ART FRONTS: VISUAL CULTURE AND RACE POLITICS IN THE MIDTWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES

Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United StatesScholarlyCommons ScholarlyCommons
Spring 2010
Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-
Century United States Century United States
Erin P. Cohn University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
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Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Art and Architecture Commons, Other
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Cohn, Erin P., "Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 156. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156 For more information, please contact [email protected].
Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States States
Abstract Abstract ART FRONTS: VISUAL CULTURE AND RACE POLITICS IN THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES Erin Park Cohn Supervisor: Kathy Peiss Art Fronts argues that visual culture played a central and understudied role in the African American freedom struggle in the middle part of the twentieth century. In particular, it traces the political lives and cultural productions of a generation of visual artists, both black and white, who seized on the Depression-era ethos of art as a weapon to forge a particular form of visual activism that agitated for social, political, and economic equality for African Americans. Participating in the proliferation of visual culture that characterized early twentieth-century America, the activist artists of this generation took advantage of opportunities to reproduce images widely and thus convey political messages in powerful and immediate ways. Art Fronts traces the careers of these artists from the early days of the Depression, when artists affiliated with the Communist Party first created images in service of African American civil rights, through the Cold War, which limited but did not destroy the links they forged between art and activism. By highlighting changes and continuities in African American cultural politics over the course of four decades, it offers fresh perspectives on the contours of the long civil rights movement. Art Fronts thus participates in recent efforts to challenge the classic narrative of the history of the civil rights movement, yet draws that scholarship in a new direction, pointing to the importance of culture, and particularly visual culture, in all phases of the movement. Indeed, visual artists were highly active in the long civil rights movement, while the images they created and circulated in service of the cause served as a necessary visual forum for a range of competing ideas about the politics of race and civil rights.
Degree Type Degree Type Dissertation
Degree Name Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Graduate Group Graduate Group History
First Advisor First Advisor Kathy Peiss
Second Advisor Second Advisor Thomas J. Sugrue
Third Advisor Third Advisor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Keywords Keywords African American art, visual culture, civil rights movement, culture and politics
Subject Categories Subject Categories African American Studies | American Art and Architecture | Other American Studies | United States History
This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156
TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES
Erin Park Cohn
in
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2010
_______________________________
_______________________________
Antonio Feros, Associate Professor of History Dissertation Committee Thomas J. Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Associate Professor of American Art
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I entered graduate school, I attended orientation meetings in which various
professors and deans described the process of pursuing a doctoral degree. One metaphor,
offered by Walter Licht, really stood out for me; he compared it to running a marathon –
a hugely exhausting task that requires inner fortitude and strength as well as the ability to
continue to put one foot in front of the other until suddenly you cross the finish line.
While the metaphor is apt in a number of ways, running a marathon is a far more solitary
pursuit than getting a Ph.D.  While I’m immensely proud of having crossed this finish
line, I never would have made it to the end of the race without the intellectual training,
encouragement, and support of advisors, mentors, friends, and family.
I had the pleasure of working with a wonderfully open-minded and enthusiastic
dissertation committee that encouraged me to engage in interdisciplinary work and
provided me with a perfect combination of diverse perspectives on my project. Tom
Sugrue served as an example of a historian who leaves no stone unturned in his research
and a model for writing clear and compelling prose. His advice, ranging from leads for
research sources to suggestions for “thickening” my argument, was always very helpful.  
While she joined my committee after the project was well under way, Gwendolyn
DuBois Shaw also did much to shape my dissertation by providing me with an art
historian’s perspective and helping me hone my skills in visual analysis.  I especially 
appreciate her willingness to take on an unknown advisee from outside of her department
and her openness to my taking an alternative, interdisciplinary approach to the study of
visual culture.
iii
I could not have asked for a more dedicated doctoral advisor than Kathy Peiss.
Having received a bachelor’s degree in medieval European history, I entered graduate
school with virtually no background knowledge of the twentieth-century United States.
From the beginning, Kathy showed tremendous patience and faith in me as I developed
that foundational knowledge from the ground up. She has shaped me as a scholar in
ways I can only now appreciate in retrospect, pushing me at every turn to my intellectual
limits and thus helping me to surpass those limits time and time again.  These “pushes” 
usually took the form of a mind-bending, three-page, single-spaced response to every
piece of written work I ever gave her, or casual but brilliant suggestions that were
difficult to wrap my head around at the time and only made sense later. I fully recognize
how rare such dedication is in a graduate advisor, and I’m honored to have had a chance 
to be the recipient of Kathy’s mentorship.
