in 2025, and for the past 50 years and counting, he has dedicated his life to uplifting the local Baltimore community and beyond.
Speaker 2:The museum building is something that we're very proud of.
Speaker 1:It's four stories of cultural artifacts of cultural artifacts, memorabilia, paintings, sculpture and, of course, black culture, from wall to wall. Bam, or Black American Museum, is located at 1776 Carswell Street, tucked away right by Clifton Park, from wall to wall. The art and collection at BAM focus on African art that emphasize the traditions of different African culture, as well as Black art, which explores the experiences of people of African descent worldwide.
Speaker 2:We invite and encourage people to check out the museum, to get involved with the museum, to understand that the future, in terms of where we are trying to go as a people, is in our culture.
Speaker 1:I came to know Frank through the House of Arts, an organization dedicated to uplifting the arts. Dedicated to uplifting the arts. On this episode, you are about to hear how one man's love and vision has sustained a cultural heritage center despite challenges.
Speaker 2:We need to begin to identify culture, not politics. Culture not religion, culture not religion. Culture not anything other than a way to embrace ourselves and to, let's say, better produce the kind of community that we all would be proud of living in.
Speaker 1:Drive it into Baltimore's Clifton Park neighborhood. There is a painting with the saying no matter how far the stream flows, it doesn't forget its source, and Frank's work exemplifies this.
Speaker 2:People are looking for ways to connect and to identify with their culture. They just don't have the kind of access to that information and Baltimore's Black American Museum has been trying to get the information out there for the last 55 years, telling people to come home, come celebrate their culture, come uplift our communities and make our community a community of value.
Speaker 1:Frank talks a lot about culture.
Speaker 2:Culture is the essence of the people.
Speaker 1:What it is not.
Speaker 2:It's nothing exotic.
Speaker 1:And what it is.
Speaker 2:We do it instinctively, being who we are, the way we see things, the way we express ourselves, whether it's breakdancing or rap music.
Speaker 1:Frank firmly believes that art is a powerful reflection and expression of culture, and it has the ability to transmit values, traditions and beliefs across generations traditions and beliefs across generations.
Speaker 2:One time, um Matt music was considered um, um a negative force, um, they call it Ebonics back in the eighties and he realizes the heritage also captured in culture. But a few years later some brothers up there in Brooklyn, somewhere in New York, uh came up with something called rap, and today Ebonics is a multi-billion dollar industry we call rap.
Speaker 1:And how art can redefine a people.
Speaker 2:The way they speak, the way they talk, the way they conduct themselves. That's their culture, that's our culture. That's their culture, that's our culture. That's something that needs to be celebrated, not only in the level of entertainment but in terms of the way we relate to one another. If we had a stronger cultural bond, we would probably produce a better community all around. African and black art is always changing, adapting to the social times and the evolving force of the African diaspora. I found it important to use culture as one of my first shows. I did with the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1972. Baltimore Museum of Art in 1972. I was one of the first black artists ever to produce a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art and that show was called Soul Power.
Speaker 1:Frank is a historic man who knows that culture is a tool that can shape relationships between people, communities and the world.
Speaker 2:I made the mistake of not registering it or trademarking it, because today it's a diplomatic term of nicety. Soft power conveys that you want to persuade people to see things your way. That is the soft power. The hard power is to put a gun in your face.
Speaker 1:Sitting down with Frank, you will learn. His attitude on life has been shaped by many forces.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you over the last 55 years or so that I've been doing this. I compared it with when I had a paper route, when I was a teenager living in East Baltimore.
Speaker 1:From his early experience with entrepreneurship as a young boy.
Speaker 2:And I built that paper route up from nothing. I may have had about 30 customers. By the time I passed the paper route on to one of my brothers, I think I had at least 90 customers.
Speaker 1:To the events in the 1960s and how Baltimore was changing drastically.
Speaker 2:When I saw what was going on in my community at the time I was living in California I was so heartbroken.
Speaker 1:It was in those moments that Frank got a calling which will guide his life to today. That Frank got a calling which will guide his life to today.
Speaker 2:Instinctively knew that there was something I could do to help remedy the situation.
Speaker 1:He found art to be a tool for change.
Speaker 2:I did not know at the time how terrible the situation is, and by that I mean we have lost total control of our communities, we've lost control of ourselves, and we're sort of like in a twilight zone of what can we do to better our situation.
