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Home , Benjamin Mays, Eldridge Cleaver, Ralph Abernathy, Ralph McGill, Rosa Parks Day

LEST WE FORGET

Images of The Black By Robert Templeton Exhibition of “Lest We Forget…” at the Housatonic Museum, Bridgeport, CT 2002 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM i Table of Contents

About Robert Templeton ...... 2 ...... 4 Booker T. Washington...... 5 Founders of the NAACP...... 6 Asa Philip Randolph ...... 7 , Jr...... 8 ...... 9 Ralph Emerson McGill...... 10 ...... 11 Hubert H. Humphrey ...... 12 ...... 13 Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi...... 14 Whitney Moore Young, Jr...... 15 Ralph David Abernathy...... 16 Lyndon B. Johnson...... 17 ...... 18 The Detroit Riots – Time Magazine ...... 19 or Non-Violence? ...... 20 The Young Blacks...... 21 From Despair to Rage...... 22 Must Riots Continue? ...... 23 Solidarity Day ...... 24 ...... 25 Eighty Years in the Black Civil Rights Movement ...... 26

©2013 All Rights Reserved Robert Templeton Collection

Robert Templeton in his Woodbury, Connecticut Studio WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM ii About Robert Templeton

Robert Templeton was born in Iowa in 1929, at the onset of the Great Depression, into a poor farming family. Life was hard, but his parents allowed themselves one small luxury: a subscription to the Saturday Evening Post. The whole family looked forward to its arrival, especially young Templeton, who was fascinated by Norman Rockwell’s covers. They instilled in him early on a love of art, and, unconventional for a farmboy, the desire to pursue art as a career. Between school and chores at the farm he managed to find time to fill his sketchbooks with pencil sketches, which already showed great promise. This came to the attention of his high school principal, Mary Buffington Summers, who helped him to apply to the Kansas City Art Institute as a National Merit Scholar. The Kansas City Art Institute awarded him the Vanderslice scholarship two years in a row. He was barely seventeen. At that time Thomas Hart Benton had already resigned from KCAI, but still occasionally made the rounds of the classrooms, looking over the students’ shoulders. His influence on Templeton was unmistakable as evident still years later when Templeton painted the 40 ft. mural ‘Portrait of America’ at the army base in Fort Leonard Wood, during basic training, when he was drafted during the Korean War. Benton sat for Templeton to do a charcoal portrait of him, which both he and Templeton signed.

On a summer trip to Santa Fe, NM, Robert befriended John Sloan, the urban artist. They continued their friendship when Templeton went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. Sloan acted as a mentor, and he and his wife Helen often invited Templeton over for Sunday tea, to enjoy conversations about art and life. It was on John Sloan’s recommendation that Templeton received a Ball Grant to the NY Art Students League, twice.

At the Art Students League, from 1950 to 1952, Templeton studied under Louis Bosa and Reginald Marsh, among others. He was drafted into the army in 1952, during the height of the Korean War, and underwent basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, before being sent to Germany. There he took advantage of his furloughs to visit the great museums of Spain and Italy. He further developed his artistic skills by painting murals at Army bases, in addition to his duties as a Signal Corps photographer. His photographs and sketches appeared in The Stars & Stripes, the US Army newspaper.

It was in Germany that Templeton met and married his wife, Leonore. They returned to New York City in 1955, and Templeton resumed his career as an artist, sharing a loft on the Lower East Side with two artist friends from his Art Student League days, where Templeton began to do portrait commissions.

In 1963 he moved with Leonore and his young son Mark back to his native Iowa, where he painted for two years in the small rural town of Corning. The paintings became the basis of the “Machine Man” series, which debuted to critical acclaim as a one-man show at the Banfer Gallery in New York City in 1964. The work reflected his fascination with the ribbons of interstate highways cutting through the Midwestern landscape, man’s relationship to the automobile, and Templeton’s love of trucks. In 1965, the Templeton family, which now numbered two-year old Kevin and two month old Tim, moved to Connecticut, where Templeton had purchased a parcel of land with an early 19th century house, where he built his studio.

