Aaron Douglas. Aspects of Negro Life: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Aaron Douglas. Aspects of Negro Life:
From Slavery through Reconstruction (detail). 1934.
© 2020 Heirs of Aaron Douglas.
All Douglas images are licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), Nueva York.

Aaron Douglas and
Aspects of Negro Life *

LEAH DICKERMAN

The murals look down on me and I can look up at
them for relief and pleasure and support when any
of the so-called superior race comes to look at our
wonders.

—Arturo Alfonso Schomburg1

In many ways, Jacob Lawrence grew up at the 135th Street branch of the
New York City Public Library in Harlem, now the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture. Lawrence joined history clubs and took art classes
allá. He showed his first works there. So perhaps it is not surprising that in
1941, before he picked up a brush to paint his sixty-panel Migration Series
addressing the mass exodus of Black Americans from the rural South to the
urban North, he went to the library, spending months in the reading room as he
researched his topic. While there, he would have visited with a work that had
become familiar, almost familial: Aaron Douglas’s epic four-panel mural series,
Aspects of Negro Life (1934).

*
An early version of this essay appeared as “An American Scene: Aaron Douglas and Aspects of
Negro Life” in a special issue of Marg magazine on Art and Conflict (Junio 2020), edited by Glenn D. Lowry,
páginas. 84–93. Much of the writing and thought that transformed this essay from the form in which it appears
there to its current incarnation took place in the spring and summer of 2020, during the shock waves of
the COVID-19 pandemic, the deaths of George Floyd and so many others and the racial reckoning they
prompted, and the spectacle of a base and corrupt president who often invoked the myths of the Lost
Cause. This essay has been shaped by all of these things, and also by the ways in which research departed
from normal access to books, archives, and libraries. I have often used Kindle and other electronic edi-
ciones, have made use of digitally accessible materials, and have checked archival sources via email. El
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, now more than ever, remains an invaluable place to
engage with a heritage of ideas. Special thanks to Kevin Young, Michelle Commander, and Tammi
Lawson. Emily Stoller-Patterson and Francesca Lo Galbo provided critical research assistance. Homi
Bhabha, Laura Brodie, Rachel Churner, Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, Jennifer Harris, David Joselit, Adán
Lehner, and Khalil J. Muhammad all offered thoughtful comments at various junctures along the way. I
am grateful for such a community of friends and colleagues.

1.
Syretta McFadden, “Harlem’s Schomburg Center: Celebrating History and Culture of the
Black Experience,” Carnegie Reporter, Noviembre 1, 2019. https://www.carnegie.org/news/articles/
harlems-schomburg-center-celebrating-history-and-culture-black-experience/.

OCTUBRE 174, Caer 2020, páginas. 126–162. © 2020 Revista Octubre, Limitado. y el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00411

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128

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W.. mi. B. Du Bois and the staff of The Crisis at the magazine’s offices. Date unknown.

Douglas was almost two decades older than Lawrence, an eminence within
Lawrence’s midst and the visual artist perhaps most closely associated with the
Harlem Renaissance. In the library panels, which answered a call to represent “an
American scene” from the first major program of federal support for the arts in
the country, Douglas traced the trajectory of African-American history in four
stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America;
through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; y
then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas
constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America
seen through Black eyes. One can imagine that it framed the younger artist’s
thinking—that it offered a prompt—as Lawrence worked on a migration story of
su propia. In looking to Douglas, Lawrence was not alone: Douglas forged a model,
keenly resonant with the generation to come, of how one might be Black,
Americano, and an artist.

“I had hardly reached the city,” wrote Douglas of his arrival in New York in
summer 1925, “before I was called upon to produce cover designs and drawings
and sketches to be used for illustrating texts of various kinds for both The Crisis

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

129

and Opportunity magazines.”2 The commissions provided entry into Harlem’s intel-
ligentsia, an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included
W.. mi. B. Du Bois, the co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of The Crisis; sociolo-
gist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo
Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Rich conversations across the
next decade—about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in
African-American was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American
modernism might be—were crucial to determining Douglas’s approach to the
trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels.3 Looking at Douglas’s visu-
al narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-
building, art-making, history-writing, and criticism came together not only to
shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism
framed through diaspora.

Douglas in Harlem

At the time of Douglas’s appearance in Harlem, the circle notably lacked a
visual artist. Charles Johnson, who was the editor and co-founder of Opportunity,
the house organ of the National Urban League, seems to have felt this to be a
disadvantage. Johnson met Douglas—the child of migrants to Kansas and a
recent graduate of the University of Nebraska, where he had been the first Black
student in the fine-arts department—at an Urban League convention in Kansas
City. He attempted to recruit the young artist to Harlem, launching a campaign
in which at least three enthusiastic letter-writing emissaries encouraged Douglas
to move: Eric Walrond, Ethel Ray Nance, and Gwendolyn Bennett.4 Despite the
hard press, it seems Douglas decided to join the cultural revolution happening
in New York only after reading the March 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic on
young writers in Harlem, which was put together by Alain Locke and the jour-

2.
Aaron Douglas, “The Harlem Renaissance” speech (ca. 1970), the Aaron Douglas Collection
1937–1974, Box 3, Folder 3, Douglas Papers, Fisk University Archives; cited in Amy Helene Kirschke,
Aaron Douglas: Arte, Race and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 1995), pag. 12.
Kirschke deals briefly with the Schomburg cycle, páginas. 121–24.

3.
Harlem’s emergence as a cultural center is, por supuesto, well-trodden terrain: The stage that it
provided for a modernism that put Blackness at its center has been explored, especially in its literary
formas, in groundbreaking texts including: Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the
1920s (Nueva York: Noonday Press, 1995); Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American
Cultura (Londres: Prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1997); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard University Press,
2003); Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Mineápolis: Graywolf Press, 2012);
and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Nueva York: norton, 2019).

4.
Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, páginas. 55–56; Cheryl R. Ragar, “Plunging into the Very Depths of the
Souls of Our People: The Life and Art of Aaron Douglas” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2008), pag. 66.
Ragar describes the formative impact of his midwestern upbringing in chapter 1, páginas. 48–73.

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130

OCTUBRE

nal’s editor, Paul Kellogg. Él
era, Douglas recalled, "el
most cogent single factor
that eventually turned my
face to New York.”5

“We may be altogether
wrong,” Kellogg had written
to George Peabody of the
proyecto, “but we think we
sense a new approach—grow-
ing out of the northward
migrations and the city envi-
ronment—the silver lining of
the injurious circumstances
you speak of; the Negro
expressing himself not
against something but for
something and so break with
the Du Bois tradition.”6 At
the first Oppor tunity magazine
dinner on March 21, 1924, en
the Civic Club, organized as a
strategic gathering of interra-
cial literati for, as Johnson
put it, “frank and unapolo-
getic discussion of subjects
long tabooed,” Locke an –
nounced the coming of a new
gen eration.7 Kellogg in turn proposed to Johnson and Locke that they dedicate an
issue of the mainstream, left-leaning journal to these emerging writers: Locke would
be the co-editor. For Locke, the Survey Graphic issue was a tactic in a larger effort to
craft the activities of this younger generation of Harlem-based thinkers—urban and
urbane, race-proud and confident in voice-—into something larger, something that
could be named.

Winold Reiss. Cover of Survey
Graphic. Marzo 1925.

For illustrations, Kellogg turned, surprisingly to some, to the Munich-trained
modernist Winold Reiss, who had gained some renown for painting sensitive and
dignified portraits of Native Americans, especially the Blackfeet of Montana, como

5.
Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, pag. 13.

douglas, “The Harlem Renaissance” speech, Box 3, Folder 3, Douglas Papers, Fisk; cited in

6.
Helbing, “African Art: Albert C. Barnes and Alain Locke,” Phylon 43, No. 1 (1982), pag. 60.

Paul Kellogg to George Peabody, Marzo 13, 1925, University of Minnesota; cited in Mark

7.
(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2018), pag. 410.

Johnson to V. F. Calverton, cited in Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

131

well as of Mexican workers and revolutionaries in Tepotzotlán and Cuernavaca.8
Kellogg invited him to create a gallery of portraits of “Harlem types” for the issue,
though it seems Kellogg did not know many “types” and asked Locke for help in
arranging for subjects.9 Locke shared his collaborator’s admiration for Reiss’s
closely observed Neue Sachlichkeit style, praising the artist for his ability to “portray
the soul and spirit of a people” and setting his work against restrictive norms of
beauty and the many caricatured representations of Black subjects: “Here they are
seen as we know them to be in fact.”10

Along with these images, Locke gathered essays for the issue on philoso-
phy, historia, anthropology, música, poetry, Y arte, as well as stately declarations,
short stories, and poems. The range of contributors ultimately crossed racial,
étnico, and national boundaries, a kind of “fusing of sentiment and experience,"
a “great race welding,” as Locke wrote in his introductory essay.11 This critical
gathering across disciplines allowed the issue to function as a calling card-—
proof of the presence of a new sensibility that was brave, thrilling, frank, y
fractious—saying, en efecto, “We are here.” “Our poets have now stopped speak-
ing for the Negro—they speak as Negroes,” Locke wrote of the freedom felt by
this new generation to write about whatever they wished. The issue succeeded in
pushing certain writers, all of whom confidently addressed the subject of
Blackness, into the public eye.

In the wake of the issue’s striking success, the publisher Albert Boni pro-
posed an expanded book-length version in the hopes that it would reach the
shelves of libraries and schools. This second iteration would be titled The New
Negro: An Interpretation; the term and the concept of the “New Negro” was not
Locke’s innovation, though the book did much to popularize it. As the critic and
historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has written about the topic many times over
his career, points out: “There couldn’t exist a New Negro without some condem-
nation of the Old Negro.”12 This essential modern figure emerged in the decades
of the Jim Crow assault on Black rights supported by a white-supremacist ideology
that was dependent on a vision of Black humanity as lesser. Urban and race-proud,
the “New Negro” seized creative and political agency.13 In this sense, this protago-
nist was the avatar of the Great Migration, of those thousands and ultimately mil-
lions who left the rural South for cities northward in pursuit of safety, opportunity,
and dignity, who voted with their feet in a leaderless mass revolution.