Other historians have helped to shape this project in numerous ways and deserve
thanks. Early on in my graduate training, Phoebe Kropp assisted me greatly in
developing my thinking about race. Likewise, Bryant Simon lit a fire in me to explore
the politics of culture through the graduate seminar he guest-taught at Penn. More
recently, Maren Stange and Casey Blake offered valuable feedback on portions of the
dissertation and assisted me in testing out some of this material on audiences at the
American Historical Association Conference. Special thanks also go to Dan Horowitz,
who took a chance on me as a young Smith alumna, took me under his wing, and helped
me get into graduate school in the first place. Through the years, his mentorship has
meant more to me than he knows.
iv
Among the greatest pleasures of graduate school have been the intellectual
exchange and friendships I developed with fellow graduate students at Penn. The Kathy
Peiss student dissertation reading group was a particular treat, offering a safe place within
which I got to test some early (and crappy) first drafts and a chance to contribute to a
number of fascinating projects. The monthly meetings also provided much-needed social
interaction and psychological support during the lonely days of dissertation research and
writing. Thanks in particular to Kim Gallon, Sarah Van Beurden, Jess Lautin, Will
Kuby, and Rob Goldberg. While not a part of the reading group, Dan Amsterdam and
Erik Mathisen proved wonderful friends and colleagues throughout graduate school.
Thanks to both of them for their support along the way.
Attending graduate school at Penn also gave me the invaluable gift of the
friendship of Sarah Manekin and Joanna Cohen. Sarah and Jo have been my sounding
boards, confidants, comic relief, and nerd accomplices from the very beginning. Thanks
to Sarah for providing close readings of my work, coaching me through crises of faith,
and serving as an inspiration in the teaching department. Eternal gratitude to Jo for her
brilliant vision of broad historical connections, her silly sense of perspective, lots of
yummy dinners, and her ability to get me out in a sparkly top from time to time. Friends
like these don’t come along often, and I plan to hold onto them for a lifetime.
I also owe a great deal of thanks to friends outside of the academic bubble and
especially family, who provided moral, financial, and edible support throughout my
journey through graduate school. Finding Elizabeth Clark as a nanny and then friend was
a huge stroke of luck; many thanks to Liz for the energetic love she brought to Dahlia and
the moral support she gave me upon emerging from my office for snacks. John and Mary
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Stack housed and fed me in royal fashion during research trips to Washington, D.C.
Colby Smith Schoene and Clare Mortensen, my oldest friends, brought me much-needed
respite from my academic life by continuing to know and nourish the whole me. My
sister, Caitlin Park, has likewise served as a witness for my life story and offered support
in times of need. I feel lucky to have a sister who I can also count on as a best friend.
Warren and Dana Cohn provided countless delicious meals, weekends away, and hours of
childcare that made completing a dissertation not only possible, but enjoyable. More
than this, they took me into their family and their hearts, and their pride in my
accomplishments means a great deal to me. My own parents, Chris and Gary Park, made
this project possible through the example that they both set for me of hard work and
dedication to doing something that you love. From a young age, they encouraged me to
follow my passions and delighted in my achievements. I thank them for never once
doubting that I could do anything I set my mind to.
My greatest gratitude, however, goes to my immediate family, David and Dahlia.
Dahlia was conceived at the same time as this project and has therefore been with me
from its very beginning. Her arrival slowed down my progress in wonderful ways,
providing delightful distractions from difficult academic work. It has been a thrill
beyond measure to watch her grow and discover the world while completing this
dissertation. Since we met thirteen years ago, David has been my greatest champion,
dropping his life and moving across the country so I could attend graduate school, never
once questioning my need to follow my intellectual curiosities, and cheering me on along
the way as I slogged through the steps of completing the degree. I could not have asked
for a more dedicated, loving, and wickedly funny partner and co-parent. Most
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importantly, I want to thank David and Dahlia for balancing me out, challenging me to
leave my brain and cultivate my heart. I dedicate this dissertation to them, my favorite
and my flower.
