Biography
 | I was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 2, 1918. Both
of my parents were from the South. My father, a railroad and steel
worker, was a Creek Indian. The Creeks had been centered mostly in
Georgia, where they were hounded and discriminated against like anyone
else with a skin darker than white. My mother came from Mississippi. All
her folks were farmers. Her own mother, my grandmother, had been a
slave, the illegitimate daughter of a white master. I am not proud of
this one white man who was one of my great-grandfathers. He was of a
much lower order of humanity than those whose lineage was directly
African. A typical slave master, he did not regard the product of his
seduction of a slave as his offspring. She was just another slave
chattel. My mother was born free, but four of her relatives, two uncles
and two cousins, were lynched in Mississippi.
Of my parents, it
was my mother to whom I was closest. My father died when I was eight. My
mother later married again, but she parted from my stepfather when I was
thirteen, and from that time on we looked after one another. She loved
music and art. When I was seven years old she bought me a set of oil
paints, and I painted my first picture, which she still has. When I was
nine, she bought me a violin and got me a music teacher. I scratched
away on the instrument for about seven years, but my all-consuming
interest was painting and drawing. I liked music, and I think that music
has had a deep and helpful influence on my painting. But I resented the
time given over to practice on the violin, and whenever I thought my
mother wasn't watching, I would drop it for the paintbrush. My mother
would have preferred me to be a musician but in this, as in everything
else throughout our life together, she had a wonderful fund of patience,
always gentle with me, trying to understand why some things of which she
thought less meant so much to me, never criticizing me sharply or
harshly.
From the earliest years I can remember, I was made
conscious of the fact that there were differences between Negro people
and white. I played with white children. My mother was a domestic
worker, traveling to white people's houses to scrub their floors, wash
their clothes and cook for them. When I was a baby in arms she would
take me to these homes, as there was nobody to look after me, and I
would sometimes play with the children there. We lived in a very poor,
ramshackle neighborhood of Chicago, and were for a time the only Negro
people on the street. I would play with the neighbor's children, but the
feeling that there were "differences" permeated the air, growing more
intense, of course, as we grew older. It became even more glaring when I
entered grade school. The idea that there were "differences" was
ever-present in the attitudes of the teachers and in what we were
taught. Then I learned to read, and there it was in the books, as well
as in the motion pictures, cartoons, newspapers, "jokes" and
advertisements. The Negro people were portrayed as grotesque
stereotypes. And the "difference" was brought home to me again when I
went out to earn money to help out in the house, which I did from the
age of nine. I delivered groceries for a store, earning 75 cents a week,
and made money in other ways apparently reserved for Negroes : shining
shoes, cleaning, sweeping as a porter in shops. I couldn't define the
"differences," let alone understand the reason for racism, but the fact
of it was always there.
When I moved on to high school, my odd
jobs in the evenings continued. I worked as a hotel bellhop, and a
counter attendant in an ice cream parlor.
A little later on I
was to be a valet and a cook. I had been a good student in grade school,
was marked out as especially gifted with the paintbrush and pencil. This
continued in high school, where the art teachers seemed to be proud of
me. The school had about two thousand pupils, of which about 25% were
Negroes. All the teachers, of course, were white. And prejudice was
always there. When I was sixteen, and again when I was seventeen, I won
an art scholarship in a competition run for high school students by the
state of Illinois, but these scholarships were denied me when it was
discovered that I was a Negro. I was avidly interested not only in
painting, but in literature and drama. The drama group in the school
allowed me to paint the scenery, and design the sets and costumes. But I
also wanted to act, and this was forbidden to a Negro.
My
disturbed feelings sometimes broke out into open defiance, and in
studies such as history I came to be known as a "problem." To explain
how this happened, I have to go back a little. When I grew too big to be
carried by my mother to the homes where she worked as a servant, she
would leave me for two or three hours in the public library. I became a
voracious reader, and continued this throughout my school years. I went
through everything in the children's section, and then, at the age of
twelve, begged the librarian for a card that would permit me to enter
the section where there were more advanced books, and to check out four
books instead of two. I again read practically every book on the
shelves, at first starting with the authors whose names began with the
letter "a" and hoping to work up to "z." I grew impatient with this
somewhat mechanical approach and browsed about, finding a writer I liked
and then reading everything the library had by him. I thus read through
the works of Jack London. Another favorite was the writer of historical
romances, Rafael Sabatini. And I accidentally came upon books that had
information that had never been imparted to me in school.
