Was Bayard Rustin the Most Important Collector of African Antiquities in the 1950s?

by Frederick John Lamp

On a frigid January 10th, 2010, I found myself driving from Yale University to upstate New York on narrow roller-coaster country roads to SusAnna and Joel Grae’s mountaintop cottage with Roderick Mcintosh, Yale’s professor of archaeology and curator of the African collection at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The sight that greeted us inside that tiny hideaway was astounding (fig. 1). Hundreds of human figures in terracotta—many almost life-sized—stared back at us from rows of shelving, every tabletop and cabinet, from each crevice and cranny. What struck us immediately was that the condition of these terracottas, especially from Nok, resembled that of the ancient figures from 900–300 B.C.E. already published in 1990 by Bernard Fagg from the finds in situ in Nigeria since 1928—purely authentic with no modern restorations, alterations, or additions as so many Nok figures in collections have.

I had first met the Graes at the Yale University Art Gallery, where I served as senior curator of African art from 2004 to 2014. They had come to visit the newly opened African gallery to talk about their collection of antiquities from Nigeria and Niger—after a meeting at the medical school, where they had funded a biomedical project to develop vaccines. I then invited Professor McIntosh to join me to see the collection because he had been at the forefront of the concern about provenance and legitimate archeological excavation, strongly confronting the problem of looting and unprovenanced collecting (Plundering Afri- ca’s Past, Indiana University Press, 1996). Without the agreement and collaboration of McIntosh, I would not have considered the acquisition of this collection because of the growing sensitivity against the collecting of undocumented art and antiquities by museums, especially from formerly colonized countries and cultures. We shared a concern about the ethics of collecting African antiquities outside of controlled archae-ological excavation and formal agreement with the country of origin. What we saw before us was a collection of antiquities more than two thousand years old originating from central Nigeria surrounding the village of Nok, from c. 900 to 300 B.C.E. (figs. 2–6), the northern Nigerian states of Katsina, from c. 200 B.C.E to 500 C.E. (figs. 7–9) and Sokoto, from c. 500 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. (figs. 10–11) and nearby sites, comprising some 120 objects in terracotta and stone, which was being offered to the Yale University Art Gallery by SusAnna and Joel B. Grae. The objects came from an area that had no significant controlled archaeological excavation until Professor Peter Breunig and his team of archaeologists from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main began their digs in 2005, in the Nok region, in collaboration with Nigerian archaeologists and students. The other areas, Sokoto and Katsina, still await archaeological excavation, although they are heavily pockmarked by local, amateur treasure hunters. Consequently, we know almost nothing about the cultures that created these works of art.

As was my custom with all potential acquisitions, I questioned the Graes on the provenance of the objects—who sold the objects to them, where that person acquired them, and what previous owners were known.

What we saw before us was a collection of antiquities more than two thousand years old originating from central Nigeria.

Joel Grae could only tell me that he had purchased the objects over the years from various sources, the largest number from a collector in New Jersey who had mainly collected dinosaur fossils, as Grae had. After considerable searching through desk drawers, we came across a group of signed letters from the seller in New Jersey, a man by the name of Wayne Cancro. The earliest letters written up to February 2004 did not mention Cancro’s source, but in a letter on February 16, 2004, Cancro noted, somewhat in passing, that the majority of the objects came from an unnamed private collector “who traveled extensively in Niger, Mali, Nigeria in the mid to late 1950s to the 1960s.” In later letters, beginning in July, 2004, Cancro identified the source as Bayard Rustin, a leading African American civil rights leader of the mid-twentieth century, and specified that Rustin purchased the terracottas in northern Nigerian villages in the course of his visits to Nnamdi Azikiwe, who became president of Nigeria at independence (fig. 12). An examination of these various letters and receipts revealed that at least thirty-one Nok objects and twenty-four Sokoto/Katsina objects came from Rustin. Rustin, as a high school student, had first come to know both Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, when both were students at Lincoln University, near Rustin’s home in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

