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Article

Adams, John Quincy  

Kevin D. Roberts

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

author of an autobiographical slave narrative, was born near Winchester, Virginia, to slave parents whose names are now unknown. Adams and his family were owned by George F. Calomese, a member of a prominent planter family. John Quincy Adams and his twin brother were one of four pairs of twins born to their mother, who had twenty-five children.

What we know of Adams's life comes from his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams (1872), which briefly traces Adams's life as a slave and as a freeman. Written in simple, plain language, the Narrative captures the tragedy of slavery in powerful ways. The most poignant events in Adams's early life involve the sale of family members and friends. In 1857 the sale of his twin brother Aaron and his sister Sallie left Adams very sad and heart broken Adams 28 Though crushed by the ...

Article

Adams-Ender, Clara  

Teri B. Weil

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

military leader, nurse, educator, and entrepreneur, was born Clara Mae Leach Adams in Willow Springs, North Carolina. Her parents, Otha Leach and Caretha Bell, were sharecroppers, and she was the fourth of ten children. Her parents were staunch supporters of education and made sure that all of their children knew this. Her parents further instilled in the children a sense of self-respect and a belief that with knowledge they could do anything.

As a child growing up in a family of sharecroppers, Adams-Ender realized early that she wanted more out of life. Her perseverance in continuing her education while missing school to work the farm with her family was evident when she graduated second in her class at the age of sixteen. Although she enrolled in a nursing program, her first career choice was to be a lawyer. However, in 1956 her father believed that ...

Article

African American art  

Regenia A. Perry, Camara Dia Holloway, Christina Knight, Dele Jegede, Bridget R. Cooks, and Jenifer P. Borum

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
01 December 2006

Term used to describe art made by Americans of African descent. While the crafts of African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries continued largely to reflect African artistic traditions (see Africa, §VIII), the earliest fine art made by professional African American artists was in an academic Western style (see fig.).

Article

Alston, Charles Henry  

Mary Anne Boelcskevy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and teacher, was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the youngest of five children of the prominent Episcopalian minister Primus Priss Alston and his second wife, Anna (Miller) Alston. Nicknamed “Spinky” by his father, Charles showed his artistic bent as a child by sculpting animals out of the red clay around his home. His father died suddenly when Charles was just three. In 1913 his mother married a former classmate, Harry Pierce Bearden (uncle of Romare Bearden), and the family moved to New York City. Charles's stepfather worked at the Bretton Hotel as the supervisor of elevator operators and newsstand personnel, and over the years the family lived in comfortable brownstones in better neighborhoods.

Alston attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was art editor of the student newspaper the Magpie during the week and he studied at the National Academy of Art on Saturdays He turned ...

Article

Andrews, Raymond  

Linda M. Carter

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer, was born in Plainview, Georgia, in Morgan County, the fourth of ten children of George Cleveland Andrews, a sharecropper and self‐taught folk artist, and Viola (Perryman) Andrews, also a sharecropper and, later, a newspaper columnist and the author of published short stories and an unpublished autobiography. Raymond's older brother, Benny Andrews, would become an internationally known painter and printmaker. Raymond Andrews's paternal grandmother, Jessie Rose Lee Wildcat Tennessee, was the daughter of an African American mother and a Native American father. Although she married Eddie Andrews, an African American who died in 1917, Raymond Andrews's paternal grandfather was James Orr, a plantation owner's son.

In 1935 Andrews and his family moved to a small house near his grandmother's home on land owned by Orr. Then in 1943 the Andrews family moved to the nearby Barnett Farm to work as sharecroppers ...

Article

Bailey, Herman “Kofi”  

Amalia K. Amaki

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

graphic artist, painter, printmaker, and political activist, was born in Chicago in 1931. An only child, he attended Chicago public schools, moving briefly to Washington, D.C., to study at Howard University with Alain Leroy Locke, Sterling Allen Brown, and James Amos Porter. After one year he then enrolled at Alabama State College (later Alabama State University) to study under the sculptor, painter, and printmaker Hayward Louis Oubre, and he received a bachelor of arts degree. Bailey continued study at the University of Southern California (USC) as a student of Charles White and the Hungarian-born Francis de Erdely. He earned the bachelor of fine arts degree in 1958 and the master of fine arts degree in 1960. At USC he worked as a graduate assistant for two years, introducing the students Mel Edwards and Calvin Burnett to the work ...

Article

Bannister, Edward Mitchell  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
01 December 2006

American painter . Bannister grew up in St Andrews, a small seaport in New Brunswick, Canada. His interest in art was encouraged by his mother, and he made his earliest studies, in drawing and watercolour, at the age of ten. After working as a cook on vessels on the Eastern seaboard, he moved in 1848 with his brother to Boston, where he set up as a barber serving the black community. During the 1850s and 1860s he learned the technique of solar photography, a process of enlarging photographic images that were developed outdoors in daylight, which he continued to practise while working in Boston and New York. Documented paintings from this time include religious scenes, seascapes and genre subjects, for example the noted Newspaper Boy (1869; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), a rare study of urban black experience.