ART FRONTS: VISUAL CULTURE AND RACE POLITICS IN THE MID-
TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES
Erin Park Cohn
Supervisor: Kathy Peiss
Art F ronts argues that visual culture played a central and understudied role in the
African American freedom struggle in the middle part of the twentieth century. In
particular, it traces the political lives and cultural productions of a generation of visual
artists, both black and white, who seized on the Depression-era ethos of art as a weapon
to forge a particular form of visual activism that agitated for social, political, and
economic equality for African Americans. Participating in the proliferation of visual
culture that characterized early twentieth-century America, the activist artists of this
generation took advantage of opportunities to reproduce images widely and thus convey
political messages in powerful and immediate ways. Art F ronts traces the careers of
these artists from the early days of the Depression, when artists affiliated with the
Communist Party first created images in service of African American civil rights, through
the Cold War, which limited but did not destroy the links they forged between art and
activism. By highlighting changes and continuities in African American cultural politics
over the course of four decades, it offers fresh perspectives on the contours of the long
civil rights movement. Art F ronts thus participates in recent efforts to challenge the
classic narrative of the history of the civil rights movement, yet draws that scholarship in
viii
a new direction, pointing to the importance of culture, and particularly visual culture, in
all phases of the movement. Indeed, visual artists were highly active in the long civil
rights movement, while the images they created and circulated in service of the cause
served as a necessary visual forum for a range of competing ideas about the politics of
race and civil rights.
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS x INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Visualizing Racial Violence and Injustice, 1931-1935 21 CHAPTER TWO: Forging Strategies of Visual Activism in the WPA 71
Federal Art Project, 1935-1942
CHAPTER THREE: Picturing African American History, 1939-1949 121 CHAPTER FOUR: The Rise and Fall of the Artist-Activist, 1940-1956 168 CHAPTER FIVE: Photographing “How It Feels To Be Black,” 1945-1969 219 EPILOGUE 275 ILLUSTRATIONS 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY 319
x
ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 William Siegel cartoon, New Masses, May, 1930 1.2 Hugo Gellert drawing, New Masses, June, 1931 1.3 AP Photo of the Scottsboro Boys, 1931 1.4 Anton Refregier, page from “They Shall Not Die!,” 1932 1.5 Walter Quirt cartoon, Daily Worker, July 11, 1930 1.6 Julius Bloch, The Prisoner, 1934 1.7 Prentiss Taylor, Eight Black Boys, 1932 1.8 Prentiss Taylor, Scottsboro, Limited, 1932 1.9 Juanita Preval, cover of the New Pioneer, February, 1934 1.10 Jacob Burck cartoon, Daily Worker, May 16, 1931 1.11 Phil Bard cartoon, Daily Worker, March 29, 1933 1.12 Juanita Preval cartoon, Liberator, June 6, 1931 1.13 William Gropper, cover of the New Pioneer, October, 1933 1.14 Jay Jackson cartoon, Chicago Defender, January 25, 1936 1.15 L. Rogers cartoon, Chicago Defender, August 18, 1934 2.1 Charles Alston, Untitled (Justice), c. late 1930s 2.2 Philip Reisman, South, c. late 1930s 2.3 Elizabeth Olds, Harlem WPA Street Scene, c. late 1930s 2.4 Raymond Steth, I Am An American, c. late 1930s 2.5 Michael Gallagher, Lynching, c. late 1930s 2.6 Raymond Steth, Evolution of Swing, c. late 1930s 2.7 Interior view of the South Side Community Art Center, c. 1940 2.8 Charles White, There Were No Crops This Year, 1940 3.1 William Chase cartoon, Amsterdam News, February 3, 1932 3.2 Charles White, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, 1943 3.3 Elizabeth Catlett, I Am the Negro Woman, 1946 3.4 Elizabeth Catlett, I Have Given the World My Songs, 1946 3.5 Elizabeth Catlett, My Role Has Been Important to Organize the Unorganized,
1946 3.6 Elizabeth Catlett, My Right is a Future of Equality With O ther Americans, 1946 3.7 Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston inspecting a cactus, 1949 3.8 Graphic Art Workshop logo 3.9 Jim Schlecker, F irst to Fall, from Negro, U .S.A., 1949 3.10 Charles White, Negro, U .S.A. cover, 1949 3.11 Antonio Frasconi, United Labor, from Negro, U .S.A., 1949 4.1 Charles White cartoon, Congress Vue, September, 1943 4.2 Ernest Crichlow cartoon, !eo$%e’s )oi+e, 1943 4.3 Cover of the 1947 Wo-Chi-Ca yearbook 4.4 Charles White, Ernest Crichlow, and Rockwell Kent at Wo-Chi-Ca, 1942 4.5 Elizabeth Catlett, Civil Rights Congress, 1949 4.6 Charles White, The Trenton Six, 1949
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4.7 Charles White, The Ingrams, 1949 4.8 Charles White, Dawn of Life, 1953 6.1 Elizabeth Catlett, Negro es Bello, 1969 6.2 Charles White, Birmingham Totem, 1963
1
IN T R O DU C T I O N