This provenance was of significant importance to our deliberations on whether to accept this collection for the Art Gallery, as, generally, we would not have accepted African antiquities, in accordance with guidelines from the American Association of Museums and the consensus of museum curators throughout the U.S., and without the express permission of the originating country. But here was a private collection apparently in the U.S. for six decades. What would be the most responsible disposition? Returning the objects to Nigeria was not acceptable to the Graes for several reasons, as 1) the Nigerian museums already have the most important collections of Nok, Sokoto, and Katsina antiquities, 2) to return them to the local Northern Nigerian communities, long steeped in extremist Islamic antagonism to “idols,” would have almost certainly resulted in their destruction, and 3) they wanted the collection to serve as historical instruction on the heritage of Africa for American students. McIntosh and I agreed that because of the scholarly importance of this collection, of all the possible dispositions (return of the collection to the market, leaving them hidden to the world, destroying them, etc.), the acquisition by Yale, and its catalogue of the collection, with all objects illustrated and fully described, to be widely distributed, as a way of educating the public and also as an alert to the countries of origin, and to the world of museums, that this collection exists and is now open for study. We also planned for the availability of the collection to students and faculty for study, for international symposia on African antiquities, excavations, and the market, and for further publications.

                                                                   

In the installation of the objects in the African gallery in 2011 (fig. 13), we included a placard explaining in detail the issues of looting, the market, and responsible collecting, calling more attention to the importance of legitimate controlled excavation by archaeologists. We wanted to use the display of art not only to confront the issues sur-ounding unprovenanced material, but also to emphasize the importance of archaeology and to sensitize our viewers, in particular the collecting community, to the destruction caused by undocumented digging (looting) and the greed of the market that encourages this. In the installation of the objects in the African gallery, we included a placard that decried these abuses, and we added a note on collecting and museums’ responsibilities:

The Gallery also applauds those collectors who have acquired objects with the intention of maintaining those materials that are already out of context for the purposes of research and spreading a deeper appreciation of African heritage. The most beneficial course of action is to place these objects in the care of public institutions, providing full provenance disclosure and allowing access for study and publication. Archaeology students at Yale use the Gallery’s collection of African antiquities, and the Gallery has plans to collaborate with the Peabody Museum of Natural History on exhibitions and education initiatives.

This placard no longer is on display. Nor is any substantial portion of the Grae collection of antiquities on display. The grand installation of thirty major figures in terracotta and stone, set in a contextual design evoking the natural setting of the sandy terrain of the Sahel (the border of the Sahara) with a wall-sized photo-mural of an archaeological excavation, all praised in a New York Times art review by Holland Cotter in 2012, are gone. The wall labels describing the context and celebrating the collecting by Bayard Rustin have disappeared.

Here is where the controversy begins. My successor as curator of African art at Yale, Barbara Plankensteiner, previously of the Vienna Museum für Völkerkunde, came with an interest in exposing plundered art, having just published a catalogue of their large col- lection from the Kingdom of Benin (sacked by the British in 1897), and an interest in repatriation, which she pursued. Upon taking office at Yale in 2015, without interviewing any of the previous owners or the curators, she immediately declared the Rustin provenance “impossible.”

Correctly, she pointed out that the antiquities from Sokoto and Katsina were unknown to the international art market in the 1950s when Rustin is supposed to have collected them in Nigeria. She suggested fraud, either on the part of the Graes, or Cancro, or that if, indeed, Rustin owned them, he may have bought the Nigerian antiquities from dealers in the U.S. later in his life and did not acquire them directly from Nigeria. She declared that there was no outside confirmation of Rustin’s ownership. On the basis of her suspicions, she expunged the public record of the provenance and the labels and removed a plaque celebrating Bayard Rustin from the gallery. She then notified the Nigerian government of this now-undocumented collection, which subsequently filed a claim for repatriation. Reinstalling the entire African art collection, she returned only a few Grae objects to the display, without any labels whatsoever. To the time of this writing, the name of Bayard Rustin remains expunged in the African art display at the Yale University Art Gallery.

A close examination of the documentation on file at Yale on the Nigerian terracotta antiquities, however, complicates her conclusion. Rustin’s activity, on almost every level, ground to a halt in the 1980s when he became gravely ill and died in 1987. Plankensteiner argued that if Rustin owned them at all, he would have bought them from U.S. dealers. But, at the same time, she acknowledges that the antiquities from Sokoto and Katsina were unknown to the U.S. art market until the late 1990s. Even if he had bought them from his deathbed, this would still be more than a decade before they first hit the market in the U.S. As far as we know, no dealers in the U.S. even knew about Sokoto and Katsina antiquities until around 1999. So her proposed dating of the purchases by Rustin in the 1970s or 1980s is no more plausible than a 1950s dating, which I shall propose here.

