Black History
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“Judgement” by John MacWhirter, signed print from an engraving, ca. 1935–43, for the Works Progress Administration. Via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179597. Click image to enlarge. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Micah 3. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Isaiah 10. ↩︎
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The Library of Congress has photos produced by the Farm Security Administration of flood refugees in 1937. Many of them are African American. ↩︎
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs
'Judgement' by John MacWhirter for the WPA, ca. 1935–43
In the powerful image above,1 a biblical passage on the pulpit reads:
They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field2 … Woe unto them who decree unrighteous decrees … who turn aside the needy from justice, and rob the poor of my people of their rights.3
Below are church pews full of worshipers. Straight ahead are two church windows and above them a cross in front of a bigger window that is cracking. The walls of the church and a beam are coming down, helped along by falling bombs. Surrounding the cross that the bombs are falling toward are four quadrants that show challenges and injustices of the late 1930s and early 1940s. (If they match up with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I am unsure how.)
Clockwise from top-left: There is a factory producing something; out front stands a boy whose emaciated ribs and distended stomach are painfully visible. Next, there are buildings almost completely submerged by flood waters; flooded telephone poles are leaning precariously.4 After that is a Black man hanging by his neck from a tree; the seated onlookers are wearing civilian clothes, not Klan robes. Finally, there are sharecroppers bent over, working a field, presumably for less than their bare subsistence requires.
Good piece on the role of Black children and youth in the civil rights movement: “Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls” by Tulani Salahu-Din, National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu….
An Example of White Terror Depicted in WPA Art
“South” by Philip Reisman. “Executed for the Public Art Works Project, 1934."*
The South here is portrayed as a place of white terror: lynching, cross burning, Ku Klux Klan. Note, too, the figures on the left: men in chains working at gun point, modern-day slave labor powering industry. The prisoner whose face is visible is Black, the armed guard white. (Click to enlarge for detail.)
I’ve always avoided posting such images, but the history whitewashing of the current administration is making me think differently. This art, at least, is respectful. It depicts the humanity of the victims, unlike the grizzly souvenir postcards circulated by the terrorists.
* Source: NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179787.
“Spirituals” by Lillien Richter for the Works Progress Administration, ca. 1935–43. Print from engraving, signed by artist, via NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179325.
'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)
"The Contraband"
"The Recruit"
"The Veteran"
The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1
The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2
From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.
The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
“Daisy Bates takes a walk – Activist Daisy Bates picketing with placard: ‘Jailing our youth will not solve the problem in Little Rock. We are only asking for full citizenship rights.'” Ca. 1957.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Demonstrations Collection, image id 1953728.
“Two Boys” by Getel Kahn, color print, ca. 1935–43. Note the books the boy in red has slung over his shoulder.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, WPA Art Collection, image id 5179323.
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
Books Are Weapons – World War Two poster by NYC WPA War Services promoting knowledge about Black history and culture, the war's colonial entanglements in Africa, and the role of Black Americans in national defense. The books referenced were housed in the New York Public Library's renowned Schomburg Collection.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5211531.
“WPA Rhythm Band” by Elisabeth Olds, 1937. I love how dynamic this image is, like her “Harlem WPA Street Dance” from the same year.
Signed and dated print, Federal Art Project, NYC WPA, via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5180673.
“Harlem WPA Street Dance” by Elisabeth Olds, 1937. Signed and dated print, Federal Art Project, NYC WPA, via Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5180674.
Negro boy near Cincinnati, Ohio by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration, 1942 or 1943.
Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877922/.
Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!
World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.
Group portrait of a Tuskegee Airmen squadron, U.S. Army Air Corps, ca. 1939–45. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1823641.
“Air Force says recruits will again learn about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News, January 26, 2025.
The head of the service’s San Antonio-based training command said a video about the famed Black aviators would remain in the Air Force basic training curriculum. The course had been shut down in response to President Trump’s DEI ban.
Apparently overly zealous interpretations of executive orders can be turned back in some cases. It’s a small win for military training and tradition building, but it also suggests that military professionals can get through, at least on something like this. Trump’s pardon of war criminals in his first term tell a different story, however.
“Heeding Trump, Air Force won’t teach recruits about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express News, January 24, 2025, expressnews.com….
A video describing the exploits of the groundbreaking African American airmen, who flew combat sorties during World War II, has been removed from the instructional curriculum for new recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, the hub of Air Force basic training.
Now that I’m more than 20 years older than Martin Luther King, Jr., ever had a chance to become, his youth at the time of his murder is much clearer to me, much starker. It makes his achievements seem that much greater and his death all the more painful.
Pictured above: photos of two buttons and a poster from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library, image IDs 57281864, 57281854, and 58250348.