Four Hundred Years of Free Labor

"We as people of Africa have a story to tell about a journey of four hundred years here in America. Kidnapped from the motherland of Africa, placed in chains and shackles, uprooted from family into slavery.

"Back in 1979 the company I was working for closed down, and I started wandering around. I had a lot of little jobs here and there, but nothing to stay with, and I knew I had to regroup, find a way to go on with my life. I looked around me and saw so much trouble in the world, so much suffering among my people. I was living in a place that looks upon Africans as less than a human being. My African ancestors built America on the sweat of their backs, in their blood, in their life—free slave labor—and the only pay is death. I saw how the races was drifting further and further apart and how black people ourselves was drifting apart. And I asked God to help me find a way that I could help bring people together as one, for understanding, even for the littlest child. Because America had started to lose the family, and when the family is lost, that is the end of all of us here as a people.

"And it finally came back to me that the only way was through art, art is the universal thing. Make the art and put a message with it that could heal the wounds everywhere. Communicate to the world a message of God—love and peace for all. I then took on the name "Peacemaker."

"When I heard that Birmingham was going to build a civil rights museum, that gave me what you call a stepping stone. From what I was hearing, the main players in the freedom struggle, the foot soldiers, was left out of the story. We need the leaders, but without the foot soldiers the struggle and fight can’t be won. But where is the recognition for the soldiers?

"And I thought about the journey we have made through America for four hundred years. God gave me the vision of art, to link that four-hundred-years journey of Africans in America, link that truth to the children who are turning away from us, and I decided to name it the "African Village in America." It tries to tell the story of that life we have spent here.

"Since about ’92 or ’93 I also been making pieces about art, about subjects I want to express. I got this idea of what you could call “pacifying” people with pieces I put together that are not intended for my African Village. I put together what are 'message pieces,' ideas I get that relate to the ideas in the yard but don’t belong in the yard—ideas about life, about people relating to other people, and about nature.

"Art is the one way man can have a common thread that would connect the hearts of all people. Art is for universal understanding. There is no 'insider' or 'outsider' art, because art is one. All that we know, all that we have been, can be explained in art.

"We as people of Africa have a story to tell about a journey of four hundred years here in America. Kidnapped from the motherland of Africa, placed in chains and shackles, uprooted from family into slavery. Fifty-four thousand shiploads of men, women, children—three hundred packed into the bottom of a ship for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Of one hundred million African people taken into the Western Hemisphere, seventy-five million missing—only twenty-five million made it alive in the Middle Passage to America. What happened to the seventy-five million missing Africans?

"God created all men equal. The American Declaration of Independence, passed by Congress July 4, 1776, states that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America by the hand of John Hancock. How was slavery allowed in a great country like America, with such powerful words and a belief in God? My African ancestors that made it to the shores of America was royalty—kings and queens—and tradesmen, skilled craftsmen, artists, farmers. The Africans had a high-culture society and a very complex civilization. The African culture is over seven thousand years old. The Nubian people of Egypt: Where civilization began. Timbuktu of the Kingdom of Mali, with its university and scholars: A city of wisdom.

"Africa have one to two thousand different dialects and languages. All of this was taken from our African ancestors at the shores of America. We was forced in chains and shackles and naked, with nothing but God to protect us and deliver us from this agony, misery, and death. We had to learn the language of our oppressor. We had to learn the culture of our oppressor. In this we lost our African language, our culture, our family, our comb for our hair, our drum for our communication. We lost our pride and dignity. We became the property of our oppressor, denied human rights for over four hundred years, treated in America like an animal, not as an African, a human being, a brother or sister, or a child of God.

"But we Africans are going to make it in America and become full Americans, by the will of God and by giving our best work, each one of us. I give my art and the messages that go with it. Another person give labor, or the preparation of food, or writing, or the teaching of little children. God instruct us not to quit, not to break. To survive is to win, you know. An old oak tree don’t die, you know. It bends to show its strength. Each bend that you see, if you could look inside it you could see what it went through. The last got to bend to the end.

"We are a beautiful race that cannot be ignored. We have went through tribulation, but from that experience we learn patience and develop the strength of hope. When you take all the fruit off a tree, and there’s one piece left, it is the sweetest piece because it have been through the most to survive. If God choose to bring us along last, we will come last. Something have to come last, to be the best.

"I look at our book Souls Grown Deep now, the book that tells our story, a story that cannot be buried now, and I understand the role that me and every other African art maker play. We are like individual drops of water. Everything got to start with a drop of water. A river got to start with a drop of water. You know how a river do, don’t you? When it make its mind up, ain’t nothing going to stop it, don’t make no difference what gets put in the way. Once that river starts to flow, it will go all the way down to the sea. Our river is starting to flow now." —Joe Minter