For this volume, Locke extended an invitation to Douglas-—now Reiss’s
student thanks to an introduction arranged by Johnson-—to contribute illustra-

8.
Life of Alain Locke, páginas. 480–81.

Regarding criticism of Kellogg and Locke’s choice of Reiss, see Stewart, The New Negro: El

10.

11.

Ibídem., pag. 438.

Alain Locke, “Harlem Types,” Survey Graphic 53, No. 11 (Marzo 1925), páginas. 651, 652.

Ibídem., pag. 630.

12.
(Londres: Penguin Press, 2019), pag. xvii.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

13.

Ibídem.

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132

OCTUBRE

douglas. Illustration from The New Negro: An Interpretation.
© 2020 Heirs of Aaron Douglas.

tions as well.14 Douglas followed Reiss’s cue in making bold “drawings and decora-
tive designs”15 that drew inspiration from African masks and sculptures. With this
first important commission, a Harlem debut in the pages of Locke’s already famous
manifesto-anthology, Douglas began to define the vocabulary with which he would
work for the rest of his career—sharp-edged graphic forms with silhouetted and geo-
metricized figures shown in profile. In most of these simple but powerful images,
Douglas gives equal weight to black and white: Neither sits as background, defining
only negative space; bastante, form is produced in the interrelation.

Two full-page illustrations by Douglas—“Roll, Jordán, Roll” and “An’ the Stars
Began to Fall”—prefaced a new text by Locke on “The Negro Spirituals.” At the con-
clusion of the essay, the full musical notation of two spirituals drawn from early collec-
tions of folk songs were reprinted. These graphic bookends—Douglas’s images on
one side, the songs on the other—flank Locke’s claim that spirituals were

the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America. . . .
It may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is
America’s folk song; but if the Spirituals are what we think them to be,
a classic folk expression, then this is their ultimate destiny.16

14.
Charles Johnson arranged for Douglas to meet Reiss. Reiss’s studio was the first professional
artist’s studio Douglas had seen, and Reiss accepted him as a student without fees. Romare Bearden
and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: De 1792 to the Present (Nueva York: Pantheon,
1993), pag. 128. On the relationship between Douglass and Reiss, see Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, páginas. 59–64,
and also Jeffrey Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, páginas. 460–62, 473, 480–86.

15.
Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), pag. xvii.

“Drawings and decorative designs” is the description given in the list of illustrations in Alain

16.

Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in The New Negro, pag. 199.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

133

Locke was launching the refrain,
harmonized throughout the volume,
that Black culture is American culture:
It feeds what is distinctive about
American culture itself.

Douglas also spoke of spirituals
as the touchstone of his own efforts to
fulfill the commission. He described
himself as seeking to channel the
mindset of the enslaved singer in
attempting to create a visual idiom
analogous to that “most characteris-
tic” expression of race genius:

I shall not attempt to describe
my feelings as I first tried to
objectify with paint and brush
what I thought to be the visual
emanation or expressions that
came into view with the sounds
produced by the old black
song makers of antebellum
días, when they first began to
put together snatches and bits
of Protestant hymns, a lo largo de
with half-remembered tribal
chants, lullabies and work
songs. These later became the
early outlines of our spirituals,
sorrow songs and blues.17

douglas. Illustration from The New
Negro: An Interpretation.
© 2020 Heirs of Aaron Douglas.

Already Douglas was setting his work in a relation to a distant heritage, if one
that was half-remembered and not quite graspable across the distance of genera-
ciones. And he understands the process of producing distinctive forms of African-
American artistic expression as one of hybridization, of bringing together diverse cul-
tural idioms into something new and quintessentially American.

Douglas’s graphic figures appear throughout the volume—on the colophon
and as headpieces, tailpieces, and section breaks for individual essays, as well as
full-page illustrations—framing its texts with a profusion of visual markers.18

17.

douglas, “Harlem Renaissance” speech; cited in Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, pag. 62.

18.
Douglas’s work on The New Negro volume cemented the artist’s relationship to the writers
championed within to the degree that in the years following his distinctive graphic work seemed almost
to function as a signature imprint. He provided illustrations to many titles, including James Weldon
Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Poems (1927); the second edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man (long thought to be memoir; also by Johnson) (1912/1927); Langston Hughes, Six Poems:
Opportunity Art Folio (1926); Locke and Gregory Montgomery, Plays of Negro Life: A Sourcebook of Native
American Drama (1927); and Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1927) and Banjo (1929).

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134

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En efecto, the book, in a much more pronounced way than that of the original
Survey Graphic issue, staged a series of graphic interventions. Locke ended up cajol-
ing his artist and writer friends, many of whom he also tapped for contributions, a
sit for portraits by Reiss, which appeared in the volume and helped to define a
New Negro pantheon.19 Photographic reproductions of African works from Alfred
Barnes’s collection were also published, including masks from the Baule and
Bushongo and a Dahomey bronze. Along with these were reprinted pages of sheet
música, transcribed recordings of folklore by Arthur Huff Fauset, and the title
pages of rare books drawn from Arturo Schomburg’s collection, incluido
Frederick Douglass’s short fictional tale of rebellion, The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling
Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington (1852); the thesis of Jacobus Elisa
Johannes Capitein (1742), OMS, forcibly taken from his Ghanaian family, became
one of the first sub-Saharan Africans to study at a European university and be
ordained as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church; and the enslaved poet
Jupiter Hammon’s Address to the Negroes in the State of New York (1787). Houston A.
Baker Jr. was right when he wrote that Locke’s anthology represented a “broaden-

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19.

Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, páginas. 461–62.

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Reiss. Alain Leroy Locke.

Ca. 1925. © Estate of Winold Reiss.

Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

135

ing and enlargement of the field of traditional Afro-American discursive possibili-
ties.”20 The volume made a visual claim, knitting together Black cultural produc-
tion across national boundaries and periods using sound, story, images, y
rhetoric. It defined its subject not as Black people or Black history but as the cul-
tural manifestations of Blackness.

In his introduction, Locke took a strong stance: Developing a “race litera-
ture” and art was critical for the advancement of Black political aims. Locke
made this argument with keen awareness of the flood of caricatures and images
of prejudice—of “‘aunties,’ ‘uncles,’ and ‘mammies’”21—that sustained the
creed of Black intellectual inferiority at the core of white-supremacist ideology
in the post–Civil War period, as Gates, among others, has described.22 But writ-
ers of a younger generation seemed “suddenly to have slipped from under the
tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation
and implied inferiority.”23 Against this backdrop, Locke saw the flourishing of
Black cultural expression as the pathway to the liberation of the mind from the
social and ideological trauma of racism, the “repair of a damaged group psychol-
ogy.”24 Culture was the way the achievements of a people might be judged, a
means to disprove assertions of inferiority.

It was a point of frustration for Locke that younger African-Americans, so he
believed, were blind to their own cultural legacy, binding themselves to academic
traditions and white perspectives and relinquishing their African heritage. en contra-
contraste, certain members of the European avant-garde—Pablo Picasso, for one—had
recognized the power of African art in reimagining plastic form. “It is thus, un
African influence at second remove upon our younger Negro modernist painters
and sculptors,” Locke argued. “In being modernistic, they are indirectly being
African.”25 He proposed forging a more direct link by turning to African art and
explicitly embracing Black heritage and authorship, to create a race-proud mod-
ernism.26 (“Nothing is more galvanizing than a sense of a cultural past,” Locke had
written the year before.)27 In making this argument, Locke was pointing to a cen-
tral irony of European modernism: In its claims to break with what had come
antes, it appropriated the traditions of non-Western art but subordinated Black

20.
Prensa, 2013), pag. 73.

Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (chicago: University of Chicago

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, pag. 5.

Gates, Stony the Road, páginas. xv, xviii, 4, 125–36.

Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, pag. 4.

Ibídem., pag. 10.

Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, pag. 264.

Ibídem., pag. 256.

27.
Alain Locke, “A Note on African Art,” Opportunity 17 (Puede 1924), pag. 138, in Ethel M.
Vaughan Ellis, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, Cumulative Index, vols. 1–27, 1923–1949 (Nueva York:
Kraus Reprint, 1971).

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136

OCTUBRE

creativity as primitive, relegating it to
a primal, unchanging past.28 The
Black modernism Locke envisioned
would assert ties that were both prior
and more authentic to European
modernism’s animating source.

Alfred Barnes was among the
first to collect and display African
objects as art in this country—as well
as to develop a theory of formal con-
noisseurship for evaluating them. Él
had built his African holdings swiftly
in the years between 1922 y 1924,
largely through bulk purchases
through the French dealer Paul
Guillaume, and housed them at the
educational foundation in Merion,
Pensilvania, that he had founded in
1922 and opened in 1925.29 Members
of Douglas’s circle saw the proximity
of a great collection of African art as
a catalyst for their goal of nurturing a
new American race consciousness.
Charles
Johnson highlighted
Barnes’s collection in a special issue
of Opportunity published in May 1924. An unsigned editorial, presumably by
Johnson, predicted that the presence of such a collection of African artwork in the
United States would prompt greater recognition of Black contributions to
American culture: “Soon primitive Negro art will invade this country as it has
invaded Europe. And there will come a new valuation of the contribution of
Negroes, past and yet possible, to American life and culture.”30 Locke invited
Barnes to contribute an essay and reproductions of works from his collection to
the New Negro anthology, while James Weldon Johnson encouraged Barnes to
award scholarships to talented young Black artists to study his collection—which
brought together both extraordinary African and modern French holdings.

Cover of Opportunity: A Journal of
Negro Life. Puede 1924.

28.
In his new book Heritage and Debt, David Joselit speaks of the way the West made claims to
possess the future in the realms of technology and culture, thus relegating the rest of the world to the
pasado. Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art and Globalization (Cambridge MA: CON prensa, 2020).

29.
and the Harlem Renaissance (Nueva York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015), páginas. 21–71.

See Christa Clarke’s account, African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre

30.

