Charles White applied his art as a weapon in Chicago. In 1935, he asked his teacher at Chicago’s Englewood High School why their history textbook only mentioned African Americans once. The teacher told him to “Sit down and shut up.” In response, White staged his first sit-down strike. As a self-described “very shy” young man, White felt that he “wasn’t articulate enough to explain” his own interpretation of American history. Instead, he “sat down hard . . . for the whole year without participation.” He remained silent the whole term and handed in a blank sheet of paper for his final assignment, thus failing the course. “I became a joke in the class,” he concluded, “everybody treated me as a delinquent.” With no other outlet for expression, White became secretly interested in art. He would soon become the youngest member of the Arts Craft Guild, an informal group of self-taught African American artists, and would win a scholarship to the Art Institute in 1937. For White, his development as an artist in Chicago had a direct connection to his feeling of isolation in school and elsewhere. “I had no other tools to fight with,” he concluded, “so the only way I had to fight was with my brushes.”1
Charles White’s artistic and political development provides a window into Chicago’s cultural politics during the 1930s. White, an artist who emerged as a leading figure on the South Side during this turbulent yet prolific time, helped forge the social and ideological networks that connected a cadre of African American artists and black activists in Chicago. Scholars who have studied this era have concluded it represented a Chicago renaissance in the arts. Bill V. Mullen and Robert Bone have placed black artists within the radical political currents of the Popular Front (roughly from 1935 to 1947) by analyzing Communist Party activities and the influence of Marxism on cultural production. They both argue that this arts movement diverged from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s because of its participants’ commitment to the working class. They show how these artists sought to break away from the somewhat solipsistic writers of Harlem and why they found the industrial metropolis of Chicago to be a particularly fertile ground.2 Meanwhile, art historians describe these artists’ politics as part of a stylistic change.3 By focusing on the experiences of Chicago-born Charles White—both during his Chicago years in the 1930s and on his later artistic and political trajectory—this essay builds upon these works by asking how these African Americans transformed notions of history and racial protest and how these cultural politics change our understanding of the artistic movement in Chicago between the 1930s and 1960s.
As a young man, Charles White discovered African American history not in his high school class but at the Chicago Public Library. While at work as a domestic, White’s mother, Ethel Gary, often had to leave her young son under the librarian’s supervision. The library became a refuge for White as he systematically browsed all of its collection. “I [read] through everything in the children’s section,” White recalled, “and then, at the age of twelve, begged the librarian for a card that would permit me to enter the section where there were more advanced books.” Despite being two years below the required age, one of the staff members gave in to White’s persistence and issued him an adult-reader card. Authorized to explore these previously forbidden books, White devoured them. Then, as a fourteen-year-old, White witnessed the opening of the George Cleveland Hall branch of the public library that became a crucial institution for Chicago’s South Side black community; during its first five years of operation, the library loaned an annual average of two hundred thousand books. As one Chicago Defender article explained, the library’s establishment was “a milestone of attainment for the community,” and its head librarian, Vivian Harsh, “worked relentlessly toward supplying universal service on material concerning the Race.” Harsh would become a pivotal figure in the promulgation of black culture in Chicago, and her efforts made a direct impression on Charles White and other black artists.4
During one of his marathon sessions at the library, White “quite accidentally” found The New Negro, a book that changed his life. Edited by Alain Locke in 1925, this volume represented the most significant anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. It featured the celebrated black voices of poets like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps, novelists like Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, and intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. “This book opened my eyes,” White recalled, because “I had never realized the Negro people had done so much for this world of culture, that they had contributed so much to the development of America.” The book inspired White “to search for other books on Negroes, which led to the Negro historical figures, individuals that played a role in the abolition of slavery.” White read about the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner as well as figures like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth in his own self-taught U.S. history course. Perhaps most important for White, The New Negro volume had illustrations by Aaron Douglass. The idea that “blacks painted” mattered because he had earlier experimented with art by using his mother’s curtains as canvasses, only to be punished by her and told to concentrate on music lessons instead. The New Negro proved to him that blacks had a rich artistic tradition, including the visual arts.5
The influence of The New Negro on Charles White suggests a different relationship between the Harlem and Chicago movements. Scholars have noted that The New Negro excluded A. Philip Randolph’s socialism and Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, both Harlem-based 1920s political movements of largely working-class African Americans. Historian David Levering Lewis considered this exclusion “irresponsibly delusional,” and literary scholar Arnold Rampersad claimed that The New Negro gave license for these artists and their audiences to turn their backs on the social movements of their day. These scholars have responded to a facile glorification of the Harlem Renaissance. As the celebrated African American writer Sterling Brown wrote in the 1950s, it had become fashionable to “make the thirties a whipping boy, while pampering the glorious twenties.”6 Although recent scholars have shown how the Harlem movement actually had more diverse and deeper roots in the black cultural politics of the 1920s, many black artists had been dismissive of the Harlem movement in the 1930s and sought to break away from it.7 Yet, when Charles White discovered The New Negro at the library, he had no knowledge of the debates that followed its publication. He read only the finished product and found it to be a radical declaration of the “blossoming of Negro culture.” As Locke wrote to introduce the volume, these artists had grown tired of being depicted as “the sick man of American Democracy.” White made The New Negro a foundation for his own artistic goals. If, as Locke suggested, the “pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem,” White hoped that its rhythm could be expanded upon in Chicago.8
Depression-era circumstances also modified the black artistic rhythm in Chicago. Not long after White discovered black history and culture at the Hall library, he read about an informal art group that met on Sundays called the Arts Craft Guild. A fifteen-year-old White “timidly took a few drawings to their meeting” and became a member of the group of impoverished but determined artists. They held community exhibitions in churches, the YMCA, settlement houses, and even in vacant lots when no other space was available. The young members of the guild—including Bernard Goss, Margaret Taylor (later Margaret Goss Burroughs), William Carter, and Eldzier Cortor—would become the core of artists who would make up the black Chicago scene.9 Living in small studio apartments adjacent to alleyways and taking manual labor jobs to survive, these artists imagined the strivings of laborers in Chicago from a distinct, working-class perspective. Similar to his cohort, Charles White worked as a dishwasher, janitor, cook, and valet while forging his career as an artist. During the early Depression years, he managed to get some lucrative work as a sign painter until he realized his employment was an attempt by the company’s owner to avoid union laborers. Too young to join the union, its members eventually convinced him to quit.10 Putting his energy into painting canvasses rather than signs, White and other guild members developed a cooperative learning environment to teach each other professional skills. William McGill, a commercial sign painter, organized the guild, but its eldest and most experienced artist, George E. Neal, became its master teacher by 1934. Neal, originally from Tennessee, was a twenty-three-year-old painter with some training from the Art Institute of Chicago who taught others in the arts guild at the Ada McKinley settlement house on Thirty-Second Street, his studio at Thirty-Third and Michigan (that later burned down), and wherever else he found space. The guild also raised money to send other members to the Art Institute by throwing parties. After a member completed a formal course there, he or she would then return to the group and teach the other members of the guild.11 Before any government program in the arts, the guild harnessed and expanded the activities of a concerted group of African Americans on Chicago’s South Side.
