Black Lightning

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Osborne Perry Anderson was one of the five African American men to accompany John Brown in the raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in October 1859. Anderson was a free-born black abolitionist, born in West Fallow Field, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1830. Along with John Anthony Copeland Jr., another member of the Brown raiding party, Anderson attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He later moved to Chatham, Canada, where he worked as a printer for Mary Ann Shadd's newspaper, the Provincial Freeman. In 1858 Anderson met John Brown and eventually became persuaded to join his band of men determined to attack Harpers Ferry.

One year after meeting John Brown, on October 16, 1859 Anderson took part in Brown’s radical scheme to free the United States of slavery. Like Brown and the other followers, Anderson believed that if the group seized weapons at Harpers Ferry and then marched south, they would create a massive slave uprising that would liberate all of the nearly four million African Americans in bondage.

Osborne Anderson was among the five followers of Brown who escaped capture when U.S. Marines attacked the Arsenal to stop the raid. He was the only African American to escape capture. In 1861 Anderson, now safely in the North, wrote A Voice From Harper’s Ferry with assistance from Mary Ann Shadd, in which he described his role in the raid and argued that many local slaves would have welcomed their liberation and some in fact had helped Brown and his men. Anderson's account was the only one published by a member of Brown's party and provided a rare first hand description of the events and the motivation of these abolitionists.

In 1864, five years after the Harpers Ferry Raid, Anderson enlisted in the Union Army, serving as a recruitment officer in Indiana and Arkansas. Osborne Anderson died on December 13, 1872 in Washington, D.C. at the age of forty-two.
 

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American Colonization Society (1816-1964)

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The American Colonization Society (ACS), also known as the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States, emerged in 1816 as a national organization dedicated to promoting the manumission of the enslaved and the settlement of free blacks in West Africa, specifically in the colony of Liberia. The ACS transported approximately 12,000 blacks to Liberia over the course of its existence.


In December 1816, alarmed by the rapidly growing free black and slave populations, the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from Basking Ridge,
New Jersey, travelled to Washington, D.C. to gather support for colonization which he saw as the solution to the growing racial tension in the United States. He led a meeting which created the ACS on December 21, 1816. The meeting included some of the most powerful and influential men in the country such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Randolph of Virginia. Finley believed the presence of blacks in the United States was a threat to the national well-being and felt Africans Americans would only be able to fulfill their potential as human beings in Africa. He envisioned slaveholders freeing their slaves and sending them to Africa. Colonization, according to Finley, would thus benefit American blacks as well at the entire nation by promoting a gradual end to slavery.


American Colonization Society members were overwhelmingly white and initially included
abolitionists as well as slave owners, all of whom generally agreed with the prevailing view of the time that free blacks could not be integrated into white America. Other black and white abolitionists, however, began to question the intent of the ACS, claiming its true intent was to drain off the most educated of the free black population which often challenged slavery and thus preserve the institution.


The society’s program focused on purchasing and freeing slaves, paying their passage (and that of free blacks) to the west coast of Africa, and assisting them after their arrival there. The federal government provided some initial funding for the Society and helped the ACS purchase the Cape Mesurado area off the coast of West Africa which subsequently became the colony of Liberia. In 1830 the government ended its payments to the ACS; from then on the colonization program was financed exclusively by local and state branches and from churches. In 1838 the ACS adopted a new constitution, one in which the organization became a federation of state auxiliaries.



Between 1820 and 1831 nearly 3,000 black emigrants went to the ACS’s settlement in Liberia. By the mid-1830s though, negative reports from previous emigrants and improving economic conditions for blacks in the United States led to a decline in the Society’s ability to recruit new emigrants.



In 1847, Liberia declared its independence from the American Colonization Society. As the only western-oriented nation on the African continent, Liberia attracted another 2,000 settlers between 1848 and 1860. It was inactive during the
American Civil War as African Americans gained their freedom and thus saw no reason to emigrate.


Ironically, the ACS was revived in the 1870s by black leaders such as
Rev. Henry McNeal Turner as the end of Reconstruction dashed hopes of many African Americans that they would enjoy full citizenship rights. With much fanfare the ACS sent another two thousand blacks to Liberia. Despite deteriorating political conditions in the United States, however, the vast majority of blacks rejected this new call for emigration. The ACS sent its last settlers to Liberia in 1904. Thereafter, the American Colonization Society functioned as a Liberian aid society until it finally dissolved in 1964.


 

Black Lightning

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Afro-American Council (1898-1907)

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The Afro-American Council (AAC) was established in Rochester, New York, in September 1898 by newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune and Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. They envisioned the organization as a revival of the earlier National Afro-American League (NAAL), which in 1890 became the first national black organization specifically created to challenge racial segregation and discrimination. By the mid-1890s the NAAL dissolved as conditions facing Southern African Americans continued to worsen. The AAC proposed to take up the goals of the defunct NAAL. Like its predecessor, the AAC opposed lynching, disfranchisement of black voters, and racial discrimination against all African Americans.

The immediate impetus for the AAC was the brutal murder of African American postmaster Frazier B. Baker in Lake City, South Carolina by a white mob. In response to the incident, Fortune and Walters called for a number of black leaders to meet at Rochester to dedicate a statue of Frederick Douglass, the city's most prominent African American resident, and to remain there to create the Afro-American Council.