Alain Locke, “Dr. Barnes,” Opportunity 17 (Puede 1924), pag. 133.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

137

Johnson nominated four candidates, two of whom—Douglas and Gwendolyn
Bennett—began to study there in October 1927.31

Douglas had first visited Merion in April 1926, writing to Barnes afterwards:

Thus far the “new consciousness” among Negroes has produced noth-
ing of value in the plastic arts. This is due mainly to the three hun-
dred years of bondage separating the American Negro from the roots
of his native traditions and culture; y, to the substitution of alien
culture and ideals, cual, even among those to the manor born have
never proven, especially fertil [sic] soil for the cultivation of the arts.
Never-the-less, it now seems only a matter of time before the
American Negro will learn again to express himself in plastic forms
original and enduring.32

This sense of being ready to enter onto the stage of history—the “matter of
time” noted here—seems to refer to Douglas himself as much as to any broader
cultural reckoning.

Douglas had already set his direction. Writing to Langston Hughes in

December 1925, he defined the path before him:

Your problem, Langston, my problem, no our problem is to conceive,
develop, and establish an art era. Not white art painted black. . . . Let’s
bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain,
through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very
depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough,
neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it.33

Douglas’s use of the word “souls” is precise: It invokes W. mi. B. Du Bois’s pro-
foundly influential book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), framing his own thinking
within the psychic crisis that Du Bois describes. In his opening essay, Du Bois,
insisting on the importance of Black subjectivity, defines the tension produced
through the experience of being Black in America. He writes of living in a world
in which one can see oneself only through the eyes of others, a condition he
famously speaks of as a kind of “double consciousness”: “One ever feels his
twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striv-
ings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it

31.

Clarke, African Art in the Barnes Foundation, pag. 62.

32.
Aaron Douglas to Alfred Barnes, Abril 6, 1926, Barnes Foundation Archive; cited in Clarke,
African Art in the Barnes Foundation, pag. 63. On the tension that developed in the relationship between
Douglas and Barnes, see Kirschke, Aaron Douglas, páginas. 105–09.

Aaron Douglas to Langston Hughes, December 21, 1925, Langston Hughes Papers, James
33.
Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Arts and Letters, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale
Universidad, nuevo refugio.

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138

OCTUBRE

from being torn asunder.”34 Du Bois emphasizes collective trauma—a splitting of
consciousness that resonates, in its simultaneous acceptance and rejection of social
reality, with Freudian models of the unconscious just being defined in these years.
Instead of the individual, the group is subject to traumatic shock.35 As Du Bois
would assert, the fracture is produced in framing not only African-Americans
through white eyes but also America itself. For it was not just that the Black citizen
was American, but also that America—its cities, cultura, and population—was
Negro, and its Blackness could not be filtered out.36 In his murals for the library,
Douglas seems to ask: What image of America would bring together these perspec-
tives—that of being Black and of being an American? What image would make
them whole?

Diasporic Thinking

The intellectual origins of a pan-national “race consciousness” that
embraced African cultural heritage are multiple. What is clear: Such conscious-
ness of race did not come from Africa itself, as Isabel Wilkerson reminds us in
her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). “Africans are not
Negro,” she reports one Nigerian-born interlocutor telling her. “They are Igbo
and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not Black.”37 One pathway to race
consciousness can be seen in Locke’s own evolution. In the fall of 1911, Locke
returned to the United States after four years of study abroad as the first Black
recipient of a Rhodes scholarship. (At Oxford, he was among those who
launched the African Union Society, whose mandate was to encourage “a wide
interest in such matters as affect the welfare of the race in Africa and all other
parts of the world.”)38 John Edward Bruce, president of the New York–based
Negro Society for Historical Research founded just a few months earlier to pro-
mote the study of Black history, welcomed the young scholar to speak at his
Yonkers residence in front of a gathering of the group’s members in early

34.

W.. mi. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Nueva York: Amazon Classics Edition, 2017), pag. 3.

35.
The resonance with Freudian thought is striking. Perhaps we can understand it in relation to
what sociologist Robert K. Merton has called “multiples”—independent, simultaneous intellectual dis-
coveries. Many have discussed the origins of Du Bois’s use of “double consciousness,” often pointing to
his studies of Hegel in Berlin and studies with William James at Harvard. Ver, entre otros, Henry
Louis Gates Jr., “The Black Letters on the Sign: W.. mi. B. Du Bois and the Canon,” series introduction,
in W. mi. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), páginas. 4–5. For more on the Hegelian strain of Du Bois’s thought, see Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W.. mi. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard
Prensa universitaria, 2014).

36.
Letters on the Sign,” páginas. 5–6.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, páginas. 218–25. Gates stresses this latter point in “Black

37.

38.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Nueva York: Random House, 2020), pag. 53.

Cited in Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, pag. 45.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

139

December.39 Schomburg, a co-founder and secretary-treasurer of the Society,
attended: It was likely where he and Locke first met. In Locke’s talk that
evening, “The Question of a Race Tradition,” a variation of one that he would
give several times that year, the twenty-six-year-old posed the question of
“whether or not the Negro wishes to have a separate history, apart from the gen-
eral history of this country?”40 The frame for understanding Black experience,
he argued, was not that of nation but that of a “race culture” that extended
across boundaries along the vectors of migration and dispersal. “Our involuntary
transportation is analogous to the colonial Americans’ voluntary revolution,” he
declared. “We must, like him, go back to claim as tradition and culture all we
have broken with as government and authority.”41 Rather than a sentimental
view of the past, what was needed was a period of “reconstructive scholarship” to
build a new understanding of a “heritage of ideas.”42

When Locke spoke to the gathering of eminent elders in Yonkers in 1911,
the word diaspora was not yet used to describe the dispersal of peoples of African
descent. The term—with its origins in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible
and the story of the exodus of the Jews after the destruction of the Second
Temple—was used in English from the mid-nineteenth century to refer to the
scattering of Jewish populations as a historical and demographic event, and it
arrived in the vocabulary of Black studies in the 1950s and ’60s.43 Black interna-
tionalism, sin embargo, was well established. African-American thinkers and activists
had sought to align with an international Black community, including at the first
Pan-African meeting organized by opponents of colonialism in 1900. Du Bois
picked up the mantle after World War I, organizing Pan-African congresses with

39.
Elinor Des Verney Sinnette notes in her biography of Schomburg that Locke delivered the
talk in Yonkers on December 9. Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Collector
(Detroit: New York Public Library and Wayne State University Press, 1989), pag. 45; Stewart says
December 12 in The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, pag. 228.

40.
Alain Locke, “The Question of a Race Tradition” (1911), clipping, exact date and place of
publication unknown, Schomburg Papers, SC Mico R-2798, Reel 10, Frame 0783, Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture. As far as I can ascertain, this talk has not been otherwise pub-
lished or preserved.

41.

Ibídem.

42.
Alain Locke Papers; see Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, pag. 227.

Ibídem. A variation of this idea appears in Locke, “The Negro and a Race Tradition” (1911),

43.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Harvard
University Press, 1995), páginas. 205–08; Krista Thompson, “A Side Long Glance: The Practice of African
Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art Journal 70, No. 3 (Caer 2011), pag. 8; Brent Hayes Edwards,
“The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66, volumen. 19, No. 1 (Primavera 2001), páginas. 45– 73. Gilroy’s landmark study
helps us see the radicalism of Locke’s thinking, which in many ways anticipates Gilroy’s own. (A paint-
ing by Douglas graces its cover, though neither he nor Locke play major roles within.) Gilroy describes
the concept of the Black Atlantic as a means to counter certain ways that we often speak about mod-
ernism and modernity: its national boundaries; its linear narratives; the absence of concern with race
or ethnicity; the complicity that modernisms have with regimes of power; stresses on originality and the
view of tradition as repetition or derivation rather than a catalyst for innovation.

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140

OCTUBRE

allies in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, y 1945 that aimed to discuss and coordinate
the common political interests of peoples of African descent. “Pan-Africa,” Du
Bois would famously declare in an article in The Crisis in 1933, the year before
Douglas began work on his series for the library, “means intellectual understand-
ing and co-operation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about
at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the
Negro peoples.”44 (En 1915, as he launched himself into the role of international
organizer, Du Bois also wrote The Negro, a history of the race, over half of which
was dedicated to African history, crafting it so that, as John K. Thornton writes in
the introduction to the Oxford edition of the book, “African history had move-
mento . . . and Africans were seen as historical actors.”)45 In Locke’s thinking, cómo-
alguna vez, we can begin to discern something new, an emergent idea of diaspora—
though he didn’t use that pivotal word—understood not as a historical or demo-
graphic event, a mass dispersal of population under duress, nor as an alliance
around common political interests, but rather as a cultural theory. Connecting
the descendants of Africa in a transcultural formation, Locke begins to articulate
a dynamic concept of heritage bound by neither nation nor ethnicity. It is a pre-
scient idea, one with echoes in the later writings of thinkers such as Amiri
Baraka, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, Saidiya Hartmann, Huey
Copeland, Krista Thompson, y otros.

“As with the Jew,” Locke would later note in the introduction to The New
Negro, “persecution is making the Negro international.”46 Jewish thought on dias-
pora may have sparked Locke’s thinking, his biographer Jeffrey Stewart sug-
gests.47 Locke attended the First Universal Races Congress in London in July
1911, the first international conclave of its type, as its name suggested, organizado
by Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture Society. The sociologist Georg
Simmel was there, and Du Bois attended as leader of the American delegation,
offering a hymn that he had written as a sort of benediction: “Save us, Mundo
Spirit, from our lesser selves! Grant us that war and hatred cease, Reveal our
souls in every race and hue!”48 Simmel and Du Bois took their places alongside
others attracted to the gathering including Mahatma Gandhi, Annie Besant,
Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Franz Boas. With such a list, tal vez
it is not surprising that the topic of inquiry seems to have been modernity itself,
with race as the constitutive frame.

44.
1933), pag. 247.

W.. mi. B. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa and the New Racial Philosophy,” The Crisis 40 (Noviembre

45.
and the Canon,” Introduction to Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pag. xxi.

Thornton cited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Black Letters on the Sign: W.. mi. B. Du Bois

46.

Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, pag. 14.

47.
Jewish sources in the idea of “diaspora”; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, páginas. ix, 144, 206–08.

Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, páginas. 219–20. Gilroy stresses the fertile link with

48.
Quarterly 20, No. 4 (1959), páginas. 372–78.

Elliott M. Rudwick, “W. mi. B. Dubois and the Universal Races Congress of 1911,” The Phlyon

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

141

At the conference, Locke listened with particular attention to Israel
Zangwill’s talk, “The Jewish Race,” in which the writer and Zionist activist focused
on the “real Jewish problem”—that of the preservation of Jewish identity and cul-
ture across dispersed populations.49 Modern Jews’ hearty embrace of their adopt-
ed cultures gave them a “chameleon quality,” he argued, as the greatest students
and proponents of the national heritage of the places in which they lived.50 “If a
Russian Jew, [Bernard] Berenson, is the chief authority on Italian art, and George
Brandes, the Dane, is Europe’s greatest critic . . . all these phenomena find their
explanation in the cosmopolitanism of the wandering Jew.”51 With this pull to
assimilation, preservation of Jewish identity as a displaced nation required that
Jews themselves develop a racial self-consciousness, Zangwill suggested. The mes-
sage seems to have resonated with Locke.

In his Yonkers talk a few months later, Locke argued that the foundation
for a race history required reaching back beyond “the trauma of the slavery
experience” and the “sentimental ties which bind us to the Abolitionist period”
to an African past.52 “We cannot afford to let our regard for our immediate past
[in the United States] blind us to the remote racial past [in Africa],” he argued.
Locke was proposing a diasporic identity that he would call “group” or “race
consciousness.”53 “The historical dilemma of the American Negro,” he reflected,
“is the painful position of standing between two heritages, one lost, the other
not fully realized.”54

The Library

Following the Yonkers talk, Arturo Schomburg forged an alliance of sorts with
the young scholar. Locke, who was named an associate member of the Society, would
prepare bibliographies, suggest books to read and purchase, and answer research
questions for Schomburg. Schomburg, in turn, seems to have been spurred by the
relationship to lead campaigns as bibliophile-in-chief, amassing books, manuscripts,
prints, and other materials that testified to the historical and cultural achievements of
people of African descent.55 Schomburg also deputized Locke to acquire things for
the collection on his travels, listing materials he wished to buy and the shops and
dealers to visit in order to do so. Soon, others were asked to perform roles, con

49.

Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, pag. 219.

50.
Londres, 1911, Londres: P.S. Rey & Hijo, páginas. 268–79.

Ibídem. and Israel Zangwill, “The Jewish Race,” First Universal Races Congress, University of

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

Zangwill, “The Jewish Race.”

Locke, “The Question of a Race Tradition,” unpaginated.

Por ejemplo, Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, páginas. 7, 14.

Locke, “The Question of a Race Tradition,” unpaginated.

Sinnette, Schomburg, páginas. 46, 88–89.

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Hughes and James Weldon Johnson acting as agents in acquiring books and other
materials on Schomburg’s behalf.56

Schomburg was a migrant from Puerto Rico, where his parents had themselves
been migrants—his mother was a Black woman from the Virgin Islands and his father
was from Germany and of mixed race. Schomburg later described his motivation in
collecting the documents of Black history as a reaction against the denial of that his-
conservador: A grammar-school teacher had told him that Black people had “no history, No
heroes,” providing the spark that ignited his desire to uncover that past.57 The collec-
tion’s scope encompassed myriad forms of evidence concerning the history, lives, y
achievements of people of African descent. Highlights included a first edition of
Phillis Wheatley’s poetry; astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s
almanacs and papers, which Schomburg spent many years pursuing; items related to
the life of Aleksandr Pushkin, one of whose great-grandfathers was born in central
África; and the correspondence of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint
L’Ouverture. Though Schomburg particularly prized documents related to individu-
als of great erudition, courageous leadership, and/or unheralded genius, he also
gathered materials that offered witness to the lives of those who were dispossessed
and disenfranchised, including Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States (1837) y
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which provided a frank
account of the sexual abuse that permeated the institution of slavery, as well as
Frederick Douglass’s more famous Narrative (1845).58

These collecting efforts were matched by robust packaging initiatives, part of
what Brent Edwards has described as the “compulsively documentary” impulse of
the New Negro movement and Gerard Early has called a “considerable obsession
in anthologizing the Negro.”59 James Weldon Johnson helped Schomburg compile
his Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry (1915), a landmark effort to
record the work of Black poets, then used the collection to create his anthology
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), one of the earliest of its type and the first
gathering of Negro verse distributed by a major US publisher. Johnson returned
to the collection for The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), edited with J.
Rosamond Johnson, and his Black Manhattan (1930, a volume for which an
aggrieved Schomburg felt he received insufficient credit).60 Du Bois similarly pro-
posed to Schomburg an “Encyclopedia Africana which would gather, among other

56.

57.

Ibídem., páginas. 92–93.

Sinnette, Schomburg, pag. 13.

58.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, editores., The Portable Nineteenth-Century African
American Women Writers (Nueva York: Pingüino, 2017). Michelle Commander, Associate Director for the
Lapidus Center for Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center, confirmed via
email that these texts were part of the original Schomburg collection (the archive has been closed
since the onset of COVID-19); she is currently working on a project on Schomburg’s seed library.

59.
Diaspora, pag. 566. See fn. 60 for a partial list of these anthologies.

Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, pag. 44. Gerard Early as cited in Edwards, The Practice of

60.

Sinnette, Schomburg, páginas. 31, 187.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

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cosas, bios of distinguished Negroes”—a project that greatly occupied both men
in the 1930s.61 What comes through is that the archive served as a cornerstone of
New Negro ambitions—its documentary mass as a bulwark of facts against those
who would ignore or distort history. “Here is the evidence,” as Schomburg wrote
in “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” his contribution to the New Negro anthology
(with heavy editing from Locke).62

One feels the compensatory pain in this archival impulse, this urge to prove
one’s being, to lay out the facts of Black existence and its manifestations.63 Yet this
“documentary compulsion”—researching, collecting, creating and annotating bibli-
ographies, editing anthologies, and writing framing texts—can also be understood as
work done in articulating the archive. As Michel Foucault has taught us, the archive is
not merely a collection but a generative system: It maps the terrain of possibility.64 It
frames what can and cannot be said, when things begin and when they end, donación
forma, lugar, and time to what has been inchoate. The inchoate, por supuesto, is the
ether of primitivism’s no-particular-time and no-particular-place. The archive pulls
Black culture into history. En este sentido, the production of “facts” is also a claim to the
modern, to the construction of history in parallel with the modern professionalized
discourses of science, sociology, policing, and detection.

By the time the collection came to the library, en 1926, with ten thousand dol-
lars of grant support from the Carnegie Corporation secured with the help of the
Urban League, Schomburg had amassed over five thousand books, three thousand
manuscripts, and two hundred etchings.65 The collector reunited himself with his col-
lection in 1932 when he assumed the role of curator at the library, which he occupied
until his death in 1938. In the years in which Douglas’s panels were commissioned,
creado, and installed, Schomburg was a familiar presence in the reading room,
pointing readers to its treasures and offering impromptu lectures on Black history, todo
the while continuing to add to it—an important note in understanding how the col-
lection’s contents were used in what might be understood as an open classroom.66
(One WPA project—carried out by the writers’ division—was an annotated bibliogra-
phy of the collection’s rare manuscripts, advised by Schomburg himself.)67 Este, en
combination with the many classes, clubs, programas, and exhibitions hosted there,
meant that the library became far more than the books on its shelves and the printed

61.

62.

Ibídem., pag. 34.

Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The New Negro, pag. 232.

Brent Edwards speaks of a drive to authentication with a long history in Black literary pro-
63.
duction before it might be seen to emerge in these archival impulses of the 1920s and ’30s: Él
describes slave narratives, Por ejemplo, as “a persistently framed mode of production: They are almost
always supported and sometimes suffocated by a mass of documentary and verifying material serving to
‘authenticate’ the Negro’s subject’s discourse by positioning and explicating it.” Edwards, The Practice of
Diaspora, pag. 499.

64.

65.

66.

67.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Nueva York: Pantheon, 1972), páginas. 128–29.

Sinnette, Schomburg, pag. 78.

Ibídem., pag. 99.

Ibídem.

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144

OCTUBRE

matter in its flat files, y
rather a new kind of com-
munity space: a repository
of collective knowledge
designed to activate en –
gage ment with a “heritage
of ideas,” as Locke had
described years earlier.

commission
given to Douglas to paint
the mural series was made
possible by the support of
the country’s first federal-
ly sponsored program for
arte: the Public Works of
Art Project (PWAP).
Created by the Depart –
ment of the Treasury with
an extraordinary budget of
over one million dollars,
the PWAP carried the man-
date of blunting the hu –
man impact of the Great
Depression by giving “work
to artists in arranging to
have competent represen-
tatives of the profession
embellish public build-
ings.”68 Artists were encouraged to represent the “American scene”69—to address the
idea of America itself. The word “scene” carried with it an idea of America’s multiplic-
idad, its varied regions, occupations, and populations, and helped set an agenda for
WPA projects to come. In the first four months of 1934, the PWAP hired more than
3,700 artists, many recruited through newspaper ads.70 Successful applicants had to
prove they were professional artists and pass a needs test. If they qualified, they were
placed in one of two categories—artist or laborer—that determined their salary. Todavía

douglas (izquierda) and Arthur A. Schomburg
in front of Douglas’s Aspects of Negro
Life: Song of the Towers. 1934.

68.
Prentice Wagner (Londres: Giles, 2009).

Elizabeth Brown, "Prefacio,” in Ann Prentice Wagner, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, by Ann

69.

Ibídem.

70.
Ibídem.; Jerry Adler, “1934: Art of the New Deal,” Smithsonian Magazine (Junio 2009), páginas. 62–67;
Thomas Thurston, “The New Deal and the First Federally Sponsored Art Program: The Public Works
Art Project (PWAP) 1933–1934,” in Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive and
WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904–1943, ed. Heather Becker (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 2002), pag. 75.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

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as federal money was available only to artists who qualified as professional, most Black
artists were de facto ineligible, as they were largely excluded from jobs in art schools
or gallery representation. Aaron Douglas was among a very few African-Americans
who did qualify. (When Douglas joined Augusta Savage and others in founding the
Harlem Artists Guild in early 1935—Douglas was named president of the new organi-
zación, Savage vice-president—one of the primary purposes was to get more Black
artists on federal projects and payroll.)71 I imagine that, like the campaigns of collect-
ing materials, publishing articles and anthologies, and securing funds to give the
archive a home in the heart of Harlem, Douglas’s commission for the Aspects of Negro
Life series, también, was the result of a collective community effort.

