Jacob Lawrence

"My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas."

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born September 7, 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His parents divorced when he was 12 and his mother moved the family to New York City, enrolling him in an arts and crafts center in Harlem to occupy him after school until she got off work.

Wright began taking formal classes at the WPA-funded Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center in 1932, where director Augusta Savage got him a scholarship to the American Artists School and a paid position with the WPA. It was at the Art Center that he met his wife, artist/sculptor Gwendolyn Knight.

His first exhibit was in Baltimore at the age of 21 with a group of 41 paintings depicting the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Later series focused on Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Two years later a collection of 60 paintings on the Great Migration was shown at the New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery. The paintings were bought by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection of Washington D. C. Fortune Magazine covered the sale, printing color reproductions of 26 of the paintings and bringing Lawrence's work to the attention of the American public. Thus he became one of the most widely-known African American artist of the twentieth centrury.

With Gwendolyn Knight

Lawrence served in the Coast Guard during World War II, continuing to paint. His work from this time, and later paintings based on his experiences, made up the collection entitled War. Other series were Life In Harlem and Desegregation, with "The Ordeal of Alice" being the most well-known of the latter group. After the Desegregation series he focused on the theme of collaboration in The Builders, with one of the series being bought by the White House Historical Association in 2007 for $2.5 million. It currently hangs in the Green Room.

Lawrence taught at the Pratt Institute and at other schools in the New York area. In 1970 he and Knight moved to Seattle where he was on the faculty of the University of Washington. He was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal the same year, and in 1983 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He died in Seattle on June 9, 2000 at the age of 82. The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation administers their estates and archives their work. Knight died in 2005. The Seattle Art Museum gives an annual $10,000 award in their names to artists who "reflect the cultural contexts and values systems that informed their work."

"Our homes were very decorative, full of pattern, like inexpensive throw rugs. It must have had some influence, all this color and everything. Because we were so poor the people used this as a means of brightening their life. I used to do bright patterns after these throw rugs; I got ideas from them, the arabesques, the movement and so on."

The Seamstress

Tombstones

The Builders

The Ordeal of Alice

Self-Portrait

Scaffold

Migration 17

Daybreak

Migration 3

Richard Wright

 "I was leaving the South 
to fling myself into the unknown . . . 
I was taking a part of the South 
to transplant in alien soil, 
to see if it could grow differently, 
if it could drink of new and cool rains, 
bend in strange winds, 
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom"

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born September 4, 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi. His family moved around throughout the area, often living with relatives after his father left and his mother suffered a series of strokes. Wright, his mother and older brother settled in Jackson, Mississippi when he was eight to live with his grandmother, an extremely religious woman. The repression he experienced there, as well as the racism encountered in daily life, formed the basis for his writing throughout his life.

Wright graduated from Junior High as valedictorian but refused to give a speech written by the vice principal that catered to the all-white school board. This was the end of his formal education, and at age 15 he moved to Memphis where he began reading H. L. Mencken and other books a white co-worker checked out of the library for him. He later moved to Chicago, continuing to educate himself, reading the naturalist literature of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. He worked as a postal clerk, and his mother, brother and aunt came to live with him. When he was laid off in 1931 the family was forced to go on relief.

During this time Wright joined the John Reed Club, a Marxist organization for artists, writers, and other intellectuals. He joined the Communist Party in 1933 but became disenchanted by power struggles and racism in the part, as well as being perceived as bourgeois by other African Americans because of his intellect and his association with whites.  His experience during this time was published in 1944 in Atlantic Monthly as "I Tried to Be a Communist".

Wright moved to New York in 1937 where he became the Harlem editor of The Daily Worker, and participated in a WPA writers' project where he won a $500 prize for his short story, Fire and Cloud. The acclaim from this win led to the publication of a collection of four novellas, Uncle Tom's Children, a brutal depiction of life in the South.

It was followed in 1940 by Wright's most noted work, Native Son, again a bleak portrayal of African American life in the early part of the twentieth century. This book, set in Chicago, explores the  social forces leading central character Bigger Thomas to murder his employer's daughter. An immediate best-seller, it became the first Book of the Month Club selection written by an African American and is considered one of the most influential books of the century.

A dramatic version written by Wright and Paul Green, and produced by Orson Welles, opened on Broadway the following year. Also in 1941 Twelve Million Black Voices was published, with Wright's descriptions of photographs by Edwin Rosskan. An autobiography Black Boy came out in 1945, depicting Wright's life in the South before his move to Chicago. A second volume covering his later years, American Hunger, was published posthumously in 1977.

