A Daughter Is Grateful - Alice Bernstein Speaks at Congressional Auditorium

On October 21, 2009, an event took place in the Congressional Auditorium in the US Capitol Visitor Center, "The People of Clarendon County"--A Play by Ossie Davis, & the Asnwer to Racism! based on the book edited by Alice Bernstein and pubished by Third World Press. The featured guests at this gala event were House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, and Congressmen John Conyers (MI), Elijah Cummings (MD), and Jose Serrano (NY). What follows is Ms. Bernstein's bio as it appeared in the printed souvenir program:

Alice Bernstein is a journalist and Aesthetic Realism Associate whose articles and regular column, “Alice Bernstein & Friends,” appear nationwide. She is the editor and co-author of the anthology Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism (Orange Angle Press, 2004). Mrs. Bernstein was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and majored in English literature at Brooklyn College. She is grateful to her parents, the late Jack and May Musicant, who were among the earliest students of Aesthetic Realism with Eli Siegel, for encouraging her desire for knowledge and her interest in people of all faiths, races, and backgrounds. Alice Bernstein had the honor to study in classes with Eli Siegel, and continues her studies in professional classes taught by Ellen Reiss at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.
In 1963 she married noted photographer David Bernstein, and they have a daughter Rachel. Throughout their marriage, the Bernsteins have collaborated on many projects, including news stories and interviews, often illustrated with his photo­graphs, and essays on cultural and historical subjects—for example, “Photography and Feeling: The American Indian” (1968), “The Opposites Visit Old, Old Egyptian Art” (1973), “A Ceremony of Grief and Triumph: The African Burial Ground” (2000), “Bronzeville and Harlem: Photography and Justice” (2004), and “Remembering the Civil Rights Struggle in Brooklyn—and Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality” (2006).
Mrs. Bernstein began writing about Aesthetic Realism as the knowledge that can end racism in 1982 with a story against apartheid in South Africa. She is a scholar and contributing writer of many entries in African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Oxford University Press, 2008), “the largest collection of black lives ever assembled.” Her entries include the great tap dance master Dr. Jimmy Slyde and South Carolinians Rev. Joseph Armstrong DeLaine, civil rights leader in Clarendon County, and Judge Matthew J. Perry, the first black lawyer from the Deep South appointed to the federal judiciary, after whom a U.S. courthouse in Columbia, SC was named in 2004. Her research also uncovered extensive information about North Carolinian Israel B. Abbott (c.1843-1887), carpenter, editor, and state representative during Reconstruction. In 2005 Alice Bernstein began the oral history project of interviews with unsung heroes, “The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights,” which in 2009 includes over 140 men and women— black, white, Asian, Latino, and Native American— around the country, videotaped by David Bernstein. About this project, State Representative Tyrone Brooks of Georgia writes, “I am grateful for what Alice Bernstein is doing to preserve our history and bring it to the forefront so that it captures the attention of young people.” The project was awarded grants in 2007 from the Puffin Foundation and the Yip Harburg Foundation.

Photo: Alice Bernstein at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Harlem, 2008), on the occasion of the first revival of "The People of Clarendon County" by Ossie Davis, after 53 years!

To read about the event in the Congressional Auditorium,

click here.