The activities of the guild occurred alongside a larger political reorientation of black Chicagoans in the mid-1930s. In February 1936, 750 delegates from twenty-eight states registered their names at the Eighth Regiment Armory in South Chicago for the first conclave of National Negro Congress (NNC). Inside the armory, banners read, “Jobs and Adequate Relief for a Million Negro Destitute Families” and “Black America Demands an End to Lynching, Mob Violence.” Outside, thousands huddled around loudspeakers to hear the speeches of what the Defender termed “IKN’s” or “Internationally Known Negroes.” Top black intellectuals, churchmen, labor leaders, and artists—including Ralph Bunche of Howard University, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., James W. Ford of the Communist Party, Lester Granger of the National Urban League, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Arna Bontemps—participated in sessions on trade unions, youth, women, churches, businesses, war and fascism, and interracial relations.12
The NNC proved important for black artists who made connections with labor delegates. Chicago migrant Richard Wright chaired the “Negro Culture and History” panel that featured writers Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes as well as artists Augusta Savage and Frederick Douglass Allen. The specific presentation by Wright, titled “The Role of the Negro Artist and Writer in the Changing Social Order,” indicated how these artists sought to place themselves into a social movement to ameliorate dire Depression-era conditions. They agreed that “in the past Negro institutions have exploited Negro artists and writers” and that “Negro cultural workers have generally been neglected and suppressed” by both white and black elites. The Depression had caused the artists to work “at almost starvation levels,” and, like their labor brethren, they saw the “Writer’s Union” as a means to solve their poverty and combat “caricature and subservient roles” in white culture. They hoped that the NNC would sponsor Negro culture magazines, conferences, and exhibits to depict black culture and, alongside the Federal Writers Project, put them to work. By viewing themselves at the NNC conference as the “cultural workers” in the struggle for a “new Bill of Rights for the Negro people,” these artists realized, in the words of Wright, that “they are not alone.”13
The NNC sought to remake urban black communities by convincing African Americans to embrace militant protest tactics against discrimination. Both the NNC and many of its white allies had links to communists and fellow travelers who shared goals concerning organizing workers across racial lines, demanding a greater responsibility of the government for social welfare, and making human rights a priority over property rights. Some of these activists had joined the Communist Party, while others had been members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in its 1920s heyday, but these affiliations mattered less than their commitment to specific causes during the Popular Front era in America. Over the next decade, NNC members in Chicago and elsewhere reoriented black communities by organizing thousands of workers into unions, integrating employment fields, fostering a militant version of black culture based on the history of slavery and Reconstruction, pressuring the NAACP to adopt a labor agenda, registering voters in the south, and petitioning the newly founded United Nations to remedy U.S. human-rights violations.14 Many of these young artists joined the black-led NNC movement and as “cultural workers” helped legitimize new understandings of African American protest, history, and humanity.
In Chicago, artists, intellectuals, and activists cross-pollinated to an unprecedented degree during the Popular Front. The NNC’s Fine Arts Committee in Chicago, for example, sponsored a symposium in April 1936 to follow up on its founding convention. This event honored Bontemps, the author of Black Thunder, a historical novel that described Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 slave conspiracy in Virginia. At the Abraham Lincoln Center, a public community center built by the Unitarian Church, the NNC organized a symposium to discuss Bontemps’s novel that featured a wide representation of African American leaders. The reporter and aspiring poet, Frank Marshall Davis, Vivian Harsh of the Hall Library, a prominent black social worker, Thyra Edwards, and a representative of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, an organization created by the historian Carter G. Woodson in Chicago two decades earlier, all took part.15 The South Side Writers’ Group, another development out of the NNC conference, also feted Bontemps for the publication of Black Thunder. For Wright, the leading force in the new writers’ group, Bontemps’s work “filled a yawning gap” for “competent” black novels. Margaret Walker, a poet and writer from Chicago, recalled that this novel “came closest in feeling and philosophy” to the militant strain of black historical memory that these writers sought to recover in the 1930s. As important, “well known Negro artists” held an accompanying exhibit to the NNC’s literary symposium.16 Like Bontemps and other African American writers, White and his fellow visual artists increasingly sought to depict black historical events in ways that reclaimed past generations of African Americans as active rather than passive participants and as central to American history rather than peripheral.
This pulsating cultural activity among black Chicagoans made White realize that he was “not alone” in his aspiration to combine his art with black history. Previously, White sought to “conceal” his interest in art because other teenagers in the neighborhood considered it “effeminate.” This network of black artists legitimated White’s clandestine black history sessions at the Hall library and his identity as an artist. He admired artists like Langston Hughes, whom he sketched on a visit to Chicago (see figure 9.1), and he also remembered attending a party in the mid-1930s at the home of the dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, where he met black writers like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who discussed philosophical and political ideas about the “direction of American life” with white leftist writers like Nelson Algren. He later recalled that this “free play and exchange of ideas” at other Saturday-night parties helped him become more determined to become a professional artist.17 During this same period, White also engaged with white progressive artists. He remembered visiting the studios of Mitchell Siporin and Edward Millman, whose murals he found inspiring. Morris Topchevsky, a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe, often invited White and other artists over to his studio at the Abraham Lincoln Center to drink coffee, view his work, and discuss politics. Si Gordon, an important mentor to the black sculptor Marion Perkins, loaned books on black history to these artists.18 These contacts across the color line, under the left’s motto “Negro and White: Unite and Fight” not only brought industrial laborers together but also became a significant aspect of the artistic movement brewing in Chicago.
In addition to their informal interactions at social events, these artists would become linked as professionals through New Deal arts programs. Beginning in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act, continuing with the Public Works of Arts Project through the Civil Works Administration, and escalating numerically into a division of the Workers Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, the Illinois Art Project (IAP) hired many of these artists. These programs expanded and contracted between 1935 and 1943 based on government quotas. Initially, Charles White and those in the South Side Guild hardly noticed this new government involvement. Increase Robinson, the Chicago-born director of the project until 1938, had previously operated her own gallery in the Diana Court Building on North Michigan Avenue that favored a particular “elite” (and white) group of artists. Once in charge of the federal government’s budget for Illinois, she continued to favor these artists and imposed her own standards concerning artistic talent. She dictated “no nudes, no dives, no social propaganda” as IAP standards and often purposely fell short in filling artists quotas based on federal mandates.19
9.1. Sketchbook, 1937–42, by Charles Wilbert White, American, 1918–79, charcoal, pastel, ink, graphite, pen and inks, and watercolor on ivory wove paper, 260 mm × 205 mm (overall). White drew Langston Hughes in his sketchbook while listening to him lecture on the spread of fascism in Spain on April 1, 1938, in Chicago. White appreciated the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and also admired Hughes for his leftist cultural politics. Purchase by Ada Turnbull Hertle Fund, Director’s Fund, Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Endowment Fun, and Hugh Leander and Mary Trumbull Adams Memorial Endowment Fund; funds provided by Mary P. Hines, Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Hartman, Ruth Hartman through the Regenstein Foundation, Marshall Field, Denise and Gary Gardner, John Nichols, Sandra and Deven Rand, Amina J. Dickerson, Jean Rudd and Lionel E. Bolin, Esther Sparks Sprague, Lynn Evans in memory of Beatrice Barnett Evans and John W. Evans Jr., James T. Parker, Patricia Pratt in memory of Marion White Pratt Lindsay, Edwin T. White Jr., Daniel Schulman, Frederick G. and Joele Jones Michaud, 2006.259, The Art Institute of Chicago.