2 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM About Robert Templeton - Continued

Two years later, in the hot summer of July 1967, Templeton was in Detroit on a portrait commission, when the riots broke out, and he made sketches which were featured on the cover of the August 4 issue of Time Magazine. This experience inspired him to make a visual record of the black civil rights movement. Through his contact with Ralph McGill, a strong advocate for change and the editor of the Constitution, the artist became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Mays, a friend and mentor to Dr. King and a former president of . Templeton and Mays made a list of the people whose portraits would personify the record of the struggle for equal rights. Through the next two decades, such leaders of the movement as , Asa Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, Benjamin Mays, Ralph McGill, and Roy Wilkins had their portraits painted by him for this collection. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated before a sitting could be scheduled, so for Dr. King’s portrait, helped Templeton choose the photo which would eventually become one of Templeton’s most impressive portraits.

Templeton’s work for Time Magazine continued. He was also commissioned by CBS News to provide courtroom sketches during the Black Panther trial and the Pentagon Papers trial. His other portraits were of such national figures as President , displayed in the Hall of Presidents at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, and national, regional and local leaders in industry, politics and finance. But his consistent efforts during almost twenty years were toward the collection that he and Benjamin Mays named “Lest We Forget.”

“Lest We Forget” was first shown in 1986 at in Atlanta, with funding from the NEA and the Council for the Arts. It was subsequently sent on a national tour under the auspices of the United Negro College Fund, with a grant from Heublein. The tour culminated in an exhibition on Capitol Hill.

The last years of his life Robert Templeton devoted to his landscape paintings. He was fond of saying “The world is sitting for its portrait, and I’m the one to paint it” as he was traveling, armed with sketchbook and camera, to Puerto Rico, Germany, Greece, Egypt, , and Italy, and he would put all his memories down on canvas upon his return to his studio in Connecticut.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 3 Frederick Douglass Oil, 1984, 40 x 30 inches

Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and government official, was born of a white father and a black slave mother in Maryland, in 1817. Despairing of his future under slavery, he escaped and found his freedom in a coastal town in Massachusetts, where he learned to read and write and to speak tellingly and with prophetic strength about his ordeals as a slave and as a runaway. The abolitionists were impressed with him, and he was heard on hundreds of platforms in the US, and in Canada and England, calling for rights for all. He opposed the colonization movement, which would have freed slaves only for the purpose of settlement in such African outposts as Liberia. He was a loud and clear advocate of the uncompromising struggle for immediate emancipation in his speeches and in the pages of his newspapers as well. He became famous, and he numbered Abraham Lincoln, and among his friends and admirers.

In later years he served the US as diplomatic minister to Haiti and as a government official in a succession of administrations. He was Marshal in the District of Columbia for annual celebrations of freedom. He traveled and lectured widely in the US and abroad, and became an international figure whose judgments in speech or print were widely respected. In his life story, ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’, he wrote that “I have worked hardest to get equal rights for Negroes” but this focus “does not keep me from working to help people of all races.”

4 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Booker T. Washington Oil, 1985, 36 x 30 inches

Booker T. Washington, educational leader, was born in 1856 in to a white father and a black mother who was a slave. He was brought up in a dismal cabin and was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The family moved to the neighborhood of Charleston, West Virginia, where he attended school, and then went off at seventeen to Hampton Institute, where he worked his way through as a janitor. He distinguished himself as a student, and in 1881 he was chosen to be the founding head of Tuskegee Institute, a teacher’s school in . After years of hard work, the school was firmly established. He lectured widely on educational subjects and became a familiar of such national figures as Theodore Roosevelt, whose dinner table at the he shared. He had become the recognized leader of black following the death of Frederick Douglass. He advocated social separation of the races combined with industrial training and cooperation. For such views he was called the “Great Compromiser” by friends and such foes as Du Bois and Monroe Trotter, who demanded immediate and complete social equality. It was his accommodating quality that brought him, and kept him, at the place where he dominated the movement for civil rights, able to raise funds and other support from former slaveholders of the South and from a broad national community. His ‘Up From Slavery’ is his legacy.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 5 Founders of the NAACP Oil, 1984, 30 x 50 inches