With the inclusion of a broader spectrum of black leaders including journalists, attorneys, educators, politicians and community activists, the AAC was both more representative of the larger black middle class and better positioned to generate funds to support its activities. Bishop Walters of Washington, D.C., was its first president. Other officers included Ida B. Wells of Chicago, Illinois as secretary and John C. Dancy of North Carolina as Vice President. Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, the only black member of Congress at the time, was later a vice president of the organization. Other prominent members included Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. DuBois, former Louisiana governor Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, Professor William S. Scarborough, Henry O. Flipper, the first black West Point graduate, and Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The AAC was notable in that it was one of the first black organizations to welcome women as equal members. The organization also was the first black group to meet regularly with a U.S. President. It met with President William McKinley each year between 1898 and 1901. The AAC lobbied for the passage of a federal anti-lynching law and raised funds to challenge the Louisiana constitution's "grandfather clause" which effectively eliminated black voting in the state.

Despite its goal of having African America speak with one voice on politics (black Republicans and Democrats joined the AAC), the organization eventually divided into pro- and anti-Booker T. Washington factions. By 1902 Washington supporters dominated the Council and three years later most of the anti-Washington Council members including DuBois, Wells, Terrell, and Bishop Walters left to form the Niagara Movement. The AAC held its final meeting in Baltimore, Maryland in 1907.

Although the AAC was torn by factionalism and achieved few successes, it laid the groundwork for independent black political action in an era of racial segregation and helped train some of the nation’s most prominent black activists who would go on to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
 

Black Lightning

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Andry’s Rebellion (1811)

Named after the owner of the plantation where the event originated, the revolt of 400-500 slaves in the parishes of the Andry plantation caused uproar in New Orleans, Louisiana. Led by a Saint-Domingue slave named Charles Deslondes, the uprising was built on the fear generated by the Haitian Revolution of 1791, coupled with the large population of free Negroes to further accentuate the tension in New Orleans.

General Wade Hampton assembled two companies of volunteers, and eventually with the additional help of a regular army troop the disturbance was put down, requiring the service of nearly 700 soldiers. By the end of the day, the rebels had murdered two whites and eighty-two rebels were killed in retribution, making the suppression of this revolt the bloodiest in the history of the country. After hanging the heads of some of the guilty on poles in New Orleans, authorities tightened the restrictions governing the activities of free blacks, and a few loyal slaves were emancipated.
 

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Ira Frederick Aldridge was the first African American actor to achieve success on the international stage. He also pushed social boundaries by playing opposite white actresses in England and becoming known as the preeminent Shakespearean actor and tragedian of the 19th Century.

Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York City, New York on July 24, 1807 to free blacks Reverend Daniel and Lurona Aldridge. Although his parents encouraged him to become a pastor, he studied classical education at the African Free School in New York where he was first exposed to the performance arts. While there he became impressed with acting and by age 15 was associating with professional black actors in the city. They encouraged Aldridge to join the prestigious African Grove Theatre, an all-black theatre troupe founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett in 1821. He apprenticed under Hewlett, the first African American Shakespearean actor. Though Aldridge was gainfully employed as an actor in the 1820s, he felt that the United States was not a hospitable place for theatrical performers. Many whites resented the claim to cultural equality that they saw in black performances of Shakespeare and other white-authored texts. Realizing this, Aldridge emigrated to Europe in 1824 as the valet for British-American actor James William Wallack.

Aldridge eventually moved to Glasgow, Scotland and began studies at the University of Glasgow, where he enhanced his voice and dramatic skills in theatre. He moved to England and made his debut in London in 1825 as Othello at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, a role he would remain associated with until his death. The critic reviews gave Aldridge the name Roscius (the celebrated Roman actor of tragedy and comedy). Aldridge embraced it and began using the stage name “The African Roscius.” He even created the myth that he was the descendant of a Senegalese Prince whose family was forced to escape to the United States to save their lives. This deception erased Aldridge’s American upbringing and cast him as an exotic and almost magical being.

Throughout the mid-1820s to 1860 Ira Aldridge slowly forged a remarkable career. He performed in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bath, and Bristol in King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice. He also freely adapted classical plays, changing characters, eliminating scenes and installing new ones, even from other plays. In 1852 he embarked on a series of continental tours that intermittently would last until the end of his life. He performed his full repertoire in Prussia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, and Poland. Some of the honors he received include the Prussian Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences from King Frederick, the Golden Cross of Leopold from the Czar of Russia, and the Maltese Cross from Berne, Switzerland.

Aldridge died on August 7, 1867 while on tour in Lodz, Poland. He was 60 at the time of his death. Aldridge had been married twice and left behind several children including a daughter named Luranah who would, in her own right, go on to become a well-known actress and opera singer. There is a memorial plaque at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, in honor of his contributions to the performing arts. In 2014 a second plaque was unveiled in Lodz, Poland to honor his memory and legacy.
 

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Leigh Whipper, the first black member of the Actors’ Equity Association (1913), was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1876. His father, William James Whipper, was a Civil War Veteran from Connecticut who settled in South Carolina during the Reconstruction period and became an attorney in Charleston. His mother, Frances Rollin Whipper, was a writer. Whipper attended public school in Washington, D.C. After leaving Howard University Law School in 1895, he immediately joined the theater.

Never a drama student, Whipper honed his acting abilities by observing the techniques of some of the most established actors of his day and interpreting the voices of some of his favorite writers, including Paul Laurence Dunbar. By the turn of the century, he had made his first Broadway appearance in Georgia Minstrels and went on to appear in classical Broadway productions of Stevedore, Of Mice and Men, and Porgy. Whipper achieved national fame for his characterization of the Crabman of the Catfish Row in Porgy, interposing into his part the Crabman’s Song. It was later incorporated into the film version.

