Free Black history and art repository Mama’s Attic in Omaha is a homespun homage to founder LaVon Stennis Williams’ late mother, Emma Pearl Haynes Stennis. The dual Cultural and Humanities Center and Black Doll Museum are on the Center Mall’s first floor.
Williams, Women of Color Caucus Nebraska founder and a former attorney, curates displays inspired by Emma Pearl’s love of history and art.
“I was raised by a Southern Mississippi mother whose folks sharecropped,” Williams said. “She had a sixth grade education but you would have thought she had an advanced education because she taught Black history all the time to me and my siblings. She was a family grio (storyteller) and self-taught folk artist who made us learn Black history because that’s how she was brought up.”
At Mama’s Attic, family artifacts and photos provide personal-social-cultural context for the historical Black experience in America. In the spirit of Emma Pearl, there’s no shying away from the bitter truth of slavery, Jim Crow or the struggle for freedom, nor any apology for celebrating Black excellence.
“My mother didn’t play,” Williams said. “She’d talk history with anyone that would listen. If you didn’t want to listen you would end up listening because her stories were so fascinating. And they were real. She lived the hardship of growing up in rural Mississippi. She went through the civil rights and the Black power movements.”
It all got passed onto her children.
“We got history lessons,” Williams said. “If you acted like you weren’t interested, well, that was a whole different lecture about growing up dumb and blind and how if you don’t know your past people can use it against you.”
Emma Pearl made sure her kids knew that loved ones served in the U.S. military in every armed conflict from the Civil War forward.
At home, Williams couldn’t help but learn new words and history lessons not found in textbooks.
“Mom couldn’t afford new dictionaries and encyclopedias so she got them at the Goodwill and placed them everywhere, even the bathroom, because she expected that wherever you were you should read and learn,” she said.
Emma Pearl challenged what passed for Black history in schools.
“At Miller Park Elementary they gave us a book report assignment and let us choose who to write on,” Williams recalled. “I chose Harriet Tubman because that’s who we had been talking about in class. But when I got home my mother wouldn’t let me do it on Harriet Tubman. She said, I want you to do it on Fannie Lou Hamer. I asked, Who’s Fannie Lou Hamer? She told me. We used to think Mom was making some of these people up because we’d never heard of them. You couldn’t find them in a book then. My source was my mother.
“She remembered seeing Fannie Lou Hamer at a voters rally. So of course she was going to have me write about Fannie Lou Hamer.”
What about that school report?
“I got an F and I was thinking my mom had messed this up for me,” Williams said. “She went right up to the school the next day to make them change the grade. She said, ‘Just because you don’t know about her does not mean she doesn’t exist.’ I walked out of there with an A.
“The next year the school asked her to come talk about Black history and my mother said, ‘No, I don’t talk during Black History Month – I’ll come talk outside that month.” She resented Black history being relegated to the shortest month of the year and the government suggesting it was the only time to celebrate it. “She said it should be celebrated everyday because Black history is American history.”
When Williams practiced law she was invited to speak at a HUD Housing Conference in Washington DC and her mother accompanied her. No one showed for a subsequent workshop she led which Williams didn’t understand until she discovered her mother outside the chambers holding court before a group of politics, including former Georgia state legislator Julian Bond.
With such a captivating, strong-willed matriarch as a role model, Williams became a history buff.
The need for this history was impressed on Williams when she met a group of Black boys who were convinced the Tuskegee Airmen were fictional creations in a movie. She made it a point to introduce the boys to the last surviving Nebraskan who was a Tuskegee Airman, the late Robert Holts, and the experience led her to write a children’s book about the World War II fliers.
As the Black Lives Matter movement and the 1619 Project amplified calls for a fuller teaching of Black history. Williams didn’t have far to look for inspiration.
“It started with me wanting to do something for my mother when she passed,” Williams said.
Williams organized a February 2020 exhibition around Emma Pearl’s never before publicly displayed folk paintings along with other artifacts that speak to the Black diaspora.
“My mother painted pictures to relieve the pain and the trauma she grew up in. All the pictures were of Mississippi and the conditions she lived under,” Williams said. “She wanted to do something with these pictures in honor of her and to merge art with history. People said, this is wonderful, you should do a museum. That’s when the light bulb came on.”
Thus, Mama’s Attic was born, first with the Cultural and Humanities Center in 2020, followed this past fall by the doll museum, whose hundreds of dolls represent the arc of African American representation in popular culture. More than playthings, Williams said, “Dolls are silent witnesses” to Black history.
Williams does all the research herself for the interpretive panels and brochures she produces.
“It’s a joy for me,” Williams said. “I’m doing something I love doing so it’s not like work. I’m learning a lot more history as a result. Mom would be so proud.”
She’s sure, too, Mama would like that she’s befriended some historical figures and their families. Besides the Tuskegee book, she did another with Fannie Lou’s daughter Jacqueline Hamer, and with Sarah Collins Rudolph, the only surviving girl in the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. She’s also penned books on the Second Great Migration and soul food.
Williams’ day job is running Reconnect Inc., a nonprofit she founded whose programs help formerly incarcerated individuals reenter society and support at-risk youth and families. She views the history and education bound up in Mama’s Attic as a prevention tool.
“If you find your value and a way to respect yourself and to not buy into the myth we’re supposed to be second-class citizens, if you connect to Black people who overcame odds far greater than what you’re going through, then hopefully that keeps you from ever entering the criminal justice system and needing reentry services. Because you’ll have pride, purpose, a sense of being, and you will want to continue this legacy of Black greatness,” she said.
“When people talk about slavery as our history, no, it’s not our history, it’s what interrupted our history because slave traders did not bring over slaves, they brought captives they forced into slavery.”
These captives, she said, brought knowledge and skills from Africa with them and the survivors showed great resilience. Mama’s Attic tells stories of resistance, inspiration, achievement, ingenuity in the face of oppression.
“Our people overcame all these odds and obstacles to leave a foundation and legacy for us.”
She said some white visitors feel like they have to apologize for what transpired.
“There’s no reason to apologize – it’s history. Hopefully anyone leaves with a different understanding than what they came in with.”
Mama’s Attic is in Suite 108 of the Center Mall at 1941 South 42nd Street. To reserve a tour, visit https://www.mamasattic.org or call 402-740-6034. Check social media for special exhibitions.