I
discovered that the Negro people had played a proud role in history. A
book that fascinated me, and opened up new vistas, was Doctor Alain
Locke's, "The New Negro." I had never realized that Negro people had
done so much in the world of culture, that they had contributed so much
to the development of America, that they had even been among the
discoverers of the continent.
For a while I kept this newfound
knowledge to myself. It became a kind of secret life, a new world of
facts and ideas in diametric opposition to what was being taught in the
classrooms and textbooks as unquestionable truth. But then, the clash
began to come out in the open.
I would ask my teachers why they
never mentioned a Negro in history. I would bring up the name of Crispus
Attucks, the first martyr of the American Revolution of 1776, or of
Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. I would mention the
painters, Bennister and Tenner. My teachers answered smugly and often
angrily. The histories from which we were taught, they would say, were
written by competent people, and whatever they did not mention was
simply not important enough to mention. When I spoke up about these
ignored great figures, I would be told to sit down and shut up. In
public speaking classes, whenever I had a chance to speak, it would be
about these discoveries of mine. The other Negro students were often
embarrassed by this. It had been deeply ingrained in them as in me in my
first school years, that to be a Negro was something of which to be
ashamed; that the Negro people were an inferior people, illiterate,
uncouth. And this was intensified by the clownish role forced upon
Negroes in the cinema, by thousands of barbs and shafts in the comic
strips, in the newspapers, in casual conversation of white people.
Everything characteristic of Negro culture was isolated and distorted
into an object of hilarity. And so it was considered best not to mention
this embarrassing word or subject. It is a terrible thing, this turning
of children against their parents and ancestors, robbing them of their
heritage and the riches of their past, leaving them spiritually
motherless and fatherless.
I grew to dislike school intensely.
Many times I was on the point of being expelled. I was called stupid and
arrogant. My mother was asked to come to school, and receive a list of
complaints. And so whenever I didn't feel like going to school, I didn't
go. Playing truant, I would go to the Art Institute of Chicago and
wander about its art galleries, looking at paintings, and dreaming of
becoming an artist. Outside of my art teachers, who would come to my
rescue when I got into trouble, I was very lonely in school. But I did
find a small group of students struggling to break down discriminatory
practices in school, and joined them. Thus at sixteen I had my first
experience in an organized movement to attack some social problem.
In these years I also began to feel more confidence in myself.
I became friends with a white fellow student whose father was a
professional sign painter. He taught both of us the trade and we set up
a little shop after school hours, doing signs and lettering, and even
theatre displays. For a time we were hired by a theatre to do this work,
and given 75 dollars a week. Unconscious of the existence of trade
unions, certainly the schools never mentioned them, we did not know that
the employer was using us to avoid hiring union members, and was thus
saving an amount equal to what he was paying us, which we soon found
out. During this time I also sketched incessantly, at lunchtime or in
whatever spare time I could find in the evenings. I drew whatever I saw;
the people I knew, the streets about my home, events that had happened.
And I discovered that there were other Negro artists in Chicago. I read
in a Negro newspaper of a Negro art group called the Arts Crafts Guild,
which met every Sunday. I was fifteen at the time. I timidly took a few
drawings to their meeting, and was admitted. They met every week, mostly
to work from a model, or from scenes in the streets, and criticized each
other's work. They had community exhibitions, and thus some of my work
was first publicly seen, in places like a Negro Baptist church, a Young
Men's Christian Association house, a Settlement House or Boys Club. We
would occasionally take over a vacant lot for our exhibitions. We got to
know each other intimately, and would visit each other's homes. Some
lived in a garage which we rented for a studio. Dues were small. None of
us had any formal art training except for one who had gone for a short
time to the Institute, and was the club president, chief critic, guide
and instructor, giving us all some knowledge of the technical aspects of
handling paint.
