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

by Nicolas Lampert

  4. A lithograph depicting the mob attack and murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837 was created by the African American artist Henry Tanner in 1881. The lithograph, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy, was printed by the Fergus Printing Company, Chicago.

  5. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 311.

  6. Ibid., 310.

  7. J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade: 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 165.

  8. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 315.

  9. Falconbridge, a physician, took part on four slave-ship voyages and later became an abolitionist. His text “Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa” (1788) was a damning firstperson account.

  10. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 338.

  11. Ibid., 338.

  12. Ibid., 324.

  13. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 166.

  14. Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, 327.

  15. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 7.

  16. Ibid., 354.

  17. A rare illustrated pamphlet entitled The History of the Amistad Captives, compiled by John W. Barber in 1840, is reprinted in Sidney Kaplan, “Black Mutiny on the Amistad,” in Black and White in American Culture: An Anthology from the Massachusetts Review, Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan, eds. (Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 291–330. The fascinating pamphlet contains biographical sketches and illustrations of the Africans whom John W. Barber, a Connecticut historian, interviewed while the Amistad captives awaited trial in New Haven.

  18. Reilly, Jr. “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” 57–58.

  19. Ibid., 59.

  20. Ibid., 60.

  21. Reilly Jr., “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” 63.

  22. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 143–144.

  23. Bernard F. Reilly Jr. suggests that both prints may be the work of J. H. Bufford due to the stylistic similarities of lithographs published in Boston at the time, as opposed to those produced in New York and Philadelphia. An expert on American prints, Reilly Jr. was formerly the head of the curatorial section of the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. See Bernard F. Reilly Jr. American Political Prints 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991), 73–74.

  24. Horton, and Horton Slavery and the Making of America, 157.

  25. For an in-depth essay that covers the visual outpouring of graphics and prints in reaction to the caning of Sumner, see David Tatham, “Pictorial Responses to the Caning of Senator Sumner,” in American Printmaking Before 1876: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy: Papers presented at a symposium held at the Library of Congress, June 12 and 13, 1972 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1975), 11–19.

  Chapter 4: Abolitionism as Autonomy, Activism, and Entertainment

  1. William Still was an African American abolitionist who helped organize the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. Along with assisting fugitive slaves escaping north, he interviewed hundreds of fugitives and published these interviews in 1872 in the book The Underground Railroad. Although William Still was omitted from the lithograph The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a second “Resurrection” print (with the same title) was completed in 1851 by Peter Kramer that more accurately portrays the people who were in the room, including Still, at the time of Brown’s arrival. See Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2003), 114.

  2. Frederick S. Voss, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 46.

  3. Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 88, 89.

  4. Ibid., 89.

  5. Ibid., 117.

  6. Negative reviews of Mirror of Slavery had the potential to derail their tour. This was the case when a Staffordshire Herald review in March 1852 blasted the performance as being a “gross and palpable exaggeration” of slavery. The negative review caused attendance for local shows to decrease from several hundred to forty. Brown sued the paper for libel, stating that his profits had been adversely affected and won the case, receiving £100 in damages. See Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 143–45.

  7. Ibid., 117.

  8. Ibid., 123.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ruggles discusses possible scenarios. See The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 134–37.

  11. Brown quoted in Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 145.

  12. Daphne A. Brooks, ed., Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 77.

  13. Audrey A. Fisch argues that the UK public responded favorably to any work that presented the United States in a negative light, for it increased the UK’s own sense of nationalism and superiority. Abolitionists were especially embraced for exposing the hypocrisy in America’s claim as being a beacon of democracy. See Audrey A. Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture, 74–75.

  14. Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown, 174.

  Chapter 5: The Battleground over Public Memory

  1. In 1998, artist Ed Hamilton completed and installed The African American Civil War Memorial (The Spirit of Freedom) in the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, DC. The monument honored the 180,000 black soldiers in the Union Army and Navy and featured three black infantry soldiers and a sailor set against the exterior of a nine-foot semicircular column. The interior of the circle depicted a soldier departing from his wife and child, and an adjacent wall to the sculpture listed the names of all of the African American soldiers who served during the Civil War, including the white officers who led black regiments.

  2. Frederick Douglas, “MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!” Broadside (Rochester, March 2, 1863), reprinted in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Philip S. Foner, ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 526.

