A couple weeks ago, a new exhibit featuring 47 works by the great painter and print-maker Charles White went on display at the Art Museum on North Carolina Central University campus.
“Five Great American Negroes,” by Charles White
Photo credit: Federal Arts Project of Works Progress Administration
Shortly after completing “Five Great American Negroes,” in 1942 and 1943, White received consecutive Rosenwald grants that allowed him to travel the south and study art. Around the same time, White married another Rosenwald fellow Elizabeth Catlett.
Admission to the museum is free and the exhibit will be on display until December 21st.
On Monday evening, July 23rd, Harvard Law professor Dr. Kenneth Mack presented his new book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, to a spirited crowd at Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington D.C. Dr. Mack explained that, while the story of civil rights lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston is a familiar one to most people, his book is at once a more detailed history of the era and a reflection on the subjective experience of a group of characters who found themselves “representing their race” in the legal profession.
Dr. Mack read two passages from Representing the Race at Politics & Prose, the second of which dealt with a little known civil rights attorney named Pauli Murray who argued that legally there was no distinction between equal rights for blacks and equal rights for women, preferring to refer to them as a single issue: “human rights.” Mack treats her personal life in some depth in the book, explaining how her “unresolved crisis of identity,” as a biracial, potentially transgendered, individual, contributed to her drive to fight discrimination through the law. Because Murray was profoundly uncomfortable in society—due to her position at the margins of both race and gender—she serves as an ideal case study for Dr. Mack’s book. Like the other attorneys he discusses, Murray obtained a kind of agency and freedom from her individual discomfort by taking on the role of an outspoken trial lawyer for civil rights cases.
Murray graduated from Howard Law School in 1944 and, according to the Chicago Defender, received a Rosenwald Fund grant “to analyze the extension of minority rights under New Deal labor and social legislation and court rulings, and for graduate work at Harvard.” As the top graduate of Howard, Murray was a prime candidate for Harvard, but her application was denied because of her gender. Murray’s appeal of this decision to the Harvard administration is a great read and is published in Rebels in Law, Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers, edited by J. Clay Smith Jr. In it, she diplomatically argues for the practicality and inevitability of including women in the study of law but also uses wit in a revealing way. “Very recent medical examination reveals me to be a functionally normal woman with perhaps a ‘male slant’ on things, which may account for my insistence upon getting into Harvard.” This sounds cheeky if you haven’t read Dr. Mack’s book. In fact, Murray had actually requested examination by doctors to see if she was a hermaphrodite and had also explored the use of male hormone injections. Mack uses this quote to demonstrate how Murray’s personal incompatibility with existing social categories drove her “insistence” upon success in the legal battle against discrimination.
Murray’s connection to the Rosenwald Fund is an intriguing one. She later explained that in her application to the fund, she had stated she would like to attend Harvard Law but hadn’t yet been accepted. Then, when she saw in the newspaper that a grant was awarded for her to continue study at Harvard, she was as surprised as anyone. This public mix-up added fuel to the fire of her appeal. Although ultimately she was unsuccessful in her bid to attend Harvard (she went to University of California, Berkeley instead) the experience probably helped cement in her mind the congruence of discrimination against blacks and discrimination against women, which she summed up perfectly with the term “Jane Crow.” Murray was ahead of her time once again, but not by much. Just six years later, Harvard Law admitted its first female students, to little fanfare and almost no blowback from alumni.
Another Rosenwald fellow figures in Dr. Mack’s new book. Robert Lee Carter also attended Howard Law School and went on to become a high-ranking NAACP lawyer who argued in front of the Supreme Court during Brown v. Board of Education. Newspapers reported in 1940 that Carter had received a Rosenwald grant “For a study of the constitutional protection which American courts have given civil liberties since 1900, at Columbia University,” work that was pertinent to the legal argument that ultimately would demonstrate the unconstitutionality of institutionalized segregation. Mr. Carter passed away earlier this year.
Charles H. Houston, a key figure in the history of legal challenges to segregation, also has an interesting connection to the Rosenwald Schools. Houston, who was born in Washington D.C., went on to practice law in the area as well as instruct students such as Thurgood Marshall at Howard Law School. His career as a lawyer spanned the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, and included many important civil rights cases. Kenneth W. Mack’s new book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, gives an excellent background of Houston’s life and accomplishments.
Being a lawyer, Houston focused especially on the integration of the country’s legal system. At this time, segregation in the courts was different than the segregation faced by other professions, like doctors, teachers or small business owners. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed in 1899, since “a lawyer must have co-operation from fellow lawyers and respect and influence in court… prejudice or discrimination of any kind is especially felt in this profession.” Especially in the South, black attorneys were forced to put up with many hurdles and limits set up within the courtroom. In 1933, Houston accepted a case with which he could challenge the segregated Southern court system in Loudoun County, Virginia. In the murder trial of George Crawford, Houston set important precedents for the rights of black attorneys to argue major cases and the importance of black participation in juries.
