Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
from the freedom movement.
Although America has made societal progress from its days of overt racial intolerance and legal segregation, the true spirit of the civil rights struggle lives on in efforts to eradicate poverty; in campaigns for improvement of public education; in attempts to end unjust and disproportionate incarceration of blacks in the prison system; and in endeavors to obtain health care for every American. Until these and other civil rights are fulfilled, the struggle continues in every community, town, city, and state in our nation.
Diane Nash
August 2008
Movements
African American Art and the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was the most significant realignment of American democracy since the American Civil War of the 1860s. The movement asserted a rebirth and a reinvention of black identity and black consciousness as African Americans redefined themselves, while also forcing a reappraisal of white identity and America’s democratic values. The landmark events, songs, speeches, poems, and literature of the period, spanning from the Brown v. Board of Education United States Supreme Court Decision of 1954 to the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968, are well known.
The art that grew out of the movement is also critical to understanding this tumultuous time. The struggle was waged on two fronts: in the streets and in the realm of images and ideas that proclaimed the awakening of a people in search of self-discovery, self-determination, and selflegitimization. Black artists asked themselves, “What kind of art should a black artist make in these times?” according to Lerone Bennett Jr., and they answered with various artistic responses that embraced the struggle for social justice, racial pride, and the liberation of people of African descent everywhere.
The artwork, in large measure, resounded with propagandistic and reactionary messages. Even so, culturally as well as aesthetically important works were produced by black artists who are well known today, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Williams, Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett, Benny Andrews, Moneta Sleet, Raymond Saunders, Charles White, Marion Perkins, Richard Yarde, David Hammonds, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gordon Parks, Sam Gilliam, Jeff Donaldson, James Overstreet, and Nelson Stevens, among others. Important groups like Spiral in New York City and AfriCobra in Chicago embodied the spirit and aspirations of blacks and promoted Pan-Africanist ideals.
Much of the art produced by black artists of the period is only now emerging from the shadows of the iconic images of celebrity (Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and consumer goods (Campbell Soup Cans and Brillo Pads) favored by pop artists like Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenberg. African American artists responded, in the main, to the events of the period with an art that cast a critical eye on American democracy, much like Faith Ringgold’s The Flag is Bleeding (1967), or addressed the matter of confrontation with authority as depicted in Jeff Donaldson’s Aunt Jemima and the Pillsbury Dough Boy ‘64 (1964). They also celebrated heroes and heroines who embodied in their personal story the struggle for social justice, as did Elizabeth Catlett-Mora in her iconic print Malcolm Speaks for Us (1969). Others, such as the photographer Moneta Sleet, chronicled the times in works like his From Selma to Montgomery (1965) that captured triumphs and tragedies of the period.
Much of the art produced by black artists of the period is only now emerging from the shadows of the iconic images of celebrity.
African American artists turned their easels, cameras, pencils, and pens not only to documenting the movement but also to producing an activist art that expressed and promoted the aspirations of black America. After World War II (1939–1945), African American artists witnessed, documented, and participated in the periodic but steady challenges blacks across the country waged against unjust political and social practices in America. Like all of black America, they witnessed the conflicts that erupted year after year throughout the American South, the legal challenges to racial segregation, the mass boycotts, the student sit-ins, and countless other events that called into question America’s commitment to its democratic creed. And, like black Americans everywhere, they heeded the call for a new vision and a new way of life for black America, and actively enlisted their art in the struggle for social and political change.
Victor D. Simmons
Black Arts Movement/Black Aesthetic Movement
In the same way that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was launched to insure that black Americans received their rights as citizens, the Black Arts Movement, sometimes referred to as the Black Aesthetic Movement that operated alongside it, sought to define black Americans and the black experience on their own terms. The images that America had sanctioned as representative of black Americans were degrading, inaccurate, and racist. As long as these images were based on European criteria and racist notions, black Americans would never truly be able to enjoy their full rights as citizens.
The Black Arts Movement set out to create and promote a sensibility that embraced the beauty and truth of the black community, as well as the traditions and cultural ideas that enabled black Americans to survive in an environment that legally and socially relegated them to second-class citizenship. The Black Arts Movement created academic standards of analysis and criticism that had direct relationships to the black cultural experience. Acknowledging contributions and sacrifices in the creation of America while at the same time recognizing and respecting the traditions and culture of black Americans became paramount to the transformation of American society.
Artists of the Black Arts Movement offered works that were key in creating images which supported the manifesto that “black is beautiful.” Black artists offered their own life experiences of struggle, survival, and accomplishment, as well as images of other members of the black community that had previously been denigrated or ignored. All artistic media were used to rail against white cultural perspectives, including art, music, poetry, fiction, drama, and literature in general. Many of the artists were also active in the Civil Rights Movement in various ways, including marches.
Leading artists of the movement included Amiri Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti (also known as Don L. Lee), and Sonia Sanchez. Theorists and essayists included Larry Neal, Etheridge Knight, Addison Gayle Jr., and Maulana Karenga. Although the artists’ works were often seen as anti-white, anti-middle class, and anti-American, their goal was to create a true image of black Americans in a social system that had either made blacks invisible or had promoted negative stereotypes of them. These artists’ works changed the image of black Americans on a national and even global scale. Without the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement would have lacked the framework to transform images and attitudes in order to bring about fundamental social change.
Lean’tin L. Bracks
New Negro Movement
The New Negro Movement is a term many scholars use to refer to the Harlem Renaissance; they feel that the phrase “New Negro” recognizes the shift in consciousness black writers had during the period and it recognizes that black literature proliferated at the time but did not undergo a renaissance. Several events serve as the precursors of the movement: the publication of The Souls of Black Folks (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois, which delves into cultural history and helps define the problem of black identity and addresses the importance of black people in America; the organization of the NAACP (1909) and the National Urban League (1911); the Great Migration (beginning c. 1910) in which black people moved from the rural South to the urban North looking for employment and a better way of life; and the end of World War I (1918), which saw soldiers who had fought for foreign democracy returning home to find racism,