To escape American racism and the growing anti-Communist political climate, Wright moved to Paris in 1946, becoming a French citizen the next year. His later novels, influenced by his association with existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, did not have the success of his earlier work. He traveled throughout Europe, Africa and Asia, writing non-fiction accounts of culture, politics and religion. He began writing haiku in the late 1950's, amassing over four thousand, with 817 published in Haiku: This Other World  in 1997.

Keep straight down this block,

then turn right where you will find

a peach tree blooming.

As the sun goes down, 

a green melon splits open

and juice trickles out 

Coming from the woods,

a bull has a lilac sprig

dangling from a horn

The Christmas season:

a whore is painting her lips

larger than they are  

Wright died suddenly in Paris of a heart attack on November 28, 1960 at the age of 52. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 and the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1941.

I Have Seen Black Hands

I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them --
Out of millions of bundles of wool and flannel tiny black fingers have reached restlessly and hungrily for life.
Reached out for the black nipples of black breasts of black mothers,
And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys in the childish grips of possession,
And choclate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones, and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and gummy,
And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and slingshots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play,
And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's, Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill,
They've held pens and rulers and maps and books in palms spotted and smeared with ink,
And they've held dice and cards and half-pint flasks and cue sticks and cigars and cigarettes in the pride of new maturity . . .
II
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them --
They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails,
And they were caught in the fast-moving belts of machines and snagged and smashed and crushed,
And they jerked up and down at the throbbing machines massing taller and taller the heaps of gold in the banks of the bosses,
And they piled higher and higher the steel, iron, the lumber, wheat, rye, the oats, corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the coat, the meat, the fruit, the glass, and the stone until there was too much to be used,
And they grabbed guns and slung them on their shoulders and marched and groped in trenches and fought and killed and conquered nations who were customers for the goods black hands made.
And again black hands stacked goods higher and higher until there was too much to be used,
And then the black hand held trembling at the factory gates the dreaded lay-off slip,
And the black hands hung idle and swung empty and grew soft and got weak and bony from unemployment and starvation,
And they grew nervous and sweaty, and opened and shut in anguish and doubt and hesitation and irresolution . . .
III
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them --
Reaching hesitantly out of days of slow death for the goods they had made, but the bosses warned that the goods were private and did not belong to them,
And the black hands struck desperately out in defense of life and there was blood, but the enraged bosses decreed that this too was wrong,
And the black hands felt the cold steel bars of the prison they had made, in despair tested their strength and found that they could neither bend nor break them,
And the black hands fought and scratched and held back but a thousand white hands took them and tied them,
And the black hands lifted palms in mute and futile supplication to the sodden faces of mobs wild in the reveries of sadism,
And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at the noose that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that cooked and charred the black flesh . . .
IV
I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers,
And some day -- and it is only this which sutains me --
Someday there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!





"Between the World and Me"


And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me....
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
    upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
    finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
    a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
    and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
    butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
    drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
    lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
    surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull....
And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
    for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
    icy walls of fear--
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
    grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
    poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
    darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
    into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
    my flesh.
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
    cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
    upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
    my life be burned....
And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
    into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
    black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
    they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
    me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
    my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
    baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
    sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
    yellow surprise at the sun....

Althea Gibson

The entrance of Negroes into national tennis is as inevitable as it has proven in baseball, in football, or in boxing; there is no denying so much talent. The committee at Forest Hills has the power to stifle the efforts of one Althea Gibson, who may or may not be succeeded by others of her race who have equal or superior ability. They will knock at the door as she has done. Eventually the tennis world will rise up en masse to protest the injustices perpetrated by our policymakers. Eventually -- why not now? ~ Alice Marble, American Lawn Tennis Magazine, 1950

Althea Gibson was born August 25, 1927 in Silver, South Carolina, and her family moved to Harlem when she was three. Her father taught her to box, and at age ten she began playing paddleball in Police Athletic League tournaments. Her skill caught the attention of local African American tennis players at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club.