Speaker 1:Frank set out in the 60s on a mission to create a space that would not only capture the experience of the changing times but serve as a compass for the community.
Speaker 2:Most people I come in contact with in the last 55 years and I have yet to be wrong about this. All of God's children have talent, have skills. They doodle, they draw, they make up stuff. This is part of their culture. This is part of them reaching back, getting something that their parents didn't give them, and they had it before they went to kindergarten. And that thing is still alive in you, if you nurture it.
Speaker 1:After 50 years of running Baltimore's only Black American Museum and selling art to his local community, Frank says there is still a deep need to cultivate the art within the community of Baltimore and beyond.
Speaker 2:We all have talent. Our community is not dying for a lack of talent. It's dying on the lack of recognition and recognition of the talent.
Speaker 1:Frank has used his life working to fill a crucial void of enriching the lives of people, especially young people.
Speaker 2:We can't give up on the children and we haven't shown them the right way to go since day one, and he has been using art to help people extract cultural fulfillment.
Speaker 2:I'm a proponent of reaching people's creative side. In my experience dealing with the five-year-olds, I used to teach a program here at the museum called the Children's Hour, and my class was creative writing. We had the ceramic classes, we had the gym. It was a lot of fun. It was a great challenge. I totally, totally enjoyed it. My daughter was even in class here.
Speaker 2:What you want to do when you're dealing with young people is to tap into their talent. They all have talent. They all have talent. They all may not be artists to draw or artists to dance or artists to sing or however way you can define that person being an artist because of their particular interest in that particular situation, but all these children have talent. It doesn't take much to cultivate it. It really does not. That surprised me more than anything.
Speaker 2:When I got involved with the children's program here. I was so impressed with the spontaneity of these children's creativity. They used to come in here and say to me Mr BT, they called me. The kids would say up your nose or above a hose. And I'm thinking to myself this is 1975, now, this wasn't yesterday. Where the heck did they get that? I thought they were writing poetry, they were making fun of me, but they would say oh, up your nose or above a hose, I'm thinking so. I asked their parents one day when they came to get them you ever hear the expression up your nose? She said oh, it's a TV show where it comes on. Where they said that, I said I'm telling you they turned it into what they want it to be. I thought that was so interesting.
Speaker 1:That is the power of what Frank has built. Bam and the art there inspire people who come through not only from seeing history and the promise of the future, but providing a roadmap to their created size.
Speaker 2:The museum can enrich anybody's life, no matter what part of the world you're in. If you reach a level in your civilization where you're beginning to patronize libraries and museums, you know you've moved a level up. You took it to another level.
Speaker 1:Frank believes everyone possesses an artistic talent, even if you cannot see it with your eyes just yet.
Speaker 2:And all I'm saying is that invest in yourself. That's the best thing you can do for the future. And if you think that much of yourself, think that much of your neighbor or your community or the children down the street, the first 20 years here at the museum I had a children's club every weekend where the kids would come in and, free of charge, draw art this that then invite their parents to come see the artwork they put up in the museum. You know, all of that's an integral part of being a better community than we have now.
Speaker 1:BAM empowers people today to make sense of their livelihoods and set them on a journey of revitalizing themselves and their communities.
Speaker 2:But there's still enough people out there that value the culture enough to say I want to. I can do something about that. That's where I can make a difference With a cultural institute like the Baltimore's only black American Museum.
Speaker 1:You can make a difference With a cultural institute like the Baltimore's only Black American Museum you can have a say, frank, cautions surrounding yourself with art alone would not move a community just like that.
Speaker 2:Again, again. I don't think art by itself is a cure-all.
Speaker 1:Instead, he points to how a community-wide sense of ownership is needed.
Speaker 2:What would make the community better would be to have a cultural outreach Like when I was a kid they used to have what they called rec centers. On the weekends or after school you could go to the rec center and play basketball and do all kinds of things. Usually they would open the school up in a certain section of the school where you could go back in in the afternoon. And you know, we even had a place called Chick-Wave, named after the great jazz drummer Chick-Wave. That's from Baltimore. We had Chick-Wave Center and we had places where we could go and swim and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But we need to do it. We don't need to ask the government to do it. We can do it, just like the Honorable Lajah Muhammad found tens of thousands of like-minded people and created the Nation of Islam as we understand it in America, marcus Garvey way back in the 1920s, the Black Star Line and the Back to Africa movement Not necessarily everybody going back to Africa, but realizing that that's where our base is and we can build. From understanding and appreciating Africa and all the other groups in the diaspora, we can be a better people For.