In 1870 Bannister and his wife moved to ...

Article

Bannister, Edward Mitchell  

Betty Kaplan Gubert

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Edward Mitchell Bannister was the first of two sons born to Edward and Hannah Alexander Bannister. His father was from Barbados; his mother, who was probably of Scottish descent, was a native of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and fostered her older son's love of drawing. His father died when Bannister was six; his mother died in 1844. The two boys were sent to live with a wealthy white lawyer, Harris Hatch, and his family. They worked on the Hatches' farm but had access to the Hatches' library, which was filled with books and with paintings that Bannister copied incessantly.

Following the path of many young men who lived in coastal communities, Bannister went to sea, working on fishing boats and schooners. He settled in Boston in 1848 laboring at menial jobs before he learned the skilled trades of barbering and women s hair styling He ...

Article

Bannister, Edward Mitchell  

Pamela M. Fletcher

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

painter, was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, the son of Hannah Alexander, a native of New Brunswick, and Edward Bannister, from Barbados. While his birth date has generally been given as 1828, recent research has suggested that he was born several years earlier. After the death of his father in 1832, Edward was raised by his mother, whom he later credited with encouraging his artistic aspirations: “The love of art in some form came to me from my mother. … She it was who encouraged and fostered my childhood propensities for drawing and coloring” (Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 17). His mother died in 1844 and Edward and his younger brother William were sent to work for a wealthy local family where he was exposed to classical literature music and painting Edward s interest in art continued and an early biography of the ...

Article

Barnes, Samuel Edward  

Paul Stillwell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

pioneer black naval officer, was born in Oberlin, Ohio, one of five children (two boys and three girls) of James and Margaret Barnes. James, from North Carolina, was a chef at Oberlin College, and Margaret, from Kentucky, ran a family laundry. Soon after they married, Barnes's parents settled in Oberlin to raise their family because of the community's liberal atmosphere. They were aware of the role the town had played as a way station on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century. Barnes received the bulk of his education in Oberlin. He graduated from high school there in 1932 and was elected to the National Honor Society. In 1936 he graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor s degree in Physical Education He was an outstanding athlete who played end on the college s football team and starred on the track team He established a ...

Article

Bell, Mary A.  

Theresa Leininger-Miller

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist, was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of James F. Bell and Susanna County, probably laborers. Little is known about Bell's early life. She presumably attended segregated schools. It is unlikely that she ever received artistic training; she declared that she drew “without human teaching.” She probably worked as a domestic servant, laundress, or seamstress, beginning in her teenage years, and she may have traveled extensively. Bell said she “lived all around” before World War I. Since she does not appear in early-twentieth-century city directories or census records in Washington, D.C., or Boston, Massachusetts, and because she apparently never married or had children, it is likely that she resided with her various employers.

By the mid-1920s Bell was working for Edward Peter Pierce, justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1914 to 1937, and Adele Dutaud Pierce his wife as a live ...

Article

Bennett, Gwendolyn  

Theresa Leininger-Miller

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer and artist, was born in Giddings, Texas, the daughter of Joshua Robin Bennett and Mayme F. Abernathy, teachers on an Indian reservation. In 1906 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Gwendolyn's father studied law and her mother worked as a manicurist and hairdresser. When her parents divorced, her mother won custody, but her father kidnapped the seven-year-old Gwendolyn. The two, with Gwendolyn's stepmother, lived in hiding in various towns along the East Coast and in Pennsylvania before finally settling in New York.

At Brooklyn's Girls' High (1918–1921) Bennett participated in the drama and literary societies—the first African American to do so—and won first place in an art contest. She attended fine arts classes at Columbia University (1921) and the Pratt Institute, from which she graduated in 1924 While she was still an undergraduate her poems Nocturne and Heritage were published in ...

Article

Blackburn, Walter Scott  

Rita Kohn

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

architect and civic leader, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of the Reverend Cleo W. Blackburn, executive director of Flanner House, a social service center for Indianapolis's black community, president of Jarvis Christian College, and executive director and CEO of the Board of Fundamental Education (BFE), which received a national charter in 1954. Cleo Blackburn was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, the son of a slave. At Butler University he–earned a degree in social work and was ordained a–minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). After earning a master's degree in Sociology at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Cleo Blackburn was director of research and records at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. He returned to Indianapolis in 1936. In 2000 he was recognized posthumously as one of the fifty most influential people of the twentieth century in Indianapolis. Walter Blackburn's mother, Fannie Scott Blackburn a civic ...

Article

Bolden, Melvin R.  

Glenn Allen Knoblock

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and political activist, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1937 Bolden received a four‐year scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, where he majored in illustration and advertising design. Upon his graduation he became an artist and layout designer for a top advertising agency in Philadelphia. His duties included prep work for original work by Norman Rockwell. In fact Bolden and Rockwell became close friends, and it was Rockwell who “encouraged Bolden to use neighbors and local townspeople as models for his art,” according to a New Hampshire Circle of Friends flyer.