In the spring of 1939, Alain Locke published a short piece in Opportunity entitled
!Advance on the Art Front,0 in which he singled out the arts as the most important arena
of civil rights activism.  Encouraged by what he saw as culture=s power to bring about
political change, Locke employed a military metaphor that, while associated with the
Communist left, had become mainstream by the end of the 1930s. He described the
recent invigoration of African American art as !a courageous cavalry move over difficult
ground in the face of obstacles worse than powder and shell - silence and uncertainty.0
For Locke, this advance on the art front proved that the arts could be effective in arguing
the case of black social, political, economic, and cultural equality. Art was African
Americans= !most persuasive and incontrovertible type of group propaganda, our best 
cultural line of defense.0  With great confidence, Locke concluded that !we may 
justifiably say that Negro art has inaugurated a new phase of public influence and
service.01 An intellectual leader positioned at the center of African American culture,
Locke clearly sensed a shift in the role of art in black political life. His adoption of leftist
conceptions of art as weapon and culture as a !front0 in a larger struggle is telling, 
hinting at the degree to which culture and civil rights politics had come together by the
end of the Great Depression.  Indeed, Locke=s declaration of a new era in socially 
committed African American art marked an important break from the Harlem
Renaissance that he had been so instrumental in bringing about in the 1920s.
This dissertation examines the shift to which Locke alluded in his essay,
uncovering the ways in which visual culture became a central weapon in the African 1Alain Locke, !Advance on the Art Front,0 Opportunity 17 (May, 1939): 132-36.
2
American freedom struggle in the middle part of the twentieth century. In particular, it
traces the political lives and cultural productions of a generation of visual artists, both
black and white, who seized on the Depression-era ethos of art as a weapon to forge a
particular form of visual activism that agitated for social, political, and economic equality
for African Americans. I argue that this form of cultural activism played a central, if
understudied, role in the early civil rights movement. Participating in the proliferation of
visual culture that characterized early twentieth-century America, the activist artists of
this generation took advantage of opportunities to reproduce images widely and thus
convey political messages in powerful and immediate ways. Art F ronts traces the careers
of these artists from the early days of the Depression, when artists affiliated with the
Communist Party first created images in service of African American civil rights, through
the Cold War, which limited but did not destroy the links they forged between art and
activism. By highlighting changes and continuities in African American cultural politics
over the course of four decades, it offers fresh perspectives on the contours of the long
civil rights movement. Art F ronts thus participates in recent efforts to challenge the
classic narrative of the history of the civil rights movement, yet draws that scholarship in
a new direction, pointing to the importance of culture, and particularly visual culture, in
all phases of the movement.2 Indeed, visual artists were highly active in the long civil
rights movement, while the images they created and circulated in service of the cause
2 For an excellent articulation of the importance of expanding the temporal and geographical boundaries of civil rights scholarship, see Jacqueline Dowd Hall, !The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,0 Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March, 2005). For recent works that have done this, see Charles M. Payne and Adam Green, eds., Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Martha Biondi, To Stand and F ight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).
3
served as a necessary visual forum for a range of competing ideas about race and civil
rights.3
In developing strategies of visual activism, artists of the early civil rights
movement seized on the rise of an increasingly visual mass culture in the United States in
the early twentieth century. As capitalist developments in the late nineteenth century
brought about social and economic organization on a larger scale than ever before, as
technological developments allowed for both mass communication and consumption, and
as modern urban life began to subject Americans to a barrage of sensual and especially
visual stimuli, the visual image became an increasingly important mode of conveying
information.4 Citing the rise of the cinema and the proliferation of cartoons, billboards,
and other visual advertising, Vachel Lindsay observed in 1915 that !American 
civilization becomes more hieroglyphic every day.05 In addition, the invention of
halftone…