A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  The Positive Image

  “We want everything that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us.”

  —W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion,” The Crisis, June 1921

  Du Bois understood that a key way to undermine racism was through culture. His editorial stance of presenting the “talented tenth” in the pages of The Crisis was a direct response to the racist manner in which African Americans were portrayed in mainstream culture. Even the radical press, in particular The Masses, presented African Americans as the “exotic other.” Du Bois wrote, “White Americans are willing to read about Negros, but they prefer to read about Negros who are fools, clowns, prostitutes, or in any rate, in despair and contemplating suicide.”28

  The Crisis was designed to challenge this bias. Du Bois filled numerous issues with photographic images of the black middle class—from college graduates to star athletes to those who had achieved success in business, the sciences, and other careers. He intentionally turned a blind eye to examples of unlawfulness, decadence, despair, and self-destruction within the black community. He refused the request by then chairman of the NAACP, Oswald Villard, to include a list of crimes committed by African Americans in The Crisis to counterbalance the list of white crimes. Instead, Du Bois’s emphasis promoted African Americans at their best.

  Du Bois had been a master at using photographic images for political purposes long before he became editor of The Crisis. In 1900 he won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition for an exhibition he curated titled Exposition des Nègres d’Amerique [Exhibit of the American Negro]. He displayed photographs of ordinary African Americans, which countered the barrage of racist images that dominated the mass media and popular culture.29 Du Bois, always the historian and sociologist, included charts, maps, and data on black life in the United States. In short, he curated an exhibition to refute racial stereotypes, and this was the driving force behind much of his later work in the pages of The Crisis.

  As editor he focused on black subject matter and invited African American artists and authors to contribute their talents to the magazine. During the 1920s—at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance—he became one of the most important patrons of African American art and literature. He routinely highlighted the artwork of Aaron Douglas, Laura Wheeler, Albert Smith, and Hale Woodruff, among others, and published writings by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and E. Franklin Frazier. Yet Du Bois’s editorial bias guided what he deemed acceptable. He encouraged artists to depict the “talented tenth” and to look to Africa for inspiration and subject matter. He wrote, “In The Crisis at least, you do not have to confine your writings to the portrayal of beggars, scoundrels and prostitutes; you can write about ordinary decent colored people if you want.”30

  Albert A. Smith, ‘The Reason,” The Crisis, February 1920 (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries)

  Du Bois expressed a bias for a political art. In a famous speech, “Criteria of Negro Art,” delivered in Chicago in 1926 (and reprinted in The Crisis in the October issue), he stated:

  Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever talent I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.31

  The problem was that many black artists did not want any type of criteria for art, and they did not want Du Bois to dictate what subject matter was appropriate. Instead, they wanted to freely express themselves and all aspects of black life—the good and the bad. Langston Hughes wrote:

  We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within our-selves.32

  Other responses to Du Bois were less diplomatic. Claude McKay angrily wrote, “I should not be surprised when you mistake the art of life for nonsense and try to pass off propaganda as life in art!”33 Du Bois, however, remained rigid. He felt that any negative portrayal of African Americans would empower white America to continue to view them as inferior, and furthermore, it would not uplift the race.34

  Romare Bearden, “For the Children!” The Crisis, October 1934 (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries) (courtesy of VAGA)

  In the context of lynch mobs and segregation Du Bois believed that the immediate climate was far too dangerous for artists not to focus full attention on propaganda that would aid the black freedom movement.

  “To Du Bois, a literature which did not exist for a moral purpose was a decadent, socially dangerous activity,” wrote Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Baberry Johnson.35 Throughout his long tenure as editor he championed an activist agenda. He balanced sharp critiques of injustices with celebratory articles and images of the “best and the brightest”—an approach that drew an equal amount of praise and criticism from his peers.

  On July 1, 1934, Du Bois resigned from the NAACP. He was tired of being censored by the Board of Directors, and they were tired of his editorial control over The Crisis, along with his drift toward radical Marxism and praise for the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, his influence and ideas carried over to subsequent issues of The Crisis. One of the young artists whom he championed—Romare Bearden—published the illustration “For the Children!” in the October 1934 issue, just months after Du Bois had resigned.

  It depicted an African American man standing next to his son, holding a shotgun. In the distance are three KKK members, marked by the words lynching, peonage, and segregation. The defiant image—a call for armed self-defense and a precursor to the actions of Robert F. Williams (author of Negroes with Guns) and later the Black Panther Party—was featured in a special issue dedicated to children. Du Bois’s words echoed in Bearden’s image—specifically his September 1919 editorial that read, in part, “When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”36 Du Bois ended his twenty-four-year reign at The Crisis as the NAACP’s most prominent voice, a scholar and an activist, and a guiding voice to many, including the next generation. There was never a social-justice crusader quite like him, a leader who embraced the arts and a leader who, himself, was an artist.

