LEST WE FORGET Images of The Black Civil Rights Movement 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 Frederick Douglass .................................4 Booker T. Washington...............................5 Founders of the NAACP.............................6 Asa Philip Randolph .................................7 Martin Luther King, Jr. ...............................8 Benjamin Mays......................................9 Ralph Emerson McGill...............................10 Roy Wilkins ..........................................11 Hubert H. Humphrey ................................12 Rosa Parks ..........................................13 Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi................................14 Whitney Moore Young, Jr. ...........................15 Ralph David Abernathy..............................16 Lyndon B. Johnson..................................17 Malcolm X ...........................................18 The Detroit Riots – Time Magazine ..................19 Black Power or Non-Violence? .....................20 The Young Blacks...................................21 From Despair to Rage...............................22 Must Riots Continue? ...............................23 Solidarity Day ........................................24 Eldridge Cleaver.....................................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, Missouri 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 New York 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 Atlanta Constitution, the artist became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Mays, a friend and mentor to Dr. King and a former president of Morehouse College. 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 Ralph Abernathy, Asa Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, Benjamin Mays, Ralph McGill, Hubert Humphrey 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, Coretta Scott King 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 Bobby Seale Black Panther trial and the Pentagon Papers trial. His other portraits were of such national figures as President Jimmy Carter, 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 Emory University in Atlanta, with funding from the NEA and the Georgia 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, France, 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, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth 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 Virginia 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 Alabama. 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 White House he shared. He had become the recognized leader of black Americans following the death of Frederick Douglass. He advocated social separation of the races combined with industrial training and cooperation.