For black artists, Robinson’s leadership meant virtual exclusion. Charles White remembered only one black artist (the already famous Archibald Motley Jr.) on the IAP payroll in its early years. White instead won a scholarship to the Art Institute in 1937, and Peter Pollack, owner of a North Michigan gallery, provided White and other black artists with their “first opportunity to exhibit downtown.” White considered himself fortunate to receive this support because two other art schools offered White scholarships and then, upon finding out he was African American, withdrew their offers, and black artists were also virtually excluded from showing their work in downtown Chicago. For the time being, nongovernmental programs inspired and fostered an art community on the South Side.20
In late 1934, several white artists in Chicago formed an Artists Union to organize their ranks as they entered into the new government programs. These artists initially affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose leaders organized workers on a craft basis and rarely ventured across racial lines. As a result, the AFL dismissed the suggestion to strike by more radical members of this Chicago local; the only demand the union seemed to agree upon was the need to remove Increase Robinson as director of the IAP for her tyrannical methods. By 1937, however, these radical-minded artists gained more control of the union by allying with the new interracial movement of industrial workers represented by John L. Lewis and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). Chicago’s union local severed ties with the AFL and affiliated instead with the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), a decision that would greatly impact black artists. Beginning the previous year, the CIO, with NNC assistance, had begun to organize interracial unions, especially in the steel and meatpacking industries.21 The Artists Union affiliation with the CIO showed their desire to become part of this larger, interracial, and more militant movement of the working class during the Second New Deal.22
As a new union member, Charles White remembered taking immediate action in 1937. He joined in the nationwide strike originally called by the Chicago local and recalled how the police “arrested [him] a few times,” which resulted in him spending “some nights in jail.”23 The sit-down strikes and pickets at the Merchandise Mart and WPA offices on Erie Street succeeded in getting Increase Robinson removed; she was replaced with the George Thorp in 1938. During the transition of leadership, IAP quotas expanded, which allowed Thorp to hire many more artists. At least one hundred new artists became part of the IAP, including White and many other black artists in his cohort. In addition, Thorp now shared power with two white arts officials who had strong connections with these African American artists: Peter Pollack and Morris Topchevsky. Pollack would become the administrator of the government-sponsored IAP art centers; Topchevsky became one of two Artist Union grievance representatives to sit on the IAP credentials review board.24 All of these changes resulted in a more democratic and interracial representation of artists under federal supervision in Chicago. For these South Side artists, the experience in fighting for IAP inclusion made them even more determined as activists. “My first lesson on the [IAP] project,” White remembered, “dealt not so much with paint as with the role of unions in fighting for the rights of working people.”25
Experiences with unionism also affected White’s artistic vision. White remembered taking part in “the League against War and Fascism, and the organization for support of the republican government of Spain” and also showed his work at an “An Exhibition in Defense of Peace and Democracy” in 1938. Moreover, White’s art during this period fixated on issues around work and, more specifically, the plight of black laborers in America. One of his earliest charcoal drawings, CCC Camp (also titled Laborers), portrayed the physical rigor of black workers for Civilian Conservation Corps, an early New Deal program that paid unemployed workers to perform manual labor on rural public works projects (see figure 9.2). Once hired by the WPA, White expanded upon this theme to produce bold images like Fatigue, featuring a laborer whose body appears distraught yet his eyes show a complexity beyond his physical appearance. By 1939, White’s There Were No Crops This Year and Fellow Worker, Won’t You March with Us? evinced how racial discrimination relegated blacks to perform unremunerated jobs but also highlighted the importance of forming bonds between workers (see figure 10.20 in the current volume for There Were No Crops). Describing the charcoal drawing There Were No Crops, one art historian explained that the “posture and sorrowful demeanor” of these workers showed how “black laborers . . . carry the weight of economic and social distress.” Meanwhile, Fellow Worker signified the importance of solidarity among workers, making reference to the Artists Union and other civil rights unionism during the late 1930s. In 1940, White explained these works sought to “depict the whole social scene” and use paint as a “weapon . . . to fight what I resent.”26
White’s approach to art was a departure from those in the previous generation of black artists in Chicago. Although Willard Motley wrote in 1940 that these younger artists followed a “trail blazed years ago” by his brother, Archibald Motley Jr., and other artists like William Edouard Scott and Charles C. Dawson, these younger artists made a clear break from those who had earlier earned acclaim in Chicago. One of the artists Motley featured in the article, Charles Sebree, exemplified the difference between these 1930s artists and their predecessors. Motley remarked that because “his star rose early,” he considered Sebree the “problem child” of the group, calling him “an escapist” and “disillusioned.” Sebree told Motley, “I’m tired of Chicago,” and had plans “to sell all my paintings and go to New York.”27 These comments echoed the perspective of the older generation of Chicago artists who had studied at the Art Institute in the early 1900s and exhibited with the Chicago Art League and Negro in Art Week at the Institute, women’s clubs, and the Century of Progress Exhibition in 1933. While Scott (the president of the Art League) and Dawson saw these respectable events as a step forward for black artists, Archibald Motley found them unappealing. Having become internationally famous two decades earlier, Motley chose not to live in the South Side’s Black Belt, did not identify himself as a “Negro artist,” courted patrons like the Armour family (unions organized against the family’s meatpacking plants in the 1930s), and according to Dawson, “never associated with [other black artists] to any extent after [Art Institute] school hours.”28
9.2. CCC Camp (also, Laborers), [ca. 1930]. Charles White’s earliest drawings depicted both the hard labor and dignity of African American workers. Courtesy of the Charles Wilbert White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The generational and political distinctions among these artists also became apparent when considering the works of art they produced. Motley focused on scenes that often depicted black Chicagoans engaged in unproductive or illicit activities.29 And while Dawson tended to avoid racially demeaning themes—he won a prize for his painting of a black veteran of World War I to “counteract the eternal stereotyping . . . of the Negro”—his depiction of a black woman for a Poro Beauty College advertisement showed the difference between him and the next generation. Dawson chose to feature a thin, light-skinned, straight-haired woman for this drawing, naming her after the Egyptian goddess Isis. To imagine Isis, the artist used models from advertisements for Hair Dressing Pomade and Slick-Black.30 In sharp contrast to this image, Charles White’s drawings and paintings of black women, such as “Gussie,” featured women with darker complexions, varying body types, and different styles of hair. White’s representation of black women would eventually be recognized as a significant divergence from what one progressive black journalist saw as the common image of a black woman “as a light-skinned wretched character ‘passing for white.’” In viewing a 1951 solo New York exhibition by White called the Negro Woman, this same writer asked, “Is there now, or had there been, any other artist who had consistently striven to portray the Negro woman as child, adolescent, woman, mother, worker, leader, artist?”31
Other Chicago artists, along with White, also broke from their predecessors. In a Chicago-produced issue of New Challenge magazine, local black writers declared, “We are not attempting to re-stage the ‘revolt’ and ‘renaissance’ which grew unsteadily and upon false foundations ten years ago.” Richard Wright insisted that every black writer should instead apply the ideology of Marxism, “unify his personality, organize his emotions, buttress him with a tense and obdurate will to change the world” and combine it with life experience to create a “full awareness” of “values by which the race is to struggle, live and die.”32 While the visual artists seldom clarified their vision in writing, they used their creativity to depict a similar “full awareness” on canvas and in stone. Marion Perkins, for example, carved figures from soap, wood, and rock while selling newspapers on Indiana Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street on the South Side. He also attended meetings of the South Side Writers’ Group, and after his sculptures attracted the attention of other artists by the late 1930s, he began to study under the white leftist sculptor Si Gordon. Perkins’s “male subjects,” one art historian concluded, “display spiritual intensity and anxiety, while his female figures symbolize refuge and tranquility.”33 More overtly political than Perkins, Bernard Goss painted works with titles like Slave Rebellion and Always the Dirty Work. Deeming himself a “revolutionary painter” in 1940, he said, “I’m not satisfied with social and economic conditions [and] my aim is to do something about them.”34 Like White, these black Chicago artists produced a new aesthetic that centered upon African Americans as dignified and hard-working Americans.