  13

  Become the Media, Circa 1930

  ON DECEMBER 29, 1932, Samuel Brody reported in the Daily Worker on the second National Hunger March, a Communist-led march where 1,600 marchers representing the Unemployment Councils marched to Washington, DC, in columns leaving from Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, calling on Congress to enact federal unemployment assistance. Brody wrote:

  Our cameramen were class-conscious workers who understood the historical significance of this epic March for bread and the right to live . . . we “shot” the March not as “disinterested” news-gatherers but as actual participants in the March itself. Therein lies the importance of our finished film. It is the viewpoint of the marchers themselves. Whereas the capitalist cameramen who followed the marchers all the way down to Washington were constantly on the lookout for sensational material which would distort the character of the March in the eyes of the masses, our worker cameramen . . . succeeded in recording incidents that show the fiendish brutality of the police towards the marchers.1

  Brody was not an objective reporter. He was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League (F&PL)—a group of activist filmmakers and photographers who documented labor struggles and anti-capitalist demonstrations. His quote articulated how participants i
n marches and the mainstream media view the same event through different lenses. One largely glorifies demonstrators; the other vilifies them. One scorns the police; the other praises them. Brody represented the former in both cases.

  The F&PL itself was part of the broader cultural movement that was sponsored by the Communist International or Comintern. It was a section of the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), an American chapter of the Comintern-supported Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH) that Lenin had called for in Berlin in 1921 to provide famine relief for the Soviet Union.2 After that, it expanded to other countries providing relief—food, clothing, and shelter—to striking workers and their families. Early WIR relief efforts in the United States included aiding the textile strikes at Passaic, New Jersey (1926–1927), New Bedford, Massachusetts (1928), and Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, along with the miners’ strikes of 1931–1932.3

  Leo Seltzer, Harlem Demonstration, 1933 (courtesy of Leo Seltzer, via Russell Campbell)

  The WIR also focused on agitprop. In Germany, under the leadership of Willi Münzenberg, the WIR produced films, theatre productions, newspapers, illustrated periodicals, and books—all of which promoted the ideals of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution.4 In the Soviet Union, numerous feature-length, black-and-white silent films were released, including Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), Storm Over Asia (1928), and Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin (1934), among others. The WIR, besides helping to produce Soviet films, also began distributing them—most notably Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)—using culture as a key tactic to spread the ideas of the revolution and to draw in new recruits. Russell Campbell writes:

  In the U.S. the WIR affiliate, at first known as the Friends of Soviet Russia, had been involved with film distribution since its founding in 1922. Throughout the decade it arranged nationwide releases of documentaries about the Soviet Union designed to counteract the hostile propaganda emanating from Hollywood, and beginning in 1926 it also handled nontheatrical distribution (and, effectively, exhibition) of Soviet features. This distribution arm of the WIR was to become closely allied with the Workers Film and Photo League.5

  F&PL logo (image courtesy of Russell Campbell)

  In New York City, the Workers’ Camera Club, which was allied with the International Labor Defense (the Communist legal-aid organization), evolved into the Labor Defender Photo Group.6 This group, in turn, evolved into the F&PL and began meeting at the WIR Building on 131 West Twenty-Eight Street.7 The NYC branch would eventually include upward of 75 to 100 rotating members but the core of the group remained Samuel Brody, Lester Balog, Robert Del Duca, Leo Seltzer, and Tom Brandon—the latter of whom was a WIR organizer who helped fund and distribute their work. Also important was the film critic Harry Allan Potamkin, who was not technically a member but influenced the F&PL’s direction as it quickly moved beyond just disseminating Soviet workers’ films. A primary motive of the F&PL was to produce their own media. F&PL photographers and filmmakers took part in strikes and demonstrations and filmed their experiences. After shooting an action, the film was then edited into a short newsreel, a silent black-and-white film. The newsreels were then taken on the road and screened to working-class audiences in union halls, theaters, pool halls, and other makeshift venues across the country.

  The same approach was applied to still photography. F&PL photographers documented strikes and demonstrations and supplied images through their National Photo Exchange to labor and Communist newspapers, including the Daily Worker, Labor Defender, Der Arbeiter, Freiheit, and Labor Unity, among others. Stills were also sold to mainstream newspapers and periodicals—including Survey Graphic and Fortune—both for publicity and to generate income for F&PL members. While New York City remained a hub of F&PL activity, other cities formed their own branches, including Detroit (which had upward of twenty members), Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Smaller, less influential branches with a half dozen or so members also formed in Paterson and Perth Amboy, New Jersey; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh; Cleveland, Ohio; Laredo, Texas; and Madison, Wisconsin. The overarching goal that connected all of this work was expressed in the F&PL motto: “The Camera as a Weapon in the Class Struggle!”

  Black and Blue Filmmaking

  “For me, the Film and Photo League activity was a way of life, often working all day and most of the night, sleeping on a desk or editing table, wrapped in the projection screen, eating food that might have been contributed for relief purposes and wearing clothes that were donated.”