Moorfield Storey, lawyer and author, practiced law in Boston, where he was a reformer and a strong supporter of civil rights. He wrote a number of books and pamphlets including ‘Legal Aspects of the Negro Question and Problems of Today’, in which he discussed race prejudice. He was among the sixty prominent Americans who responded to the call of Mary White Ovington to meet in 1909, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, to protest the recent frightening riot in Springfield, Illinois, and the many decades of such oppressive acts of terror as burnings and . He became the first national president of the NAACP.

Mary White Ovington, reformer and the spirit behind that meeting, was born in Brooklyn in 1865, where she grew up in an atmosphere of abolitionism and women’s rights. She worked in settlement houses and came to know the depth of the problems of the blacks. In 1911, she published her 1904 study ‘Half a Man: The Status of the Negro’. By that time, she had seen her 1909 meeting evolve into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For more than forty years she served as board member, executive secretary, and chairman, and served as conciliator among the various factions that threatened to destroy the movement.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, scholar and activist, was born in western Massachusetts in 1868. He attended local schools where he was usually the only black. He went off to Fisk University, graduated, and enrolled at Harvard College as a junior. He stayed on through his doctorate in 1895. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania while doing the research for his magisterial ‘Philadelphia Negro’ in 1899. He taught at Atlanta University and became the ideological rival to Booker T. Washington upon the publication of his ‘Souls of Black Folk’. He was the first NAACP director of research and publications and he founded Crisis, of which he was editor for two dozen years.

6 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Asa Philip Randolph Oil, 1978, 44 x 30 inches

Asa Philip Randolph, labor leader, was born in 1889 in Florida. After high school, he went to New York City and studied at City College. He was active in the Socialist party, and in 1925 he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. From that position of power he was influential in the formation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. During these New Deal years, he threatened a on Washington by a hundred thousand black people, to protest discrimination in the defense industries. He opposed discrimination also in the armed forces, and in 1955 he became a member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Two years later he was a vice president and in regular opposition to George Meany, the union leader who was lukewarm on civil rights in the unions.

It was during this active period that he was called the “most dangerous Negro in America” by those who feared his power. He was an organizer of the August 1963 march on Washington, sharing leadership responsibilities with Roy Wilkins, , Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and . In later years his socialism became more moderate and he became active in the Urban League and the Liberal party. To carry on his commitment to his causes, he founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute, advocating the power of the black worker. He died in 1979, recognized for his many solid contributions to the civil rights movement.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 7 Martin Luther King, Jr. Oil, 1964 - 1985, 96 x 84 inches

Martin Luther King, Jr., clergyman, was born in 1929 in Atlanta where he was brought up, and he entered Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. There he fell under the good influence of Benjamin Mays. He was ordained in his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1947, and received his bachelor’s degree in sociology the next year. He then went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he was student body president and valedictorian of his graduating class. He went on to for his doctorate, received in 1955. It was there that he studied in depth the beliefs of Gandhi and others and settled upon a philosophy to guide his life.

He took a pulpit in Montgomery, where he came to early fame as an organizer of the . He became the national spokesman for the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement and an organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1959, he joined his father as co-pastor in Atlanta.

He traveled and lectured widely and spent some time in the Birmingham jail following a series of nonviolent demonstrations. He was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where at the Lincoln Memorial he delivered his memorable “” speech. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He led the Memphis to Jackson March that followed the of . In , he proposed the Poor People’s March on Washington, but the next month he was shot by an assassin and died in the hospital. The manner of his death led to the outbreak of riots in over a hundred cities in America.

He is remembered through his writings and the many studies about him. Those studies agree that it was the adoption of the passive resistance and nonviolent protest approach of Gandhi that gave leadership to King throughout his civil rights career, adding conviction to his eloquence.