Those who knew Bayard Rustin in the 1950’s, of course, would now be few. And those who had visited him in his home would be even fewer. For several years, I searched in vain for friends and co-workers who might still be alive and might have actually visited his apartment in his early years. I wrote to every civil rights leader from the 1960s who I knew was still alive, to every gay organization in New York City (Rustin was gay), and to all church and civic organizations connected to him, without success. But I was able to reach one co-worker in the civil rights movement, George M. Houser, by telephone conversation on July 30, 2012. I had left a message at his retirement home in California, and he called me on my cellphone while I was on a sixty-mile bicycle ride in the wilds of northern Connecticut. Fortunately, I had a tape recorder with me to record my route and milage, and, with my heart pounding, sitting on a grassy hillside, I recorded my questions and his answers with bated breath. Houser and Rustin together were co-founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution in 1946, and the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. After seeing images of the Grae terracotta figures that I sent him, Houser attested that he had seen the terracotta figures in Rustin’s apartment around 1952. He confirmed my record of our telephone conversation in a subsequent email, on August 2, 2012:

I went to Africa for the first time in 1954, and visited Nigeria, where I met with Azikiwe before independence. Bayard Rus- tin went earlier, in the 1940s or early 1950s [actually1952]. I visited Bayard’s apartment in the early 1950s and I saw these clay sculptures pictured in your article in the Yale Bulletin. I was so impressed with how Bayard was able to get so much and was able to make such close contacts, and this inspired me to go to Africa. Bayard was a pretty good bargainer, and he was good at working with people.

In our conversation I pressed him to recall whether the objects he saw were in fact terracotta. Houser specified that he indeed saw terracotta figures among a large collection of African art in Rustin’s apartment when Rustin returned from Nigeria. Houser’s testimony makes clear that although Rustin’s visit in 1952 was short, he amassed a sizable collection while there, most certainly under the guidance of his powerful friend, Azikiwe (fig. 12).

It is well-established that Rustin traveled to Nigeria not only in 1952 but also in 1971. Jervis Anderson, Rustin’s biographer (Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen, 1997) wrote about Rustin’s various trips to Africa: “In Nigeria, where he arrived on September 13 [1952], Rustin toured the ‘bush’ regions, observing forms of indigenous art and tribal governments. He encountered ‘sculpture in wood and stone that made the realistic classical works of Greece and Rome seem cold and photographic’.  ”

Unfortunately, he says no more about these objects specifically, but in Chapter 24, “The Aesthete and Collector,” Anderson mentions Rustin’s collection of “African carvings” (fig. 14), but, again, does not specify the materials, the forms, or the origins. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that immediately on his first trip in 1952, Rustin took an interest in sculpture. In 1959–60, Rustin extended his travels in Africa, visiting Ghana and trav-eling from Accra north through Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, and the French Sudan (now Mali) to the Algerian border. Walter Naegle, Rustin’s last partner and survivor, who helped found The Bayard Rustin Fund, added: “…most of Rustin’s collecting was in the 1950s because he was heavily occupied with the Civil Rights movements in the sixties and seventies.” This would certainly pertain to the Nigerian terracotta antiq- uities, as the next time Rustin visited Nigeria was in 1971, and only very briefly, although it is possible that Rustin collected the Bura antiquities (fig. 15.) in Niger during the 1959–60 tour.

At the Harlem headquarters for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963, which will be forever known as the event that ensured the success of the civil rights movement and launched the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the highest pantheon of American champions, Rustin, then fifty-three years old, managed all the practical logistics, even though he did so behind the scenes. Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post, in 2011, reported that his sexuality was too much of a liability for the movement, according to U.S. congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia, who had been an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a college student in the 1960s (LL.B., Yale Law School, 1964), and worked under Rustin on the 1960 March on Washington. “It was around this point in August 1963, in the sweltering days before the March on Washington, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was waiting for someone to say something really nasty about her boss.: ‘I was sure the attacks would come because I knew what they could attack Bayard for,’” she recalled. After all, Bayard Rustin was openly gay from the beginning of his civil rights work, when, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, simply being gay was extremely risky. Any gay behavior was illegal throughout the U.S. and would certainly result in imprisonment if caught, as Rustin was. In 1953, he had been arrested in Pasadena, California, for having consensual sex with men. He served fifty days in jail and was registered as a sex offender.

