African American Visual Arts (British Association for American Studies (BAAS) by Celeste-Marie Bernier

Author:Celeste-Marie Bernier [Bernier, Celeste-Marie]
Format: epub
Tags: editing
Published: 2008-10-07T08:12:25+00:00

The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America(1943, Plate 7)

The ‘point of my awareness of blackness’, Charles White admitted, was the ‘discovery of black history’ (UCWP, White, ‘Charles White’, 1968: 57). As he explained, ‘I never knew Negroes wrote novels, that they wrote poetry, that they were outstanding leaders. . . I discovered Negro history. . . and man, it just blew my mind!’ (Ibid.). For Charles White, ‘[n]o theme is more demanding of you’, as a black artist, ‘than that of Negro history and their great national figures. For the people must be able to relate to those meaningful qualities of personality, that while universal are sacred to the depth of national pride’ (CWP 3190, White, ‘Memo’, 1956: 2). For this reason, he created numerous murals including: Five Great American Negroes (1939–40), A History of the Negro Press (1940), The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America (1943, see Plate 7) and Mary McLeod Bethune (1978). For White, the mural was the ‘strongest’ medium he could find because it offered him the ‘room’ to visualise the ‘beauty’, ‘dignity’ and ‘spiritual’ truth of the ‘inner-man’ (in Hoag, 1965: 13, 14). In these large-scale, full-colour and cubist inflected works, White represented important events and individuals from African American history. He encouraged black audiences to identify with his subjects by advocating a heroic continuum according to which the suffering of black families, workers, and activists were aggrandised in their juxtaposition with nineteenth-century historic and cultural leaders. These works were also inspired by his determination to oppose the denial of African American history in white mainstream culture. As a teenager, he had been furious to discover that the ‘book that was the standard book at that time for U.S. history devoted only one line to the 400 years of black history’ (UCWP, White, ‘Charles White’, 1968: 57).

White admitted that the creation of The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America was an ‘enormous job’ (in Hoag, 1965: 11; see Plate 7). He executed the mural in egg tempera directly on to an interior wall of the music department at Hampton University, a historically black college, where it still stands. Standing in front of this mural a year ago, I realised just how much is lost in small-scale reproductions. They fail to capture the intricacies of White’s black figures whose epic proportions reinforce their mythical status. White chose Hampton because he wanted to instil a sense of pride and heritage into African American university scholars. This town was also an apt location given that it was the place in which he had been forced to the back of a bus at gunpoint. For a painter who insisted his works were not satirical, it is difficult not to see an ironic subtext here. In general terms, the visual drama of this work derives from White’s experimentation with an abstract composition, symbolism and symmetry. As such, this mural can be compared with Romare Bearden’s later photomontage projections. Both epic-size works generate interpretative ambiguity in their crowded spatial arrangements and experimental colour symbolism.

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