Whipper made his film debut as a bit player in Oscar Micheaux's silent race films, Symbol of the Unconquered (1920) and Within Our Gates (1920). He later starred in the Hollywood films Of Mice and Men (1939), and The Oxbow Incident (1943). In 1944, Whipper was honored by the Ethiopian government for his portrayal of the superior Emperor Haile Selassie in the movie Mission to Moscow (1943), in which he delivers a speech before the League of the Nations.

Though he appeared in nearly two-dozen films, Whipper was devoted to his stage career and maintained lifelong activity as a member in several organizations, including the American Federation of Radio Artists (1937) and the Screen Actors Guild (1933). He was also a founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America (1937) along with actress Fredi Washington, who appeared as his leading lady in the Broadway play Lysistrata.

Leigh Whipper retired from the screen and stage in 1972 and settled in Harlem, New York, where he died in 1975 at the age of 98.
 

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Robert S. Duncanson


Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821 – December 21, 1872) was an African-American painter associated with the Hudson River School.[1][2] He was a landscape and portrait painter born in northern New York in 1821.[3]


The grandson of a freed Virginia slave, Robert Seldon Duncanson was the first African American artist to achieve wide renown during his lifetime.

Legacy

Although not very well known by the general public, Robert S. Duncanson had a significant impact on American art. As the first American painter to take up residence in Canada and focus on its landscape, his influence has been felt there as well.[15] At a gallery showing in Harlem, the New York Amsterdam News called the works by Duncanson “pioneering.”[16] It is not the genre he chose to paint in that was pioneering, it was the subtle way he infused his paintings with an African-American sensibility without creating what the art world would categorize as African-American paintings. Although Duncanson’s son urged him to be more outright African-American in his works, Duncanson wrote to his son, “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”[17] This highlights his laid-back approach to racial tensions that the art world had not seen before. Audiences looking at Duncanson’s work have to look hard, beyond the obvious associations with themes of landscape and idealized lands, to see the commentary on a post Civil War America and a socially aware African-American artist. Instead, Richard Powell of American Visions says that Duncanson’s success is a “victory over society’s presumptions of what African American artist should create.”[18] Duncanson’s artwork has become a useful tool in teaching art students about the history of African-American artists.

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America’s Forgotten Landscape Painter: Robert S. Duncanson
Beloved by 19th-century audiences around the world, the African-American artist fell into obscurity, only to be celebrated as a genius a century later


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In the mid-1860s, an African-American artist arrived at the home of England’s poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on the Isle of Wight. He brought with him his most celebrated painting, Land of the Lotus Eaters, based on a poem by the great man of letters.


Tennyson was delighted with the image. “Your landscape,” he proclaimed, “is a land in which one loves to wander and linger.”

The artist, Robert S. Duncanson, known in America as “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” now stood poised to conquer England.

"He invented a unique place for himself that no other African-American had attained at that time,” says art historian Claire Perry, curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit “The Great American Hall of Wonders.” “It was a position as an eminent artist recognized both within the United States and abroad as a master." Duncanson’s painting Landscape with Rainbow is in the exhibit, which closes January 8, 2012.



Though dozens of Duncanson’s paintings survive in art institutions and private collections, after his death in 1872, his name faded into obscurity. But an exhibition of his paintings at the Cincinnati Art Museum on the centenary of his death helped restore his renown. Since then, his work has been the subject of several books, including art historian Joseph Ketner’s The Emergence of the African-American Artist, as well as the recent exhibition “Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freedmen's Sons,” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York.

“Duncanson’s progression from a humble housepainter to recognition in the arts,” writes Ketner, “signaled the emergence of the African-American artist from a people predominantly relegated to laborers and artisans.”

Duncanson was born circa 1821 in Fayette, New York, into a family of free African-Americans skilled in carpentry and house painting. When he was a boy, the family moved to Monroe, Michigan, where he took up the family trade as a teenager, advertising a new business as a painter and glazier in the Monroe Gazette. But Duncanson, who taught himself fine art by copying prints and drawing still lifes and portraits, was not content to remain a tradesman. He soon moved to Cincinnati, then known as the "Athens of the West" for its abundance of art patrons and exhibition venues.

To make ends meet, he essentially became an itinerant artist, looking for work between Cincinnati, Monroe and Detroit. But in 1848, his career received a major boost when he was commissioned by anti-slavery activist Charles Avery to paint the landscape, Cliff Mine, Lake Superior. The association led to a lifelong relationship with abolitionists and sympathizers who wanted to support black artists.

The commission also ignited a passion in Duncanson for landscape painting, which led to a friendship with William Sonntag, one of Cincinnati's leading practitioners of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. In 1850, the Daily Cincinnati Gazette reported, "In the room adjoining Sonntag's, at Apollo Building, Duncanson, favorably known as a fruit painter, has recently finished a very good strong lake view."

"He had exceptional talent as an artist," says Perry. "But there was also something about his personality that made important patrons take him under their wings.” Nicholas Longworth, a horticulturalist with anti-slavery sentiments, was one of those patrons. Longworth hired him to paint eight monumental landscape murals on the panels inside the main hall of his Belmont mansion, now known as Taft Museum of Art, in Cincinnati. “These are the most ambitious and accomplished domestic mural paintings in antebellum America,” writes Ketner.

"Longworth was one of the richest men in the United States," says Perry. "He knew everyone and had connections with everyone. When he gave Duncanson this very important commission for his home, he gave him the Good Housekeeping stamp of approval."