In its finished form, Douglas’s historical cycle, in both its placement at the
135th Street Library and in its narrative address, celebrated one of the most criti-
cal endeavors of the New Negro group: It served as a capstone for the two-
decade project of defining and building an active archive as a foundation for
claiming history. “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make
his future. . . . History must restore what slavery took away,” read “The Negro Digs
Up His Past,” “for it is the social damage that the present generation must repair
and offset.”72 And the panels presented a far more complex history of America
than was usually told.

Panel 1: The Negro in an African Setting

The first of the four panels reveals the Negro in an
African setting and emphasizes the strongly rhythmic
arts of music, the dance and sculpture, which had
influenced the modern world possibly more pro-
foundly than any other phase of African life. El
fetish, the drummer, the dancers, in the formal lan-
guage of space and color, recreate the exhilaration,
the ecstasy, the rhythmic pulsation of life in ancient
África.

—Aaron Douglas, typescript handout, 194973

For any storyteller, the question is, Where to begin? Douglas sets the stage
with a scene amidst lush foliage in Africa: A pair of dancers perform, accompanied

71.
Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, pag. 131. Bearden conceived of
this volume before his death in 1988, and Harry Henderson continued work on it until its publication
en 1993. Based on many oral interviews and firsthand accounts, the text contains many details not
found elsewhere.

72.
Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” originally published in Survey Graphic (Marzo
1925), pag. 670; then in Locke, The New Negro, pag. 231. Locke claimed that the essay was so poorly orga-
nized that he had to rewrite it. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, pag. 462.
73.
Folder, Douglas Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Aaron Douglas, “Notes from Aaron Douglas," Octubre 27, 1949, Box 1, “Miscellaneous”

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douglas. Aspects of Negro Life:
The Negro in an African Setting. 1934.
© 2020 Heirs of Aaron Douglas.

by drummers and encircled by armed onlookers. At center is a sculptural person-
edad, perhaps a deity. Other human figures are shown in profile. Some seem to
take inspiration from the African works that Douglas studied in Barnes’s collec-
ción. (The central image in particular, with its frontal symmetry, elongated torso
y brazos, and seated posture, bears a general typological resemblance to certain
Dogon, Senufo, and Fang carved works.)74 From the upper center, a series of radi-
ating circles defined by progressively lighter tones emanate from the deity itself.
This motif, seen in all the Schomburg panels, suggests sensory extension, tal vez
in the form of light or sound—a “rhythmic pulsation” that emanates from the flat
planes of the paintings outwards and from Africa across time and space.

To begin a story of America in Africa was unusual: It is hard to find prece-
dents in the fine arts, aunque, to be sure, they existed in the stories told by those
who had been enslaved, whose narratives were published in the rare volumes now
held in the Schomburg collection.75 And they could be heard in the stories of
street preachers, self-taught historians, as well as Garveyite stump speakers, OMS

74.
Clarke, African Art in the Barnes Foundation, pag. 63. For works in Barnes’s collection that
offer points of comparison, see Clarke, African Art in the Barnes Foundation, Por ejemplo: figs. 1, 7, 8,
99, 37 b, 37 C.

75.
Charles Ball, Por ejemplo, traces his lineage to the Afro-Muslim royalty of his grandfather’s gen-
eration in his Slavery in the United States, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who
Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave (pittsburgh: j. t. Shryock, 1853).

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

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embraced Egyptian and African origins and were often heard at Speakers’ Corner,
which was situated diagonally across the intersection of 135th and Lenox from the
library and offered a platform for voices not represented in mainstream media.76
Es, nonetheless, a remarkable beginning for a painting cycle commissioned with
federal funds as an “American scene.” Beginning in Africa shifts the framing of the
tale, to use Du Bois’s words, toward “the strange meaning of being Black here.”77
America begins not with the Mayflower and Pilgrim Rock nor the fleet of three
from the London Company arriving in Jamestown of schoolbook lore, pero
rather—implicitly, for it is not shown—with the slave schooner White Lion that car-
ried the first enslaved Africans to British North America in 1619. The panel, entonces,
foregrounds forced migration and slavery as America’s foundation and original
sin. In this sense, Douglas’s panels mark a beginning as well: We see in many of
the WPA projects headed up by Black writers and artists a concerted effort to tell a
story of America with enslavement at its origin and center.78

al mismo tiempo, this image of the African roots from which Black
Americans had been separated by “three hundred years of bondage”79 also cele-
brates a rich heritage of art, música, and dance. Locke reviewed the show of African
art organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, which displayed over four
hundred objects on six floors. Presented just six years after the museum’s found-
En g, the exhibition suggested a geographically expansive definition of modernism
with Africa as a point of origin. Locke was delighted, praising the exhibition for
documenting African high-cultural achievement: “Aside from being the finest
American showing of African Art,” he wrote, it “reveals it for the first time in its
own right as a mature and classic expression.”80 The show spurred Locke’s own,
ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to found the Harlem Museum of African Arts.81

76.
appeared. Por supuesto, more work is needed here.

Thanks to Huey Copeland for the prompt to think of other modes in which this narrative

77.

W.. mi. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Amazon Classic edition), pag. 2.

78.
Such WPA projects include the “75 Years of Freedom” exhibition held at the Library of
Congress to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment, offering documents of Black
contribution to American life beginning from the seventeenth century; the initiatives within the
Federal Writers’ Project and the WPA’s Department of Negro Affairs, run by poet Sterling Brown, y
various state projects to record the oral histories and testimonies of those elders who had been formally
enslaved; the volume The Negro in Virginia, also published with the support of the Department of Negro
Affairs, which incorporated documents and the testimony of many formerly enslaved individuals; y
mural projects such as Charles White’s Five Great American Negroes (1939).

79.

80.

81.

From Locke to Barnes, cited in Clarke, African Art in the Barnes Foundation, pag. 63.

Alain Locke, “African Art: Classic Style,” American Magazine of Art 28, No. 5 (Puede 1935), pag. 271.

On these efforts, see Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, páginas. 545–65.

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148

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Panel 2: From Slavery through Reconstruction

The second panel is composed of three sections cover-
ing periods from slavery through the Reconstruction.

From right to left:

the first section depicts the slaves’ doubt and
incertidumbre, transformed into exultation at the read-
ing of the Emancipation Proclamation;

in the second section, the figure standing on
the box symbolizes the careers of outstanding Negro
leaders during this time;

the third section shows the departure of the
Union soldiers from the South, and the onslaught of
the Klan that followed.

—Aaron Douglas, typescript handout, 194982

Douglas’s second panel acknowledges the Civil War, though troops are seen
only in faint silhouettes standing in formation at the right and in recession at the
izquierda. Foregrounded are spiky cotton plants with their fluffy buds, the global com-
modity that, as Sven Beckert has described, defined America’s destiny, spurring its
rise onto the global stage, shaping its political and economic structures, and pro-
viding the rationale for the enslavement of African workers and the cause for civil
war.83 All this seems implicit in the historical panorama that Douglas lays out
amidst the cotton plantings.

Beginning at the right, a federal soldier reads the Emancipation
Proclamation; the document itself emits an aura of light. At the edge of the circle
of light, sounds a bugle player, whose brass instrument foreshadows the birth of
jazz with a singer by his side offering, one imagines, a song of thanks or of prayer
for the journey to come. While a group rejoices with their arms above their
cabezas, one figure raises a fist. At the very center, a speaker stands on a soapbox
podium, holding a rolled paper scroll tightly in his hand: Is it the Emancipation
Proclamation? Or the Constitution itself? At his flank, voters wait to take their
turn at the ballot box. To the left, laborers picking cotton in a field rise up as they
take in the words of the Black candidate. Above in the upper left, under cover of
darkness, are a trio on horseback of cone-headed Klansmen, the paramilitary
forces of white supremacy. Barely visible, a long figure seems to turn to challenge
one of them.

Douglas’s mural lays out the achievements, aspirations, and terrors of the
twelve-year period of Reconstruction with historiographic precision. It was an

82.

83.

douglas, “Notes from Aaron Douglas," Octubre 27, 1949.

See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Nueva York: Vintage Books, 2014).

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douglas. Aspects of Negro Life:
From Slavery through Reconstruction. 1934.

unusual focus of commemoration; these years were more generally absent from,
or diminished in, the historical telling. Du Bois recounted an experience in
which he submitted an entry on the American Negro for the Encyclopedia
Britannica that included a paragraph on the achievements of Black Americans in
the Reconstruction era. The editors asked him to delete it. He withdrew the arti-
cle instead.84 By 1936, Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, would
write to studio head David O. Selznick of his concerns over the making of the
film Gone with the Wind: “The writing of the history of the Reconstruction period
has become so completely confederatized during the last 2 o 3 generations that
we naturally are somewhat anxious.”85 Both Du Bois’s experience and White’s
anxieties reflect the profound influence of Edward Pollard’s book The Lost
Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1866), written in the
wake of the Confederacy’s defeat. Pollard began with the proposition that after
military loss, “all that was left of the South was the ‘war of ideas.’”86 “The war
properly decided only what was put at issue: the restoration of the Union and
the excision of slavery: and to these two conditions the South submits,” he wrote.
“But the war did not decide Negro equality.”87

Du Bois chose Reconstruction for his own project of revisionism, writing sev-
eral articles and then an extraordinary, groundbreaking book, Black Reconstruction
in America (1935), the first full-length study of the role and experience of Black
Americans in the decades immediately following Emancipation, and a sweeping

W.. mi. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pag. ix. Du Bois writes of his experience with
84.
the entry for Encyclopedia Britannica in the preface, loc. 16722. He first wrote on the achievements of
the Reconstruction period in “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review 15 (Julio
1910), páginas. 781–99, the first article by an African-American to be published in the journal.

85.
2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/movies/gone-with-the-wind-battle.html.

Jennifer Schuessler, “The Long Battle Over ‘Gone with the Wind,” New York Times, Junio 14,

86.