In 1944 and 1945 Gibson won the girls' championship of the American Tennis Association, an African American organization similar to the whites-only United States Lawn Tennis Association. ATA officials recognized her potential to compete against USLTA opponents and in 1946 she was invited to move to North Carolina to train. Mentor Sugar Ray Robinson urged her to "go south". She lived with the family of ATA President Dr. Hubert Eaton in Wilmington, North Carolina during the school year and with Vice President Dr. Robert Johnson in the summers for the next three years while she finished high school, having dropped out several years earlier. After graduation from Wilmington High School she enrolled Florida A&M University, earning a degree in Physical Education in 1953. She then taught at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Gibson won her first of ten consecutive ATA championships in 1947, and in 1950 was accepted to play in the U. S. Nationals only at the insistence of four-time women's champion Alice Marble. She only lasted until the second round that year, but two years later was ranked ninth in the United States and in 1956 won the women's singles and doubles at the French Championship. The next two years she won championships at Wimbledon and the U. S. Nationals, along with five more doubles titles. There would not be another African American champion at Wimbledon until Arthur Ashe in 1975.

In 1958 Gibson retired from playing in the USLTA. Before the open era began ten years later it was a strictly amateur association with no cash prizes beyond an expense allowance. There was no professional women's tennis at the time, and no endorsements were available. It is reported that she made $100,000 playing exhibition matches before Harlem Globetrotters games in 1960.

Gibson worked as a teaching pro and wrote an autobiography I Always Wanted to be Somebody. She recorded an album Althea Gibson Sings and appeared in the movie The Horse Soldiers. In 1964 was the first African American member of the LPGA, competing for fourteen years but never placing higher than second place in a tournament. She again encountered racism, once being allowed to compete at the Beaumont, Texas Country Club but being forbidden to used the clubhouse or the restrooms. In 1971 she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She became the New Hersey State Commissioner of Athletics in 1975 and also served on the Governor's Council on Physical Fitness.

Gibson died on September 28, 2003 at the age of 76. She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Wyatt Tee Walker

‘‘One of the keenest minds of the nonviolent revolution.’’ ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil rights leader, pastor and musicologist Wyatt Tee Walker was born August 16, 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts and attended Virginia Union University, earning  a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics and a master's in divinity. It was at this time he met Martin Luther King, Jr. at an inter-seminary meeting while King was at Crozier Theological Seminary.

Upon graduation in 1953, Walker became pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. He became involved in local civil rights issues, serving as president of the Petersburg NAACP chapter and as founder and president of the Virginia branch of the Congress of Racial Equality. He organized the Petersburg Improvement Association, modeled after the Montgomery Improvement Association, a grassroots organization fighting segregation. Walker was jailed in 1958 the first of seventeen times for leading efforts to integrate the Petersburg Public Library, deliberately choosing to try to check out a biography of Robert E. Lee.

Police dogs attack Walter Gadsden in Birmingham

Walker was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Convention in 1957, and in 1960 King asked him to come to Atlanta to serve as its executive director. He proved to be an excellent administrator, coordinating staff, raising money, and raising the new organization to national prominence alongside the older NAACP and CORE.

He was the primary strategist for "Project C", the implementation of the Birmingham Campaign in 1963 that called for marches, sit-ins and boycotts of local businesses, with an eye for detail that included counting the number of stools at each lunch counter. The violent reaction of Commission of Public Safety Bull Connor, using dogs and fire hoses to subdue the protesters, brought national attention to the SCLC's efforts as did King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Taylor left the SCLC to for the Negro Heritage Library, working with school boards to expand public school curricula and library resources to reflect African American history and culture. In 1967 he was called to serve as senior pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. King conducted his official installation and preached that Sunday's sermon on March 24, 1968, eleven days before he was assassinated.

Taylor returned to school to earn a doctorate in 1975 from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, specializing in African American sacred music. He published Somebody's Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, the first of his eleven books, in 1979. He has served as an urban affairs consultant to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and on the American Committee on Africa, an anti-apartheid group.

Taylor retired in 2004 and now lives in Virginia. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

James Baldwin

“I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn’t know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use.”

Novelist, essayist and activist James Arthur Baldwin was born August 2, 1924 in Harlem, taking the name of his step-father, David Baldwin, a storefront Pentecostal preacher. The younger Baldwin also preached as a teenager, and his early experiences are the basis of his semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954).

After living in Greenwich Village for several years where he studied at The New School and met author Richard Wright, Baldwin moved to Paris, France, to escape the prejudice he experienced being African American and homosexual in America. The title of his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), pays tribute to Wright's work Native Son, although the two were not close in later years.

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), deals with themes of homosexuality, as do other of his later works. In 1957 he returned to the states to lend his voice to the emerging civil rights movement as efforts were being made toward school desegregation throughout the south. A second edition of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), topped the best-seller lists with over a million copies sold, and his third, The Fire Next Time (1963), was aimed at educating the white American public on what it means to be black in America.

