Red Valkyrie

Badass Black Women History Month: Celebrating 28 Black Women Who Said, “Fuck it, I’ll Do It!” Day 11: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877-1968 Sculptor, Poet, Painter

I cannot wait to tell y’all about this baddie, Meta Vaux. When people think about black history, far too often they think of sadness, poverty, and hardship. That’s fair; we got a lot of that. But, we’ve also always had a lot of fly, boujie ass black excellence. In the early 20th century, affluent black communities were common in major cities around the north (Chicago’s Bronzeville is one example). So, today, we’re gonna get to know Meta Vaux, Philadelphia’s baddest and boujiest. 

Meta Vaux came from a fairly wealthy family. Her mother was a beautician and her father was a barber. At the time, Philadelphia’s black community was booming as the Great Migration brought an influx of new black organizations, businesses and institutions. Yeah, Meta Vaux was a lil black girl who took horseback riding lessons. She was trained in dance, art and music. When she was in HIGH SCHOOL, one of her projects was selected for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This got her a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art where she decided to study sculpture. 

She graduated in 1899, but faced discrimination in Philadelphia’s white art circles. So, she said fuck y’all and, like so many black artists, found refuge in Paris. While there, she became friends with W.E.B. DuBois and was inspired to introduce black themes into her work. She became internationally known as “the sculptor of horrors.” She had a desire to portray terrifying aspects of humanity, like her sculpture of Mary Turner––a pregnant young black woman who was lynched the previous year. 

She eventually returned to America in 1903. White fragility tried at every turn to stop her. Philadelphia’s art community shunned her, but she still became the first black woman to receive a U.S. government commission. Meta Vaux would marry, raise three children and continue to create art, but she’d never reach the heights of her Paris fame in America. 

When she and her husband moved to Framingham, MA, neighbors in their mostly white neighborhood created a petition to have the family removed. Yeah, some pasty white Massachusetts farmers tried to get a black woman who studied with Rodin removed from their neighborhood.

“My child, you are a sculptor; you have the sense of form in your fingers.”  - Rodin on Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

Badass Black Women History Month: Celebrating 28 Black Women Who Said, “Fuck it, I’ll Do It!” Day 11: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877-1968 Sculptor, Poet, Painter

I cannot wait to tell y’all about this baddie, Meta Vaux. When people think about black history, far too often they think of sadness, poverty, and hardship. That’s fair; we got a lot of that. But, we’ve also always had a lot of fly, boujie ass black excellence. In the early 20th century, affluent black communities were common in major cities around the north (Chicago’s Bronzeville is one example). So, today, we’re gonna get to know Meta Vaux, Philadelphia’s baddest and boujiest. 

Meta Vaux came from a fairly wealthy family. Her mother was a beautician and her father was a barber. At the time, Philadelphia’s black community was booming as the Great Migration brought an influx of new black organizations, businesses and institutions. Yeah, Meta Vaux was a lil black girl who took horseback riding lessons. She was trained in dance, art and music. When she was in HIGH SCHOOL, one of her projects was selected for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This got her a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art where she decided to study sculpture. 

She graduated in 1899, but faced discrimination in Philadelphia’s white art circles. So, she said fuck y’all and, like so many black artists, found refuge in Paris. While there, she became friends with W.E.B. DuBois and was inspired to introduce black themes into her work. She became internationally known as “the sculptor of horrors.” She had a desire to portray terrifying aspects of humanity, like her sculpture of Mary Turner––a pregnant young black woman who was lynched the previous year. 

She eventually returned to America in 1903. White fragility tried at every turn to stop her. Philadelphia’s art community shunned her, but she still became the first black woman to receive a U.S. government commission. Meta Vaux would marry, raise three children and continue to create art, but she’d never reach the heights of her Paris fame in America. 

When she and her husband moved to Framingham, MA, neighbors in their mostly white neighborhood created a petition to have the family removed. Yeah, some pasty white Massachusetts farmers tried to get a black woman who studied with Rodin removed from their neighborhood.

“My child, you are a sculptor; you have the sense of form in your fingers.”  - Rodin on Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

There is a statue of this incredible woman in Gordon Square Garden in London, near where she once lived. A plaque on the statue states that she sometimes spent quiet time in the garden.

I was lucky enough to see this statue last week, and it was an emotional experience. Although I got there just as the park was closing and was being actively shooed towards the exit while I took this photo.

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

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