8 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Benjamin Mays Oil, 1969, 40 x 32 inches

Benjamin Elijah Mays, educator, was born in 1895 in , and graduated from in Maine in 1920. He went to the University of for his masters degree and doctorate, and while he was working on those degrees, he was ordained into the Baptist ministry. He taught at Morehouse College and at South Carolina State College. From 1934 to 1940, he served as dean of the School of Religion and then moved on to the presidency of Morehouse College, a position he distinguished for the next quarter of a century. He also served his community well, becoming the first black president of the Atlanta school board. He spoke early and often against segregation and for education. He received nearly thirty honorary doctorates and other honors and awards including election to the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations, one of a dozen major leaders so honored. He had been a model for one of his Morehouse students, Martin Luther King, Jr., and he served the young minister as an unofficial senior adviser.

He gave the eulogy at King’s funeral. Among his books were the first sociological study of African-American religion, ‘The Negro’s Church’, published in 1933, ‘The Negro’s God’, of 1938, ‘Disturbed about Man’ of 1969, and his autobiographical ‘Born to Rebel’, of 1971. These books reveal a combination of sharp intellect with religious commitment and prophetic conviction.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 9 Ralph Emerson McGill Oil, 1984 (from 1969 photo shoot), 40 x 30 inches

Ralph Emerson McGill, newspaperman, was born in Tennessee in 1898 and studied at between 1917 and 1922, with time out for service in the Marines during 1918 and 1919. Upon graduation, he joined the staff of the Banner in Nashville where he worked for a half-dozen years before he moved to Atlanta and its Constitution. He spent the next decade as its sports editor, before becoming executive editor for another four years. He was the editor from 1942 to 1960. In those years, he had become an outspoken critic of bigotry and segregation.

For the decade of the 1960s, he was the publisher of the Constitution, and his writings led to his being called the ‘Conscience of the South.’ In these years many honors came to him, including the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and honorary degrees from about twenty colleges including Harvard, 1961; Morehouse, 1962; Notre Dame, 1963; Brown, 1964; and Atlanta and Tufts, 1965. He was a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His adopted city of Atlanta honored him by changing the name of a street to Ralph McGill Boulevard, after it had carried for decades the name of the first imperial Wizard of the . His books include ‘The South and the Southerner’, and ‘No Place to Hide: The South and Human Rights’. His writing had chronicled the South’s ‘Second Reconstruction’.

10 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Roy Wilkins Oil, 1984, 42 x 32 inches

Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, was born in Missouri in 1901. He was brought up in Minnesota, where he worked his way through the University, with a number of jobs from stockyard worker to editor. Upon his graduation, he began to work on the Kansas City Call, a major black newspaper. He became active in the NAACP there and was secretary of the local city chapter. Recognized for his leadership qualities, he became the assistant executive secretary of the national NAACP under Walter White, and soon succeeded W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of Crisis, the major organization publication. He was a consultant to the War Department during the Second World War and served with Du Bois and White as advisers at the 1945 conference that founded the . He continued to lecture and write, and upon the death of White in 1955, he was appointed executive secretary of the organization he had seen grow to 1300 branches and chapters and a quarter-million members.

During his own stewardship, the NAACP reaffirmed its profound commitment to the democratic process and integration, condemning separatism and violence. He served in the administration of Lyndon Johnson as an adviser, and he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil honor. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965 were strongly supported by Wilkins and his NAACP. He retired in 1977, covered with honors, and was succeeded by .

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 11 Hubert H. Humphrey Oil, about 1970, 51 x 37 inches

As a US Senator from Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey was an active liberal with a creative program to advance equal rights, one of the first in the Capitol to recognize the need for a strong bill of civil rights for blacks. Beyond Congress, he helped to write a strong civil rights plank into the platform of the Democratic party. He supported the Peace Corps, urban renewal, aid to health and education, and many other causes as senator, and from 1965 to 1969, as the vice president of the during the Great Society administration of Lyndon Johnson. His attempt to succeed Johnson in the election campaign of 1968 failed, and he turned for a time to teaching at Macalester College, and at the University of Minnesota.