We decided we would give out prizes at our
exhibitions, the judges being an older artist and one of the leading
figures in the community. We earned money through parties, and announced
that the prizes could now be, instead of a few dollars worth of art
materials, a "scholarship" to the Art Institute. We could not give a
real scholarship, of course, which cost 250 dollars, but we were able to
pay the fees for a few night lessons. We also stipulated that whoever
was the winner would have to teach us what we had learned. In this way,
we all shared the prizes. Altogether we managed to send about a dozen
club members to Institute classes. I never won one of those
"scholarships," but I did get to do some drawing from life at a sketch
class run by an artist named Todras Geller, who did a good deal of work
for Chicago synagogues.
When I was nineteen and just out of
high school, the most exciting event of my artistic career up to that
time took place. I won a statewide competition for high school
graduates, the prize being a full scholarship to the Chicago Art
Institute. And this time the prize was actually given to me. I still had
to make a living working at night and vacation times, but was able to
finish the two-year course in one year. With this expert technical
instruction behind me, I felt that I was really set on the road to
becoming a full-fledged artist. But how was I to make a living and still
find enough time to draw and paint? At this point, the W.P.A. (Works
Progress Administration) arts project beckoned.
The W.P.A. arts
projects, instituted by the New Deal administration of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, were a form of unemployment relief, but they
established the principle that the unemployed were to be given useful
work, not simply a miserable few pennies of a dole. And they also
embraced the principle practically unheard of up until then in United
States history that the arts were socially useful work. In a queer way,
some of the very restrictions that "free enterprise" put on the projects
worked to the advantage of the artists. For the work done by the
unemployed had to be of a kind that did not compete against private
business. So the work done on the arts project drawings, paintings,
murals, could not be privately sold, but had to be a public possession,
hung in schools, post offices, and other community and government
buildings. Many of the artists on the projects found a gratifying new
spirit entering their work, with the knowledge that it would be publicly
seen and discussed, looked upon by the people as their own.
To
be accepted on the project, one had to prove possession of the requisite
skills, and also had to be unemployed, unable to find work, on relief,
and a pauper, without any suitable possessions. The latter part of this
was easy. The Negro people were poor even in boom days. Since the crash
of 1929, the great mass of Negro families had been unemployed. But when
it came to be accepted as an artist, racism again showed its face. The
director of the Illinois art project did not think that Negro people
could be artists, and on the entire project there was but one Negro: an
elderly artist who had earned a national reputation some years before.
Otherwise no Negroes were taken on, although there were from fifty to a
hundred who were fully qualified. But an Artists Union had formed, which
I joined. It went on strike against those discriminatory practices. We
picketed the projects; I was arrested a few times by the police, and
spent some nights in jail. Finally we won. And so my first lesson on the
project dealt not so much with paint as with the role of the unions in
fighting for the rights of working people.
Looking back at my
three years on the project, I see it was a tremendous step for me to be
able to paint full time, be paid for it, although the pay was the bare
minimum of unemployment relief. The most wonderful thing for me was the
feeling of cooperation with other artists, of mutual help instead of
competitiveness, and of cooperation between the artists and the people.
It was in line with what I had always hoped to do as an artist, namely
paint things pertaining to the real everyday life of people, and for
them to see and enjoy. It was also a thrill for me to see so many
accomplished artists at work, and to be able to learn from them.
I became active in Artists Union committees and also took part
in the work of the League against War and Fascism, and the organizations
for support of the republican government of Spain. It was obvious that
the welfare of the Negro people, the progress of all the working people,
and the cause of democracy were linked together. And this was also the
basis for the progress of art. The artist could not spend his life in
his studio. He had to play a role in social life.
When I was
twenty three I won a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, a
philanthropic organization. At this time I also married. My wife was an
accomplished sculptor. With the fellowship grant we went to live and
work for two years in the South, touring practically all the southern
states but mainly living in Louisiana, Virginia, and Georgia. I painted
a mural for the Hampton Institute, a Negro college in Virginia. It dealt
with the theme I had long before tried to argue about in high school,
the contributions of the Negro people to the development of democracy in
the United States.