Ever ambitious, Duncanson wanted to be the best at his profession and embarked upon a grand tour of Europe in 1853 to study the masters. His letters reveal an understated confidence: "My trip to Europe has to some extent enabled me to judge of my own talent," he wrote. "Of all the Landscapes I saw in Europe, (and I saw thousands) I do not feel discouraged . . . . Someday I will return."

Meanwhile, Cincinnati had become a hotbed of anti-slavery activity, and Duncanson appears to have supported the cause, participating in abolitionist societies and donating paintings to help raise funds. During the 1850s, Duncanson also worked as the principal artist in the city's premier daguerrean studio with owner James Presley Ball, a fellow African-American. “Both men had African-Americans living with them who listed themselves as painters or daguerreans,” says Ketner. “This was the first real aggregate cluster of an African-American community of artists in America.”


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Robert Duncanson painted Landscape with Rainbow two years after everybody thought Frederic Church’s rainbow in Niagara could never be topped, says art historian Claire Perry. Although other artists grew skittish, “Duncanson waded right in,” she says. “It was a bold move.” (Gift of Leonard and Paula Granoff / Smithsonian American Art Museum)



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Duncanson is believed to have helped create the images in the anti-slavery presentation, Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States. (The painting itself no longer exists, but evidence suggests that it was Duncanson’s brushwork). Presented in theaters across the country, the 600-yard-wide panorama utilized narration and special sound and lighting effects to portray the horrors of human bondage from capture and trans-Atlantic passage to slave markets and escape to Canada.


In fact, after his European pilgrimage, Duncanson had declared,” I have made up my mind to paint a great picture, even if I fail." Although critics had responded favorably to Duncanson’s first post-tour effort, Time’s Temple, it was 1858’s Western Forest that exposed him to an international abolitionist community and helped pave the way for his return to England.

Duncanson executed his next work in the tradition of European paintings that conveyed historical, literary or other moralizing subjects. The result was Land of the Lotus Eaters, based on Tennyson’s poem about the paradise that seduced Ulysses' soldiers. But in Duncanson’s tropical landscape, white soldiers are resting comfortably on the banks of a river, while being served by dark-skinned Americans, reflecting contemporary criticism, says Ketner, that the South had grown dependent on slave labor to support its standard of living. “He prophesied the forthcoming long and bloody Civil War,” writes Ketner, “and offered an African-American perspective.”

A reviewer at the Daily Cincinnati Gazette proclaimed, "Mr. Duncanson has long enjoyed the enviable reputation of being the best landscape painter in the West, and his latest effort cannot fail to raise him still higher."

Duncanson decided to take his “great picture” to Europe—by way of Canada—some say to avoid having to obtain a diplomatic passport required for persons of color traveling abroad. His stopover in Canada would last more than two years.

During his stay, Duncanson helped foster a school of landscape painting, influencing Canadian artists such as Otto Jacobi, C. J. Way, and Duncanson’s pupil, Allan Edson, who would become one of the country’s formative landscape artists. He worked with the prestigious gallery of William Notman, known as the “Photographer to the Queen,” to promote arts and culture; was heralded as a “cultivator” of the arts in Canada; and was perceived as a native son. When he left for the British Isles in 1865, and stopped in Dublin to participate in the International Exposition, he exhibited in the Canadian pavilion.

In London, Duncanson’s long-awaited unveiling of Land of the Lotus Eaters inspired lavish praise. “It is a grand conception, and a composition of infinite skill,” raved one reviewer. “This painting may rank among the most delicious that Art has given us,” he added, “but it is wrought with the skill of a master.”

Duncanson soon became the toast of Great Britain. He enjoyed the patronage of the Duchess of Sutherland, the Marquis of Westminster and other aristocrats and royals, including the King of Sweden, who purchased Lotus Eaters. Duncanson visited the Duchess of Argyll at her castle in Scotland, and made sketches for new landscapes there and in Ireland. Finally, he had realized his longtime dream of returning to Europe and winning international acclaim.

In the midst of such praise and patronage, Duncanson abruptly left England in 1866, after only a year. He may have been eager to experience the rebirth of America now that the Civil War—and the threat posed by the slave-holding Confederacy across the Ohio border—had ended, but his reasons are unclear to art historians.

“Excitable, energetic, irrepressible are words I would apply to his personality,” says Ketner. “It’s what gave him the impetus to have these daring aspirations, but maybe that personality became troubled.”

At the height of his success and fame in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Duncanson was stricken with what was referred to as dementia. Prone to sudden outbursts, erratic behavior and delusions, by 1870, he imagined that he was possessed by the spirit of a deceased artist. Scholars suggest that the brooding mood and turbulent waters of seascapes, such as Sunset on the New England Coast and A Storm off the Irish Coast, reflected his disturbed mental state.

Ketner, who consulted physicians about the symptoms described by Duncanson’s contemporaries, believes his condition was caused by lead poisoning. “As a housepainter, he had dealt with large quantities of lead paint since boyhood,” says Ketner, “and then was exposed to cumulative amounts as an artist.”

While curator Perry believes the stress of straddling the chasm between white and black societies may have contributed to his mental deterioration, she continues to weigh several factors. “He did live a life of incredible stress as a successful African-American in a white-dominated world,” she says. “But people who perform at the highest level of artistic skills are also people of unusual sensitivity.”

Despite the challenges he confronted, Duncanson persevered. He opened a new studio in Cincinnati and turned his sketches of the Scottish Highlands into masterpieces, including Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, a painting inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake,” and Pass at Leny, in which he subordinates the sentimentality of previous landscapes to more naturalistic forms. In 1871, he toured America with several historical works, priced upward of $15,000 apiece.

