When Art Is an Act of Protest

“Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs,” said artist Charles White in a 1978 interview with the Negro History Bulletin. “The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.”

By 1978, the 60-year-old White had been a celebrated artist, draftsman, painter, and printmaker for over three decades, and was famed for his work that meditated on the themes of black history, culture, and racial injustice. White’s mother, a domestic worker without access to other childcare options, often left him at the Chicago Central Public Library, steps from the Art Institute of Chicago. White split his days between the two institutions, reading, drawing, and wandering the galleries. His childhood was defined by both a voracious desire to make art—it was “an integral part of my being,” he told the interviewer in 1978—and by racial prejudice.

As a child in a predominantly white public high school, White painted sets for school plays that he was barred from acting in. He grew disillusioned by the exclusion of black history from the classroom; at the library, he had read about prominent black historical figures such as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, and he was incensed to find that—aside from a single sentence devoted to Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the American Revolution—his high school history book did not mention a single black person.

“I raised this question to my teacher and she told me to sit down,” White said in a 1965 interview with the Archives of American Art. “She didn’t even bother to be polite about it.” After that, White protested the class—which his school wouldn’t allow him to drop—by not participating. “When the term paper came, I signed my name and turned it in blank,” he said. White funneled his energy into art and activism; as a high schooler, he was the staff artist for the National Negro Congress in Chicago. Later, he would become an important figure in Chicago’s Black Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s, alongside people such as writer Richard Wright and dancer Katherine Dunham.

In 1938, like many creatives weathering the devastation of the Great Depression, White joined the Federal Art Project, a WPA program that employed out-of-work artists. He was first hired as an easel painter and paid $97 a month to produce one painting every five weeks—but he asked to be transferred to the mural division, so he could work in a medium that he regarded as an ideal platform for social commentary. In 1939, he began work on Five Great American Negroes, a nearly 13-foot-wide mural on canvas depicting many of the people who had been omitted from his high school history book, including Sojourner Truth, Washington, and Douglass, as well as contemporaries Marian Anderson and George Washington Carver. (The mural is currently in the permanent collection of Howard University.) Completed in 1940, the artwork put White on the map, garnering media attention and an invitation to display work at the American Negro Exposition, a landmark exhibition in Chicago that celebrated black artists, writers, and musicians.

When White started painting Five Great American Negroes, efforts had already been underway for decades to research and teach black history within the African American community. Historian Carter G. Woodson, often referred to as the “father of black history,” founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and launched Negro History Week (precursor to Black History Month) in 1926. However, this effort almost exclusively affected African Americans. “It did not, as a general rule, cross the color line ... It was not until the 1960s that the civil rights and Black Power movements brought black history into white consciousness,” writes Jeffrey Aaron Snyder in his 2018 book Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow.

In 1942, White was able to expand on the themes he explored in Five Great American Negroes when he received a grant for a grand mural at Hampton University, a historically black university in Hampton, Virginia. Over the course of nine months, White painted directly on the wall of the school’s main auditorium in egg tempera, a technique he had learned during his work with the WPA. Unveiled in 1943, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America would become one of White’s most famous works. “The object was to take the contributions both through the physical revolt of fighting for the abolition of slavery, and also the contributions that had been made in the sciences as well as the arts, as well as politics,” White told his 1965 interviewer.

At 12 by 17 feet, the mural is a sweeping depiction of prominent black figures from history (including some that had appeared earlier in Five Great American Negroes), such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Booker T. Washington. Peter Still, a runaway slave, is shown gripping a flag emblazoned with the words: “I will die before I submit to the yoke.” The mural, like many of White’s works, was a corrective to historical narratives that ignored the accomplishments of black Americans.

White would go on to enjoy a vaunted career, with 53 solo shows, exhibitions at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of Fine Art, and a 14-year teaching post at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Art historian and curator Andrea Barnwell Brownlee writes in her 2002 monograph Charles White that, despite his success, “the general lack of interest in African American art until recent years” as well as a scholarly “discomfort with radicalism” contributed to an insufficient lack of awareness of White’s work. (A retrospective of White’s work is currently on tour; it is his first major show in 30 years.) In an introduction to the 1967 book Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White, White’s friend, the musician Harry Belafonte, praised the “tough and tender strength” of White’s work. “All of his art is a testimony to the vitality of American culture,” wrote Belafonte. “And his art is tremendously American.”