87.

Pollard, cited in Gates, Stony the Road, pag. 18.

Ibídem.

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corrective to Lost Cause narratives. In his preface, Du Bois felt the need to frame
the radicality of his proposition: “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes
were ordinary human beings,” he wrote, “realizing that this attitude will from the
first seriously curtail my audience.”88

Du Bois was completing his manuscript—he had moved from New York to take
a position at Fisk University—while Douglas was working on his historical cycle; fue
published the following year. The centrality given to Reconstruction in Douglas’s
murals—and the unusual points of emphasis in the artist’s depiction—seems clearly
framed by Du Bois’s concurrent project. The twelve years of Reconstruction, Du Bois
suggested, offered a vision of America’s destiny of full and equal citizenship for all.
He sketched the achievements of the period: the passage of the country’s first civil-
rights law and the miraculous trio of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
amendments to the Constitution that laid the foundation for modern citizenship in
banning slavery (1865), extending due process of law to all (1868), and granting uni-
versalles (masculino) suffrage (1870). Prodigious numbers of freedmen—enabled by federal
military occupation of the states of the former Confederacy—took up the promises of
these amendments and asserted their right to vote, electing approximately two thou-
sand Black officeholders and creating a robust Black leadership class. 89

Yet Du Bois also defined a counterforce often left unacknowledged—the
effort at reconquest backed by violence. The dozen years after Robert E. Lee’s sur-
render at Appomattox were among the most violent periods in American history
outside of wartime, a time when lynching was pervasive (now conservatively esti-
mated to be over four hundred Black people across the South between 1868 y
1871),90 along with other forms of racial terror.91 The Reconstruction period’s
hopes came to a fatal end with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, cual
secured the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president with a Faustian bargain
that traded Southern electoral votes for a commitment to withdraw federal troops
from the South and led to both Jim Crow segregation laws and suppression of the
Black vote. Du Bois wrote sorrowfully, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment
in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”92

Read against this text, as it seems to have been conceived, the panel gives visi-
ble form to the tension described by Du Bois: The orator places the Black candi-
date at the very center of the work—a candidate who indeed could hardly be imag-
ined in 1930s America, either North or South—creating a monument to Black
agency, suffrage, and political power. At left, the presence of hooded night riders
acknowledges the surging forces of the neo-Confederacy in stark terms. The con-
trast sets the joy of Emancipation and the dispersal of the Confederate Army

88.

89.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, loc. 967.

Gates gives the number of officeholders in Stony the Road, pag. xvi.

90.
2017, pag. 15, https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/lynching-in-america-3d-ed-080219.pdf.

Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd edition,

91.
ing the degree of violence in the post–Civil War period.

Gates, Stony the Road, pag. 9; and Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America, páginas. 10-15, regard-

92.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, loc. 1577.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

151

against federal abandonment with the departure of Union troops. At the same
tiempo, this panel, hanging in the 135th Street library in the heart of Harlem, speaks
to the latent legacy of these years as thousands of Black Americans moved north-
ward to claim their rights as citizens.

Panel 3: An Idyll of the Deep South

The third panel, “An Idyll of the Deep South,” por-
trays Negroes,

toiling in the fields,
singing and dancing in a lighter mood, y
mourning as they prepare to take away a man

who has been lynched.

—Aaron Douglas, typescript handout, 194993

The title of Panel 3, “Idyll of the Deep South,” seems to offer ironic mimicry of
Lost Cause nostalgia: It marks the dark years of waiting. On the right, a handful of
figures till the soil, with sharecroppers’ cabins behind them: Their postures echo
those of their enslaved forebears in the second panel. At center, at the focal point of
Douglas’s radiating circles of light, a group gathers, perhaps in secret, in a leafy
glade to sing and play music; the presence of a banjo and guitar suggests the blues.
At far left, kneeling figures look up at the base of the tree, where we see a pair of
hanging feet, an image that is still searing despite the years that have passed since it
was painted. A distant star casts a beam of light that cuts across the panel.

We are shielded from the sight of the lynching victim’s broken body—or per-
haps Douglas is protecting it from our eyes, giving a kind of rarely extended

93.

douglas, “Notes from Aaron Douglas," Octubre 27, 1949.

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douglas. Aspects of Negro Life:
An Idyll of the Deep South. 1934.

152

OCTUBRE

respect to the victim of a racial crime. El
image shifts the focus to those who remain,
and in doing so points to the paradox of such
murderous tactics: Despite hooded costumes
and secret, extralegal societies, the spectacle
of damaged bodies was required for lynching
to serve its aim of terrorizing communities
into submission. With these feet, douglas
points to the way that Jim Crow—its laws of
segregation, the economics of sharecropping,
and white-supremacist ideology—was under-
girded by violence.

Flag from from the window of the
NAACP headquarters on 69 Quinto
Avenida, Nueva York, 1936.

Anti-lynching legislation was among
the foremost political aims of Douglas’s cir-
cle. The NAACP had aggressively lobbied for this goal since 1912, and other key
officials included James Weldon Johnson (executive secretary, 1920–1930) y
Walter White (executive secretary, 1931–1955). Blanco, who was blue-eyed and suf-
ficiently light-skinned that he could pass for white, traveled undercover to investi-
gate lynchings, mob violence, and other acts of racial terror for the NAACP, gath-
ering information “by the simple method of not telling those whom I was investi-
gating of the Negro blood within my veins,”94 then publishing first-person reports
in The Crisis and other Black press outlets. A veces, he wrote of the risk taken in
his covert operations: “I found it rather desirable to disappear slightly in advance
of reception committees imbued with the desire to make an addition to the lynch-
ing record.”95 Between 1920 y 1938, whenever news of a lynching was received,
the NAACP would hang a banner reading A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY from its
offices on Fifth Avenue, creating a relay for information between South and
North. The practice was discontinued after the threat of eviction.

More than two hundred bills to make lynching a federal crime were intro-
duced in the first half of the century and failed, meaning that the federal govern-
ment failed to intervene on behalf of its Black citizens and left enforcement of
racially motivated murders to the states. (Legislation outlawing lynching was
signed only in 2018.) All this makes clear the enormous stakes of Douglas’s inclu-
sion in a commission supported by federal monies and the subject of which was
America itself. The challenge was recognized: One reporter noted in a piece head-
lined “Lynching, Klan Shown in Panels Created on Relief Funds” that the subject
“brought instant objections from his PWA superiors.”96

94.

Walter F. Blanco, “Color Lines,” Survey Graphic (Marzo 1925), pag. 681.

Walter F. Blanco, “I Investigate Lynchings,” American Mercury, Enero 1929; here from the
95.
National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, The Making of African American Identity, volumen. 3, 1917–
1968, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/segregation/text2/investigatelynchings.pdf.

96.
t. R. Poston, “Aaron Douglas Moves to the Left with PWA Decoration. New Mural Unveiled
in Assembly Hall of Library Here,” New York Amsterdam News, Noviembre 24, 1934, Schomburg Papers,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

153

Yet despite the vivid specter of violence, the composition centers on music: en
men gathering with banjo and guitar, singing the blues. The poet Sterling Brown,
the Williams College–educated son of a minister born into enslavement, offered
comentario, along with Alain Locke and the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, en
Black musical genres in the opening program for the exhibition that they organized
with others for the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment at the Library of
Congreso en 1940. Brown described the poetic structure of the blues—usually twelve-
bar stanzas with three lines of four stressed syllables, with the second line often
repeating the first and the third line clinching it with a rhyme. More importantly, él
underlined its distinctive spirit: Where Spirituals and gospel are religious, the blues
are profane: “the Negro’s secular songs of sadness, disappointment, frustration.”
They have a manner that is “wry, twisted and hard,” steeped in the truth of living
Black in America.97 “This is the way that the blues singers and their poets have found
life to be,” he reflected in a later essay on the subject. “And for these reasons, el
Blues are Black, are Black songs for Black audiences.”98

Panel 4: Song of the Towers

In the fourth mural, “Song of Towers,"

the first section on the right, showing a figure
fleeing from the clutching hand of serfdom, es
symbolic of the migrations of Negroes from the
South and the Carribbean [sic] into the urban
and industrial life of America during and
just after World War I;
the second section represents the will to self-
expresión, the spontaneous creativeness of
the later 1920’s, which spread vigorously
throughout all of the arts in an expression of
the anxiety and yearning from the soul of the
Negro people;
the last section of this panel attempts to re-create
the confusion, the dejection, and frustration
resulting from the depression of the 1930’s.
—Aaron Douglas, typescript handout, 194999

The jazzman stands at center, holding his saxophone aloft. An instrument is
once again the focal point of Douglas’s radiating circles of light. He is poised on a
gear of a giant machine, the emblem of an industrial economy, a far cry from the

97.
Sterling Brown, “The Blues, Ballads and Social Songs,” in 75 Years of Freedom: Commemoration
of the 75th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Library
of Congress (Washington, corriente continua: Oficina de Imprenta del Gobierno, 1943), pag. 17.

98.

99.

Sterling Brown, “The Blues,” Phylon 13, No. 4 (1952), pag. 291.

douglas, “Notes from Aaron Douglas," Octubre 27, 1949.

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154

OCTUBRE

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sharecropping of the previous panel. Another figure, holding a briefcase or tool-
box, runs up the circle of the gear. A third figure in the left foreground lies prone
in despair. There is no doubt that these figures are urban denizens and citizens of
New York in particular. They are surrounded by skyscrapers of the kind that had
risen with great speed on New York’s horizon in the five years immediately before
this work was painted. The Statue of Liberty can be seen in the distant back-
ground, reminding us as viewers of its bold poetic embrace: “Give me your tired,
your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Lady Liberty, con
the broken chains of slavery at her feet, underscores the figures’ status as refugees,
among the thousands who had traveled from the South northward, shifting the
bulk of the Black population from countryside to city.

Por 1925 Harlem had become, as Locke described in his introduction to the
New Negro anthology, “the largest black community in the world,” an Afro-metrop-
olis, built of the confluence of different streams of migration.100 Between 1916
y 1926, New York’s Black population increased by sixty-six percent.101 In 1910,
Harlem was ninety percent white, por 1930 it was seventy percent Black.102 For

100.