Even as his health failed, his passion for his work persisted. Duncanson was installing an exhibition in Detroit in October 1872 when he suffered a seizure and collapsed. He died two months later; the cause of death remains uncertain.




 

IllmaticDelta

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James Presley Ball

James Presley Ball, Sr. (1825 – May 4, 1904) was a prominent African-American photographer, abolitionist, and businessman.[1][2]

Ball was born in Frederick County, Virginia to William and Susan Ball in 1825.[3] He learned daguerreotype photography from John B. Bailey of Boston, who like Ball was "a freeman of color."[4] Ball opened a one-room daguerreotype studio in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1845.[1] The business did not prosper, so Ball worked as an itinerant daguerreotypist, settling briefly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then in Richmond, Virginia in 1846 to develop a more successful studio near the State Capitol building.[1]

Ball was an award-winning artist, celebrated internationally for his portraits of well-known whites, African Americans, and Asians. His sitters included such celebrities as Frederick Douglass, Jenny Lind, and Ulysses Grant's family.


Photographs
Among the subjects of Ball's photographic portraits were P.T. Barnum, Charles dikkens, Henry Highland Garnet, the family of Ulysses S. Grant, Jenny Lind, and Queen Victoria.[1][3][7] The techniques used for "all the known photographs of J. P. Ball" as of 1993 included mostly daguerreotypes and albumen prints (e.g., as carte de visites).[1] In 1992, Swann Galleries sold an 1851 daguerreotype by Ball of three storefronts in Cincinnati for $63,800, which set a world record at the time for highest price paid for a daguerreotype at auction.[10]

Ball's photographic work is held by, among other institutions:[1][11] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Historical Society, George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Montana Historical Society, Ohio State University, and University of Washington.

James Presley Ball pioneered Black photography

J.P. Ball at one time was considered the best photographer in the Cincinnati area and later one of the best and most successful in the nation, yet few people have ever heard of him. Prior to this study this writer’s knowledge of famous African American photographers was limited to James Van der Zee and those who came afterwards such as Gordon Parks, Monetta J. Sleet. Though not renown today for his work, Ball might very well be worthy of being a peer to other better known photographers such as Matthew Brady and others. It seems that Ball’s peers are often limited to other African American photographers such as Augusta Washington, Daniel Freeman, and Jules Lion. A closer look at his work as revealed in the book J.P. Ball, Daguerrean and Studio Photographer clearly shows that this was a photographer who has left a treasure.

Born a free man in Virginia in 1825, Ball was a not only an extremely successful Daguerrean/photographer but was a businessman and dabbled in politics later in his life becoming a Montana delegate to the Republican convention in 1894. His reputation spanned from his beginnings in Virginia to Cincinnati to Minneapolis to Montana to Seattle and finally to Hawaii. He produced hundreds of photographs of the white, black, and Chinese community. He was the official photographer of the 25th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and photographed the construction of the Montana state capital. Many of his studio portraits and photographs of public events are archived by the Montana Historical Society. His photographs chronicle a changing community. They depict immigrants from Asia and Europe as well as migrants from all over the United States.http://www.lonniedawkins.com/JamesPresleyBall.htm#_edn1

The book J.P. Ball, Daguerrean and Studio Photographer includes about 300 of Ball’s pictures including people of all walks of life. Mostly it includes portraits of what appears to be well to do people. This collection clearly shows that Ball had a vast array of clients who sought out his work. Curiously it seems that each person has their left arm leaning on a chair, post, or table. There are wonderful group pictures including families and schools. Almost all pictures are of people and only a few are of buildings. Each portrait shows the studio that Ball owned at the time. Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Albumen prints, carte-de-visite and Albumen cabinet card are the mediums. Highlight of the book is the pictures of William Biggerstaff which is discussed shortly and the Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade; of Northern and Southern Cities; of Cotton and Sugar Plantations; of the Mississippi, Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, Niagara Falls, & C. and the pamphlet that accompanied it.

J. P. Ball's great contribution to history and photography is his coverage of the injustices of slavery and the lynchings that took place in the 1900. He used his photographic skills to expose the abhorrent institution of slavery by promoting antislavery activities. [ii] Deborah Willis, historian and photographer in her book Reflections in Black, A History of Black Photographers 1840 to Present reflects on how “visual representations of black people commonly produced on postcards and sheet music depicted exaggerated features and demeaning situations that have left enduring negative impact, one that has endured to this day.” Ball’s photography and the work of other black photographers contradicted this by showing more realistic depictions of both ordinary and famous people. “Most of their African-American clients wanted to celebrate their achievements and establish a counter image that conveyed a sense of self and self-worth.”[iii]

One of his most moving documentation was the photography of the lynching of William Biggerstaff. In a series of photographs Biggerstaff who was accused of murder is first pictured in a suit with a flower pinned to his lapel and a handkerchief in his pocket. The timing was Montana in 1854 shortly before Biggerstaff; a former slave was to be hung for the crime of murdering a man. The next picture is one of Biggerstaff being hanged, again dressed in a suit. Finally, he is shown in a in a casket dressed in a suit with what appears to be dressed in a suit. These pictures brought dignity and humanity to a man. Margo Jefferson describes some other photography of lynchings thusly as pictures of perpetrators and spectators who treated lynchings as family affairs, civic celebrations, picnics (the preferred terms was “ Negro barbecue”) and some kind of sexual catharsis. A lot of the men have rugged dusty look of bit players in old westerns, and the strike movie attitudes for the camera or clasp the ankles of the dead man sternly”. Some wear white shirts, ties and straw boaters. (One young man with immaculately styled hair looks dressed to call on his sweetheart once the lynching’s done.) “[iv] Ball made an important contribution to history by showing how these people were human beings with families and dignity.


