Eric Bentley, English, "[his] personality is uncompromising and his mind is original to the point of giving offense--He is a stormy petrel-- a conscientious objector, a political radical, and a person who is not disposed to permit flabby or conventional opinions to go unchallenged in his presence."
Fredrick Cohen and Elsa Kahl, German, he a musician/conductor, she a dancer
Frances de Graff, Dutch writer
Clark Foreman, American 'integrationalist'
On the other side are Erwin Strauss, the BMC physician, Robert Wunsch (despite his outreach teaching at local black schools), the Alberses, etc., 'the old guard'
Obstacles to Integration:
Legal:
No laws governing segregation in institutes of higher learning
Time:
"Is now the right time to make this radical departure from Southern procedure?" Wunsch
"If you wait for the 'ideal' time, you never do anything." Foreman
Community:
"Welfare of this particular community." Ted Dreier
"To the highest standards of the country, rather than to the standards of the immediate locality." Foreman
The older members of the community express a belief that the newer members are more committed to promoting their own political radicalism than ensuring the continued existence of Black Mountain. A claim which Eric Bentley confirms.
Spring 1944:
student vote : 2 to 1 in favor of admitting black students for fall '45
faculty vote: 1 to 1
Summer '45:
2 black students are admitted to the Music and Art Summer Institute
Carol Brice, singer, and Roland Hayes, composer, are invited as guest faculty.
Hayes's summer concert in the most highly attended event at Black Mountain, 300 outside visitors.
The summer experiment concludes without incident. The college maintains a position of observing the segregationist state law outside of the Black Mountain campus while asking visitors to disregard these laws on the grounds of the college. This policy causes incoming black students and faculty to remain on campus, Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence included.
Fall '45 Sylvesta Martin, first full-time black student, Dr. Percy Baker is a visiting lecturer
1947, the college issues a declaration of accepting all students of all races
Jacob Lawrence
Sept. 7, 1917, born in Atlantic City, NJ
1930, family moves to Harlem, Lawrence studies arts and crafts with Charles Alston.
1934, Alston's WPA Harlem Art Workshop is relocated to 306 w. 141st St. 'Studio 306'
others include poet Claude McKay, writers Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes and painter Gwendolyn Knight.
Lawrence studies the objective reality of the muralists Orozco and Diego Rivera. His own work is characterized by a modernist style: flatness, patterned shapes, repetition of forms, reduction and simplicity.
On the universality of his art:
"I'd like for them to see a good painting and that I had something to say about this particular theme, that it is a successful statement and that it means just as much to one person in one culture as it does to someone of another."
Summer '46, teaches at Summer Art Institute at Black Mountain
Albers is the first artist outside the 'community' to influence him in, "understanding the dynamics of the picture plane."
Art of everyday life, the materials of craft and the economical use of color and lines.
1941, Completes The Migration of the Negro, with the help of Gwendolyn Knight (they will be married later that year).
A series of 60 panels, the work is intended to be seen as a lyrical narrative in which the story has repeated refrains, such as chains, and a continuity of color. The color is applied to each panel before a new color is begun both to ensure the continuity and because the price of paints influences Lawrence's economical use.
Similar narrative series by Lawrence: The Life of Fredrick Douglass, The Life of Harriet Tubman, The Life of Toussant L'Ouverture, The Life of John Brown
Other works include the Ordeal of Alice, a depiction of the pressures and violence of integration, and Street Scene Ð Restaurant, portraying a furtive john surrounded by slums and black prostitutes.
Lawrence paints scenes from the life he has lived:
"I never use the term 'protest' in connection with my paintings. They just deal with the social scene, they're how I feel about things."
A later series, Builders, begun in 1968, offers images of blacks and whites working together to erect buildings. It indicates a belief on the part of Lawrence in the possibility for racial harmony in an integrated America.
The line between Lawrence's earlier and later works underscores the conflict between the artist's obligation to the community versus individual creative expression.
Bayard Rustin, in endowing him with the Springer Medal from the NAACP in 1970,
"The black artist is a part of the very struggle for justice and freedom by the fact that he paints or creates a poem because by so doing he is expressing the imagination and creativity and creation ... he automatically adorns the struggle."
"The black artist's role is to reveal to all the human core of the human experience as seen through the black experience. It is because Jacob Lawrence, with his beautiful canvases, has done precisely that, that we honor him."
Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence uses the term 'griot,' West-African storytellers charged with maintaining the oral histories of their communities
Ralph Ellison, who studied at Workshop 306 as well:
"The work of art is important in itself, it is a social reform in itself."
Street Scene Ð Restaurant c.1936
Builders No. 1 -- 1974