Locke, “The New Negro," pag. 6.

101.
l. Diane Barnes, “Great Migration,” in Encyclopedia of African-American History, 1896 to the
Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twentieth-first Century, ed. Paul Finkelman (Nueva York: Oxford
Prensa universitaria, 2009), páginas. 326–29.

102.

Gates, Stony the Road, pag. 203.

Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

155

Locke, the meaning of this concentration in population went far beyond demo-
graphics. “In Harlem,” he wrote, “Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for
group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race
capital. . . . Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic.”103
It offered both a claim to world connection and a home for diaspora, a place for
the scattered people of African descent to take their rightful place on the contem-
porary world stage. “The pulse of the Negro world,” Locke wrote, conjuring a
sleeping giant, “has begun to beat in Harlem.”104 An echo of his studies with
Georg Simmel resonates in Locke’s description of Harlem; the German sociologist
understood modern societies as fluid constructions, holding heterogeneous ele-
ments and people together in dynamic interaction, whereas rural communities
required social conformity. This is the Harlem that Douglas enshrines as his New
Zion, urban and urbane, Black and American, whose pulsing light and sound
reverberate internationally and which heralds the dream of full and untrammeled
citizenship—“a mass movement toward the larger and more democratic
chance.”105 Yet in the prone figure to the left he also signals the Depression-era
disillusionment of the Black worker.

El (Absent) Fifth Panel

Señor. Douglas is openly apologetic about the note of
defeat upon which his mural ends. As a student of
Marx and an artist who has been “bolshevized by
condiciones,” he knows that he has not finished the
picture. Had there been a fifth panel, he believes, él
could not have escaped pointing to the way out for
the Negro—to the one way outlined by Karl Marx
and his disciples—the unity of the black and white
works in the class struggle. Had this been done, cómo-
alguna vez, the whole mural would undoubtedly have been
rejected by the FWA authorities.

—New York Amsterdam News, 1934106

In his conversation with reporter Ted Poston, Douglas suggests that he envi-
sioned a fifth panel that would have brought the series to its revolutionary conclu-
sión, and that its absence left him with some regret. He complained: “Under our

103.

104.

105.

Locke, “The New Negro," pag. 7.

Ibídem.

Ibídem., pag. 6.

106.
Unsigned [t. R. Poston], “Aaron Douglas Moves to the Left with PWA Decoration. Nuevo
Mural Unveiled in Assembly Hall of the Library Here,” New York Amsterdam News, Noviembre 24, 1934,
Schomburg Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Reporting for the Amsterdam
Noticias, Poston covered the 1932 trip taken by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others to the
USSR and the Scottsboro Trial in 1933. See Kathleen A. Hauke, Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist
(Atenas: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

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156

OCTUBRE

present system, the artist must paint what his employer wants. If he is to keep his
own self-respect, however he must try to maintain a certain honesty and present the
picture as he sees it.”107 There are hints of affiliation nonetheless. The orator on a
soapbox in Panel 2 resembles a monument, its form perhaps taking a cue from the
scores of Soviet monuments erected to Lenin in the previous decade. And then
there are the feet of the lynching victim, the hooded figures of the KKK, y el
broken body at the base of the cogwheel.

Things become clearer in a conversation that took place in 1971 entre
Douglas and the art historian David Driskell. Driskell, who owned a study for
Panel 3, asked about the star seen to the left of the lynching tree in that work.
The star, which might seem to evoke the Star of Bethlehem or the North Star
that guided fugitives on the Underground Railroad, was in fact, Douglas related,
the red star of communism.108 Squeezed underneath a rough sketch of the com-
posición, Driskell added in tight lines: “I had to all but swear to Aaron that I
would not speak about its meaning, the star and the ray, eso es, until after his
death.” The artist recounted with hindsight that there were those who “(got a lit-
tle pink) from this Red Star, thinking that they were going to get relief from
oppression . . . and were disappointed,” naming Hughes, Paul Robeson, y
activist and educator Louise Thompson as among those who “leaned pink,"
though not himself. Sin embargo, it seems that the perception of communist
sympathy had consequences for Douglas and the work at hand: It provoked the
premature termination of his WPA assignment. “They wanted to punish me at
the WPA,” he told Driskell, “that white woman who felt she couldn’t control me,
so she fired me.”

The touch of “pink” was new to Douglas, and suggests some of the shifts that
had taken place since the publication of the New Negro anthology in 1925, años
that saw the mass unemployment of the Great Depression and its outsized impact
on Black workers; the beginning of the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boy-
cotts; the Scottsboro Trial; and a new interest in the class analysis of racial issues
from a younger generation of writers and sociologists. This combination of race
consciousness and Marxism offered novel insight: Racism was grounded in eco-
nomic exploitation, and dismantling it required rethinking capitalism itself.
Douglas tells the reporter Ted Poston that he has put aside his interest in other
teorías, including the theosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff that had interested Jean
Toomer and other writers, and joined a group of like-minded thinkers who stud-
ied Marx.109 “I had sought escape through so many of these theories,” he says with

107.

Unsigned [t. R. Poston], “Aaron Douglas Moves to the Left,” unpaginated.

108.
David C.. Driskell, Notes on Talk with Aaron Douglas (Abril 1971): Folder T 132–13. David C..
Driskell Papers, Personal. David C. Driskell Center Archive. Accessed via driskellcenterarchives.word-
press.com/2013/10/24/an-idyll-of-the-deep-south-and-david-c-driskells-discussion-with-aaron-douglas.

109.
Unsigned [t. R. Poston], “Aaron Douglas Moves to the Left,” unpaginated. On Douglas’s inter-
est in Gurdjieff, see Marissa Vincenti, “A Matter of Spirit: Aaron Douglas, Gurjiieffian Thought, y el
Expression of ‘Conscious Art,’” The International Review of African American Art 21, No. 3 (2007), páginas. 11-15.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

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all the passion and conviction of a new convert, “that when I finally encountered
the truth through the revolutionary movement, I was absolutely unable to face
reality. I had to cast aside everything that I had once believed and begin anew.”110
The group was certainly the Vanguard group, a left-wing salon of sorts that
Douglas and Augusta Savage often hosted: Participants included Hughes,
Thompson, and Romare Bearden.111

Douglas found a new role as a labor leader on behalf of art workers. Uno
facet of this work was his role as president of the Harlem Artists Guild, founded to
organize collective action to improve conditions for Black artists and, especially, a
apply pressure to place greater numbers of Black artists on federal projects.112
Bearden recalled the first meeting: “I was astonished to find nearly fifty artists pre-
sent, since I had no idea there were that many Black Artists in the entire country.
My surprise was shared by most of the other artists, because until then we have
been isolated.”113 In this capacity, Douglas served as the only Black delegate to the
First American Artists Congress held in New York in February 1936, organized in
response to the Popular Front call for artists to unite against the threat of fascism.
In an appearance on the floor, Douglas addressed the gathered crowd of hun-
dreds, clearly chafing at judgments about what the Black artist should and should
not paint: “What the Negro artist should paint and how he should paint it can’t
accurately be determined without reference to specific social conditions. . . . Nuestro
concern has been to establish and maintain recognition of our essential humani-
ty, en otras palabras, complete social and political equality.”

He concluded with a reminder:

If there is anyone here who does not understand Fascism let him ask
the first Negro he sees in the street. In America, race discrimination is
one of the chief props on which Fascism can be built. One of the most
vital blows the artist of this congress can deliver to the threat of Fascism
is to refuse to discriminate against any man because of his nationality,
race or creed.114

The month following Douglas’s appearance, art historian Meyer Schapiro
published an essay in the first issue of Art Front, the official organ of the Artists

110.

111.

112.

Unsigned [t. R. Poston], “Aaron Douglas Moves to the Left.”

Ragar describes the Vanguard group in “Plunging into the Very Depths,” páginas. 144–145.

Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, pag. 131.

113.
Romare Bearden, “The 1930s—An Art Reminiscence,” New York Amsterdam News, Septiembre
18, 1971; cited in Ruth Fine, “Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between,” in The Art of Romare Bearden
(Washington, corriente continua: National Gallery of Art, 2003), páginas. 26–29.

douglas, “The Negro in American Culture,” published in Artists Against War and Fascism:
114.
Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, Nueva Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1986), páginas. 82–84. See also Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-
American Artists, páginas. 132–33.

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158

OCTUBRE

Union (with which the Harlem Artists Guild was affiliated as the only Black unit).
“There are Negro liberals,” Schapiro writes without mentioning Douglas or Locke
by name, “who teach that the American Negro artist should cultivate the old
African style, and that he must give up his effort to paint and carve like a white
man.”115 For Schapiro, the proposition depended on a belief in a flawed concept:
the belief in a transhistorical national style and the idea of race itself. Style is not
static, he argues, but changes with social and economic transformation. Nor does
style reflect the psychology of a nation; en cambio, it speaks to class. Race itself is a
flawed construct; there are not distinct psychological characteristics bound up
with physical traits. “If this analysis is correct,” writes Schapiro, “then we must
denounce appeals for an American art which identify the American with a specific
blood group or race, or which identify American art with supposedly fixed and
inherent psychological characters inherited from the past.”116

Schapiro, por supuesto, had simplified Locke’s argument: Locke had champi-
oned the idea not of a time-bound mimicry but rather of a consciousness of her-
itage that could serve as a source for a distinctly new and race-proud modernism.
The text belies Schapiro’s own concerns, heightened, as one can imagine, en 1936
with the threat of virulent Nazi anti-Semitism:

Such distinctions in art have been a large element in the propaganda
for war and fascism and in the pretense of peoples that they are eternal-
ly different from and superior to others and are therefore, justified in
oppressing them. The racial theories of fascism call constantly on the
traditions of art. . . . 117

Schapiro rejects a modernism that defines itself in relation to Blackness—
or any other specific cultural heritage and identity. Yet his defense of universali-
ty comes from a position of vulnerability; it offers a lesson in the distinction
between anti-fascism and anti-racism, as well as in the shaping of our own mod-
ernist canon. For Schapiro, the Enlightenment ideal of the equality of men still
holds in the present. He is skeptical of heritage as a validating myth and sees cul-
turally distinctive forms as belonging firmly to the past. Douglas and Locke
begin in a different place: They assume the presence of a caste hierarchy, take it
as a given. For them the role of art is to dismantle such myths.