The convergence of the IAP, local black leaders, and the Artists Union in late 1930s also led to a campaign for an art center on the South Side. Beginning in 1938, Pollack discussed the idea of a center for black artists with the new IAP director George Thorp and a number of black community representatives. They concluded that the government had the ability to sponsor the renovation as well as the center’s teachers and materials if the community would raise enough funds to buy a building to house these activities. During the Second New Deal, the government sponsored approximately one hundred such centers nationwide, but few of them were located in African American neighborhoods. This project, legitimated by government support, would make a larger point about the significance of black culture to American culture. A group of black community members (including businessmen, social workers, and union organizers) discovered a dilapidated mansion at 3831 South Michigan Avenue.35 Once the location had been decided, artists like the twenty-one-year-old Margaret Goss became especially active in fund-raising by working out of a headquarters on East Garfield Park but more often standing on street corners in Bronzeville to collect for their “mile of dimes” campaign. In an effort to create community-wide support, the Defender printed favorable editorials, and merchants along Forty-Seventh Street (the nexus of Bronzeville during this era) displayed works by the artists in their windows. To tap the pocketbooks of the elite of Chicago’s black community, these art advocates conceived of an Artists and Models Ball in 1939. With the help of Marva Louis, the wife of then heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, they sold tickets to what would become an annual charity event of theater, dance, and art to benefit the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC). All of these events netted them about $8000, a large sum during the Depression, and they purchased the building for the new center.36
In the course of this Chicago New Deal artistic peak, two events stand out: the American Negro Exposition and the dedication of the South Side Community Art Center. Just before the art center had opened, many black artists displayed their work as part of a larger Diamond 1940 Jubilee Exposition, sponsored largely by the Democratic Party to secure black votes in that year’s election. At the Chicago Coliseum, the exposition celebrated the progress of African Americans in the seventy-five years since emancipation. Among the more than two hundred pieces at the south hall of the exposition was White’s There Were No Crops This Year, which graced the cover of the exhibit catalogue and won a first-prize award. Locke, who would become increasingly involved with Chicago artists in 1940 through this exhibit and others, declared that the exposition featured the “most comprehensive and representative collection of the Negro’s art that has ever been presented for public view” and “put Negro art on the map.”37 Meanwhile, the art center opened in late 1940 and held four exhibitions and a dozen classes before First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt officially inaugurated it in May 1941. For this dedication event, the police cordoned off two blocks on South Michigan Avenue to accommodate the thousands of African Americans who flocked to the center. There, and later at the Parkway Ballroom, they heard Roosevelt endorse the center and call for a “democracy in art.”38
Chicago’s African American artists took this idea of democracy in art seriously. In its first year, the art center staff organized two-dozen exhibitions, which twenty-eight thousand people saw, and enrolled twelve thousand members of the community in classes. The center’s artists also did not shy away from hosting political events. Despite the organization’s harassment from the congressional committee of Martin Dies for being “red,” the NNC held a “folk party” at the center in 1941 to raise money to support its civil rights work. The artists taught classes and worked in center’s studio, and their centralized workspace fostered a greater cultural cohesion among them.39 For White, the energy produced by the center made him more politically ambitious in his art. Gordon Parks, whose photography studio occupied the basement of the center, remembered touring Chicago’s poorest areas of the South Side with White to get a better sense of the plight of the people there. Describing these areas as “wrecked and bombed out,” Parks returned to the art center and observed White “strengthen an arm with a delicate brush stroke or give anguish to a face with mixtures of coloring” to depict what they had encountered in the neighborhood. Amazed by White’s “powerful, black figures,” Parks claimed that they “pointed to the kind of photography that I knew I should be doing.”40
Charles White not only became increasingly bold in his subject matter but also in his choice of artistic medium. To reach a wider array of people with his art, he designed and completed three massive murals in Chicago in 1939–40. For the first Artist and Models Ball at the Savoy in Chicago, White unveiled what would become his first mural, Five Great Negroes, which represented both his revisionist education in black history and use of art as a weapon. The mural featured Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, former slaves who became ardent abolitionists; Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, educators and intellectuals from the early twentieth century; and Marian Anderson, the contemporary mezzo-soprano, who, in an act of cultural defiance, performed in front of the Lincoln Memorial when banned from Constitutional Hall by the lily-white Daughters of the American Revolution (see figure 10.19 in the current volume).41 During the next two years in Chicago, White would produce a commissioned mural titled The History of the Negro Press for the Negro Exposition and a second one called Chaos of the American Negro to be installed at the Cleveland Hall public library, a fitting tribute to his early education in black history there (see figure 9.3). When asked about his decision to paint on such a large scale, White acknowledged his debt to Chicago muralists like Mitchell Siporin and Edward Millman but also claimed the medium as specifically important for “Negro history.” “Easel paintings hang in museums and galleries where they are apt to be seen only by the privileged few,” he told a reporter. “But art is not for artists and connoisseurs alone. It should be for the people.”42
The national spotlight on these Chicago artists also exposed class tensions among Chicago’s African Americans. Having contributed money to the center, the elite members of the Bronzeville community now tried to impose their own views of culture on these artists. Similar to the intellectual battles between artists and organizers of the 1940 exposition (discussed elsewhere in this volume), the center became a focal point for battles over notions of respectability.43 In planning the dedication ceremony, the art center’s board failed to invite the artists whose activism and work had spawned the center. Artists like Margaret Goss did not take this slight lightly. She and others demanded that the artists be included at the dedication and gave a short speech in which she dedicated the space to George Neal, their mentor, who had recently passed away. Referring to this self-directed period under Neal, Goss told the audience at the dedication, “We were not then and are not now complimented by the people who had the romantic idea we liked to live in garrets, wear cast-off clothes and go around with emaciated faces, painting for fun.” Challenging the press accounts that romanticized their poverty as a source of their creativity, Goss instead claimed the center would provide “new hope and vistas” for the people in the neighborhood and serve as an important resource to “express our creativity and humanity.”44 Goss would later secure a position on the “elite board” of the center; with other progressive women like Pauline Kigh Reed and Thelma Kirkpatrick (of NNC affiliation), she fought to ensure the autonomy of the artists at the SSCAC.45
9.3 Chaos of the American Negro. Charles White sought out opportunities to paint public murals that depicted African American history, including Chaos of the American Negro, a WPA mural for the Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library. Courtesy of Special Collections, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library.
For these artists, political and artistic affiliations during the Popular Front sometimes crossed racial lines more easily than class lines. Parks, for example, remembered with appreciation Pollack, the center’s white director, who tried to protect the artists from the board: “A good deal of Peter’s . . . time was spent assuaging the feelings of opinionated officers and trustees, all of whom had different ideas about running the place.” Despite the feeling that “a revolt [by the board] was always at hand,” Parks remembered the center as a “haven for striving painters, sculptors, dancers, writers and poets [and] always alive with some sort of activity.”46 Margaret Goss concurred. She remembered the “the days of ‘black and white, unite and fight’ [when] black and white people were together all the time.” Her roommate during the summer of 1940, the renowned sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, also asserted the “cultural needs” of the “working people of America.” There was “greater collaboration between Negro and white,” she wrote, “because of their common aim—economic security for the artist.”47 Rather than hampering their expression as African Americans, white leftist artists and IAP administrators encouraged it.
