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

by Nicolas Lampert

  6. Ibid., 69–70.

  7. Aaron Douglas, “The Negro in American Culture,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 84.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Congress papers were subsequently turned into a book and sold for fifty cents. The print run was 3,000. Reprints of the papers are found in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism.

  10. José Clemente Orozco, “General Report of the Mexican Delegation to the American Artists’ Congress,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 203–07.

  11. Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Printed Matter, 1936–1942, n.d., Box 4, Reel 5898, Frame 331, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Printed-Matter–305715.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Other important exhibitions (not organized by the congress) included the 1938 exhibition Housing: Roofs for Forty Million, sponsored by the WPA-FAP and organized by the art cooperative An American Group. They also co-organized the 1937 exhibition Waterfront Art Show, with the Marine Workers Committee, which was held at the New School of Social Research and visualized the concerns of the dockworkers’ strike. See Helen Langa, Radical Art, 35.

  14. Alex R. Stavenitz, “American Today Exhibition,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 282. A catalogue for the show was also published during the same year: America Today: A Book of 100 Prints Chosen and Exhibited by the American Artists’ Congress (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1936).

  15. Harry Sternberg, “Graphic Art,” in Baigell and Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism, 137.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Francis V. O’Connor, “Introduction,” in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19.

  18. Baron’s gallery also hosted the 1935 print show The Struggle for Negro Rights that was sponsored by five groups: the Artists’ Union, the Artists’ Committee of Action, the International Labor Defense, the John Reed Club, and the African American art group the Vanguard. The Struggle for Negro Rights was staged as a counterpoint to the NAACP anti-lynching exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching that was organized by the acting secretary of the NAACP Walter Francis White and held at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries a month prior to the ACA exhibition.

  19. After showing at the Valentine Gallery, Guernica was moved to MoMA. Picasso had refused to allow Guernica to return to Spain as long as the country was under fascist rule. After Franco’s death in 1975 (and Picasso’s in 1973), Spain became a democratic constitutional monarchy and ratified a new constitution in 1978. The Museum of Modern Art, reluctant to part with arguably its most famous painting, finally ceded in 1981 when the painting was shipped to the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It has subsequently been moved to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Guernica has taken on such a level of fame that even the crate that was utilized to ship the painting from MoMA back to Spain has been placed on exhibit.

  20. Langa, Radical Art, 210–211.

  21. Baigell and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism, 30.

  22. Ibid, 32.

  Chapter 17: Resistance or Loyalty: The Visual Politics of Miné Okubo

  1. Following Pearl Harbor, martial law was declared in Hawaii. On December 9, two days following the attack, 1,291 Japanese, 865 Germans, and 147 Italians were in custody in Hawaii and the mainland. See Gary Y. Okihiro, “An American Story,” in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 52.

  2. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans: Updated and Revised Edition (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), 391.

  3. Ibid., 388.

  4. Okihiro, “An American Story,” 62.

  5. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 391.

  6. Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in California, Oregon, and Washington were sent to one of ten concentration camps: Amache, Colorado; Gila River, Arizona; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Jerome, Arkansas; Manzanar, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Poston, Arizona; Rohwer, Arizona; Topaz, Utah; or Tule Lake, California. Temporary camps/assembly centers included Arizona (Mayer); Oregon (Portland); Washington (Puyallup); California (Fresno, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Salinas, Santa Anita, Stockton, Tanforan, Tulare, and Manzanar). The U.S. Department of Justice also operated camps in Texas (Crystal City and Seagoville), Montana (Fort Missoula), Idaho (Kooskia), and New Mexico (Santa Fe) for “dangerous” suspects—that is, community leaders, fishermen, newspaper editors, and activists. See Stella Oh, “Paradoxes of Citizenship: Re-viewing the Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660,” in Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, Greg Robinson and Elena Tajoma Creef, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 155.

  7. Miné Okubo, “Statement Before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians,” in Robinson and Tajoma, Miné Okubo, 47.

  8. The U.S. government promoted this notion through the propaganda film The Japanese Relocation and by tightly controlling media access to the camps. The press had been allowed to film the evacuation process, yet access to the camps was limited and those who were allowed to photograph the camps faced restrictions. Images that showed armed guards, crowded camp scenes, prison towers, or barbed wire were discouraged. Ansel Adams (hired by the WRA) presented this rubric in his MoMA exhibition and book Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans. Other photographic images of the camps can be found in pictorial summaries that accompanied the “Final Report of the Western Defense Command,” and two high school yearbooks from the Manzanar camp that included photographs by internee Toyo Miyataki.