  —Leo Seltzer8

  Mass unemployment and labor unrest was the backdrop of the 1930s and the Great Depression. Between May 1933 and July 1937 more than 10,000 labor strikes occurred.9 Demonstrations and marches were ever-present, as were activist-artists to cover these events.

  In 1930, the F&PL reported on the March 6 International Unemployment Day that took place in cities around the world, including thirty U.S. cities. The New York City demonstration at Union Square drew tens of thousands of people and descended into a full-scale riot when 1,000 police officers attempted to prevent demonstrators from marching down Broadway to City Hall. Police clubs and fire hoses battered the crowd, but no one outside the marchers and bystanders would know this from the mainstream media coverage: New York City police commissioner Grover Whalen had urged the media to minimize coverage of the demonstration and subsequent riot. Brody wrote in the Daily Worker on May 20, 1930:

  The capitalist class knows that there are certain things that it cannot afford to have shown. It is afraid of some pictures. . . . Films are being used against the workers like police clubs, only more subtly—like the reactionary press. If the capitalist class fears pictures and prevents us from seeing records of events like the March 6 unemployment demonstration and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial we will equip our own cameramen and make our own films.10

  Leo Seltzer, Floating Hospital, New York City, 1933 (courtesy of Leo Seltzer, via Russell Campbell)

  This is exactly what the F&PL did, against considerable odds, given that the police targeted the F&PL as members of the demonstration, not journalists. Leo Seltzer, one of the more daring cameramen of the group, later reflected, “People would look at my stuff and they’d say, how’d you get it? Did you have a zoom lens? No! and I have black and blue marks on my hands from being beaten.”11 This degree of engagement produced striking film footage and still images. Seltzer adds:

  The commercial newsreels had those big vans for their equipment, and they set the camera up on top. They’d park about a block away with a telephoto lens, and their films never really gave you a sense of being involved. My film had that quality because I was physically involved in what I was filming, and that’s what I think gave it a unique and exciting point of view.”12

  Other F&PL members echoed this sentiment. Leo Hurwitz stated that F&PL work

  had energy derived from a real sense of purpose, from doing something needed and new, from a personal identification with subject matter. When homeless men were photographed in doorways or on park benches, feeling guided the viewfinder. The world had to be shown what its eyes were turned away from.13

  He added, “When you put your hand in your pocket and you can touch your total savings, your life is revealed as not the private thing it seemed before. It becomes connected with others who share your problem.”14

  This cultural work was part and parcel with the aims of the larger Communist Party USA movement and was aimed at two intended audiences: those who partook in the same actions that the F&PL had filmed, and other workers who might be inspired by them. Seltzer recalls footage he took of a demonstration in support of the Scottsboro Boys—eight of whom faced the death penalty on trumped-up rape charges:

  After we marched into the area in front of the Capitol Building, I got out of the line and started shooting film. Then things started to happen. There were a lot of plainclothes men and police around. The cops jumped at this grou
p and started ripping placards off, and beating people up.15

  He continues:

  I was filming this one policeman. It was a rainy day, and he had on a heavy, rubberized raincoat. I was about ten or fifteen feet behind him and two or three feet beyond him was the line of pickets, with the Capitol Dome beyond that. That was the shot. And as I was shooting, the cop ran in and grabbed the placard from a black marcher and ripped the cardboard. And there was this marcher with the stick still in his hand. The marcher looked at the bare stick, and the cop was tearing up the placard which said, “Free the Scottsboro Boys,” and suddenly the marcher turned and whacked the cop left and right with his stick. And the cop was so stunned, he just stood there.16

  Seltzer was thrown in jail for two days, but his footage was well received by audiences when it was compiled into the film America Today and screened at theaters sympathetic to Communist campaigns. At the Acme Theatre on Fourteenth Street, Seltzer noted, “When that sequence was shown the audience jumped up and said, “Give it to him! Give it to him!”17 Other venues for F&PL and Soviet films were not as friendly. Seltzer recalls an event outside Pittsburgh:

  I don’t know who shot the Pittsburgh film, but I went back with a projector to show it to the miners who were still blacklisted. They were still living in tents for the second winter. And I remember I went into the town and stretched this sheet between two houses—the sheriff’s and the deputy’s house on either side—and we expected to be shot at any minute while projecting the film.18

  Other cities were determined to stop the screenings. In New York, F&PL members were hauled into court in January 1935 for showing films in their own headquarters.19 In Chicago, Mayor Edward Kelly enforced a ban on all newsreel films that featured rioting or large gatherings, making it impossible to project images of strikes and pickets within the city.20 The situation was more volatile in the South: F&PL members were at times driven out of a town by a mob. To keep safe, Sam Brody would sleep with guns by his bed when he covered the textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina.21