The onset of World War II dispersed some of the black artists from Chicago. In 1940, White married Catlett, moved to New Orleans for a short period, and then studied in New York. Thanks to two consecutive fellowships from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Foundation, he worked in the south and New York before he enlisted in the army in 1944.48 Soon thereafter, White and Catlett separated. After recovering from tuberculosis contracted in the army, White would eventually remarry and move to California. Gordon Parks also left Chicago for an international career as a photographer for Lifemagazine and, later, a filmmaker who would direct and produce milestone films like The Learning Tree and Shaft.49 Pollack departed for the army and settled in New York after the war. As one teenage student of the art center, Gwendolyn Brooks, wrote to Pollack, “Foolishly, I had looked on you as a fixture here.” Brooks wrote that Pollack “inspired [her] to start at the Art Center,” and while she realized his departure was “for a noble reason,” she nonetheless did not feel “joyous” about it.50
Those who remained in Chicago faced political and financial struggles when government and community support for artists dried up during and after the war. Increasingly after 1940, war production displaced arts programs. Before leaving for the army, Pollack, in an attempt to sustain the SSCAC, pitched the center as important to African American morale and convinced the WPA and later Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) to fund the production of war-related art.51 Many artists put down their paints and instead created propaganda posters for government distribution. While these artists supported the war effort and the million black troops in uniform, the politics during the war nonetheless muted the artistic freedom that had existed for a time under the IAP. Once OCD funds diminished, the pressure to produce war-related art diminished, but it also put the center’s future in jeopardy. Fortunately, a concerted group of women involved with the art center saved it from destruction. Pauline Kigh Reed formed a “Committee of 100” women, and they managed to keep the center open, though at times its classes and resources were circumscribed compared to its first three years of operation.52
These artists also faced severe setbacks with the onset of McCarthyism after the war. The new political climate led the art center’s board to evict communists and other progressives from the gallery and studios at the center. Although the board did not achieve its goal, the Cold War climate convinced artists like Margaret Goss Burroughs to take a long sojourn to Mexico in the early 1950s. Moreover, the new anticommunist repression in America severed many of the interracial ties between artists formed during the Popular Front era. As Burroughs explained, by the 1950s people believed that “certainly any white person who had a black friend was a Communist.”53
The Cold War led these artists to form new alliances in Chicago and produced a stronger nationalist influence in their politics and artwork. After World War II, Margaret Goss, John Gray, and members of the Chicago Council of the National Negro Congress formed the National Negro Museum and Historical Foundation. This group published pamphlets, organized “Negro History Week” events, and held other cultural events that retained connections with labor at the Packinghouse Labor Center. At one of these NNC-sponsored events, White returned to Chicago to present “a report from the South,” Goss performed “dramatic readings,” and the audience sang “people’s songs” and discussed the recent speech by W. E. B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land,” that called for a southern civil rights movement in 1947.54 This nonprofit group, according to the African American scholar St. Clair Drake, was the result of a backroom deal between prominent black leftists and the political head of the black Democratic submachine in Chicago, William Dawson. Drake recalled that Dawson offered to ensure the local “red squad” would not harass these artists for their past and present political affiliations if they would limit their protest to a “strict cultural nationalist line.”55 Although information on this deal between Dawson and black leftists does not appear in other sources, the documents of the early Historical Foundation do indicate a new level of cooperation between the Democratic machine and these activists. Their “Negro History Week” celebrations had the unprecedented endorsement of the mayor of Chicago and governor of Illinois, seemingly a concession secured by Dawson’s black submachine. From the vantage point of these activists, they took this opportunity to continue to promulgate a revisionist version of black history that White and other artists had made central to their work during the Depression years. The members of the foundation demanded “Democracy in the South” and “Full Equality—Economic, Political, Cultural and Social— in the North” and made clear that “militancy and self-sacrifice for freedom is the tradition of American progress, and the Negro’s struggle has strengthened it, kept it alive.”56 Moreover, Margaret Goss Burroughs and her new husband, Charles Burroughs (married in 1949), would start the Ebony Museum of black history across the street from the art center in 1961. A decade later, they convinced Mayor Richard J. Daley to donate a parks department building in Washington Park to found the DuSable Museum of African American History.57 These accomplishments allowed this Popular Front generation of artists to remain culturally significant during a time of political repression. While many of the initial artists of Chicago’s cultural renaissance dispersed during and after the war, those who remained sustained institutions like the South Side Community Art Center, organized new forums for African American culture, and would inspire a new generation of artists and activists in Chicago during the 1960s.
White left Chicago in 1940, but Chicago never left him. During the war years and into the 1950s, White’s work became even more radical. White’s earlier Chicago murals informed his most celebrated mural, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, a work he produced in 1943 at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Like his Five Great Negroes mural, this one honored slave rebels like Vesey and Tubman and cultural figures like the blues singer Leadbelly but also contemporary political rebels like Max Yergan of the NNC and the internationally famous singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson.58 During the 1940s, White produced art in left-wing publications like the Congress View, the publication of the NNC during the war years, political pamphlets against lynching and other civil rights abuses, and communist-specific publications like New Masses.59 For White, these causes were not peripheral to his art; they were the purpose of his art. He had heard stories about family members on his mother’s side who had been lynched in Mississippi, and he barely escaped lethal beatings on two occasions when living in the south in the 1940s, once by a streetcar conductor in Hampton, Virginia, and a second time when he entered an all-white tavern in New Orleans.60 His portrayals of specific lynching cases helped publicize black, leftist civil rights causes but also became an intensely personal means of communicating his anguish over racial discrimination. Locke saw this work as art despite its specific political purpose. He wrote to White that a 1950 show of White’s work in New York was a “joy to see, in spite of the heavy social criticism necessarily involved in your message.” For Locke, White’s use of art as a weapon had become overwhelming effective: “Though I grant the truth and urgency of the Trenton-Six and the Ingram case [two internationally publicized cases of racial brutality], I found myself at my age and stage too sensitive to take [these works] full blast except in staggered doses” (see figure 9.4).61 Following this show and his Negro Woman show in New York, White traveled to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as part of a delegation for the Third World Festival for Youth and Students for Peace. Further radicalized, upon his return, he helped draft a press release against the increasing Cold War hostility in the United States. Declaring “We Will Not Be a Silent Generation,” White and other youth leaders pledged to fight the “singling out of Negro youth among those of us subpoenaed [by the House of Un-American Activities]” and not be deterred by a “witch hunt . . . meant to create a ‘silent generation’ of youth, whose brains are dulled, whose mouths are closed.”62
Though his travels and experiences would change his art, White remained resolute about depicting the “whole social scene” that concerned the pivotal place of African American culture in America. Upon seeing an exhibit of his work in 1961, Lorraine Hansberry, the black playwright and former neighbor of the White family in Chicago, believed that the “memories of that crucible, the Chicago Southside, must live deep within the breast of this artist. . . . For now what explodes from his boards, is a monumental essence of a people; with winged cheeks, the comforting and chastising eyes; the willful jaws set to book.”63 In oral histories and later writings, White always emphasized his years as a young man in Chicago: “I grew up in one of the poor sections of Chicago and have known hunger and misery. [M]y work is . . . dedicated with all the strength that I have to giving dignity to the lives of the people.”64
By the late 1960s, White’s emphasis on politically charged public art experienced a rebirth when black nationalists created installations on the South and West Sides of Chicago. In preparing a filmstrip on the progression of African American art for school children in the 1970s, White selected a chronology that originated in West Africa, continued despite repression during the slavery era, became modern and urban during the early twentieth century, revived a militant African American identity during the Popular Front era, and led to the 1960s generation with works like the Wall of Respect, a mural on Chicago’s South Side (see figure 9.5). Conceived in 1967 as a tribute to “black heroes,” this wall paralleled the Chicago murals of White. Yet, the two-dozen artists who originally created it took White’s idea a step further by making it a collaborative, community-created mural. White approved of this new “mass art” and hoped it would lead to the “full participation by all in the meaning of a new functional art.” The Wall and other installations made Chicago a center for African American art once again, as black and Latino artists and activists would launch mural projects in a dozen other cities the following year.65
9.4. Rosa Lee Ingram and Sons, Sammy and Wallace, [ca. 1948]. Charles White’s work increasingly depicted the civil rights struggles of African Americans during and after the Second World War, including Rosa Lee Ingram, a widowed tenant farmer in Georgia who in 1947 killed her white neighbor in self-defense but was nonetheless sentenced to death along with two of her sons. A campaign by the Civil Rights Congress, which Charles White supported, ultimately spared their lives. Courtesy of the Charles Wilbert White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The trajectory from White’s Five Great American Negroes to Wall of Respect bookend an African American renaissance in the arts of Chicago that congealed around black culture as intertwined with social justice. Before the federal government aided any of these artists, they formed their own classes under George Neal and learned from each other. The network created by the NNC also contributed to this black-led movement that went across racial lines but certainly did not seek to parrot white leftist politics. African Americans, these artists believed, had their own rich history and stood at the cultural vanguard of America, not its periphery. By the mid-1930s, progressive white members of the IAP and Artists Union witnessed the talent coming from the South Side and sought to join it. Although black “cultural workers” benefited from interactions with their white counterparts, scholars have assumed that too much of their radical politics was conveyed from white leftists to African Americans. The current chapter shows, however, that a black-led protest movement of the 1930s and 1940s inspired these artists as much as white leftists did. In fact, the members of IAP desired to join these black artists and activists as much as the black artists and activists wanted to join the IAP members.
