The Visual Culture of Racial Integration, 1931-1954

FAIN: FT-248818-16

John Ott
James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)

Research toward a book-length study on African-American art in the 1930s and 40s.

This project investigates black and white artists' efforts towards racial integration, both in terms of imagery and within art institutions, during the decades just before the Civil Rights movement: from the infamous 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys until Brown v. Board's desegregation of public schools in 1954. Individual chapters address images of racial solidarity produced within the arts programs of the New Deal, graphics commissioned by multiracial labor unions, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of the desegregation of the military in the late 1940s, the "enlightened capitalist” vision of integration in mass-market magazines like Life, Fortune, Ebony, and Sepia, and efforts by black modernists like Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff to claim abstraction as an integrationist visual style.