In the four-part cycle of Aspects of Negro Life, Douglas traces threads of conti-
nuity reaching back across the Middle Passage. His signature style—of flat planes
echoing lines and figures in profile with sharp graphic cuts—self-consciously draws

Thread Lines

115.

116.

117.

Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and Art,” Art Front (Marzo 1936), pag. 10.

Ibídem., pag. 12.

Ibídem., pag. 10.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

159

on ancient Egyptian and African sources. This idiom carries through the historical
chronology of the panels, tracing a lineage that suggests a still powerful, if latent,
visual heritage. Music offers another thread of connection. Musical motifs recur in
each of the panels—the drums of Africa; the spirituals of enslavement that chart
symbolic journeys of escape and the repurposed brass instruments of the Civil
Guerra; the sorrow and defiance of the Jim Crow blues, and the triumphant figure of
the jazzman in Harlem. The panels offer “aspects” of Black history—a chapterized
narrative—defined by musical forms: a suggestion that on its own, each musical
genre can be seen as emblematic of an era and that together, in their interweav-
En g, they trace Black experience in America. Aquí, the reverberating tonal circles
one often sees in Douglas’s work focus attention on musical elements—instru-
ments and players—and imply a sonic rhythm, a throb and beat that carry through
American history for those who care to listen. At points, sin embargo, these roving
beams of light spotlight other details—the sculptural deity in the first panel; el
Emancipation Proclamation and paper scroll in the hand of the Black candidate
in the second; both the sax and the Statue of Liberty together in the third—creat-
ing a list of those things held most dear.

While the highbrow Locke saw spirituals as the ultimate expression of a dis-
tinctly African-American art form, and while Sterling Brown saw blues in that light,
for Langston Hughes it was jazz. “Jazz was one of the inherent expressions of
Negro life in America,” he wrote.

The eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt
against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work,
trabajar, trabajar; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a
smile. . . . To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he
accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of
his art that old whisper “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations
of his people, to “Why should I want to be white?” I am a Negro—and
beautiful. . . . 118

Hughes’s tom-tom connects the syncopations of modern jazz and the percus-
sive beat of African drumming to Blackness, resilience, and resistance, defining a
cultural legacy that could be discerned in the modern sound, and one that offered
a way forward.

This recognition—that music offers a framework for understanding African-
American experience—was new, new in the sense that it was enabled by modern
recording technologies that emerged shortly before Douglas painted his panels.
Performers in early “race records”—78-rpm recordings of Black music intended
for Black consumers—among them Mamie Smith (first recording 1920), luis
Armstrong (1923), Jelly Roll Morton (1923), Ma Rainey (1923), and Bessie Smith

118.
1926), www.thenation.com/article/negro-artist-and-racial-mountain.

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation 122 (Junio 23,

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160

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(1923)—sang and played with a kind of confidence, virtuosity, and emotional
range that audiences would not have previously heard from Black entertainers in
the vaudeville or minstrelsy shows that were the mainstay of American popular cul-
tura. Their appearance marked what poet Kevin Young speaks of as “the invention
of a Black ‘I’ in American culture.”119 It’s hard not to smile at the easy bravura of
the final refrain of Bessie Smith’s first record, “Downhearted Blues” (1923), a hit
with over eight hundred thousand sales: “I got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in
my hand / I got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / I’m gonna hold it
until you men come under my command.” The way that Douglas foregrounds
music throughout the series, concluding with the figure of the jazzman in Harlem
with arms aloft, suggests that we too might see music as the manifestation of that
Black modernism that he, Locke, and others had championed.

The larger framework for this thinking was the Migration itself—its massive
human flow bringing the singers, músicos, sounds, and instruments of the South
northward into a new urban framework. En cambio, the hunger of Black audi-
ences for Black song and the commercial success of race records—sold through
newsboys, door-to-door salesmen, and Pullman porters—led both record-company
scouts and folklorists to the South in a kind of reverse (and parallel) migration.
Field recordings with newly portable audio equipment uncovered the voices and
playing of Black musicians born into slavery, including four harmonized male
voices urging listeners to “get on board” in the gospel hymn “Old Ship of Zion”;
j. METRO. Mullin’s virtuoso banjo playing in “Old Coon Dog” (recorded by Alan and
Elizabeth Lomax); and Billy McCrea singing work songs like “Blow, Cornie, Blow,"
recalled from his experience as an enslaved cook on a steamboat (recorded by
John Avery Lomax).120 Recordings such as these brought the history of Black
music in America into visibility, o, perhaps more aptly, audibility, while radio
popularized race music with a mass audience, bringing crossover fame and record
sales and, to a more limited extent, radio appearances by Black musicians. (El
radiating circles in Douglas’s mural might be seen to evoke the sound waves of
broadcast technology.) The Great Depression brought an end to race music:
Record companies eliminated their race catalogues, and commercial radio net-
works like NBC and CBS employed white musicians to cover Black genres and
songs instead,121 a fact that may have given extra impetus to Douglas’s celebration
de (and insistence on) the Black origins of American musical forms—a way of giv-
ing credit where credit was due.

In tracing these intertwined threads of form, sound, and history, Douglas’s
panels define—along with Locke’s and Du Bois’s writing and Schomburg’s collect-
ing—a concept of historical inheritance that travels along the pathways of migra-

119.

Joven, The Grey Album, pag. 54.

120.
Septiembre 6, 2019.

See Wesley Morris, “Episode 3: The Birth of American Music," 1619 podcast, New York Times,

121.
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop (Music of the African
Diaspora Book 7) (berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and William Barlow, “Black Music on
Radio During the Jazz Age,” African American Review 29, No. 2 (Verano 1995), páginas. 325–28.

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Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life

161

ción. Linkages are maintained, if transformed, over space and time. This her-
itage and the cultural authorship it connotes might be heard—like the distant
sound of drumming, the “rhythmic pulsation” that Douglas describes—with
finely tuned ears.

An American Problem

Storytelling, Walter Benjamin suggested in a 1936 essay, helps us transmute
information into wisdom. It is graced with sense-making power, allowing for the
communication of experience beyond facts alone: “The storyteller takes what he
tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it
the experience of those who are listening to the tale.” The art of storytelling,
increasingly rare within the media-saturated, shock-laden conditions of modernity,
is a profound tool in building community and connection: It absorbs collective
testimony (“the ability to exchange experiences”) and conveys wisdom across gen-
erations, time and space (“counsel woven into the fabric of real life”).122
Benjamin’s insight, it strikes me, suggests the role that Douglas’s epic visual narra-
tive might have been intended to play in relation to the archive of printed matter
housed in the library where it hangs…. And why it may have been so important for
Schomburg and this cohort of collection builders to place a story—with the narra-
tive amplitude that the German critic longed for—there.

Schomburg’s papers, now housed at the library that bears his name, include
a slim file that contains a prospectus by Douglas for a project entitled “Portrait of
the American Negro.” No other information is given, nor is any date. It seems to be
an early outline for Douglas’s mural project: If that is so, we can see how far the
artist’s thinking had come. The prospectus charts “the most important characters and
events in Negro History,” moving in nine sections through 1) the Revolution; 2) slave
revolts, abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; 3) foreign wars; 4) migration
from the South; 5) riots; 6) famous trials; 7) a black leadership class; 8) political
movimientos; y 9) religious, social, and educational institutions.123 The sequence
catalogues historical inflection points, moments of collective agency. It lays out a
claim for the fullness of Black participation in the history of the country.

As completed, sin embargo, the panels do something quite different. They testify
to the aspirations and failures of America, holding these things against each
other—the promise of Emancipation and Reconstruction in constant tension with
the dark and violent forces that would deny them. Douglas outlines the afterlife of
slavery. The structures of slavery (itself barely pictured) appear in continued forms
of disenfranchisement, racial terror, and the oppression of labor. In each of the
three American panels, domination is never fully achieved, forms of resistance are
found. Ni, sin embargo, is freedom ever fully gained. The emergence of Black politi-

122.
an introduction by Hannah Arendt (Nueva York: Schocken Books, 1968), páginas. 83, 86–87.

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with

123.

Aaron Douglas, “Prospectus for Portrait of the American Negro,” Arthur A. Schomburg Papers.

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162

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cal power in the years after the Civil War is set against the rise of the Klan; el
birth of the blues as a distinctively African-American musical form is bound up
with Jim Crow sharecropping and racial terror; jazz, Harlem, and the promise of
“democratic chance” against the abuses of capitalism that disproportionately
impact Black labor.

The last chapter of Du Bois’s book about Reconstruction, “The Propaganda
of History,” reflects on what he calls “the lies agreed upon,”124 the confrontation
with history that white America has largely avoided. To look squarely at America
would require unraveling the stories we tell ourselves about our nation as princi-
pled, as a fundamentally innocent moral force, editing out its brutality, violence,
and dependence on ideas that contradict those great ideals. This myth of America
is tightly held; its undoing meets resistance. “We have too often a deliberate
attempt so to change the facts of history,” writes Du Bois, so “that the story will
make pleasant reading for Americans.”125

Du Bois’s words point to one facet of what strikes me as so extraordinary
about Douglas’s work: It is insistent in its refusal of these myths of America, "el
lies agreed upon.” Douglas’s panels address the complexities of the nation that
most did not want to hear or see. They picture the practices that contradict its
principios, holding them side by side: law and racial terror, civil rights and segre-
gation, suffrage and disenfranchisement. With this doubling, Douglas shifts the
sense of “double consciousness” described by Du Bois. Rather than the psyche of
the Black citizen riven through the experience of being seen through the eyes of
otros, it makes visible America’s own fault line: the discrepancy between creed
and practice. Locke writes in a similar mode in The New Negro:

So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way
for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one
hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the
otro. There is, por supuesto, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being
on the right side of the country’s ideals. We realize we cannot be
undone without America’s undoing.126

What Douglas pictures is not a “Negro problem” but an American one.

124.

125.

126.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, loc. 16739.

Ibídem., loc. 16721.

Locke, “The New Negro," pag. 12.

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