At the same time he took pictures of a vast variety of people famous and unknown, slaves and freemen. His sitters included Frederick Douglass, Henry H. Garnet, Jenny Lind, and Ulysses S. Grant.[v] Even early in his career it was stated that “Ball was able to attract clients to his rented room: “The Virginians rushed in crowds to his room; all classes, white and black, bond and free sought to have their lineaments, stamped by the artist who painted with the Sun’s rays.””



Ball is famous for his abolitionist work and his photo panorama: Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade; of Northern and Southern Cities; of Cotton and Sugar Plantations; of the Mississippi, Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, Niagara Falls, & C. This work 2,400 square foot antislavery photo panorama and accompanying charted the slave experience through images of the life in Africa, the horrors of the middle passage, and daily routines in America. It included portraits, cityscapes, and significant events in the history of slavery. It was displayed at Ball’s studio and at an 1855 exhibit at Boston’s Armory Hall.[vi] This work was in conjunction with Robert S. Duncan and African American landscape artist.

 

Black Lightning

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Roger Arliner Young, born in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology and to conduct research at the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Young conducted research on the anatomy of paramecium and the effects of radiation on sea urchin eggs.

Young enrolled at Howard University at the age of twenty-seven, intending to major in music. After struggling through a biology course with African American biologist Ernest Everett Just, she changed her major to that subject, earning a B.S. in 1923. Just hired her as an assistant professor at Howard while she attended graduate school. The next year, Young enrolled at the University of Chicago in Illinois part-time and published her first article on paramecium which achieved international recognition. She received her M.S in Zoology in 1926 and was elected to the honor society Sigma Xi.

Between 1927 and 1936 Young and Just worked together at Howard University and during the summers they conducted research at Woods Hole. While Just was in Europe, Young served as the substitute chair for Howard’s biology department. Upon his return to Howard in 1929, Young entered the Ph.D. program in biology at the University of Chicago. However, the pressures of her duties at Howard and her responsibilities to care for her invalid mother were counterproductive to her success. She failed the qualifying exam and returned to Howard where rumors of a romance with Just led to her dismissal in 1936. Young recovered from this low point to publish four articles between 1935 and 1938.

After leaving Howard, Young maintained ties with scientists she met at Woods Hole. One, V.L. Heilbrunn, recruited her to the University of Pennsylvania were she completed her Ph.D. in 1940. Between 1940 and 1953 she taught at North Carolina College and Shaw University, where she served as the Biology Department Chair. Young, affected by her mother’s death in 1953 and still under intense pressure as a solitary black female scientist, had difficulty holding a job. She worked at various black colleges until the late 1950s when she voluntarily committed herself to the Mississippi State Mental Asylum. After her release in 1962, Young lectured at Southern University until she died in 1964.
 

Black Lightning

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Samuel (“Sammy”) Leamon Younge Jr. was a young civil rights activist who was shot to death on January 3, 1966 when he attempted to use a whites-only restroom at a gas station in Macon County, Alabama. He was 21 years old. Younge was killed 11 years after and 40 miles from where the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott began. At the time of his death he was a military veteran and Tuskegee Institute political science student.
Younge was born on November 17, 1944 in Tuskegee, Alabama. His parents were educated professionals; Samuel Sr. was an occupational therapist, and Younge’s mother, Renee, was a schoolteacher. Unlike most black men in Macon County, Sammy Younge and his younger brother, Stephen (“Stevie”), grew up with middle class privileges and comforts.

Between September 1957 and January 1960 Younge attended Cornwall Academy, a college preparatory school for boys in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a town famous as the birthplace of W.E.B. DuBois. Younge graduated from Tuskegee Institute High School in 1962 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Soon after his enlistment Younge served on the aircraft carrier USS Independence during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the vessel participated in the United States blockade of Cuba. After a year in the Navy, Young developed a failing kidney that had to be surgically removed. He was given a medical discharge from the Navy in July 1964.

Younge returned to Tuskegee and worked at the Tuskegee Veteran's Hospital for a few months before entering the Tuskegee Institute in January 1965 as a freshman. In March 1965 Younge took part in the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches in support of voting rights. That participation led to his joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL), groups that led voter registration drives for African Americans, and worked to help desegregate public facilities, recreational facilities, and schools. Younge also traveled to Mississippi later in 1965 to help SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party register black voters.

Younge’s murder in January 1966 at the Standard Oil Gas Station by its elderly white night attendant, Marvin Segrest, came as he was involved in a voter registration campaign in Macon County. It sparked a variety of protests. Three days after his murder SNCC called a press conference in which it declared its opposition to the war in Vietnam. Younge’s death was highlighted as an example of fighting for freedom abroad that was denied at home. There were protests in Tuskegee when white county officials initially refused to indict Segrest and later when an all-white jury, in an overwhelmingly black county, took only one hour and ten minutes to acquit Segrest in his December 1966 trial.

SNCC and local black leaders used Younge’s death (in combination with the 1965 Voting Rights Act) to inspire a rise in black political participation in the region. By 1970 the majority of office holders in Macon County and other predominately black central Alabama counties were African American.

Today Younge’s name is carved on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, a tribute to the 40 people who were slain between 1954 (the year the U.S. Supreme Court banned school segregation) and 1968 (the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination).
 