Because of this, in the fifties, leaders of the movement ostracized him. According to Hendrix, Martin Luther King, Jr. banished Rus- tin from the movement because the Harlem congressperson Adam Clayton Powell threatened to spread a rumor that King and Rustin were lovers. This broke Rustin emotionally, and it alienated him from the others in the movement, but it did not deter him from his passion for it. It was not until A. Philip Randolph brought Rustin back to organize the 1963 March on Washington that Rustin was back at work, albeit secretly so that his queerness didn’t distract from the movement. At the same time, he was relentlessly pursued by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI through the 1970s (from Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities, 2019). He was no longer the flashy young star that he was in 1952.

In 1952, if Rustin in Nigeria had indeed asked his friend Nnamdi Azikiwe about procuring art objects, it is not implausible that someone from northern Nigeria knew of a group of found terracotta fragments in local hands. Azikiwe certainly would have had powerful contacts throughout the country to have gained the presidency at independence. Furthermore, Rustin had come to Nigeria to help Azikiwe organize local resistance units throughout the country in the struggle for independence, and they would have met local leaders in various regions, as Anderson has reported.

The collector, Grae, continued to go back to Cancro over several decades to purchase small groups of figures simply out of fascination for the art. One handwritten letter from the dealer, Cancro, to Grae, on February 16, 2004, describes, for the first time, a vague provenance:

African terracottas number about 30 including 4 figures & about 26 other pieces.  Acquired from a private collection in 1981 who [sic] traveled extensively in Niger, Mali, Nigeria in the mid to late 1950s to the 1960s. All items were acquired by him at that time when light digging was permitted.

In a letter to Grae, dated July 12, 2004, Cancro specified that he had purchased the objects from Rustin, referring probably to all of Rustin’s African collections:

In 1981, I purchased from Bayard Rustin all seventy-four ancient terracotta and stone statues that I have recently sold to you. Mr. Rustin told me that he obtained the collection incrementally over the periods of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s while visiting Africa and dealing with local tribal Chiefs who put together teams to dig and find the statutes [sic].

That Rustin probably found persons with already accumulated collections of both recent ritual wood sculpture and broken terracotta antiquities willing to sell is confirmed by Cancro a year later, on June 10, 2005:

In furtherance of my previous letters to you regarding the numerous Nok, Sokoto, Katsina and Bura pieces that I sold to you, be advised that Bayard Rustin advised me they were all purchased by him in his dealing with the tribal elders and chiefs during the 1950s and 1960s and brought back into the United States.

In my only conversation with the seller, Wayne Cancro, by telephone, shortly after the donation, he confirmed to me that the letters were his, but he said he was unable to recall any more details from his transaction with Rustin beyond what he had already written to Grae in 2004–2005, as it was already three decades past.

The discrepancies in the dates that Cancro gives for Rustin’s collecting demonstrate that he was simply writing his recollections from decades prior, apparently writing off the top of his head, and clearly not fully aware of the chronology of Rustin’s several African trips, having not read Rustin’s biographies, as we have. Cancro is not a dealer of African art, but rather a Jersey City collector of fos- sils who happened to acquire this collection of antiquities about which he apparently knew nothing except the basic identifications. If he had consciously been attempting to create a false narrative, one would think that he would have been careful to coordinate his statements.

It seems obvious that Cancro had no idea of the importance of the African material in his possession, selling 191 objects to Grae attributed to the collection of Bayard Rustin, for a total of $32,645, i.e., c. $170 per object, according to receipts in the curatorial records at Yale. No knowledgeable dealer would have left these materials in their broken state, in fragments thrown together into burlap bags and boxes, as these were, according to the restorer, Bob Hansmann, when he picked them up from Grae to rejoin them.

Significantly, Cancro did not use the Rustin name to sell the objects to Grae. And Grae was so unconcerned about the documentation of the pieces that he did not even get a receipt. He just loved the art. It was only after Grae had purchased the bulk of the objects by the early 2000s, and asked Cancro for documentation, that Cancro specified Bayard Rustin as the source in writing, well after he had any financial incentive. Furthermore, Cancro specified which objects of antiquity did not come from Rustin in the lots he sold to Grae. And in freely donating the objects to Yale, the Graes did not even take a tax deduction.

On his visit to meet with Cancro around 1986, and on later visits, Grae was accompanied by a friend whom we shall identify, for security purposes, at their request, as “Grae’s Friend to Cancro,” or GFC, with the pronoun “they” (identified by name to the writer, to the donors of the collection, and to the curator and director of the Yale University Art Gallery). GFC often drove with him to Cancro’s and assisted him with the selection of pieces of art. In October 2020, SusAnna Grae, who had never visited Cancro, conducted an oral interview with GFC about their recollections, and they remembered that they had visited Cancro with Grae “approximately seven to eight times,” and that “Mr. Grae had already been purchasing art and fossils from Mr. Cancro for some time prior to my visits . . . It was invitation only, in a house with no external signage. There were various art items displayed in three-to- four good-sized rooms—living room, dining room, bedroom. Sixty to eighty percent was sub-Saharan African art—at least forty to fifty pieces on each visit. In addition, there was usually a display of large fossils.”