In 1970, he was returned to the Senate, where he continued his liberal campaigns. He earned the name of the Happy Warrior, and he was happiest when he was charging toward another liberal goal. The great federal programs in the area of civil rights from 1949 to the late 1970s owe more to him than to anyone else. Among his books are ‘The Cause is Mankind: A Liberal Program for Modern America’ (1964), and his autobiography, ‘The Education of a Public Man’, of 1976.

12 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Rosa Parks Oil, 1970, 35 x 28 inches

Rosa Parks, seamstress and symbol, was born in Tuskegee in 1913 as Rosa McCauley, and attended Alabama State College. She married Raymond Parks in 1932, and was active in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, serving as secretary and youth adviser from 1943 to 1956. She came to the notice of the world when in 1955 she refused to yield her seat in the white section on a Montgomery bus. She was promptly arrested, and this led to a boycott of the city bus system organized by two local ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy. Their newly organized Montgomery Improvement Association oversaw the year-long boycott that ended segregation in the bus system.

Throughout her life, she gained many honors including the Springarn Medal of the NAACP in 1979, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Award, the Service Award of Ebony, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. She earned ten honorary degrees including one awarded by Shaw College in Detroit, where she worked as secretary and receptionist in the office of Congressman John J. Conyers, Jr.

Part of the citation for her Mount Holyoke degree read, “When you led, you had no way of knowing if anyone would follow.” In 1984, she received the Eleanor Roosevelt Woman of Courage Award. In 1990 her seventy- seventh birthday was held at the Kennedy Center with three thousand black leaders, government officials, and others celebrating her life.

Her autobiographies included ‘Rosa Parks: My Story’ and ‘Quiet Strength’. Rosa Parks died in October 2005. Her birthday, February 4th, has become commemorated as in and .

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 13 Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi Oil, 1980, 28 x 40 inches

14 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Whitney Moore Young, Jr. Oil, 1980, 38 x 31 inches

Whitney Moore Young, Jr., executive, was born in 1921 in Kentucky, where he graduated from Kentucky State College. He took his Master’s degree in 1947 at the University of Minnesota. Degree in hand, he joined the staff of the Urban League of Saint Paul, Minnesota, as the director of industrial relations and vocational guidance programs. Three years later he became executive director of the Urban League in Omaha, where he was also on the faculty of the School of Social Work at the University of Nebraska.

During the fifties he also taught at Creighton University and at Atlanta University. In 1960 he held a Rockefeller Foundation grant that gave him a postgraduate year at Harvard University, and this leave was followed by appointment in 1961 as the executive director of the . He was a strong force for good in that important position, and in 1963 he was one of the organizers of the March on Washington. A book of his essays entitled ‘To Be Equal’ was published in 1964 and throughout the 1960s he continued his work. In 1971 that work took him to Lagos, Nigeria, to a conference sponsored by the African-American Association, where he died at fifty years of age. Under his leadership the National Urban League had grown to about a hundred affiliate organizations in over thirty states.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 15 Ralph David Abernathy Oil, 1964, 30 x 24 inches

Ralph David Abernathy, clergyman, was born in Alabama in 1926, and received his bachelor’s degree from Alabama State College, after having served in the Army during the Second World War. He did his graduate work at Atlanta University, and became a minister in Montgomery, where he had as a colleague Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1955, he organized the Montgomery Improvement Association, and a short time later, he and King became known nationally because of their leadership of the successful bus boycott. It was then that they organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, soon the nation’s leading advocate of , resisted strenuously by militant factions. Upon King’s death, Abernathy succeeded him as president.

He organized the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington where Resurrection City was built, a group of huts in the center of the nation’s capital. He was jailed for twenty days for refusing to obey the police order to remove the huts. He went on to organize the SCLC , to exert financial pressure against companies that had poor records in extending equal opportunities to blacks. In 1961 he had become pastor of an Atlanta church and his honors came to include honorary degrees from such institutions as Long Island University, , Morehouse College, and Kalamazoo College. His autobiography is ‘And the Walls Came Tumbling Down’, published in 1989.