Although Houston did not live to see the Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a project he undertook during the fall of 1934 played a major role in the landmark verdict. During this time, Houston traveled to the South and filmed black schools in order to document the inequalities under Jim Crow segregation. These films (funded by a philanthropic organization out of New York, the Harmon Foundation) went on to be used as a vital exhibit in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (four years after Houston’s death).
These films are important to our project on Julius Rosenwald for an unlikely reason. While they were meant to demonstrate the failure of school districts to maintain black schools (the intertitles point out that the roofs and windows are in need of repair) they remain as possibly the oldest moving images of Rosenwald Schools. Houston’s footage of what is believed to be the Bethel Grade School in South Carolina will be featured in the upcoming documentary, The Rosenwald Schools, a clip from which can be viewed here:
In addition to breaking down the barriers of segregation in the legal system, Houston was a great believer in the importance of equal educational opportunity. In 1935, he claimed that “Discrimination in education is symbolic of all the more drastic discriminations which Negroes suffer in American life” (quoted in Genna Rae McNeil and A. Leon Higginbotham’s biography, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights). Like Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington before him, Houston fought for equality in education for all.
Last week, on April 19th and 20th, Howard University presented the Blackwell Memorial Conference, two years after Dr. David Blackwell passed away at the age of 91. Dr. Blackwell taught at both Howard and UC Berkeley, but before receiving these prestigious appointments he received some important assistance from the Rosenwald Fund. The New York Times recalled in his obituary that, in 1941, “[after] being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.” This was an important post-doctoral appointment for the young scholar, and his work was “groundbreaking” in spite of the racial discrimination he faced.
David Blackwell in 1967
Photo Credit: Konrad Jacobs, Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH
Most of the papers in the conference were academic, discussing his many contributions to the fields of statistics and mathematics. However, several of the papers are more personal, including remembrances of his style as a teacher, his transformational and inspirational effect on Howard University and thoughts on how to increase educational access in the future for growing minority groups.
Blackwell is remembered by another conference as well. Since 2000, a biannual event called The Blackwell-Tapia Conference has been held at various mathematical science institutes around North America. In addition to providing a meeting place for researchers, the event is accompanied by the awarding of the Blackwell-Tapia prize, which goes to a mathematical scientist who has significantly contributed to his field and also served as a role model for aspiring minority students in the mathematical sciences. This year’s event will be held in November, 2012 at Brown University.
Elizabeth Catlett, painter, sculptor and former Rosenwald fellow, passed away Monday in her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. in 1915 but moved around a lot as a student and artist, spending time at black universities such as Howard, Hampton and Dillard and also studying at the University of Iowa and the Art Institute of Chicago. Catlett’s large body of work cements her status as one of the great African American artists of the 20th century, and her obituaries note that she was one of the last remaining links to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s. Catlett was also married to another Rosenwald fellow, artist Charles White.
One of Catlett’s best-known works, a series of linoleum-block prints called The Negro Woman, was created with the help of consecutive Rosenwald fellowships in 1946 and 1947. The abstract black and white images in this series include portraits of black women doing everyday tasks, pictures of black luminaries such as Harriet Tubman and striking images of segregation and labor organization. The images are made more powerful by their bold and matter of fact titles, such as “I have always worked hard in America” and “My right is a future of equality with other Americans.” A print from this series belonging to the Whitney Museum can be viewed online here.
“Singing Head,” Elizabeth Catlett, 1980
Photo Credit: Michael Rose
Property of Smithsonian American Art Museum
It was the Rosenwald fellowship that initially brought Catlett to Mexico, where she spent the latter half of her life. According to Daniel Schulman’s essay in A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Catlett spent the first year of her fellowship thinking creatively about how to make a sophisticated artwork that would still communicate to a mass audience. At the same time, Catlett was honing her printmaking craft (which she first studied at Howard) at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a political printmaking collective in Mexico. The Rosenwald grant allowed Catlett the freedom to gradually develop The Negro Woman, which Schulman, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, called “[maybe] the most successfully realized and powerful project to have emerged from a Rosenwald Fellowship.”
Harry Crews
Author and University of Florida professor of creative writing Harry Crews, who also passed away within the last week (March 28th) spoke of a connection to Sears in his early life. Crews grew up in rural Georgia in a household that contained only two books, the Bible and the “Consumer’s Bible,” the annual Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue. As a child, he would make up stories with friends while paging through the catalogue, riffing on its idealized images.
Crews recounted this method of creative storytelling for a 2003 documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (IMDb), a scene from which can be seen here. “See, when I was a boy, the Sears Roebuck catalogue […] came to everybody’s mailbox in the South,” says Crews in the documentary. “First thing that struck us was everybody in the Sears Roebuck catalogue was perfect. Wasn’t any baldheads, everybody had all the fingers that was coming to ‘em. Nobody had any open and running sores on their bodies. But everybody we knew had a finger missing or one eye put out from a staple glancing off a post. In other words, everybody in our world was maimed and mutilated whereas everybody in the Sears Roebuck world was perfect. And so we just started to tell stories about the people. We’d give them names.”
“Five Great American Negroes,” by Charles White
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