9.5. Wall of Respect. Charles White appreciated a new generation of artists who depicted militant African American history in public art exemplified by this mural at Forty-Third and Langley on Chicago’s South Side. Photograph courtesy of Mark Rogovin.
At its early 1940s peak, the group of black artists that had labored in relative obscurity in Chicago became nationally known. Through the creation of the South Side Community Art Center, the Negro Exposition, and follow-up shows at the Library of Congress and Howard University, Chicago became the vibrant center of African American culture. Even Richard Wright, who had departed Chicago for New York in 1937, returned around 1940 to work on a book that would become 12 Million Black Voices. “Voices are speaking,” he concluded in this book, and African Americans are “with the new tide” that moves into the “sphere of conscious history.” This book, produced at the height of the black arts movement during the Popular Front era in Chicago, became one of Richard Wright’s most optimistic assessments of black urban life and culture. By looking at the development of artists in Chicago, this essay helps explain this optimism. Parks remembered that Wright inscribed Parks’s copy of 12 Million Black Voices—that “became my bible”—as “to one who moves with the tide.”66 That Wright returned to witness and write about this tide is significant, however, because although Wright had been part of it in 1936, he had little to do with the high tide that crested four years later. The culture and protest politics of these African Americans became so intertwined in Chicago that, unlike the Harlem Renaissance, it is hard to separate them. This crossing of previously distinctive political and cultural spheres and class and racial lines informed the artistic development of Chicago’s native son, Charles White, and he, in turn, left his mark on the city of his youth long after his departure from the South Side.
Although World War II and postwar McCarthyism severed many of these interracial alliances and deprived African American artists in Chicago of further national attention, the war and McCarthyism did not change the artists’ mission to depict the humanity of working people and, specifically, the history of struggle by African Americans. The strong network of African American progressive “cultural workers” from the Depression era held together to inform the civil rights protests and black nationalism enacted by the next generation.
1. Dwight Casimere, “Charles White: Giant of American Art Portrays: The Original Man,” Muhammad Speaks, Chicago, December 6 and December 20, 1968, copy, roll 3194, “printed materials,” Charles White Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (hereafter White Papers); Charles White, interview by Betty Hoag, “Oral History Interview with Charles White, 1965 Mar. 9,” March 9, 1965, 6–7, transcript at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/white65.htm.
2. Bone focuses on Richard Wright and the South Side Writers’ Group. Mullen’s study looks less to Wright than to the “rapprochement between African-American and white members of the U.S. left.” See Robert Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” Callaloo 28 (Summer 1986): 447–48; and Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 5, especially 75–105, which deals with Chicago’s visual artists.
3. Daniel Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis’: African American Painters in Chicago, 1893–1945,” in Chicago Modern 1893–1945, Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy (Chicago: Terra Museum and University of Chicago Press, 2004), 39–48; and Andrea D. Barnwell, Charles White, David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2002), 3–26. The most cogent account of 1930s artists and their politics focused primarily on New York. See Andrew Hemmingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
4. White, interview by Betty Hoag, 6; Charles White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 4, n.d. [early 1950s], roll 3189, White Papers; “Miss Vivian Harsh Gets Library Post,” Chicago Defender, July 11, 1931, 4; “Hall Branch Library Is 8 Years Old,” Chicago Defender, January 20, 1940, 4; “George C. Hall Library Notes: 38th and Michigan,” Chicago Defender, April 11, 1936, 30. White probably frequented the Ogden Park branch (in Englewood) of the public library, where Vivian Harsh worked as a librarian before her appointment as the head librarian of the Hall branch. White may have also spent time at the main public library in downtown Chicago.
5. White, translation for an article after return to Europe; Casimere, “Charles White”; White, interview by Betty Hoag, 6; and Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992).
6. See Arnold Rampersad, introduction, in Locke, New Negro, xviii–xxi; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, (New York: Knopf, 1981); Sterling Brown, “The New Negro in Literature, 1925–1955,” in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward: Papers Contributing to the Sixteenth Annual Spring Conference of the Division of Social Sciences, ed. Rayford Logan, Eugene C. Holmes, and G. Franklin Edwards (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1955), 62.
7. See Michael Feith and Genevieve Fabre, eds., Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey, eds., Double Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
8. White, interview by Betty Hoag, 6; Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in Locke, New Negro, 11, 14. White made a distinction between his memory of reading The New Negro as a young man and his criticism of the Harlem Renaissance in later years. During the peak of his political radicalism in the1950s, White told a reporter that the leap in maturity of black artists happened earlier than the 1920s and that the Harlem movement was more about the discovery of these artists by white patrons and critics. While White believed this discovery benefited artists by giving them exposure, he also claimed it led to an abandonment of their own people in favor of a “shallow cosmopolitanism.” See Sidney Finkelstein, draft of an article, 1954, 13, roll 3194, White Papers.
9. Charles White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 5–7; Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, Chicago, interview by Anna M. Tyler, November 11 and December 5, 1988, transcript, 19–25, Afro-American Artists, Chicago Oral History Project, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Peter Clothier, “Charles White: A Critical Perspective,” in Images of Dignity: A Retrospective of the Works of Charles White (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 1982), 12.
10. Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” Opportunity 18 (January, 1940): 21–22; Walter Christmas, “Artist Seeks Life of Man on Street,” Daily Compass, n.d. [1951], subject files: The Worker, roll 3194, White Papers; and Charles White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 5; Barnwell, Charles White, 16.
11. Burroughs, interview by Anna M. Tyler, 19–22; Bernard Goss, “Art Chronicle: Ten Negro Artists on Chicago’s South Side,” Midwest—A Review, December, 1936, 17–19, clipping in scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers; Leontine Collier and Violetta Harrigan to Charles White, January 8, 1979, subject files, George Edward Neal Art Committee, roll 3192, White Papers; White, interview by Betty Hoag, 4; and Clothier, “Charles White,” 12.
12. Chicago Defender, February 22, 1936, natl. ed., 3. See also 1936 Delegates to the National Negro Congress, comp. Lori Husband (Matteson, Ill.: Self-published, 1998). Nahum Brascher, a reporter for the Defender, wrote “Weather—Zero—cannot stop folks when they choose to know what it’s all about.” The same source quoted the banners and listed some of the “IKN’s.” “Race Congress Sidelights,” Chicago Defender, February 22, 1936, 5.
13. “Race Congress Sidelights” and “Congress Opens: Delegates Crowd City for Sessions,” Chicago Defender, February 15, 1936, 1, 2; Richard Wright, “Two Million Black Voices,” New Masses, February 25, 1936, 15; “Outline of Program for 4-Day Session of Nat. Negro Congress,” Chicago Defender, February 15, 1936, 2; National Negro Congress, The Official Proceedings of the National Negro Congress, (Washington, D.C.: NNC, 1936), 32–33; Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Holt, 2001), 115–16; Richard Wright, “The Meaning of the NNC,” n.d. [1936] item 882, box 79, Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
14. Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
15. Fine Arts Committee, National Negro Congress, Chicago, “Reception in Honor of Arna Bontemps,” flyer for April 26, 1936, event, “National Negro Congress” folder, box 21, Arna Bontemps Papers, Special Collections Department, Bird Library, Syracuse University. The advance for this novel paid for Bontemps’s 1935 move to Chicago and got him a position on the Illinois Writers Project. Looking back on his novel in the late 1960s, Bontemps stressed that “the theme of self-assertion by black men whose endurance was strained to the breaking point was not one that readers of fiction were prepared to contemplate [in the 1930s].” Judging from the NNC reception and Bontemps’s role in this artistic movement in Chicago, his recollection may have been obscured by the suppression of this cultural movement during the Cold War. Bontemps, introduction, Black Thunder (1936; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1968), xiv–xv.