16 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Lyndon B. Johnson Oil, 1968, 30 x 24 inches

Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 37th president of the United State, was as dedicated and aggressive a politician that ever rose to prominence in America. His early years growing up on a farm in Stonewall, Texas, were spent in poverty. From that experience, sprang a lifelong empathy for the poor and the disadvantaged. His political career officially began in 1937 as Texas state representative. In 1949, he was elected United States senator and served until 1961, holding the posts of Senate Majority Whip and Senate Majority Leader. Johnson was selected to be Kennedy’s running mate in the 1960 Presidential election.

After Kennedy’s tragic assassination in 1963, LBJ became president and embarked on designing and implementing what he called the “Great Society.” During his Presidency, he pushed for and signed legislation that created Medicare, the War on Poverty, Medicaid, an increase of public funding for education, public television, the , and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 among many other accomplishments. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed most forms of , and was signed on July 2, 1964. The National Voting Rights Act outlawed voting discrimination, and was instrumental in allowing millions of blacks to vote for the first time.

Johnson also showed his strong support of civil rights with his 1967 nomination of civil rights attorney to be the first African American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Many of the bills he signed, in particular the Civil Rights legislation, continue to have a positive effect on America to this day.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 17 Malcolm X Oil, 1985, 56 x 42 inches

Malcolm X, clergyman, was born Malcolm Little in Nebraska in 1925. He spent much of his youth in foster homes and state institutions before he finished the eighth grade and left for Boston, where a half-sister lived. He became lost in a life of drugs and crime and was sentenced to ten years in prison by the time he became twenty-one. After learning to read and write while inside, he corresponded with , the leader of the Black .

By 1952, he was out on parole and speaking out about his belief that the white Christian world was intrinsically evil and dangerous, and that the only way for blacks to survive was to separate themselves from it. He adopted the name by which he is remembered, Malcolm X, and founded mosques in Philadelphia and Harlem. His increasingly radical statements led to his expulsion from the Black Muslim movement and to the formation of his own nationalist groups, the Muslim Mosque and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

He was seen by friends and foes alike as an angry young man who took pride in his controversial social views including racial separation. He considered the nonviolence advocates to be utterly wrong, and he became famous for saying so. In this way, he helped the nonviolent movement by making it appear to be a more palatable alternative for moderate blacks and whites.

By 1965, Malcolm X had become slightly more moderate in his own views, after a 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, when he was killed in New York City by members of a rival black group. His ‘Autobiography’ was published shortly after his death, and in 1992, a movie on his life was a popular success. 18 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM The Detroit Riots - Time Magazine Acrylic, 1967, 31 x 24 inches

The riots in Detroit in the late sixties were an for Robert Templeton. They came out of a long tradition of blacks in that city. Early in the nineteenth century, it was the last stop on the for fugitive slaves heading for freedom in the part of Canada that abutted Detroit, and later the goal for waves of blacks migrating from the South for well-paying jobs in the auto industry. There they mixed with immigrants from Europe on the assembly lines and in the city, and violence broke out often, as they found themselves competing for jobs.

During World War II, the riot begun at Belle Isle was a terrible racial confrontation. The riot of 1967 had Twelfth Street as its epicenter with looting, setting of fires, and pitched battles with guns and knives, making the area a no- man’s-land. It was here that Templeton sketched for Time, before the National Guard, numbering about ten thousand troops, was sent in by Governor Romney, and President Johnson had sent a contingent of paratroopers.