After World War II Mel Bolden moved to New York and became a full‐time illustrator, working first for black newspapers, then for such general magazines as Fortune, Saturday Review, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, Boy's Life, as well as for major newspapers like the New York Times and the New York ...

Article

Brandon, Brumsic, Jr.  

Vincent F. A. Golphin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

artist and creator of Luther, one of the first comic strips with African American characters to be widely published in U.S. newspapers, was born in Washington, D.C., two blocks north of Union Station, then the national capital's major transportation center. Brumsic Brandon Sr. worked there as a railway porter. Brandon Jr.'s mother, the former Pearl Brooks, was a stock clerk and maid at the Kann's Department Store.

At Charles Young Platoon Elementary School, Brandon was a high achiever who loved to draw, which inspired him to pursue art as a career. In 1942, when he entered Armstrong Technical High School, he took nearly every painting, sketching, and sculpture course. Also, at the urging of teachers, he added courses in drafting, which later made him more employable. Brandon graduated in February 1945 intent on becoming a comic strip artist but instead he became one of the first African ...

Article

Brown, Samuel Joseph, Jr.  

Dália Leonardo

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2012

artist and educator, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. When he was ten, his family moved to Philadelphia, where he eventually attended South Philadelphia High School. In 1930 Brown graduated from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, having specialized in public-school art education. In 1933 Brown was the first African American accepted into the Pennsylvania Public Works of Art Project a New Deal program owing in large part to the influence of Fiske Kimball who was the director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and an admirer of Brown s watercolors The Public Works of Art Project enabled Brown to exhibit his art in a number of venues including the Harmon Foundation in New York City Howard University the University of Pennsylvania and the Baltimore Museum of Art Kimball proved to be a steady ally inquiring about scholarship and travel funds for Brown and referring him to ...

Article

Bullock, Barbara  

A. M. Weaver

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

painter and mixed-media artist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to James and Janey Bullock, of whom little else is known. She was the youngest of three children. An inquisitive child who was always making things, Bullock's creativity blossomed under the watchful eye of her mother and, later, her stepmother. When Bullock was twelve years old, her mother died, marking the beginning of a spiritual quest that eventually led her to becoming an artist.

Bullock's formal art education began in 1958 at the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial, a Philadelphia institution that provided free instruction to adults and children. The 109-year-old school had a reputation for fostering the growth and development of artists, and Bullock stayed there for a year. Later she attended the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia, from 1965 to 1966 Bullock arrived there at a time when the school still followed the traditional academic approach to ...

Article

Burnett, Calvin Waller  

Amalia K. Amaki

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

painter and printmaker, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Nathan Burnett Sr., a physician and surgeon, and Adelaide Waller, a homemaker. Though his parents, especially his father, hoped he would pursue a medical or legal career, Burnett instead evinced an interest in art, one perhaps originating with his parents’ own. Calvin appreciated his father's drawings and a painting of an apple done by his mother that was displayed at their home.

As a young boy Burnett routinely copied Mickey Mouse and other characters from the comics in the Sunday paper with such skill that his parents reserved a small section of the kitchen counter for his use They also took him to area museums where he was particularly impressed with Greek sculpture and engaged in prolonged discussions with both parents about the objects on view He was further encouraged by visits to his grandparents home where some ...

Article

Campbell, Elmer Simms  

Pamela Lee Gray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

cartoonist, author, artist, and graphic illustrator, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Elmer Cary Campbell, a high school administrator, and Elizabeth Simms, a painter and homemaker. Campbell moved to Chicago to live with an aunt and to take advanced art classes at Elmwood High School. In 1923, while a student there, he won a national contest for an editorial cartoon about Armistice Day. After graduation, Campbell attended the Lewis Institute and the University of Chicago, where he worked at The Phoenix a humor magazine He also worked as a post office messenger and railroad car waiter Campbell was accepted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed three years of study there before returning to St Louis to work briefly at Triad Studios a commercial art studio He then moved to Harlem to live with an aunt and attend the Art Students League where ...

Article

Carter, Vincent O.  

Steve Paul

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

expatriate writer and artist, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Joseph and Eola Carter. His mother worked in a laundry; his father was a hotel porter. For most of his boyhood, the Carters lived in a second-floor apartment at 618 Cottage Lane in Kansas City's ethnically diverse north end. Their street was an alley of bungalows and small houses that ran behind the dwellings of mostly Italian immigrants. Carter was shy, bookish, and smart, and developed a fine singing voice. As a schoolboy he liked to take Sunday outings on his own to the stately art museum, where he stared at Flemish paintings. Carter graduated from Lincoln High School in 1941 and entered the U S Army He served three years with the 509th Port Battalion mostly in France On his return he worked as a railroad cook went to college Lincoln University in ...