Photographs by Steve Mellon
Story by Bob Batz Jr., with image descriptions as told by Emory Biko

	Emory Biko: "An artist creates something that's a piece of him -- that's a piece of his heart. So, to me, this collection is art. It's letting me speak to people and say the things I want to say." Click photo for larger image. Sights and Sounds of History Audio: The importance of being able to see and touch history More pictures, with extended audio captions: The African's Experience in America

The Ku Klux Klan sword glinted in the pre-dawn darkness of rural Eastern Ohio, lit by flashlight beams of the men gathered around it. Emory Biko reached for the silvery blade, eager to feel its weight in his hand.

One of the men said, "I bet you're the first black man to hold that in the dark and be able to talk about it in the daylight."

"I guess I am," Biko said.

This was in May at the Hartville Flea Market, and just another typical morning in the life of Biko. He's a Homewood artist and self-described "junkie" who scours junk stores, antique sales and garbage cans for African-American artifacts and memorabilia. As he puts it, "I buy anything black."

He's well-known as a "vulture" who swoops through flea markets before sunrise so he can beat others to rare finds such as this 1918 KKK ceremonial sword.

Alas, the $700 price was too rich that day for the boom-and-bust budget of an artist who can't always afford turnpike tolls for his beater '86 GMC Vandura. He did score some antique books and a painting, but to have to walk past the sword, "It just hurt my heart."

His crazy (as he would say) collection, which in a decade has grown to more than 13,000 items, is a mission he now calls "the Museum of the African's Experience in America."

It is, technically, a museum without walls, but it has plenty of homes, especially this time of year -- Black History Month -- when he's thrilled to bring it to whoever asks.

	"This is an 1841 slave tag from Charleston, S.C. The city sold these tags, requiring slaves to wear or have one when in town unaccompanied by their owners or other white people who hired them. If you were caught without a tag, you faced stiff fines. Or worse." Click photo for larger image.

A big exhibition of his primo stuff and some of his own sculpture just this week ended a held-over, two-month run at the North Side's Foreland Street Gallery, where he formalized this new museum name by creating a brochure and a series of 11 posters that he's selling.

Biko has smaller exhibits permanently displayed at the Homewood YWCA and the nearby Alma Illery Medical Center, and always is open to opening more, as he is doing at the new Homewood Elementary School and Homewood Library. Some of his pieces go on display tomorrow at Point Park University, to catch the tail end of Black History Month.

"I'm Jesse Owens this month," he says over the cell phone. "Running, running ..."

He gets particularly pumped about reaching and teaching young people. Last weekend, at the entrance to Woodland Hills School District's East Junior High in Turtle Creek, he filled two trophy cases with provocative objects from slave shackles to a bicycle from the 1960s and early '70s that Schwinn named the "Cotton Picker."

"They see this and they start to think, 'This stuff actually happened,' " he says. "It's not like in a book."

"This may seem like just a lunch box, but it represents a big step forward. Before 'Julia' came on television in September 1968, black women were popularly depicted only as servants or 'Mammies.' With 'Julia,' Diahann Carroll became the first African-American woman to star in a prestige role in her own comedy series. Her character -- an intelligent, beautiful, widowed mother who worked as a nurse -- was very, very revolutionary for TV." Click photo for larger image.

His enthusiasm and warmth amaze people.

"I was floored," says East Junior High principal Janet Wilson-Carter. "Normally people don't go out of their way, you know. He's gone out of his way." She says the exhibit, which is to remain though mid-March, is a hit.

"So far I've had at least four or five kids late" -- because they stopped to take it all in. ... They were mesmerized."

At first sight -- in his thrift-store clothes, lion's mane of hair and beard and trademark West African mask pendant -- Biko looks all street tough. But ask about his collection, and he's a kid telling you about the candy store, excitedly inviting you to take a taste.

"I want people to know what actually happened in America," he says. "I'm trying to get people to try to understand it."

That's why he likes Black History Month, though he cracks that after February, he'll no longer be "African American," just "that colored guy with the dreads." He's straight-talking and unflinching, whether commenting on a print of black babies titled "Alligator Bait" or a Flip Wilson talking doll.

	"In the Ku Klux Klan vernacular, this is a 'lynch pin' from 1921. The story that came with it is that it's from a lynching of two brothers in Kentucky. If you participated in a lynching, you received one of these pins to prove it. Stamped on the back are the words, 'I was there.' " Click photo for larger image.

People, black and white, react strongly, especially to the things that were made to put down or keep down black people. Biko says he draws power from these and uses them not only to concretely show how it was, but also to expose the same things happening today. The museum communicates that perspective and his pride.

He was born Emory Johnson in the Hill District in 1958. His image appeared in his Foreland Street exhibition in a tiny photo, made in one of those booths at G.C. Murphy's, Downtown, when he was about 12. He's wearing a Black Panther button on his hat.

Growing up on the Hill, he lived black history. His father was a laborer at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works. His mother served as a neighborhood mentor. "She believed in a righteous world for black people."

Biko wanted to be a lawyer, but after he graduated from Schenley High School in 1975, he joined the Marines. He "messed around the world" and "didn't wake up" until 1992, when someone's challenge that he'd never be an artist spurred him to make it happen -- out in Omaha.

He was literally a starving artist, forced to fish for bluegill and to fight raccoons for food from Dumpsters. But he survived, making art and connections, including one with a man who then ran a private black Americana museum in Omaha's downtown.

He volunteered there. He learned about inventors and other black figures who blew his mind, and enjoyed blowing the minds of touring schoolchildren. He began to envision a museum of his own and started collecting for it in earnest after returning to Pittsburgh in 1995. That's when he changed his name in honor of the martyred South African black nationalist Stephen Biko.

He's all hustler, and pops up all over, including as a volunteer moderator for the "Without Sanctuary" lynching exhibition that visited The Andy Warhol Museum. He wishes he could get around faster, especially on weekends, when he hits flea markets from Tarentum to Washington, Pa.

"You know what I really want? A helicopter!"

		For more information Emory Biko and his Museum of the African's Experience in America can be reached at Box 243, 6393 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15206 or by calling 412-363-4646.

He wants his museum to have a building, but is in no hurry and can't be, since he aims to keep doing this on his own. "I'm cool right where I'm at," he says. "I'm living a dream and loving it."

He's still working hard at his papier-mache and other art, which also deals with black history. But, surrounded by piles of postcards, prints, pins, and other pieces of the past he's hunted in the dark, he says, "This right here to me is art."

That's how it was viewed by some of the few people who got to see the exhibit at the Foreland Street Gallery. One appreciatively described it in the guest book as "eye-opening, sad, touching."

Biko's buddy, folk and outsider art promoter Pat McArdle, wrote, "It's a fantastic exhibit that shows all your passion and what a flashlight at dawn can discover."

"I love old photographs. They really tell stories. This one, of a family on lower Webster Avenue, was part of a lot I dug out of the trash outside of a Hill District drugstore that had closed. The film had been dropped off -- in the 1940s or '50s --but the pictures never were picked up. Some of the people in them are probably still living around Pittsburgh. These people will be in some display of mine forever." Click photo for larger image.