After Dr. William Craft Brumfield earned his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages (with a specialty in 19th century Russian history and literature) from the University of California, Berkeley, his nonpareil photograph odyssey began at Harvard where he was an assistant professor from 1974 to 1980. But thereafter, fortunately for us, he landed in New Orleans at "blessed Tulane" as he called his place of refuge.
As I mined my material, what caught my eye was Brumfield's election in 2002 to the State Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences and in 2006 an Honorary Fellow of the Russian Academy of the Fine Arts; he is the only American that has been elected to not one, but two, Russian state academies. Dr. Brumfield lived and studied for fifteen years in Russia beginning his photographic work there in 1970 as a graduate student and doing post-doctoral research at Moscow and Leningrad Universities and also at the Russian Institute of Art History in Moscow. In this day and age, fifteen years there seems like an eternity.
Before a packed house, at The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University in early March, Dr. Brumfield together with Moderator Dr. Lidia Zhigunova, a Professor of Practice in German and Russian at Tulane, gave us insight into the invasion of Ukraine. I gathered from the outset that they do not support the Russian invasion. Describing it as a catastrophe of great proportions, Dr. Brumfield declared - though hoping for a miracle - "I am not optimistic."
Deflated, I hung onto Dr. Brumfield's every word as he is a recognized authority on Russian history who not only photographed Russia but also Ukraine in 1979. During the question and answer, he explained that the Russians feel aggrieved and threatened by the West, and "they see a manifest destiny." Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have the desire to recreate the Russian Empire and, from my own pedestrian perspective, to become the superpower. This is evidenced by Russia's grievous, brutal attack on the Ukrainian people. But Ukraine to date hasn't rolled over. The Ukrainian people have mettle and appear willing to fight to the death.
Discouraged about the war, I turned my focus to ancestry. What intrigued me, even more than Dr. Brumfield's illustrious career, was his early background, his roots. He is the son of Lewis Floyd Brumfield, Jr. (1895-1975) who, born in 1895 in Bolivar - seventeen miles to the west of Franklinton, a straight shot on Highway 440 - grew up on a small farm, with a stand of hickory trees in back. The heartfelt way Dr. Brumfield described it, during his presentation at Tulane, struck a chord. And something else resonated. Lewis Floyd Brumfield, Jr., pictured in his son's magnificent book "Journeys Through The Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky," was a United States Marine with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I in France. Dr. Brumfield proudly reflected, "He fought his way through France."
And similar to my father in World War II, Lewis Floyd Brumfield crossed paths with a band of Russians in the French Army near the end of World War I. It was, in fact, Dr. Brumfield's father who first told him, while he was playing toy soldiers as a young boy, that he had encountered the Russians and that they were our people, our allies. The poignant anecdote reminded me of my own father.
Digressing, in my dad's case, it was in the spring of 1945 that Russians surrounded his U.S. Army observation plane in northern Germany, holding him and the New York reporter he was ferrying to the frontline at gunpoint. It was a great relief when the Russians finally realized they were Americans. A liaison pilot for the 28th Field Artillery Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, Daddy waited for the reporter to identify them, speaking Russian, but the civilian was paralyzed by fear. Had an eventual exchange of identification not occurred, the two of them would never made it out of that field. Once realizing they were allies - part of the "Big Three" (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) - my dad shared in many toasts and departed with a gold watch (trading a Zippo cigarette lighter), and more importantly, his life.
These earlier experiences of our fathers, during the First and Second World Wars, make the current cataclysmic events all the more disconcerting.
Returning to Dr. Brumfield's ancestry, born in 1944 to Lewis Floyd Brumfield and Pauline Elizabeth Craft Brumfield in North Carolina, Dr. Brumfield grew up primarily in Gainesville, Georgia, which boasted a large poultry industry in which his dad specialized though, with a degree in agriculture, he had worked as an extension agent in North Carolina. Dr. William's sister Carol was born in 1951.
But back to the beginning and the little farm at Bolivar - digging into the past - I made the connection. Lewis Floyd Brumfield, Jr., one of several offspring, descended from the union of Lewis Floyd Brumfield (1861-1946) and Alice "Allie" Frances Statham (1870-1941), the daughter of Gus Statham.
And the elder Lewis Floyd Brumfield was the son of William "Bill" Brumfield (ca 1830 - ca 1910) and wife Sarah Lewis (1835-1886). All three, together with Dr. Brumfield's father - the younger Lewis Floyd Brumfield - are buried in the Beulah Baptist Church cemetery, which Dr. Brumfield referenced in his presentation at Tulane. Once he said Bolivar and Beulah Baptist Church, it clicked - I knew we were kin.
As it turns out, Dr. William Craft Brumfield's great-grandfather William "Bill" Brumfield was my great-great-grandfather Thomas Colter Brumfield's brother. Twenty years my senior, Dr. William Craft Brumfield is the great-great-grandson of William and Harriet Statham Brumfield of Washington Parish. I am their great-great-great-granddaughter. William Brumfield (ca 1788- 1868) was the influential statesman, soldier, and sheriff in Washington Parish in the early 19th century, as described in Part 1 of this series.
My focus was limited to Dr. William Craft Brumfield and his Louisiana lineage. I didn't take my research any further. But I got far enough to establish the connection, of Dr. William Craft Brumfield to Washington Parish. He was closer kin than I thought. But then, the folks we admire usually are.
Credit for the Brumfield ancestry herein goes to two late renowned historians -- Dr. E. Russ Williams, Jr., and his book "History of Washington Parish, Louisiana, 1798-1992 The Story of a Land and People on Three Rivers: The Pearl, The Bogue Chitto, and The Tangipahoa in Southeast Louisiana" (1994), and my Mama Dell Magee Clawson, and her "Fields of Broom" series, with information derived and updated from her "Fields of Broom" book (1972), that ran in "The Tylertown Times" from 2014 to 2018.