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Of the 167 enlisted black soldiers of the 25th Infantry discharged from the U.S. Army “without honor” by order of President Theodore Roosevelt after the shooting in Brownsville, Texas in 1906, Pvt. Dorsie Willis was the only to live long enough to see justice.

According to census records, Willis was born in Mississippi in 1886. His parents, Corsey and Dochie Willis were free born. Willis joined Company D, 25th Infantry of the U.S. Army on January 5, 1905. In July 1906 Willis’s battalion was sent to Fort Brown in Brownsville on the American bank of the Rio Grande and near its mouth. His battalion replaced the white 26th Infantry. The local residents, mostly Mexican and about 20% white, were not happy with the prospect of African American soldiers being stationed there, and the soldiers of the 25th Infantry immediately encountered harassment.

Less than three weeks later, between 12 and 20 men shot up Brownsville, killing one civilian and badly wounding another. Witnesses identified the shooters either as black or as soldiers, which meant the same thing since all the enlisted soldiers at Fort Brown were black. Their motive was thought to be revenge for the harassment they had suffered.

Every soldier at Fort Brown denied taking part in the shooting or knowing who might have been involved. Willis testified under oath he was in bed in his company’s barracks during the shooting and knew nothing about it. But when army investigations concluded the shooters were unidentified soldiers, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the discharge of every one on duty that night, including Dorsie Willis, without court-martial or other trial.

Historian John Weaver’s 1970 carefully researched book, The Brownsville Raid finally prompted the U.S. Army to reinvestigate the discharges, and in 1973 all discharged Brownsville soldiers were awarded Honorable Discharges posthumously; all except Dorsie Willis. On February 11, 1973, Willis was given his Certificate of Honorable Discharge attesting to his honest and faithful service. At the time only one other discharged Brownsville soldier also was alive but he had been readmitted to the army earlier and had already had an Honorable Discharge.

California Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins later persuaded his colleagues to also compensate Willis for the injustice of his original discharge, and on January 11, 1974, the U.S. Army sponsored a luncheon for Willis in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he now lived, and Army Major General De Witt Smith presented the veteran a check for $25,000. When Private Dorsie Willis died three years later on August 24, 1977, he was buried at the U.S. Military Cemetery at Fort Snelling, Minnesota with full military honors.
 

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Louis Tompkins Wright, medical researcher, war hero and political activist, was born to former slaves in La Grange, Georgia. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Atlanta’s Clark University in 1911 and a medical degree from Harvard University Medical School in 1915. Wright’s activism began at Harvard where he missed three weeks of medical school to join NAACP picket lines protesting The Birth of a Nation. Wright returned to his studies, however, and graduated fourth in his class in 1915.

Louis Wright served in France as a physician and Captain in the U.S. Army in World War I. There he successfully implemented life-saving treatments and suffered exposure to poison gas that led to both a Purple Heart and a lifelong respiratory illness. Upon his return to the United States he moved to New York City, New York where in 1919 he became the first African American appointed to the surgical staff at Harlem Hospital. Wright protested the dilapidated conditions of the hospital, raised its patient care standards, improved the professionalism of its staff, and brought the institution to national eminence. He began publication of the scholarly Harlem Hospital Bulletin and established the hospital’s medical library in 1934. During the 1930s Wright authored columns for the NAACP magazine Crisis, where he challenged the contention that biological factors caused African Americans to harbor more syphilis and infectious diseases than the general population.

Wright continued to serve on the staff of Harlem Hospital until 1949 in various capacities, including directory of the department of surgery and president of its medical board. Wright headed the team that first used Aureomycin. He became an expert in the treatment of head injuries and introduced the intradermal method of vaccination. Wright also founded the cancer research center at Harlem Hospital known as the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. In 1952 Wright died in New York City from tuberculosis.
 

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Dr. Jane Cooke Wright was a physician and cancer researcher who dedicated her professional career to the advancement of chemotherapy techniques. Jane Cooke Wright was born in New York City, New York on November 20, 1919. She was the older of two daughters to parents Louis Tompkins Wright and Corinne (Cooke) Wright. Wright attended private schools in New York City and in 1942 graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Wright’s father, one of the first African American graduates at Harvard Medical School, established the Cancer Research Center at Harlem Hospital, New York in 1947. After her undergraduate studies Wright attended New York Medical College on a four-year scholarship. She graduated with an M.D. in 1945.

Jane Cooke Wright was an intern at Bellevue Hospital, New York between 1945 and 1946. In 1947 she married David D. Jones, Jr., an attorney. The couple had two daughters, Jane and Allison. In 1949 Wright worked as a school physician in the New York City Public Schools and was a visiting physician at Harlem Hospital. In 1952 after the death of her father, Wright took over as the director of his Cancer Research Foundation.

In 1955 Wright began her work at the New York University Medical Center as the director of cancer chemotherapy research. She was also an instructor of research surgery in the Medical Center's Department of Surgery. In July 1967, Dr. Wright became a professor of surgery at New York Medical College. At the time she was the highest ranking African American woman in a United States medical institution.

Jane Cooke Wright has received numerous citations and awards. Among them, the Merit Award from Mademoiselle magazine in 1952, the Spirit of Achievement Award of the Women’s Division of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1961, and the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award in 1967. The following year her alma mater, Smith College, presented her with the Smith Medal, its highest award. In 1971 Dr. Wright became the first woman to serve as president of the New York Cancer Society.

In 1987, after a forty-four year career, Dr. Jane Cooke Wright retired as an emerita professor at New York Medical College. Her contributions to the research of cancer chemotherapy have helped to change the face of medicine and continue to be used to this day.

 

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A brilliant thinker, Vernon Johns was a pastor and activist who was the predecessor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.