Forty-three people were killed, seven thousand were arrested, and property damage at twenty-two million dollars did not include much that was lost by those in the area that had become a charred and waterlogged and rubble-strewn disaster area. These studies by Templeton show the tense situation on Twelfth Street, firemen battling out of control flames, looters, Guardsmen, and the Governor’s press conference.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 19 Black Power or Non-Violence? Acrylic, 1967, 72 x 48 inches

The civil rights struggles of all people throughout all time have required that the choice among contradictory philosophies and tactics be made. For blacks in America, the polarization of conflicting views began in the period before the Civil War, between those who favored gradual manumission of slaves for colonization to Africa, and those who demanded complete and immediate abolition by whatever means, violent if need be. Early in this century the accommodating views of a Booker T. Washington ran afoul of the clearly impatient demands of a W.E.B. Du Bois, and this creative tension continued through the twentieth century, and will continue.

Here, Templeton portrays this dilemma in an evocative study from the late sixties, in which the extreme factions in the struggle for civil rights are embodied in the placement and choice of images, in the dramatic use of color, and in strong graphics and type. On the left the black power impulse of such an activist as H. Rap Brown called for an uncompromising, impatient, and aggressive demand for justice. Against this stands the non-violent commitment of such a leader as Martin Luther King, Jr., favoring a belief in passive protest and continuing dialogue, while also continuing to rely on the justice of the courts.

20 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM The Young Blacks Oil, 1967, 40 x 30 inches

This collective portrait of a generation that came of age in the sixties evokes the vital and conflicting spirit of those interesting years. They were portrayed here as primarily urban blacks encompassing such contradictory slogans as “Burn, Baby, Burn” and “Supercool.” They expressed the optimistic idealism of youth with its attendant impatience. Although they shared youth and enthusiasm with the white hippie flower children, they saw the need to do their “own thing.” The newness of that was offset by their search for their traditions through interest in the antiquity of their African origins and their history in American slavery. Their sense of oneness led them to address one another as Soul Brother or Soul Sister. The term Negro with them gave way to be replaced by the term black and the Afro haircut became a symbol of self identity and .

The artist evokes this exciting period with a choice of images that include anchor fencing, mounted police, the stare of Malcolm X, the various approaches to reaching audiences with their messages, and the youthful forthrightness of the young man and woman. It was a formative time for many leaders.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 21 From Despair to Rage Acrylic, 1968, 26 x 20 inches

From Despair to Rage is another Templeton image to emerge from that tense period of the late 1960s, a period that saw a decline in militancy from the middle of that decade to the middle of the 1970s. The riots of 1968 ended the belief of most that violence could achieve anything of importance, and the summers of 1969 and many that followed were “cool.”

Some militant groups, among them the , were able for a brief moment to attract the attention of the media, but their particular messages of despair and anger were ignored generally in the black communities. They faded away. A series of Black Power Conferences pressed for going beyond the traditional goals of civil rights, and instead, gaining black control of all black affairs. But while these conferences went forward, gains were achieved beyond them. Ironically, one conference was held in a city that had a black mayor elected by blacks and whites; more followed soon in other cities. By 1972 there were enough black congressmen to make the Black Caucus an important force. Other black leaders found that the poor, both black and white, had needs that could be addressed by such an approach as that of George Wiley and his National Welfare Rights Association. And so it continued through the seventies, and into the Reagan years and beyond. The question of despair and rage remains, still not answered but still addressed.

22 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Must Riots Continue? Oil, 1968, 50 x 38 inches

Must Riots Continue? became a question for national attention, and President Johnson appointed a Commission on Civil Disorders with Governor Kerner of Illinois as its chairman. The report came out ahead of schedule and found that mass hysteria and great exaggeration had taken the reports out of all true proportion and created an atmosphere of mindless fear.

There were riots and disorders and they were analyzed. Most of the rioters were young men between fifteen and twenty-five, school dropouts, who had never lived anywhere but in the ghettos and were full of hostility toward the middle class, black and white. They distrusted the political system and the police who were its enforcers. These neighborhoods had crime-rates as high as thirty-five times that of some white neighborhoods, a chronic shortage of adequate health facilities with a corresponding infant mortality rate, poor trash collection that led to an alarming rate of rat-bites, and the simple compression of larger and larger numbers of blacks into already crowded ghettos. The list went on.