Significantly, GFC testified that they indeed saw a large Nigerian terra- cotta collection in Wayne Cancro’s house from the beginning. It should be noted that GFC did not see Grae’s letters from Cancro, nor did they see any written material on the Grae collection:

SusAnna Grae: How and where was the terracotta African sculpture being displayed?

GFC: It was on the floor and on tables.

SG: Was everything on stands?

GFC: No, very little.

SG: Were there broken pieces?

GFC: Yes, several sculptures had been glued together and some needed to be glued and assembled, which Cancro sometimes did, once Grae made his selection. Other pieces Grae took as-is and gave it to a craftsman that he knew who could do the assembly work and/ or make stands.

SG: Did you see any boxes or bags of broken material?

GFC: Yes, and Grae purchased some of those in my presence . . . Cancro said that he began purchasing the terracotta art incrementally from Bayard Rustin prior to the 1970s. He said that Rustin de-acquisitioned and sold art because he needed the money.

SG: When did Cancro tell you that Rustin acquired the art, and where?

GFC: In the 1950s and 1960s while traveling in West Africa on many trips.

SG: Do you recall any conversation about where the material had been stored, and did he mention a location or name?

GFC: I don’t recall the name, but Cancro did mention Rustin had a Westside storage facility near the water where a lot of his art was stored.

Later, in gratitude, Grae gifted GFC a Nok figure at some point during these visits to Cancro. GFC has confirmed the provenance in a separate letter to me:

This is to confirm that my personal Nok ancient African terracotta statue dated circa 1000 B.C.–300 A.D. from Nigeria was a part of the original collection donated to Yale University Art Gallery by Mr. Joel B. Grae in 2010. I was present at the time when this collection was acquired from Paleontologist and Dealer Mr. Wayne Cancro at [street address], Jersey City, New Jersey during the 1990’s. Mr. Cancro bought this collection from the American civil rights activist Mr. Bayard Rustin who acquired his African Art collection during his many travels to Africa around 1950’s and 1960’s.

If Grae and his friend had really comprehended the great significance of a Rustin provenance (as we do now, in retrospect), they would have rushed over to Rustin’s nearby apartment 9J in Building 7 of the Penn South Complex in West Chelsea, Manhattan, where he lay ill, broke, and forgotten and asked for his signature after the first purchase in 1986. He died a year later.

Furthermore, if Cancro were attempting to concoct an impressive, fraudulent provenance, as Plankensteiner implies, why would he choose Bayard Rustin, a forgotten, disgraced figure of a largely forgotten civil rights era? And if Cancro had thought that the Rustin provenance would be important to use as a selling point, why did he not get a signed statement from Rustin at the time of purchase? Obviously, at the time, the name was of little importance.

Plankensteiner suggested that, even if some of the terracotta antiquities, particularly from Nok, were brought back by Rustin from Nigeria in 1952, the bulk of his antiquities collection, especially from Sokoto and Katsina, must have been purchased later from dealers in the U.S. Not only would this have been impossible, as I have argued earlier, but according to all of Cancro’s letters to Grae, Rustin reported no other sources of his antiquities all dated to his visits to Africa.

It is true that Sokoto and Katsina terracotta antiquities were generally unknown to the art collecting world before Karl Ferdinand Schaedler published his own new purchase of a large Sokoto head with a beard in a catalogue of his exhibition, Gods Spirits Ancestors, of 1992–93 at the Villa Stuck in Munich, incorrectly labelled as “Nok.” Schaedler soon afterward published quite a few from his own collection in Earth and Ore, 1997. In the US, The Dallas Museum of Art acquired a large Sokoto figure in 1994, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts purchased a Sokoto figure in 1999, which it published the next year in its Bulletin 2000. Nevertheless, the authors of the encyclopedic History of Art in Africa, published in 2001, which included a section on Nok, made no mention of Sokoto and Katsina.