  9. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 80. Creef adds that throughout Citizen 13660, Okubo “constructs herself as a marginal figure, often standing at a distance on the very edge and border of the frame looking at the crowds of internees as through she herself were an outsider among the exiled,” 80.

  10. Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 71.

  11. Creef, Imaging Japanese America, 88.

  12. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983, orig. pub. 1946), 177.

  13. Laura Card, “Miné Okubo’s Illustrations for Trek Magazine,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 132–33.

  14. In fairness, Okubo also critiqued the questionnaire process within Citizen 13660. She writes, “Many of the Nisei also resented the question because of the assumption that their loyalty might be divided; it was confusing that their loyalty to the U.S. should be questioned at the moment when the army was asking them to volunteer.” Yet she sided with the internees who were “patriotic” and joined the military, which included her brother. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 176. Around 4,600 (22 percent) of the 21,000 Nisei males who were eligible for draft said “no” on the questionnaire as a protest against their internment. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397.

  15. Another Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Endo v. United States, had a different verdict. Mitsuye Endo’s lawyer successfully argued that the U.S. government had no right to detain U.S. citizens whom the WRA had deemed loyal to the United States. On December 18, 1944, the court ruled that she should be released, since her loyalty had been established. This ruling opened up a legal precedent against the camps, resulting in their eventual end.

  16. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 397.

  17. Heather Fryer, “Miné Okubo’s War: Citizen 13660’s Attack on Government Propaganda,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 97.

  18. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 176.

  19. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 398.


  20. Ibid., 398–99.

  21. Ibid, 399.

  22. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 177.

  23. Ibid., 199.

  24. Ibid., 201. Okubo’s opinion on the loyal versus disloyal question shifted over time. In her 1983 introduction to the reprinted edition of Citizen 13660, she writes, “One camp, in Tule Lake, California was for supposedly ‘disloyal’ persons . . . Incidentally, no cases of disloyalty were found in the camps,” Citizen 13660, viii.

  25. Greg Robinson, “Birth of a Citizen: Miné Okubo and the Politics of Symbolism,” in Robinson and Tajoma, eds., Miné Okubo, 160. Greg Robinson also writes that in 1943 the WRA and the OWI teamed up to “produce an enormous pile of propaganda for public consumption, focusing jointly on the achievements of the WRA and on the loyalty and American character of the inmates. WRA efforts included informational pamphlets, documentary films, and speaking tours . . . The WRA and OWI also exerted pressure on publishers and film producers to promote responsible media images of Japanese Americans and avoid hostile depictions,” 163.

  26. Okubo, Citizen 13660, x.

  27. Gesensway and Roseman, Beyond Words, 72–73.

  28. Okubo, Citizen 13660, xii, xi.

  29. Gesensway and Roseman, Beyond Words, 73. Okubo had good reason to fear that civil liberties would be threatened again. In 1950, the Internal Security Act enabled the attorney general to apprehend and place people in detention camps without a trial by jury. The ambiguous language noted that any person suspected of “probably” engaging in espionage or sabotage could be apprehended. It was aimed primarily at communist activists in the United States during the Cold War era. See Okihiro, Impounded, 78.

  Chapter 18: Come Let Us Build a New World Together

  1. Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 26.

  2. James Forman noted that by June 1962, the SNCC was $13,000 in debt. See James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 246.

  3. SNCC formed in April of 1960 when Ella Jo Baker, the executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), gathered student leaders of the sit-in movement to meet in Raleigh, North Carolina, to discuss ideas for a more formal umbrella organization. Baker argued that the students should determine their own structure in contrast to the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker, who wanted students to be part of a youth wing of SCLC.

  4. This approach differed from SCLC and the other two main organizations—the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The SCLC primarily organized shorter actions—marches, boycotts, and confrontation actions meant to incite violent police reactions and mass media coverage that would spur a national outrage and prompt the federal government to intervene. This work was critical and highly successful, but it did not carry the same risks that SNCC workers did when they embedded themselves in the rural communities of the South.

  5. Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History: 1954–68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 16.

  6. Julian Cox, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement: 1956–1968 (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008), 29.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 30.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 16.

  11. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 299.

  12. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 30.

  13. Ibid., 80.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Vanessa Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations (New York, Routledge, 2006), 29.