16. “Reception in Honor of Arna Bontemps”; Richard Wright, “A Tale of Folk Courage,” draft review of Black Thunder, item 1018, box 86, White Papers; Rowley, Richard Wright, 111; Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad, 1988), 78.
17. Benjamin Horowitz, draft of essay for Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White (Los Angeles: W. Ritchie Press, 1967), subject file: Howard University, roll 3192, White Papers.
18. White, interview by Betty Hoag, 8, 20; Burroughs, interview by Tyler, 45; and Barnwell, Charles White, 22.
19. George Mavigliano and Richard Lawson, The Federal Art Project in Illinois: 1935–1943 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 1–16, 24.
20. Article clipping [about November 1936 exhibit by White and Goss at Paragon studios, 3336 N. Michigan], scrapbook #1, roll 3195, White Papers; Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, essay in 50th Anniversary Advertising Book of the South Side Community Art Center (Chicago: South Side Community Art Center, 1991), copy in possession of the author (thanks to Dr. Burroughs); Horowitz, draft of essay, for Images of Dignity; and Charles White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 5, 7; and White, interview by Betty Hoag, 4.
21. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow.
22. Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 30–41.
23. White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 7.
24. Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 25–46.
25. White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 7.
26. Goss, “Art Chronicle,” 16–18; Barnwell, Charles White, 7; and Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 21–22.
27. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 19, 29–31.
28. Charles Dawson, unpublished autobiography, 345, 358–59, roll 4191–92, Charles C. Dawson Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Dawson Papers); Daniel Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis’: African American Painters in Chicago, 1893–1945,” in Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004); Goss, “Art Chronicle,” 17–18; and Bertrand Phillips, “William Edouard Scott (1884–1964),” World Magazine, November 3, 1973, “Material on other Artists,” roll 3915, White Papers.
29. Amy Mooney, Archibald J. Motley Jr., David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, vol. 4 (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2004); Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis,’” 48; and Amy Mooney, “Representing Race: Disjunctures in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr.,” Art Institute of Chicago: Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 163–79.
30. Charles Dawson, “Famous Black Beauties in History and Mythology 2: Isis,” advertisement for Poro Schools of Beauty Culture, Chicago, and advertisements for Hair Dressing Pomade and Slick-Black, roll 4191, Dawson Papers.
31. Clothier, “Charles White,” 11; John Pittman, “Charles White’s Exciting ‘Negro Woman’ Show at ACA,” Daily Worker, February 26, 1951, and “Race Women Honored in Art Exhibit,” Pittsburgh Courier, both in scrapbook 2, roll 3195, White Papers.
32. Richard Wright, “Editorial” and “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937): 3–4, 36–49.
33. Toussaint Perkins, Eugene Perkins, and Fern Gayden, “Statement of Purpose: The Marion Perkins Memorial Foundation, Inc.,” n.d. [post 1961], Material on Other Artists, roll 3195, White Papers; Rowley, Richard Wright, 117; Margaret G. Burroughs, “It Seems to Me,” newspaper clipping, n.d. [1950s?], printed materials, roll 3194, White Papers; and especially, Daniel Schulman, “Marion Perkins: A Chicago Sculptor Rediscovered,” Art Institute of Chicago: Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 221–43.
34. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 19, 20–21; IAP, Bulletin Exhibition Division Month Ending December 31, 1940, printed material, exhibition announcements, roll 3194, White Papers.
35. Burroughs, essay in 50th Anniversary Advertising Book; Alain Locke, “Chicago’s New South Side Art Center,” American Federation of Arts 34 (August–September 1941), 370–74.
36. Locke, “Chicago’s New South Side Art Center”; “Stars Prepare for Artists Models Ball,” unidentified article clipping, October 1939, scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers; Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (1965; New York: Berkley Medallion, 1967), 170; “Chicago Active in Effort to Establish Community Art Center,” Chicago Defender, May 20, 1939; “Howard Art Gallery Exhibits Works of Nationally Known Young Artists,” unidentified newspaper clipping, April 29, 1939, scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers; “The Community Art Center,” editorial, Chicago Defender, March 1, 1941, 14; Robert Davis, “A Community Adventure,” Chicago Defender, March 1, 1941, 13; “South Side Art Center Planned,” Chicago Sunday Times, October 22, 1939, scrapbook, roll 4887, Peter Pollack Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Pollack Papers).
37. American Negro Exposition, “Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851 to 1940),” catalogue from Tanner Art Galleries show, Chicago, July 4–September 2, 1940, copy in materials on other artists, roll 3195, White Papers; Illinois Writers’ Project, Cavalcade of the American Negro (Chicago: Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, 1940), 94–95.
38. Locke, “Chicago’s New Southside Art Center,” 374; “Editor Congratulates First Lady” and “So. Side Greets Mrs. Roosevelt,” Chicago Sunday Bee, May 11, 1941, 1; and Chicago Park District Traffic and Engineering Section, Dedication of the South Side Community Art Center, 1941, and “Dedication by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, South Side Community Art Center,” program for May 7, 1941 dedication, all roll 4887, scrapbook, Pollack Papers; and “First Lady Spends Busy Three Hours in Chicago,” Chicago Defender, May 10, 1941.
39. Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” 10; Locke, “Chicago’s New Southside Art Center,” 370–71; and Norman MacLeish in “Exhibition of Negro Artists of Chicago,” catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1941, Material on Other Artists, roll 3195, White Papers.
40. Parks, Choice of Weapons, 171–72.
41. “Stars Prepare for Artists Models Ball”; Robert A. Davis, “The Art Notebook,” Chicago Sunday Bee, October 6, 1940, scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers; Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago,” 21–22; Benjamin Horowitz, draft of essay for Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White, 1967, subject files, Howard University, roll 3192, White Papers; Barnwell, Charles White, 4.
42. Barnwell, Charles White, 26; William Carter, “The Art Notebook,” Chicago Bee, May 26 and May 27, 1940, scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers; and “Art Today: Mural by a Talented Artist,” Daily Worker, New York, August 28, 1943, scrapbook 1, roll 3195, White Papers.
43. For more on class divisions with respect to these African American artists in Chicago, see Jeff Helgeson, “Who Are You America but Me?” in the current volume.
44. Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” 8, 9.
45. Another telling incident concerned J. Levirt Kelly, a local union organizer with ties to Chicago’s underworld. Kelly had contributed a substantial amount of money to become a “life member” of the Art Center, but the other elite donors did not want him to attend the dedication ceremonies because of his connections to seedy enterprises and less-than-respectable behavior. To ensure his nonparticipation, the police brought Kelly to the station for “questioning” during the dedication. “Union Head Arrested Only ‘For Questioning,’” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1941, scrapbook, roll 4887, Pollack Papers; and Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” 8, 14.
46. Parks, Choice of Weapons, 166–69.
47. Elizabeth Catlett, “The Negro Artist in America,” American Contemporary Art, April 1944, 1, 4–5, 6, clipping in subject file “Catlett,” roll 3191, White Papers; Locke in American Negro Exposition, “Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851 to 1940)”; and Burroughs, interview by Tyler, 43–48.