Those who contest the Rustin provenance assume that the Sokoto and Katsina antiquities were unknown to anyone, including the indigenous people, at the time Rustin is said to have collected them in Nigeria, and before the 1990s. But we know that the locals encounter these kinds of antiquities in the course of their daily lives. When Leo Frobenius “discovered” antiquities at Ife in Nigeria in 1910, members of the community had already occasionally dug up heads and figures and were using them on their sacred shrines. Bura antiquities in Niger were discovered in 1975, but only because some boys had been playing football (American “soccer”) with a terracotta head, and this was brought by a relative to a local museum where he worked, as he had been sensitized at the museum to the importance of these materials. For how long had young boys been finding these things and playing with them? Nok materials came to the attention of the authorities first in 1928 when they were dug up in an alluvial tin mine. But the British colonial officer, Bernard Fagg, in his Nok Terracottas of 1990, relayed that the miners told him that they had been accidentally digging these up for a long time before that, and they customarily destroyed them, believing them to be bad omens. For how long were the people living in this large area in central Nigeria aware that these terracottas were under the ground? Were the ultra-orthodox Muslims of northern Nigeria likewise smashing the Sokoto and Katsina heads and figures as prohibited idolatry, and for how long? These figures had been in the ground there for 2000 years. Can we really believe that no local person had ever encountered them until the 1990s, when they began to appear on the market abroad, in all the excavation for house foun- dations, all the digging of wells, all the digging of graves, the digging for agriculture, or road building? Up to the present, there has been no archaeological, anthropological, or art historical research in this region of northern Nigeria on the subject of art, so no scholar or dealer knows when the local people were aware of what they had, or even, specifically, where the objects are found, within this large region of northern Nigeria.

By the 1980s, Rustin was ill and largely confined to his small apartment, virtually unknown except to a very small circle of 1960s civil rights activists, as he had been disgraced and thoroughly ostracized by the members of the movement because of his open same-sex attraction and his arrest record for a sexual encounter (perhaps a police entrapment). Even by the twenty-first century, very few people would have recognized the name of Bayard Rustin.

It was only around the time of the preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with a growing sense of the past injustices to gay men and women, that the name of Rustin began to receive attention and he suddenly became widely acclaimed. An exhibition was mounted in the Yale Sterling Library in 2013 to cel- ebrate this unknown and unheralded hero of the civil rights era. On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being “an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all.” On February 4, 2020, he was posthumously pardoned for his sexual criminal conviction in 1953 by Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who called him “a visionary champion for peace, equality, and economic justice.” But neither in 1981 nor in 2004 was Bayard Rustin a prestigious figure or a household name. If Cancro were attempting to elevate the value of this collection by fraudulently creating an attractive provenance, it would have been pointless to choose Rustin.

One should note that the extraordinary burden of proof that has been required of this documented provenance from an African American collector is not generally leveled at the usual provenances attributed to white collectors and dealers in the Yale University Art Gallery collection given by other donors. Those records are simply accepted, recorded, and become a part of the permanent registration. They are easily credible to a museum establishment that has zero percent African American staff on the professional level, or even down to the clerical level in the Department of African Art (at the time of this writing). Even the testimony of dealers from Africa is usually regarded as unreliable.

Perhaps an art dealer is considered above reproach, whereas a dealer in fossils selling art is viewed with suspicion. The art museum culture tends to believe they are on a higher plane than natural history muse-ums, dealing with the esoteric, aesthetic ideals, “man’s highest aspira-tions,” rather than the mundane grit of mother earth. Nowhere is this more poignant than in France, where the art museum is Musée (from archaic Greek “Muse”—it is the Muse itself, from the lofty, mythologized Greeks), while the natural history museum is Museum (from Latin “a study,” from the less lofty Romans). Laurence Kanter, the Art Gallery’s chief curator, made this distinction perfectly clear when the Grae/Rustin collection was accepted, protesting: “I firmly believe that African archaeological material does not belong in an art museum.” It is precisely and expressly because of the elevated essence of the rather archaic title “Art Gallery” (very British) that it is persistently maintained by Yale rather than switching to the more usual “Art Museum,” as other “Galleries” recently have.