  16. Some 86 percent of African Americans in Mississippi lived below the national poverty level. Their annual income was $1,444—the lowest in the country. Only 7 percent of African Americans finished high school, and only 5 percent were eligible to vote. Those who attempted to register to vote risked losing their jobs and being evicted from their homes. Those who organized risked their lives. See Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 132.

  17. Ibid., 135.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 146.

  20. Ibid., 42.

  21. Ibid.

  22. SNCC was not the only group involved in the Summer Project. SNCC, CORE, the SCLC, and the NAACP had come together to form COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), which all took on different tasks. Part of the reason for the alliance was to equally divvy up the money gained from national fund-raising efforts. That said, Bob Moses of SNCC was a principal organizer of the project, and SNCC committed a vast amount of energy and people to the project, setting up numerous offices across Mississippi.

  23. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 373.

  24. Ibid., 372.

  25. Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 63.

  26. Leigh Raiford, “ ‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007): 1139.

  27. The Southern Documentary Project included Herron, George Ballis, Fred de Van, Nick Lawrence, Danny Lyon, Norris McNamara, Dave Prince, and Maria Varela. Many of the images taken were distributed through the Black Star Photo Agency in New York and were featured in publications including LIFE magazine. See Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 150.

  28. Ibid., 144.

  29. Raiford, “Come Let Us Build a New World Together,” 1139.

  30. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, 141.

  31. Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 58.

  32. Ibid. 67.

  33. The decision to exclude whites from SNCC was mired in controversy and remains contentious to this day. The debate took place during the December 1966 SNCC retreat at the Peg Leg Bates resort in upstate New York. Lyon writes, “Approximately one hundred staff members were present at the conference. At two o’clock one morning, when many of the staff had gone off to go to sleep, SNCC passed a resolution to exclude whites. Nineteen voted for the resolution, eighteen voted against it, and twenty-four abstained, including all the white people present . . . To this day, many SNCC veterans think that the whites were not thrown out but instead were directed to work in the white community.” See Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 175.

  34. The shift to self-defense and militancy was cemented by Hubert “Rap” Brown—the SNCC chairman who replaced Carmichael—who, during a forty-five-minute speech in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 25, 1967, stated in response to the KKK attacks against the black community, “If America don’t come around, we are going to burn it down, brother.” Soon thereafter, gunfire was exchanged between the police and demonstrators, and seventeen buildings were damaged or completely destroyed by fire. Brown was later charged with arson due to his speech and served jail time. See Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 146.

  35. Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 135.

  Chapter 19: Party Artist: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

  1. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1991, orig. pub. 1970), 62.

  2. October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program, “What We Want, What We Believe,” in The Black Panthers Speak, Philip S. Foner, ed. (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 1995), 3.

  3. Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007), 58.

  4. Elton C. Fax, Black Artists of the New Generation (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1977), 273.

  5. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 100.

  6. St. Clair Bourne, “An Artist for the People: An Interview with Emory Douglas,” in Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, Sam Durant, ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 200
7), 200.

  7. Douglas would eventually be part of the BPP Central Committee, along with Newton, Seale, Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Kathleen Cleaver.

  8. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 101.

  9. Bourne, “An Artist for the People,” 200.

  10. Seale, Seize the Time, 404.

  11. Davarian L. Baldwin, “Culture Is a Weapon in Our Struggle for Liberation: The Black Panther Party and the Cultural Politics of Decolonization,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 296.

  12. Seale, Seize the Time, 62–63.

  13. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 236.

  14. Ibid., 96.

  15. Seale, Seize the Time, 181.

  16. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 105.

  17. Ibid., 296.

  18. Seale, Seize the Time, 180.

  19. Emory Douglas, “Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art,” The Black Panther, January 24, 1970; republished in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, William Bradley and Charles Esche, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, 2007), 166.

  20. Malcolm X speech on the founding of the OAAU, June 28, 1964. See Malcolm X. By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 35–67.

  21. Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” The Black Panther, May 18, 1968; republished in Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, 43.

  22. “Douglas, Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art,” 166.

  23. Greg Jung Morozumi, “Emory Douglas and the Third World Cultural Revolution,” in Durant, ed., Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, 130.

  24. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams write, “Most estimates in the late sixties and early seventies hovered around 1,500 to 2,000; since those estimates, other sources have suggested figures as high as 5,000. In a recent essay on the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Jon Rice maintains (based on an interview with one Panther) that in spring 1969 there were 1,000 members of the Party in Chicago alone.” See “The Black Panthers and Historical Scholarship: Why Now?” in Lazerow and Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party, 4.