Sisters in Creating Black Cultural Legacies

Nana Camille Yarbrough and Brenda Brunson-Bey

By Fern Gillespie
Nana Camille Yarbrough is a cultural icon. For over 60 years, she’s had a hyphenated career of being a musician, dancer, actress, poet, activist, dancer, producer, and author. This spans Broadway’s “Young Gifted and Black” and “God’s Trombone” as Cicely Tyson’s understudy; touring with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company; actress in the original “Shaft” movie and soap opera “Search for Tomorrow;” Black Arts Movement cultural activist, composer and performer of global hit “Praise You” based on her song “Take Yo’ Praise”;” and the author of acclaimed books for Black children, including the classic Cornrows.
Originally released in 1979, Yarbrough’s first book, Cornrows (Putnam Publishers), illustrated by Carole Byard, was a groundbreaking family book that was called “a gem” by Essence magazine and earned a prestigious Coretta Scott King Award. Over 40 years later, the milestone Cornrows has been re-published. “The is the right time. Because this is a time when people need to come together as a family around our story as a people,” Yarbrough told Our Time Press. “I had urged Random House over the years to talk about the value of our people’s stories as it relates to our physicality. Our color, our hair, which has been really terrorized. Like, we are too dark, our hair is kinky, or it’s bad. All of that is still in the minds of many of our people. Our young people coming up see glamour that is not associated with our image. So, the book Cornrows goes to the roots. That’s why I wrote it.”

For many years, she was a NYC public school teacher. “The students in the schools didn’t like themselves. They made fun of each other. They made fun of Africa,” she recalled. “That fueled my energy to write a story. The four books that I’ve written for children came after that when I stopped working in the schools.” Those books are:
The Little Tree Growing in the Shade (Putnam Publishers) is a picture book format about the role of music in African, African American, and Caribbean culture. It’s about a Black family—children, parents, and elders – attending a “Roots of Rhythm and Blues” concert. By the end, the youngsters understand more about their heritage and the impact of music on Black culture and history.
Tamika and the Wisdom Rings (Just Us Books) is a young adult novel about Tamika, a member of the Sweet Fruit of the African Family Tree Club, whose parents give her sparkling, colorful rings to remember their words of wisdom. “Like many of our children surviving in the schools today, there’s outside pressure with drugs and bullying,” explained Yarbrough. “I use the arts as a survival system. Tamika and her friend used to write poetry, and they survived. It’s the spirit of family. That’s so important that unity.”
The Shimmershine Queens, (Random House). “In the Shimmershine Queens, I have two young sisters helping each other survive in a difficult situation,” she said. “Both the Shimmershine Queens and Tamika had a positive culture at their base. They survive through their arts because the arts have saved us.”

For 12 years, she was a City College of New York faculty member, where she taught African dance as well as Harlem community classes. She was also associated with CCNY’s Black Studies Department. “When I went to Ghana. several times, and I went to those dungeons meant for enslavement. It was so heartbreaking. I stood in those dungeons and saw what was happening to our people there. It increased my pressure on me to write about it.”
Throughout her career, she has been a beacon for Black political, spiritual, and cultural advocacy. In January 2024, Nana Camille Yarbrough will be 90 years old. Currently, she’s researching her autobiography, which is the title of one of her songs—The Iron Pot Cooker.
“Some racists want to talk about our history as if it has no importance. That the enslavement of our people was a joke or a training period. We have to stop that,” she explained. “When children are very young, that’s the time to start them telling our stories. The telling leads to the books. The books are there. There are many great Black artists, writers, and illustrators. We had better get back to telling our stories. If we don’t tell it others will tell it. And it won’t be truthful.”
Brenda Brunson-Bey, creator of Brooklyn’s Afrocentric one-of-a-kind fashion design line Tribal Truths Collection, met Camille Yarbrough in the 1990s at the annual Kwanzaa celebration held at the Museum of Natural History. “I’ve always known about her because she’s an icon in our community,” Brunson-Bey told Our Time Press. “We’ve maintained a friendship. I feel that she’s a mentor to me. She’s even modeled for me at several of my fashion shows. We keep pushing each other.”

Growing up in Georgia during Jim Crow, Brunson-Bey was surrounded by family. She had grandparents on both sides–one in South Carolina and one in Georgia. On her mother’s side, her grandmother had 23 children. “We had a huge family,” she recalled. “It was almost like having your own city because we did so many things with each other.”
To Brunson-Bey, her creativity comes from both sides of her family. “On my mother’s side, when I was growing up, kids had rites of passage. At age nine, you had to learn how to crochet. I would see my aunts making quilts. That’s how you learn to sew,” she remembered. “At nine, your goal was to crochet and make a doily. If your grandmother picked your doily to put on her coffee table, it was a real giant feat. She would take your doily and put a Coca-Cola bottle around it, put the starch in it, and curl around it. At age 11, you had to learn how to embroider. So that meant by the time you went to high school, everybody knew how to sew.”
She marvels that now most people don’t know how to sew. “People will now pay the dry cleaners five dollars just to sew a button on a shirt!”
Although both sides of her family were creative, her father’s side of the family was more into entrepreneurship sewing. “My aunt Ruth Reed Brunson, who was a master seamstress, and my father Bill Brunson, Sr came to Brooklyn in 1933,” she said. “My father was a tailor. He could make a suit–sew anything. But he was relegated to working in dry cleaners. Back then, Black men who were tailors couldn’t have their own businesses doing that. I think that’s where my creative energy and inspiration for having my own businesses came from.”
While she had a passion for crafting fashions, Brunson-Bey was also fascinated by the sciences and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Morris Brown College. In the 1970s, she moved to New York and studied at FIT, receiving an associate’s degree in advertising and communications/merchandising.
Her family and her ancestors inspired the Tribal Truths Collection. “Back in those days, people would make little girl slips and dresses. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, Katie Merriweather, would make me flannel slips, and she would always stick some kind of bead or seed on it. I would say, “Grandma, why did you put this in there? “She would say “That’s your protection.” It would be almost like what we call a talisman.”
So, each fashion in The Tribal Truths Collection has its individual signature. “Fashion designers like Gucci were having labels. I created my own labels-talisman,” she said. “I bless the garments and put my little touch on it.”
Part of Brunson-Bey’s creative mission is reaching out to other Black designers and craft artists. She co-produced the Fort Greene Juneteenth Arts Festival, and she founded the Diaspora Art Collective, a monthly Brooklyn-based artists’ market.
“I grew up around really strong people,” she explained. “That generation taught me something about independence. You have to work, but if you can, work for yourself. You become the creator of your own destiny.”