48. Rosenwald fellowships proved crucial to artists like White and Parks when government-sponsored art funding dried up during the war. Unlike New York, Chicago had few rich benefactors willing to sponsor African American artists. The Rosenwald Fund, begun by Julius Rosenwald, the Jewish-born owner of Sears Department Store, and continued after his death, placed specific emphasis on funding African American cultural figures. See Benjamin Horowitz, draft of essay for Images of Dignity; White, interview by Betty Hoag; and William C. Haygood, director of fellowships, Rosenwald Fund, to Charles White, April 18, 1942, Mrs. William C. Haygood, acting director for fellowships, Julius Rosenwald Fund, Chicago, to Charles White, April 21, 1943, and Charles White, “Report of a Year’s Progress and Plan for Renewal of a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship,” all in subject files, Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, roll 3193, White Papers.
49. Parks, Choice of Weapons, 180. As his first assignment for Life magazine, Parks chose to photograph a gang in Harlem, a choice that paralleled his emphasis on working-class black life in Chicago. See Parks, “Harlem Gang Leader,” Life, November 1, 1948, 96–106.
50. “Farewell Party for Mr. Peter Pollack,” invitation, November 12, 1942, and Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely to Peter Pollack, November 13, 1942, Chicago, scrapbook, roll 4887, Pollack Papers.
51. The Lanham Act in 1942 allowed New Deal administrators to apply for funds if their activities related to national defense. See Peter Pollack, “Report to the Board of Directors,” South Side Community Art Center, September 25, 1942, Daniel Catton Rich, “The Negro in the Art World,” unidentified magazine article, n.d. [1942–1944], Peter Pollack, “Negro War Posters,” unidentified magazine article, n.d. [1942–1944], all roll 4887, Pollack Papers; and Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Project in Illinois, 17, 21, 46.
52. Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” 15; South Side Community Art Center, “National Negro Art Exhibition: We Too Look at America: Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings,” May 1941 exhibit catalogue, material on other artists, roll 3195, White Papers; South Side Community Art Center to Fellow Artist, n.d. [1965], and Fern Gayden to Charles White, March 9, 1966, both in subject files, SSCAC, roll 3193, White Papers.
53. Burroughs, “Saga of Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” 14; Burroughs, interview by Tyler, quote from 44, also 61. African Americans reacted differently to the Cold War repression of communism than their white counterparts in Chicago. Chicago poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis claimed that during his stint as a reporter for the leftist Chicago Star, “Roughly a third of its subscribers were black, for South Siders independent of the dictates of the white power structure paid little attention to Red baiting. I personally knew of a sizeable number of lawyers, doctors, and schoolteachers who made cash contributions to the ghetto headquarters of the Communist party with the admonition, ‘Keep my name out of it—but give ’em hell!’” Frank Marshall Davis, Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 282, quote from 298.
54. The Packinghouse Labor Center was located at Forty-Ninth and Wabash on the South Side of Chicago. The event discussed above took place at the home of John Gray at 211 East Twenty-Sixth Street. “An Evening with the Executive Board of the National Negro Congress,” March 30, 1947, Chicago, frame 440, reel 32, series 2, microfilm edition, Papers of the National Negro Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Harlem.
55. St. Clair Drake, interview by Robert E. Martin, July 28, 1969, number 462, transcript, 80, 118–21, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
56. “Negro History Week Mass Meeting at DuSable Sunday,” Chicago Bee, February 10, 1946, 6; Chicago NNC, “Negro History Week News,” February 3, 1947, frame 454, National Negro Museum and Historical Foundation to Friend, January 13, 1947, frame 472, National Negro Museum and Historical Foundation, and Chicago NNC, “Negro History Folder,” February 1947, frames 461–68, and National Negro Museum and Historical Foundation, “Win a People’s Peace: Negro History Week,” February 10–17, 1946, frames 353–60, all on reel 32, series 2, NNC papers. For the cultivation of this black-leftist network during the war years, see also “Rear Adm. Evers Is Speaker at Library Forum,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1942, S7; and South Side Community Art Center, “Chicago Collectors Exhibit of Negro Art,” April 8–May 3, 1945, Material on Other Artists, roll 3195, White Papers.
57. Eugene Pieter Feldman, The Birth and the Building of the DuSable Museum (Chicago: DuSable Press, 1981), 12–15, 61, 90.
58. “The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America,” invitation to formal presentation of White’s mural, Hampton Institute, Virginia, July 25, 1943, Subject Files, Hampton Institute, roll 3191, White Papers; White, interview by Hoag, 10.
59. See New Masses, April 23, 1946, May 7, 1946, December 12, 1946, and February 11, 1947, copies in Subject Files: New Masses, roll 3192, White Papers; Lou [Burnham] to Charles White, April 21, 1955, General Correspondence, roll 3189, White Papers. For examples of artwork in the Congress View (previously the Congress Vue), see November 1943, February 1944, and April 1945 issues; for examples of pamphlets, see Harry Raymond, “Dixie Comes to New York: The Story of the Freeport GI Slayings”; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” (Birmingham: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1946); “We Demand Freedom! Two Addresses by William L. Patterson” (Civil Rights Congress, n.d.); and “An Appeal to Negro Youth: Join Hands to Free Walter Lee Irvin” (Washington, D.C.: N.p., 1952). Copies of White’s artwork in these and many other illustrations for pamphlets are in printed materials, reproductions, roll 3194, White Papers.
60. White, interview by Hoag, 15; Christmas, “Artist Seeks Life of Man on Street,” 24; and White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 9.
61. Locke wrote that although White’s “Trenton Six” painting “was unsold” when he visited the gallery, he could not bring himself to buy it. See Alain Locke to Charles White, February 27, 1950, Subject Files: Alain Locke, roll 3192, White Papers; and Christmas, “Artist Seeks Life of Man on Street,” 24.
62. Sidney Kramer, “It’s About Time for PEACE!” New Challenge 1, no. 4 (December 1951), 4–5; White, translation for an article after return to Europe, 11–14; Charles White and Joy Silver, press release, January 15, 1942, New York, Charles White to Konstantien Nepomnyashe, “Charles White Tells a Story,” n.d. [1952], and Charles White, Paul Robeson Jr., and other left youth leaders, “We Will Not Be a Silent Generation,” signed statement, 1952, all in subject files, Third World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace, roll 3193, White Papers.
63. Lorraine Hansberry, quoted in Gallery 1199, New York, “An Exhibition of the Art of Charles White,” September to December, 1980, Heritage Gallery, in Subject Files: Heritage Gallery, roll 3192, White Papers; Horowitz, Images of Dignity.
64. Charles White, “‘Until the Day I Die, My Life Is Dedicated to My People’,” Freedom, New York, n.d. [early 1950s], clipping found in Third World Festival for Youth and Students folder, subject files, roll 3193, White Papers.
65. Charles White, Black Art Filmstrip, n.d. [late 1960s or early 1970s], Subject Files: Scholastic Magazine, roll 3193, White Papers. William Walker headed the original “Wall of Respect” collaboration in 1967. Ebony magazine, based in Chicago, publicized the art project nationally. See “Wall of Respect,” Ebony 23, no. 2 (December 1967): 48–50; “‘Wall of Respect’ Is Dedicated Here at Black Festival,” Chicago Defender, October 2, 1967, 14–15; Jeff Donaldson, “The Rise, Fall and Legacy of the Wall of Respect Movement,” International Review of African American Art 15, no. 1 (1998): 22–26; Jeff Huebner, “The Man behind the Wall,” Chicago Reader, August 29, 1997, 1, 14–32; “Chicago Muralists Heralded,” October 20, 2005, Community Media Workshop, http://www.newstips.org/?p=2758. The Block Museum at Northwestern University has created a website about the “Wall of Respect” at http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/wallofrespect/main.htm.
66. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, photos by Edward Rosskam (1941; repr., New York: Basic Books, 2002), 146–47.