These two years in the South were one of the
most deeply shaking and educative experiences of my life. I was in the
real home of my people, where the vast majority had lived and worked
from the days when they were brutally brought in the slave ships. In
many places Negro people were almost the entire population. Yet, without
the right to vote, without elementary civil rights, denied any
protection of courts or government, they were domineered over by a
corrupt ruling clique, who had the guns, and had the reins of the
police, courts and politics in their hands. If necessary, the rulers
could also unleash the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. They
kept the population of the South, Negro and poor white, in poverty and
illiteracy, making it a source of cheap labor. I felt the whiplash. In
New Orleans, once, I walked into a tavern, and was brutally beaten, for
Negroes were not allowed to enter such public places. In Hampton,
Virginia, a streetcar conductor pulled a gun on me and could have pulled
the trigger with impunity.
But I also learned to understand and
love my people as I had never before. In Chicago I still tried to defend
them against misrepresentation, by showing that we too had our
philosophers, our artists, our explorers, our orators, our military
heroes. We were just like the white figures told about in the books.
Like my Negro schoolmates, I had been so affected by the grotesque
perversions of Negro culture, by the ridicule heaped upon everything
Negro, that even the genuine culture came to be something to wipe out of
mind, and ignore. A touch of dialect, or the beautiful music of the
spirituals, made us faintly ashamed, especially if there were white
people present. Everything different from the Anglo-Saxon stereotype was
fit only to laugh at. And now in the south I began to understand the
beauty of my people's speech, their poetry, their folklore, their dance
and their music, as well as their staunchness, morality and courage.
Here was the source of the Negro people's contribution to American
culture, and of the far vaster contribution they could make to the world
in the future. Particularly the music affected me, the spirituals,
blues, ballads, work songs, gospel songs, church songs and secular
songs, and it has remained one of the most important influences on my
work. It is not that I have ever tried to translate the music directly
into pictorial art. But the music affected me so perfectly, in a way
that touched the heart more directly than any other art, the dignity,
the outpouring of tenderness, the social and comradely feelings, and
humanity of the people. It is this that has helped in my efforts, in
paintings and drawings, to present a feeling of universal humanity
within a particular image, so that all people of good will, looking at a
particular image would feel that something of themselves was contained
there. It is this that the great Paul Robeson expresses in his singing
in a marvelous way, so that he becomes the foremost bard of a people,
symbolizing their common aspirations. Questions that had long been
raised in my mind began to be answered. A slowly developing process that
had caused so much turmoil of mind and heart took a new leap, the hunger
to understand the complexities of the life of my people began to find
some satisfaction, although I still have so much to learn. Seeing the
people living on the land, seeing the culture as a part of life,
long-standing confusions began to be erased.
I spent a year and
a half in the Army. There I contracted tuberculosis. Discharged from the
Army, I went to Mexico for two years, and this was another memorable
chapter in my education. There I worked with the leading Mexican
artists, including those of the Taller de Grafica Popular. I was
especially moved by Leopoldo Mendez, the great master of popular
woodcut. One of the honors of which I am most proud is that of having
been elected an honorary
member of the Taller.
On my return
from Mexico, my wife and I agreed to a divorce. I spent two years in a
hospital, trying to arrest the case of tuberculosis, and underwent five
operations. I then met the woman who became, five years ago, my present
wife. She and my mother have been my two greatest teachers. What I
learned from them was what an artist has to know about human beings to
be an artist. My mother's moral strength taught me to see how much the
peace and human dignity of the world will be protected and won by the
simple, ordinary people. The guiding love and sympathetic understanding
of my wife taught me again not only the wonderful potentialities of
human beings but also their strength in the face of every adversity. It
is one of the sources for the optimistic feelings that I like to think
my pictures convey.
What may be called in part a kind of
honeymoon, and also one of the most thrilling experiences of my life,
was the trip my wife and I made to Europe in 1951. We went through
France, England and Italy, and then attended the world youth festival in
Berlin. From there we were invited to visit Czechoslovakia, Poland and
the Soviet Union. I had known from reading, of course, that there were
many artists over the world who had taken quite a different direction
from the inhuman and abstract direction in which so many of the young
artists of my own country were moving. It was quite another thing to
meet and talk to these artists directly. Formerly, at home, striving to
give my art a more realistic quality, going against the tide of what
everyone was claiming to be "new" and "the future,"
I sometimes
felt very much alone. There were others, of course, thinking the same
way, but scattered from one another, and all feeling alone. I now
realized that the great forward-moving tide of art was realism, and that
the majority of creative artists in the world were realists. I can never
feel alone as an artist again. I learned valuable lessons from what had
been done in a short time, by artists, coping with basic problems, in
Germany. How tremendously they had advanced in a few years! I realized
for the first time the greatness of the 19th century social artists in
Russia, particularly Repin.