Speaker 1:Frank. Art is a way to unite people, especially people of African descent, who have had major historical forces disrupt their unity and created conditions fostering internal conflicts.
Speaker 2:We have a lot of work to do and I don't blame people for shying away from it, but it must be done. It just must be done. None of us is safe if we can't come together and make things better.
Speaker 1:None of us are safe, no matter what part of town you live in BAM creates a place for people to come together to celebrate their differences and to rise above them. It's a work Frank is proud of doing.
Speaker 2:It's just a lack of commitment, a lack of love. Well, this is what happened with me and my grandmother when she asked me why I did what I'm doing. I never had an answer for it, at first and beginning while I was into this black stuff, because we were still niggers at the time. But I told my grandmother and that's what gave birth to what it is that I'm sitting here talking about today. I told my grandmother point blank. I never knew it until she asked me that. I told her I fell in love with black people the whores, the pimps, the prostitutes, the worst of the worst. That's who I fell in love with. I didn't fall in love with the one on Blueberry Hill or the one at Howard, at Spelman or whatever, at Morgan. I fell in love with the one that's every day going to work and putting up with what I have to put up with every day. Those are the people I'm in love with, and they happen to be black, because the need is greater.
Speaker 2:I don't see the need to want one another in other communities as I see it in the black community. I know I need the black community. Even though I didn't think I did in the beginning, I thought I was benefiting them when in fact it benefited me. So there's a lot to be gained if you invest in the black community in many different ways, not just religious, not just political, but that's where most of us run to. There's another phase of that that could be binary. It's culture. See, if you're Baptist and I'm Catholic, or you're Jehovah Witness and I'm Daddy Grace, they just don't see eye to eye. But culturally we all sort of speak the same language.
Speaker 1:If we can sum up Frank's life, we will say he has dedicated it to creating a mirror that he hopes you will see yourself in.
Speaker 2:It's not about the pictures, it's about the culture. There may be 500 pictures on the walls throughout the facility here, but it's the culture that engulfs you when you come in, and that's why I design. Part of that design would be every floor has mirrors and you can't help but see yourself in the museum when you see those mirrors and then, right in the path that you're going to take to see the museum and see yourself in the museum. Now, that's part of my artistry.
Speaker 1:We spoke with Frank inside BAM on one chilly winter day in Baltimore. You can sense the pride he feels for what he has built for the community.
Speaker 2:I had nothing to start with, so I had to take nothing and make something. I made people believe that I was going to build a museum when I would go around with a brick showing them. Here's the first brick.
Speaker 1:And he has been blessed along the way.
Speaker 2:The black people that I thought I would uplift have uplifted me, Because who was I to tell them about their culture? And actually they taught me everything that I've learned in the last 54 years. But I felt I owed them something because I had all this in me.
Speaker 1:Frank serves as a catalyst for dialogue that creates richness and diversity of black culture, and his work fosters a strong sense of identity and pride that promotes social change and enhances well-being.
Speaker 2:To me and I tell the artists a lot of times that art is not yours, it belongs to you. Know you need to let it go? No, it's fine, I made it okay. You can take it all you want, but what you do is for your community.
Speaker 1:If you are better, it's because your community helped you to be better and you want to be better as we close this episode, let us take a moment to reflect on our roots, to challenge our perspectives and to ignite our imaginations. The stories we have shared today are just a glimpse into the vast and ever-changing world of African and Black arts.
Speaker 2:It's much like what they see on television called ancestralcom. Well, this is blackculturecom, meaning people need to reach out to the museum because it's important for us to embrace our culture. More than any time in our history we have never embraced our culture. They made us ashamed of our culture. They made us ashamed of our big, thick lips. They made us ashamed of our nappy hair. They made us ashamed of our nappy hair. They made us ashamed. They made us hate ourselves and we need to get over that. We need to build a better community, not just get over it. We need to build a better community, a better neighborhood.
Speaker 1:We hope you will continue to explore, learn and appreciate the depth and beauty of our cultural expressions. Thanks for listening. This is Clyde Edmund Fisher and you have been listening to the Clyde Edmund Fisher podcast about Baltimore's only Black American design. See you in the next time.