Comments: On The Henry Ossawa Tanner House (May 9, 2023)
The Friends of the Tanner House are extremely grateful to the team of The National Trust for Historic Preservation for uplifting The Henry Ossawa Tanner House to America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2023. We are additionally honored to reach this designation alongside our neighbors in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. We recognize a legacy of common resistance that we share borne from community self-determination against accumulative, collective, and continuing policies of imposed austerity and structural inequity. Inspired by those who came before us, we continue to love and fight for our neighborhoods.
When we started our organizing to save the Henry Ossawa Tanner House, we anchored ourselves in the shared belief that nurturing Black heritage spaces in Strawberry Mansion supports community economic development strategies that reject displacement, dispossession, and erasure. We continue to manifest and uplift community-centered possibilities for the Tanner House that strive to be in right relationship with the growth, development, and maintenance of the rich Black cultural life of North Philadelphia. When one learns about the Tanner Family legacy imprinted in Philadelphia and beyond, you feel an honoring of those same commitments in what they contributed to the world. So let me tell you just a little bit about them. I admit we are still steadily unpacking it week to week.
The story of the House begins with the generation above Henry Ossawa Tanner, when the family moved in to the newly-constructed 2908 W. Diamond Street in 1872. Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner was recruited to Philadelphia from Pittsburgh to serve at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the mother church of the nation’s first black denomination as well as representing the oldest parcel of land in the United States continuously owned by African-Americans. Bishop Tanner wrote many books and also served as the editor for the Christian Recorder, which is recognized as the oldest African American journal in the United States, a faithful voice for the disenfranchised and the oppressed. His wife, Henry’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Tanner, returned to a Philadelphia she had known once before as a child, where she arrived after her enslaved mother sent Sarah and her siblings to freedom with the support of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, an anchor of Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad. Sarah taught Sunday School (which reminds me of my grandmother) and as the historical record shows, she was a highly educated woman who managed the finances for the family.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was their first child. Ossawa itself is incredibly important as it signals the abiding abolitionist commitment that the family cherished. Ossawa is short for Osawatomie, Kansas, where family friend and anti-racist abolitionist John Brown had initiated his anti-slavery campaign leading to the famous raid at Harper’s Ferry. This naming was Henry Ossawa Tanner’s inheritance of their yearning for a free world yet to come bequeathed to him by his parents in 1859. This only just a couple years before the Civil War where millions of Black folk changed the course of this country. As Henry stepped into becoming an artist in his teenage years, it was this sacred inheritance Henry brought with him as he refined his craft as an artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This was the inheritance he brought with him to Atlanta for a couple years and then of course, finally on to Paris where he spent most of his working artist and family life.
Love. Faith. Family. Freedom. These are themes you see explored: from The Annunciation (which is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art); to The Thankful Poor; to the Banjo Lesson and so on and so forth. The Smithsonian names Henry Ossawa Tanner as the first artist of his race to achieve international acclaim, and the most distinguished African-American artist of the 19th century. Yet these themes are also apparent throughout the family: His younger sister, Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson equally blazed trails. After graduating from honors from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, history shows that Booker T. Washington traveled personally to the family home in Strawberry Mansion to invite Halle to lead the Nursing School at Tuskegee Institute. And that she did in 1891, becoming the first woman of any race to serve as a licensed physician in the State of Alabama.
The story of the Tanner House extends well beyond their generation as well. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was born and raised in this House. She attended the University of Pennsylvania while living here, where it became the setting for the organizing of the Gamma Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., before Sadie would go on to become the First National President of DST. Her contributions were part of setting the foundation for what is currently the largest African American Women’s organization in the world with over 350,000 members. In 1921, Sadie became one of the first three Black women in the U.S. to obtain a Ph.D. In 1927, the first Black woman to graduate from University of Pennsylvania Law School and the first Black woman admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar…There’s more. I just don’t know if we have time today to keep going.
There’s still so much left to draw upon. We are proud to be able to earn the trust of Tanner family descendants like Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter and Lewis Tanner Moore to continue to learn the family’s story as we seek to renew the Tanner House as a non-profit-led community cultural asset. As Lewis Tanner Moore has told me, it’s important that we remember that the Tanners were able to become who they are THROUGH community. That their stories must be contextualized within their inheritance of our historical struggle, not as simply “exceptional Negroes” on an island all their own. This inspires our mission as the Friends of the Tanner House. As Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter told me the other day, it’s important we understand their stories as platforms for collective reflection, inquiry, and renewal of how Black folks in community made a way when they say we had no way; of bringing beauty into the world to showcase our triumphant, resilient humanity; of building and sustaining institutions that speak to the civic, social, artistic, and spiritual desires of the Black community. We are here today to carry on this tradition and ask your support so that it may be sustained.
We invite you to join us on May 25, 2023 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to learn more and get involved in this assembly of the willing that we are building. As Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter once said, “The house is a symbol of our African American history. It’s larger than just bricks and mortar.” But this symbol does not and cannot exist just on its own. It’s one site of a larger set of living Black heritage that needs to be invested and renewed in the Strawberry Mansion community. With that in mind, I am happy to pass the mic to my Co-Coordinator Ms. Judith Robinson, who will talk more about the neighborhood legacy which the Tanner House stands within. Thanks for your time and support.
