Newkirk that a Black woman could enter rooms where her presence had not always been expected and still insist upon being heard.
The examples mattered. Before Newkirk could become the woman telling stories, she had to see women like herself doing the telling.
Newkirk became interested in journalism while still in middle school. English and history were among her favorite subjects. But perhaps what she loved most was the possibility of finding something beneath the surface.
Her adolescence unfolded during a difficult period of school integration. At Sheepshead Bay High School, in Brooklyn, N. Y., Black students experienced harassment and violence from a neighborhood gang known as the Garrison Beach Boys. To get away from that, Newkirk eventually transferred to Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, for her senior year.
Experiences like this teach lessons that no classroom can.
They teach you what it means to enter a room and understand that someone has already decided who you are. They teach you how quickly a story can be written about you by someone who does not know you. Perhaps they also teach you to become suspicious of easy narratives.
Newkirk got a bachelor’ s degree in journalism at New York University. She earned a master’ s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and eventually a doctorate in comparative and international education, from Columbia University. continued on next page
By ANGELA D. BLOUNT
NEW YORK – In recent years, Pamela Newkirk has turned her gaze to Paris.
Her research on Black Americans in the French capital has grown into her soon-to-be-released sixth book,“ Exalted: Black and American in the City of Light.” In it, Newkirk traces the lives and contributions of some of the many Black expatriates who moved to the French capital. And she tells overlooked stories of the Black American artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals whose lives became woven into the fabric of another country, without always being fully recognized in its history.
But Paris did something else for Newkirk’ s consciousness. It complicated and then unraveled the story she had come to know of Black life in Paris.
She had grown up hearing that Black people were beloved in Paris.
Then she began speaking to people who lived there. She started doing her own research and another story emerged. France had been a colonial power and its relationship with Africa and the Caribbean carried its own history of domination. The romance between Black Americans and Paris was strong, but it could not be separated from the history of French colonialism.
But when Newkirk first arrived in Paris to begin her research, she encountered another reality. People said bonjour. People treated her well. She noticed how well she was treated. And that realization carried its own ache. Why, she wondered, was she experiencing a kind of ease abroad that she had not always experienced at home?
The contradiction became part of the story. Newkirk immersed herself in Paris. She sat in cafés once frequented by Richard Wright, Nina Simone and James Baldwin. She searched for Black American albums.
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She looked for books by or about Black people that were banned in the United States. In a tireless act of cultural cartography, she followed the physical traces of Black Americans across the French city.
And those traces were everywhere. Black American culture was, in her words,“ ubiquitous throughout the city.” She saw metro stops and public spaces carrying the names of Black Americans. Josephine Baker. Ella Fitzgerald. Rosa Parks. The legacy was not confined to museums. It was embedded into the city itself.
Especially that of Baker, the dancer, singer, actress and resistance figure who moved to France in 1925 and soon became one of that country’ s most celebrated cultural – and patriotic – icons.
Newkirk writes about Baker’ s place in French history and the extraordinary recognition that came when, on November 30, 2021, she became the first Black woman and only the
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