  3. In 1859, Massachusetts governor Nathaniel P. Banks had vetoed a bill that would have allowed black soldiers to join the Massachusetts militia, viewing it as unconstitutional. See James Oliver Horton, “Defending the Manhood of the Race: The Crisis of Citizenship in Black Boston at Midcentury,” in Hope and Glory, Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone, eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 19. President Lincoln had also initially obstructed the path of black soldiers. In July 1862, Congress lifted the legal ban on allowing black soldiers to join the military, but Lincoln was reluctant and did not endorse the large-scale recruitment of black soldiers until the following year. Lincoln did not want to lose the support of loyal slave states, nor did he want to lose the support of white voters who did not support black equality. Lincoln abhorred slavery, but his actions often charted a middle path. His preliminary announcement for the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, declared that on January 1, 1863, slaves controlled by people in rebellion against the United States would be declared free, while those slaves held by masters still loyal to the United States would not be affected by the proclamation. African Americans and abolitionists abhorred the qualification measure, but in fairness Lincoln lacked authority to outright ban slavery, for the Constitution protected slavery in slave states, so he employed a different option: freeing slaves under the powers granted during war to seize enemy property. Thus the Emancipation Proclamation shifted the Union cause from reunification to that of ending slavery. See Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves?” in Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 90–97.

  4. In 1863, Massachusetts became the first state to form a black volunteer regiment under a federal mandate, but it was not the first time
black soldiers served in the Union armies. In 1861, close to 30,000 of the 120,000 enlistees in the Navy were black soldiers, although most served in obscurity, working as cooks and laborers, and rarely saw combat. See Robert B. Edgerton, Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America’s Wars (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 25. The following year, some Union military leaders enlisted black soldiers in in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Kansas regardless of federal law. The first black regiment to see combat action was the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, which was later commanded by the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  5. Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 526.

  6. Edwin S. Redkey, “Brave Black Volunteers: A Profile of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” in Blatt, Brown and Yacovone, eds., Hope and Glory, 22, 26.

  7. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 132.

  8. David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 163.

  9. Blight, Race and Reunion, 106.

  10. Ibid., 93.

  11. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage writes, “Even in the North the typical common soldier monument advanced the primacy of the white male citizen by depicting the face of the nation as white. In the South, of course, the black soldier could not be represented without acknowledging the Union cause or the abolition of slavery.” See W.F. Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001), 72.

  12. Additionally, the 55th Massachusetts Regiment and African Americans throughout the Sea Island communities contributed funds in the hopes of creating a stone monument on Morris Island. A monument on the sandy coastal island, the site of Fort Wagner, never came to be, but the effort was not in vain. The money instead was diverted to a project that many of the black donors felt was equal, if not more important: the building of the first free school of its kind for black children in Charleston. The school was named in honor of Shaw.

  13. Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), 117.

  14. Kirk Savage, “Uncommon Soldiers: Race, Art, and the Shaw Memorial,” in Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, eds., Hope and Glory, 163–64.

  15. Ibid., 166.

  16. Blight, Race and Reunion, 341.

  17. Booker T. Washington, “Address at Dedication of the Shaw Memorial,” May 31, 1897, The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1897), 73–87, reprinted in Brown, The Public Art ofCivil War Commemoration, 128.

  18. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Williamstown: Corner House Publishers, 1971, orig. pub. 1900, 1901), 253.

  19. Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 1:332, reprinted in Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration, 122.

  Chapter 6: Photographing the Past During the Present

  1. Gerald McMaster, “Colonial Alchemy: Reading the Boarding School Experience,” in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, Lucy R. Lippard, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1992), 79.

  2. James C. Faris, “Navaho and Photography,” in Photography’s Other Histories, Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 93

  3. Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 177.

  4. Ibid., 187.

  5. Vine Deloria Jr., “Introduction,” in The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis, Christopher M. Lyman, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 11.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Lucy Lippard, “Introduction,” Lippard, ed., Partial Recall, 25.

  8. Deloria Jr., “Introduction,” 13.

  9. George P. Horse Capture, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, Martha A. Sandweiss, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 270–71.

  10. Lippard, “Introduction,” 25.

  11. Faris, “Navaho and Photography,” 95–96.

  12. Lippard, “Introduction,” 29.

  13. Ibid., 30.

  14. Ibid. 22.

  15. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” in Pinney and Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories, 45.

  16. Ibid., 41.

  17. Peggy Albright, Crow Indian Photographer: The Work of Richard Throssel (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 7–8.