Synopsis

Born in Darlington Heights, Virginia, on April 22, 1892, Vernon Johns earned his divinity degree from Oberlin College. Having an unorthodox style that merged his rural upbringing with intellectual acumen, he became pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, highlighted by his community activism and challenges to the status quo. Succeeded by Martin Luther King Jr., Johns died on April 11, 1965.

Education and Early Career

Vernon Napoleon Johns was born in Darlington Heights, part of Prince Edward County, Virginia, on April 22, 1892, with a complex multiracial family history. Johns worked on the farm growing up and was a voracious reader and learner of Western classical thought, attending the Boydton Institute and Virginia Theological Seminary and College.

Though allegedly expelled from his previous institution, Johns went on to attend Oberlin College's seminary and became the top student of his class, giving the famed Memorial Arch talk and graduating in 1918 with his divinity degree. He took on a variety of teaching and ministry work over the ensuing decades, becoming one of the most well-known African-American religious leaders of the era who was also out of the box, having a passion for traveling without being beholden to his educational background.

In 1927, Johns wed Altona Trent, a classical pianist, teacher and scholar who would also author music books. The couple went on to have three sons and three daughters.

Becomes Dexter Avenue Pastor

In 1948, after a mesmerizing trial sermon, Johns became the 19th pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the course of his four years there, Johns displayed a challenging, at times volatile temperament that put him at odds with much of the congregation, whom he took to task for often being too invested in social status.

Johns could speak and read multiple languages, being particularly fond of Greek, and was known to recite lengthy literary and scriptural passages at will as he had a photographic memory. His intellectual prowess, including a love of poetry and military histories, was balanced for a love of working the land, and he at times appeared on the pulpit in outdoorsy attire or outside of church hawking produce and food stuffs.

Johns was a community activist as well, helping African-American girls who had been raped by white men accuse their attackers to the authorities. He was also involved in desegregation work, refusing to comply with racist bus policies and at one point ordering a sandwich and drink from a white restaurant, being chased out practically by gunpoint. His sermons could be in-your-face as well, with titles connecting to oppressive, violent social dynamics faced by African Americans.

His niece, Barbara Johns, who lived with his immediate family for a time, was also at the helm of one of the suits involved in the historical 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case.

Succeeded by Martin Luther King Jr.

With a tumultuous history with Dexter Avenue and having already put in for his resignation multiple times, John's fifth resignation was accepted by the church in 1953. He was eventually succeeded there by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Johns continued with his farm work and later directed the Maryland Baptist Center and helmed Second Century Magazine in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation. Prominent civil rights leaders like King and Ralph D. Abernathy also looked to Johns for sustenance and guidance. He died on April 11, 1965, in Washington, D.C.

Historian Ralph E. Luker has written much about Johns's life and work, and Taylor Branch profiled Johns in his book Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988). Actor James Earl Jones also portrayed Johns in a notable 1994 television film, The Road to Freedom.


 

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Archibald Motley

Archibald John Motley, Junior (October 7, 1891, New Orleans, Louisiana – January 16, 1981,[1] Chicago, Illinois) was an African-American visual artist. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America - its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance.

Motley portrayed skin color and physical features as belonging to a spectrum. Ultimately, this would help reshape the definition of blackness in the context of the art world aesthetic. His skin-tone based sensitivities not only spoke to his personal background, but also addressed the individualities and diversities of flourishing black culture.




Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways. He hoped to prove to blacks through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. By displaying the richness and cultural variety of African Americans, the appeal of Motley’s work was extended to a wide audience. Many were captivated by his portraiture due to the fact that it contradicted stereotyped images, and instead displayed the “contemporary black experience.”[8] Motley’s fascination with painting the different types of African Americans stemmed from a desire to give each African American his or her own character and personality. This is consistent with Motley’s aims of portraying an absolutely accurate and transparent representation of African Americans; his commitment to differentiating between skin types shows his meticulous efforts to specify even the slightest differences between individuals. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Motley explained his motives and the difficulty behind painting the different skin tones of African Americans:

"They're not all the same color, they're not all black, they're not all, as they used to say years ago, high yellow, they're not all brown. I try to give each one of them character as individuals. And that's hard to do when you have so many figures to do, putting them all together and still have them have their characteristics" (Motley, 1978)

Archibald John Motley, Jr (1891-1981), who was born in New Orleans studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. Unlike most artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance, Archibald Motley, Jr. never lived in Harlem. He won a fellowship to study in Paris during the late 1920s. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, Motley was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration to depict scenes from African-American history in a series of murals, some of which can be seen at Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. His images of mixed-race women often reflect the Creole culture of Louisiana with its various racial hierarchies, as his grandparents & parents continued to speak Creole at their new home in Chicago. His portraits represent African American women with dignity, in response to many period stereotypes as the "Mammy" or "Jezebel." He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s & 1930s.

Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Jazz

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Octoroon 1922


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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Blues 1929

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Black Belt

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Woman Peeling Apples 1924

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) In the Back Room Card Players1934

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) The Octoroon Girl 1925




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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Saturday Night 1935



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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) The Picnic 1936

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Portrait of a Lady 1948





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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Cocktails 1926

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Lawn Party 1937

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Sunday in the Park 1941





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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Extra Paper 1946

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Gettin' Religion 1948

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Dans la Rue, Paris 1929

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Bronzeville at Night 1949

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Cafe Paris 1929

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Archibald John Motley, Jr (American Harlem Renaissance painter, 1891-1981) Casey and Mae in the Street 1948




 
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