Provenance from the most famous African art dealers in Europe and America is usually accepted without question. Generally, museums accept the provenance given by the donor as it has been written—for example, in the same African art department, the Charles B. Benenson Collection, donated to Yale University Art Gallery in 2004, lists as fact the succession of European and European American collectors and dealers for each of the more than six-hundred objects, as recorded in Benenson’s notebooks, with no qualification, even though, in most cases, there are no written documents of transfer of title. Apparently, it is much easier to believe that an important object came from the art dealer J.J. Klejman of New York (with the vague date of acquisition “after 1956”), or the American collector Arnold Maremont of Chicago (“unknown date before 1960”), or the Dutch collector Cornelis Pieter Meulendijk of Rotterdam (“unknown dates”). European collections are known to be more clearly provenanced, diligently written down by curators or registrars at the time after information given is by donors or sellers. When I reminded Plankensteiner that much of that provenance was given without written documentation, deeds of transfer, or export papers, she replied “Oh, but we know those people!” No, in fact, the information was given by assorted merchants, missionaries, and colonial officers who just dropped by the museum and deposited objects, by sale or by gift, with comments on what chief or which district or country they got them from. Yes, you think you know them, and you believe them, because they are white German-speaking people like you.

If the collection was indeed imported into the U.S. before 1970, it is within the limits recommended by the American Association of Museums, before the writing of The UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, ratified by the United States in 1986. Therefore, the collection date of 1952 is critical to its legitimacy. Nigeria began regulating the export of Nigerian patrimony in the British colonial period: in January 1939, an Order in Council prohibited the export of “antique African sculptural works of art” from Nigeria; the Antiquities Ordinance of 1953 established an Antiquities Commission (which would later become the National Commission for Museums and Monuments), directed by Kenneth Murray and later, Bernard Fagg, to be directly responsible for the “practical realization” of the Ordinance. Until the twenty-first century, United States law, which does not recognize national patrimony of art, generally did not observe the national patrimony laws of other countries (If we decided to enforce the laws of other nations, would we also enforce their misogynistic laws or their homophobic laws in respect to their nationals on U.S. territory, to be consistent?).That was certainly the case in the 1950s through the 1980s, although the legal view has changed in recent decades even if the laws have not.

Yale University Art Gallery, in the Rustin/Grae Collection, has a collection like no other. We are fortunate that the object fragments lay untouched in sacks for so long and that restoration did not happen—that is the great value of the Grae collection. A dealer, Amyas Naegele, who helped the Graes, told me that he merely joined the pieces together, and did no restoration of missing pieces, no in-fill, nor overpainting in the joinings. There is no falsification of the objects. That was the main factor in my decision to recommend this collection for acquisition by Yale.

In addition, no doubts have been expressed about the authenticity of any object in the collection. It has been positively vetted by Peter Breunig, the foremost archaeologist working in the Nok area today, when he saw thirty objects on display at the time of his lecture at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016. Breunig called it “the most import-ant and extensive collection of authentic ancient Nigerian art outside Nigeria” in his visit to the Gallery. This assessment was repeated by Gus Casely-Hayford, then Director of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, when he came to lecture at Yale in 2019, and viewed the entire collection. Key objects from the collection were featured in “Africa’s Great Civilizations,” the six-hour documentary series chronicling 200,000 years of Africa’s history, hosted by Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., for the Public Broadcasting Service, in 2017. Holland Cotter, the New York Times art critic, exclaimed about the new installation:

The present African installation, in place for a while, has recently been enhanced by the addition of antique sculptures from Mali and Nigeria. Such art, often caught up in international cultural property disputes, is both understudied and the focus of heated debates. What you see at Yale is its expressiveness, complex but straight to the heart. The sight of rows of terra-cotta heads, lined up as if sprouting from the earth, makes a powerful impression, deepened by the knowledge that most of the sculptures were field-collected in Africa in the 1950s and ’60s by the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.

For the visitors to the Yale University Art Gallery, the collection has been an intriguing high point with a mysterious presence because of the inscrutability of the figures, the questions they raise about these unknown civilizations from three thousand years in the African past, and the extraordinary wealth of their personal presentation in adornment and coiffure—we want to know who these magnificent people were. For scholars it offers tremendous opportunities for the study of Africa’s ancient past and its first great art-producing culture south of the Sahara, with implications for the study of the broader ancient African world and its interconnections at the time of dynastic Egypt, which I explored briefly in my articles, “Ancient Terracotta Figures from Northern Nigeria,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2011, and “Nok,” Grove Art Online, 2014. Bayard Rustin would be happy to see his African art collection exposed to the American public that he tried so hard to change throughout his life. I imagine he would probably take in stride the fact that he is again denied and expunged from the record.