President Johnson accepted the Kerner Report in March 1968. The next month, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. led to another sweep of riots through more than a hundred American cities, and seventy thousand federal troops, black and white, were able to halt the rioting, for a time. The 1992 riots and more recent unrest in NY City and Ferguson, Missouri prove that the potential remains and will remain until the needs outlined in the Kerner Report are addressed. In the meantime we have Templeton’s question still before us.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 23 Solidarity Day Oil, 1968, 16 x 11 inches

During the summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the nation’s capital became the focus for all of the individuals and groups from all over the country and all over the social spectrum- not just those characterized by as “the poor, the rejected, the despised”- who wanted to express their support for solidarity. This combination of Templeton’s images captures that variety in the multiple figures gathered around the Solidarity Day placard with earnest black and white faces, the intense dignity of the seated older woman with tears glistening behind her glasses, a solid symbol of the anonymous millions deeply affected by the moment.

24 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Eldridge Cleaver Oil, 1970, 26 x 36 inches

Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, one of the original members of the , was born in 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, and grew up in California. He spent time in prison as a youth, and in 1958, at the age of 23, was sent to prison after being convicted of with intent to kill. He was paroled in 1966 after serving 8 years of a 14 year sentence. While in prison, he penned ‘’, a series of essays outlining his views on racism in America. After he was paroled, Cleaver joined the newly-formed Black Panther Party, along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Cleaver became the group’s Information Minister, serving as spokesman.

In 1968, Cleaver was involved in a shooting with police in Oakland. Fearing conviction, he fled the county and spent seven years in , and France. He returned to the US in 1975, renounced the Black Panther Party and was placed on probation for the earlier shooting. Cleaver underwent a political transformation, becoming a born-again Christian, and embracing anti-communism. As he reinvented himself, he ran for the 1986 Republican Senate seat in California. He fell into poor health, and died in in 1998.

Templeton’s unique portrait is framed by a torn screen, representing the barriers which were torn down by the Black Panther Party.

WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 25 Eighty Years in The Black Civil Rights Movement Oil and charcoal, 1985, 58 x 50 inches

The unifying theme of this multiple image is the hourglass that contains the many faces of the movement. Those of the formative years in the bottom half of the hourglass include Douglass, Washington, Ovington, and Du Bois among the individual portraits created by Templeton for this exhibition and it also includes others, black and white, who were active in the earlier days of the civil rights movement. At the neck of the hourglass is the image of the young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., being taken away by white policemen from one of his many nonviolent protests, likely to spend some time in jail as a consequence. In the upper chamber of the hourglass are the figures of the latter half of the twentieth century, drawn from Templeton’s individual portraits of Mays and Wilkins and Abernathy and McGill and Malcolm X and Whitney Young and Rosa Parks. The young blacks of the sixties are there also, the new generation ready to accept the challenges that their predecessors had faced and fought.

This image of the hourglass with its unstoppable flow of individual grains of sand, or people, as is the case here, stands as a symbol for the cumulative effect that many individuals working together have to bring about change that cannot be ignored. Robert Templeton and Dr. Mays shared the concern that the people who carried the burden of the struggle for black civil rights should not be forgotten, and named the collection ‘Lest We Forget - Images of the Black Civil Rights Movement’.

26 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM Acknowlegments

Robert Templeton worked on the “Lest We Forget” exhibit for over 25 years. It was a labor of love, inspired by the passion of his subjects and their struggles against inequality. This book on the other hand was a team effort, and wouldn’t have been possible without the following people.

For expertly and painstakingly photographing the images and the gallery displays I’d like to thank my brother Kevin Templeton. For the accompanying text, which helps us learn even more about the roles of each of the subjects, I’d like to thank Jontyle Theresa Robinson and Charles Austin Page of Emory University. For his excellent graphic work designing and laying out this book, I’d like to thank Tom Berube. Finally, I’d like to thank my mother Leonore Templeton, whose tireless efforts to keep her late husband and my father’s memory alive is an inspiration to all of us.

Tim Templeton, Laguna Beach, 2014 WWW. ROBERTTEMPLETON. COM 27