I learned profound and basic lessons from
the Soviet
and Chinese artists.
But even more important was
the contact I had with the peace forces over the world. I began to
understand something of the strength of the working class, and its role
in the development of society, from the struggles and achievements in
the people's democracies and the Soviet Union. I began to understand
something of the mighty force that had been unleashed in the peace
movement, reflecting the conscious desire of the masses of people over
the world, and their conviction that they could accomplish this task. I
got a perspective that is very difficult for the average American to
attain, namely the ability to see international questions as the primary
concern of all peoples. It is not easy for the average American to feel
pride in his own culture and at the same time be able to see the
qualities it has in common with cultures apparently so different from
his own, to be able to identify himself with the African people, Chinese
and other Asian people. At home I had begun to reach such conclusions
theoretically, but only after this concrete experience was I able to
make these feelings part of my actual painting and graphic work. I was
able to look back and evaluate my own work, see the difference between a
merely general humanist approach and one in which the character and
world view of the working class, its internationalism and optimism
played a major role. I will never forget the hospitality and warmth
showered upon me, and what I can call the affection bestowed upon me as
a representative of the oppressed Negro people and of the people
striving for peace in the United States. If I had come back with nothing
else, this would have been the most powerful experience and influence on
my life from then on.
In my work I have always striven, even
when dealing with an actual personage or incident, like the case of the
Trenton Six or Mrs. Willie McGhee, to give the portrayals a general
humanity, so that people looking at them will say, "This is somebody I
know," or, "This is somebody I've seen." I feel that even more than in
my work of three years ago, I have been able to engender a feeling of
hope. Even in a scene exposing the harshness of life of the common
people, such hope is latent and must be revealed.
My wife and I
live very simply. I no longer have my hopes and aspirations tied up with
becoming a "success" in the market sense. I have had a measure of
success in exhibits, some prizes and awards, although not as much as I
might have gotten had there not been certain "difficulties" presented by
my speaking as part of the Negro people and the working class. Getting a
marketplace success or recognition by art connoisseurs is no longer my
major concern as an artist. My major concern is to get my work before
common, ordinary people; for me to be accepted as a spokesman for my
people; for my work to portray them better, and to be rich and
meaningful to them. A work of art was meant to belong to people, not to
be a single person's private possession. Art should take its place as
one of the necessities of life, like food, clothing and shelter. I was
happy when I learned that the portfolio of drawings reproduced by the
magazine "Masses and Mainstream" had reached many lands, and was helping
my people to be understood tens of thousands of miles away. When I heard
that a group of share-croppers and factory workers in Alabama had
combined whatever coins they had to buy a portfolio, had shared the
pictures among themselves, and passed them from home to home, I felt
that I had made a "success." An incident I like to remember was that
which took place when the African scholar, Dr. Matthews, to whom I
presented a portfolio, returned to South Africa. The Malian government
had refused to extend his passport. When the officials in Africa
discovered the portfolio among his belongings, they refused to let it
pass, for the presence of these Negro faces was, to them, propaganda.
Simple human dignity and brotherhood are dangerous propaganda to racists
and fascists. They finally allowed the portfolio to go through, when
they found one portrait of a white man among the six pictures. That made
it "art." The portrait happened to be one of Abraham Lincoln.
I
live in the United States as a progressive Negro artist. Like all
artists, I have special problems. But I have reached a point in my life
at which I know, with a conviction deeply rooted in reality, confirmed
by small but potent and inescapable signs, that the future is very
bright, and it holds great promise for the Negro people and all the
working people of my country; I have tried to put this message in my
art.
--Charles White, shared by Fran White. April 26, 1982
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