Charles White’s Challenge

As America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, artist Charles White challenges us to consider another dimension of its promise: Who gets to be seen as part of the American story?

Born in Chicago in 1918, White became one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, emerging from Chicago’s Black Renaissance in the 1930s. Through drawings, prints, paintings, and murals, he devoted his career to placing Black Americans at the center of the nation’s story – historical leaders, workers, mothers, children, and ordinary people whose names may never appear in the history books.

White died on October 3, 1979, at the age of 61, leaving behind a powerful body of work that continues to expand our understanding of who belongs in the American story and who deserves the promise of liberty.

View the study of White’s famous mural, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, in the The Promise of Liberty exhibition at the Peoria Riverfront Museum.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO TO DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

For generations, the visual record of American history had often pushed Black Americans to the margins, reduced them to stereotypes or omitted them altogether. Charles White did something different. He gave his subjects dignity, individuality, strength, and presence.

A remarkable 1943 mural study by White is featured in The Promise of Liberty.

The full-color study presents White’s vision for his monumental 1943 mural, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, 11 feet by 17 feet, painted in egg tempera directly on a plaster wall inside Clarke Hall’s Wainwright Auditorium at Hampton University in Virginia. The high-visibility space had been the campus YMCA and the center of campus activity.

The title itself makes an important declaration. White was not presenting Black history as a separate chapter of the American story. He showed that Black Americans had helped create, defend, and expand American democracy from the nation’s beginning.

Charles White’s densely interwoven composition brings together resistance, intellectual achievement, scientific discovery, music, labor, and family life.

Among the historical figures portrayed are Crispus Attucks, killed in the Boston Massacre; Peter Salem, who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill; resistance leaders Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner; Harriet Tubman; Sojourner Truth; Frederick Douglass; educator Booker T. Washington; scientist George Washington Carver; singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson; musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter; and labor leader Ferdinand Smith.

They appear alongside enslaved people, soldiers, workers, farmers, mothers, children, and families – representative figures whose individual names may be unknown, but whose lives and labor also shaped the nation.

Above scenes of enslavement and resistance, a winged figure evokes the continuing promise of freedom.

Frederick Douglass stands prominently within the composition, surrounded by workers, machinery, and other figures from America’s past and present. His presence creates a particularly meaningful connection to Peoria and to the Douglass letter and other materials displayed elsewhere in The Promise of Liberty.

Throughout the work, White’s strongly modeled figures and their large, powerful hands evoke courage, labor, and human dignity.

As Peoria Riverfront Museum Chief Curator Bill Conger observed, the composition becomes “a swirling mosaic of historical resistance and intellectual triumph.”

Art can participate in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of liberty.

It can challenge what a society chooses to remember. It can restore people to the historical record. It can make us look closely at someone we might otherwise pass by.

The Promise of Liberty is sponsored by the Gilmore Foundation, Ashley and Josh Bellamy, McKinnon Family Foundation, America 250 Donors, Visionary Society, Friends of History.