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

Baldwin worked with both the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He lectured extensively for CORE on college campuses and to other mixed audiences, speaking from an ideological point between the moderation of Martin Luther King Jr. and the more radical viewpoint of Malcolm X. He also participated in the March on Washington in August 1963 with long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando.

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

In addition to novels and essays, Baldwin also wrote two stage plays. The Amen Corner (1955), set in the Pentecostal church of his youth, and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), based on the Emmitt Till murder.

In Baldwin's later years he taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Hampshire College. He died in St. Paul-de-Vence, France, on November 30 or December 1, 1987 at the age of 63.

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." 

"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." 

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

Louis T. Wright, M.D.

"There is no use saving the Negro from being lynched, or educating for sound citizenship if he is to die prematurely as a result of murderous neglect by America's health agencies solely on account of his race or color." ~ Dr. Louis Wright, 1937

Louis Tomkins Wright was born in LaGrange, Georgia, on July 23, 1891. His father was a doctor who had left medical practice to go into ministry and was a district superintendent for the Methodist Episcopal Church at the time of his death in 1895. Wright's stepfather, Fletcher Penn, was also a physician, being the first African American graduate of Yale Medical School. He practiced in Atlanta.

Wright received a bachelor's degree from Clark Atlanta University where he was class valedictorian, and was admitted to Harvard Medical School. He graduated fourth in his class yet was unable to find an internship in the Boston area. He was accepted by Freedmen's Hospital in Washington DC (affiliated with Howard University), and while there researched the use of the Schick test for diphtheria on African Americans.

Wright returned to Atlanta where he went into practice with his stepfather. In 1916 NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson came to Atlanta to start a local chapter. Wright joined and was elected treasurer. This marked the beginning of his life-long friendship with Walter White who was chapter secretary. At the outbreak of World War I Wright joined the Army Medical Corps and served in France, where he won a Purple Heart after being exposed to phosgene gas.

After the war, Wright settled in New York City, where he worked for the Health Department at applied for staff privileges at Harlem Hospital. When he was hired at the hospital six months later, four white physicians resigned in protest and Dr. Cosmo O'Neal, the hospital director who hired him, was transferred to working the gate-booth at Bellevue Hospital. However, other African American doctors were subsequently hired and the New York City Civil Service Commission reorganized the administration of the city's hospitals, creating the Department of Hospitals. By 1929 Wright had been promoted to assistant visiting surgeon and was also named NYPD Police Surgeon. He became the first African American to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (1934) and to become a Board Certified Surgeon, one year after the Board was created (1939).

Inspired by the discrimination he had experienced and overcome throughout his career, Wright fought for equality in medical education and in medical care for all people. He continued be be active with the NAACP and was elected to its Board of Directors in 1931, becoming Chairman in 1934. Reunited with Walter White, who had become Executive Director, he secured funding from the Carnegie Foundation to research and make recommendations concerning health care needs of African Americans. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1940.

In 1939 Wright was stricken with tuberculosis, likely due to lung damage during the war, and was hospitalized in Ithica, New York, for most of the next three years. Returning to the staff at Harlem Hospital in 1942, he was named Director of the Department of Surgery, and the physical limitations from his illness led him to concentrate on research. He developed a metal plate for knee fractures and a neck brace, as well as becoming known as becoming known as an expert on head injuries and skull fractures. He headed the team that first used Aureomycin, and published over 35 papers on the use of antibiotics. He was also one of the pioneers of chemotherapy in treating cancer. In total, he had approximately 100 papers published in medical journals.

The library at Harlem Hospital was named in Wright's honor months before he passed away on October 8, 1952 at the age of 60. Colleague Aubrey Maynard, who had been the first African American intern at Harlem Hospital in 1926, wrote these words recalling the occasion:

“Like some of his era, [Wright] had viewed with cold horror the scene of a lynching. He had known the surging fury of defiance when a mob moved toward his home and family. From boyhood he had felt the spur and the obligation to gain educational and professional status to fulfill the aspirations of devoted parents. He had been a black soldier in a white man’s army which fostered segregation and seethed with prejudice and injustice. Through the depression he had struggled to support his family as a doctor in the ghetto. Physical disability had eroded his strength. He had learned the promises and evasions and maneuvers—and occasionally the successes—of political life in a racist society. Step by step, he had gained professional and personal stature. Now, at his celebration of his sixtieth birthday, he cherished the hope that untold thousands would pass to fulfilled lives through the doors that he had opened. His friends, who remembered the long years, rejoiced with him.”

The above quotation is from the  June 2000 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, which contains an excellent article on Dr. Wright and the status of health care for African Americans at the time of his research.