  18. Ibid., 9.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 30.

  21. Ibid., 71.

  22. Ibid., 29–30.

  23. Ibid., 34–35.

  24. Ibid., 35–36.

  25. Ibid., 37.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid., 38.

  28. Around this time, Throssel had also “assimilated.” In 1916, at age thirty-four, he was selected to become a U.S. citizen, one out of twenty-three Crow who were also given U.S. citizenship. This was part of a government initiative to move Native people away from being wards of the state. However, Throssel did not ask to become a U.S. citizen. Albright notes, “It was issued to him without his authorization and, in fact, against his wishes.” Ibid., 51.

  29. Ibid., 41–42.

  30. Ibid., 41.

  31. Ibid., 29.

  32. Ibid., 46.

  33. Ibid., 62.

  Chapter 7: Jacob A. Riis’s Image Problem

  1. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 266–67.

  2. Daniel Czitrom, “Jacob Riis’s New York,” in Rediscovering Jacob Riis, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, eds. (New York: The New Press, 2007), 32.

  3. Riis, The Making of an American,2 72–73.

  4. Ibid., 268.

  5. Ibid., 423.

  6. Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939: Revised and Expanded (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 320.

  7. Czitrom, “Jacob Riis’s New York,” 116.

  8. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971, orig. pub. 1890), 22.

  9. Ibid., 109.

  10. Ibid., 43.

  11. Ibid., 78.

  12. Ibid., 77.

  13. Ibid., 118.

  14. Edward T. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,” The Public Historian 26, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 19.

  15. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 83.

  16. Cindy Weinstein, “How Many Others Are There in the Other Half? Jacob Riis and the Tenement Population,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 2 (2002): 211.

  17. Bill Hug, “Walking the Ethnic Tightwire: Ethnicity and Dialectic in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives,” Journal of American Culture 20 (1997): 49.

  18. Ibid.

  19. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words?,” 16.

  20. Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 254.

  Chapter 8: Haymarket: An Embattled History of Static Monuments and Public Interventions

  1. William J. Adelman, “The True Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue” in Haymarket Scrapbook, Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986), 168.

  2. Paul Avrich speculates that the bomb thrower could have been a lone militant anarchist. See Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 437–45. For more historical analysis on Haymarket, see Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Hay-market Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement
and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); and Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

  3. James Green, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 129.

  4. The Union League Club of Chicago, an exclusive club whose membership was limited to only European American men through the midpoint of the twentieth century was first established in 1879 and played a key role in establishing many of the city’s elite cultural organizations and events, including helping to fund the Art Institute of Chicago, Orchestra Hall, the Field Museum, and the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago in 1893. See James D. Nowlan, Glory, Darkness, Light: A History of the Union League Club of Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004).

  5. Adelman, “The Time Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue,” 168.

  6. “Police Groups Angered over Haymarket Statue Bombing,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1969.

  7. “Daley Asks for Law, Order at Haymarket,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1970.

  8. Harry Golden Jr., “We’ll Rebuild Statue: Daley,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 6, 1970.

  9. Adelman, “The True Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue,” 168.

  10. Nicolas Lampert, “Public Memories of Haymarket in Chicago: Michael Piazza Interviewed by Nicolas Lampert,” AREA #2 (2006), 9.

  11. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, DC) and Civil Rights Memorial (Montgomery, Alabama) counter this notion by encouraging the public to interact with the monument, often by touching the surface. As well, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence-and for Peace and Human Rights (Harburg, Germany) invites the viewer to take an active role by carving words and marks into the surface of the monument.

  12. It remains unclear who initiated and installed the tile mosaic. The Chicago Tribune article featured quotes from Evan Glassman, who asserts that he was the one who created and installed the mosaic, with Grifter as an “accomplice” who helped him with his project. However, in conversations that I have had with Grifter, she notes that the information that Glassman provided to the newspaper reporter is misleading. Instead, it was she who initiated the project, created the mosaic, and set it in the concrete. See Blair Kamin, “Mystery Solved: Mosaic Artist Raises a Flag in Protest,” Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1996. Glassman later commented on the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative blog on January 17, 2012: “Kim [Kehben] Grifter was indeed my assistant on a project I was contracted on in that neighborhood at Red Light Restaurant, the mosaic was indeed a collaboration between the two of us . . . Also I was the lone installer who hoodwinked a city sub contractor into helping me install it as Kim [Kehben] was not there that day and is only using my story as hers.” See http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2012/01/art_thoughtz_takes_down_damien.html.