Instead of enhancing the fragment’s monetary value through elaborate restoration, the Graes, luckily, were especially careful not to tamper with their original condition and were able to represent the individual histories of these objects. Most Nok terracotta “antiquities” in private collections in the U.S. are heavily worked over, with whole sections restored, sometimes newly built up around a simple fragment, with joinings covered over with resurfacing. Or they are often completely new creations, even in the most prestigious collections and in lavishly- illustrated catalogues. Work has begun in the laboratory study of the Yale objects, with two submitted in 2012 to computed tomography scans (CT scans), which are especially effective for showing the interior of the sculpture (without damaging the object) and the consistency of the ceramic constitution—whether additions and restoration has been made over time (none in these cases) (fig. 2). Other avenues of research might include clay analysis to match samples from Nigeria to determine the source of the clay used, or in style and technique analysis to attempt to determine the work of individual artists or of regions.

As the momentum for the repatriation of African artistic antiquities heightens, it is important to ask the question: Who owns the heritage of African art? As the African Diaspora grows, the descendants of African antiquity are found increasingly in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and elsewhere. How does one balance the competing principles of private ownership in wealthy collector nations with the claims of an African nation to all antiquities originating within its borders, and the application of international convention? What constitutes documen- tation of provenance? How is European written testimony weighed against African and African American oral history? What are the individual property rights of modern Africans vis-à-vis national patrimony, particularly in regard to private enterprise and the right to make a living in commerce?

Who are the descendants and heirs of these societies at the bor- der of the Sahara that disappeared almost two millennia ago, before any of the current ethnic groups and national boundaries took form? Today, northern Nigeria is dominated by the Hausa and Fulani, both relatively new hegemonic immigrants to the area, speaking Afro-Asiatic or North African languages, Islamized for centuries, who ban “graven images” as evidence of evil, and destroy them when they find them.

Certainly, African Americans have some claim to the heritage that was wrenched from their ancestors.

After two thousand years, the heirs of Nok, Sokoto, Katsina, and Bura would be spread widely, even, certainly, for example, to New York City (with a population of nearly two million African descendants) and around the globe. Slave raiding reached its most heinous heights in precolonial Nigeria and Dahomey with their powerful, warring kingdoms and their infamous slave depots along the Bight of Benin, bringing enormous wealth to their royalty and nobility now valorized in art history classes. Perhaps Africa owes a debt to the descendants of millions of their fellows brutally captured in warfare by corrupt kings and chiefs and marched to the coast to be sold to greedy European traffickers, to die a gruesome death in a dungeon on the high seas, or, if they were less fortunate, to suffer in the rice fields, cotton fields, or sugar cane plantations, stripped of all kinship, in the Americas. Certainly, African Americans have some claim to the heritage that was wrenched from their ancestors.

Like nearly one hundred percent of all African art in American collections, the Rustin collection was exported from Africa without official authorization from the country of origin, regardless of any unofficial blessing from Rustin’s friend Azikiwe, campaigning for Nigerian autonomy, which would not come for another eight years. But does this mean that this collection and others should be repatriated to Nigeria, with the US recognizing and enforcing all foreign national export laws in indefinite retrospect? If repatriation were made, who would be the rightful heirs? An African American initiative has been formed to study precisely this question: the Restitution Study Group, in New York City. In the case of the terracotta antiquities from Nok, the Nigerian government has been collecting these objects since 1928 from their original sites of excavation or discovery, with full documen- tation. Both the Jos Museum and the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos have large holdings of these antiquities, not purchased from American or European dealers, but obtained directly from Nigerian finders in situ. The discoveries by Bernard Fagg and his team in the mid-twentieth century and the much more extensive discoveries by the team from Frankfurt in the twenty-first century have yielded thousands of specimens, all with meticulous archeological documentation. So, it would be superfluous to flood their reserves with collections from abroad that have completely lost their archaeological context and all the information that that yields.

The Bayard Rustin provenance has great significance as an early African American collection of African art. The act of collecting his heritage is associated with his efforts on behalf of the nascent African independence movement in the early 1950s and his personal friendship with the leaders of that movement. From his youth, he sought out his African brothers studying in colleges in southeastern Pennsylvania, and like them, he was a son of Africa. He continued his work on behalf of Africa throughout his adult life, as well as his work in America in pursuit of African American civil and cultural rights and liberties. This is what he stated as his goal: “to interpret Africa to people of America.” This, too, is to be celebrated, by means of his legacy—specifically this collection of Nigerian antiquities, collected by a descendant of Africa—which now resides in a public museum. We have much to learn from them, simply from the study of the objects of art themselves.