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Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest

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Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 2000 Great Plains Pragmatist: Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest Audrey Thompson University of Utah Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Thompson, Audrey, "Great Plains Pragmatist: Aaron Douglas and the Art of Social Protest" (2000). Great Plains Quarterly. 314. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/314 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. GREAT PLAINS PRAGMATIST AARON DOUGLAS AND THE ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST AUDREY THOMPSON Like most of the luminaries of the Harlem first experienced black solidarity and embraced Renaissance, its leading visual artist, Aaron “the values of education and social uplift.”2 Douglas, was not himself a product of Harlem.1 Many years later, meeting William Dawson, a Although Winold Reiss and Alain Locke were like-minded black musician, in Kansas City to guide Douglas in the development of his proved to be a “first step” out of artistic and artistic vision once he arrived in Harlem, his racial isolation.3 early years in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska Growing up in Kansas, pursuing a bachelor gave rise to both the communal values and of fine arts degree at the University of Ne- the artistic sense of isolation that were to lead braska, and teaching in Missouri, Aaron Dou- him to Harlem. It was in the black church and glas developed the commitment to pressing in Topeka’s “cohesive and politically active” against the limits of the known that was to African-American community that Douglas shape his artistic vision as a “pioneering Africanist.”4 His vision partook simultaneously of a sense of political urgency and artistic ex- pansiveness, both referenced to the situation and possibilities of blacks in America. Among the influences on that vision were the writ- ings of W. E. B. Du Bois, debates in Topeka’s progressive black press, and Douglas’s own 5 Audrey Thompson is an Associate Professor in the experiences as a soldier and a laborer. To- College of Education, and an adjunct professor in gether with the “optimism and self-help phi- Ethnic Studies, at the University of Utah. Her areas of losophy” imbibed from the black community research include philosophy of education, gender studies, in Topeka, Douglas’s experiences of racism, feminist pedagogy, and children’s literature. racial solidarity, and adventure infused him with an eagerness to play a role in promoting social change.6 Under the influence of Winold [GPQ 20 (Fall 2000): 311-22] Reiss and Alain Locke, Douglas was to forge 311 312 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2000 that desire for social change into a bold and to whether they might promote socially useful liberating artistic vision. change. This essay examines the tension between African-American pragmatism thus stood art and politics in Aaron Douglas’s art of so- for progress tied to experiential and interpre- cial protest by framing his project in the terms tive pluralism. It also stood for possibility: set by the African-American pragmatism of under the terms of pragmatist instrumental- the era. As George Hutchinson argues, “a large ism, meaning depended not on the innate char- proportion” of those “fighting for black lib- acter of things but on the uses to which things eration . in the first three decades of the were put. Insofar as Aaron Douglas, Alain twentieth century had been molded by prag- Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other contribu- matism and considered themselves pragma- tors to the Harlem Renaissance sought to gain tists,” although not necessarily “in the strict leverage on blacks’ shared experience by de- philosophical sense.”7 As a general phenom- vising new intellectual and cultural tools, and enon, pragmatism represented a rejection of insofar as they saw planned cultural activism fixed cultural assumptions about the way things as helping to guide social progress, they formed had to be; instead, pragmatists sought mul- part of the newly emerging tradition in Afri- tiple, new ways of framing meaning. Whereas can-American pragmatism.8 Aaron Douglas conventional approaches to knowledge solidi- figured among the African-American pragma- fied existing assumptions about the nature of tists of the twenties and thirties whose work reality into a foundation upon which all fur- was to shape a new understanding of black ther knowledge would be built, pragmatists experience and black possibility. set aside prevailing assumptions about truth. Rather than taking their cue from supposedly ALAIN LOCKE AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN universal truths, pragmatists attempted to con- PRAGMATISM struct new, emergent knowledge based on both actual conditions and as-yet-to-be-imagined Rejecting fixed categories and absolute possibilities. truths as the reference for knowledge, prag- Because they saw all existing forms of matism regards experience as the ground of knowledge as problematic, African-American knowledge; for that experience to be mean- pragmatists sought to create the conditions ingful, however, it must be mediated by the for constructing new knowledge from social tools of intelligence. While Aaron Douglas experience. Simply trying to persuade whites— brought considerable cultural and political or blacks—that the racist stereotypes of blacks experience with him to Harlem, he did not yet were untrue would not lead to significant have the artistic tools he would use to inter- change, for any new racial knowledge explic- pret and frame that experience. Winold Reiss itly tied to the old “knowledge” would have to was the German artist who introduced Aaron “build upon” falsehoods. The solution, there- Douglas to a new way of painting African fore, was to shift away from existing frame- Americans; Alain Locke, a philosopher and a works of knowledge by appealing to an leading spokesman for the Harlem Renais- altogether different framework. Inducing shifts sance, provided Douglas with the pragmatist in perception and experience afforded the framework that identified art as playing a cru- opportunity to reorganize social relationships cial role in social protest and racial education. and therefore social possibility. Whether ide- ational (as in the case of art and literature) or OVERCOMING THE EFFECTS OF material (as in the case of economic relations), MIS-EDUCATION such shifts were to be guided not by reference to timeless standards or absolute truth but by While most white pragmatists of the time instrumental considerations: by projections as did not understand experience in racial terms, AARON DOUGLAS AND THE ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST 313 African-American pragmatists such as Alain York but as the authentic folk culture at the Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Carter G. heart of a new racial vision. Woodson pointed out that, in the context of American culture in the early part of the twen- ART AS SOCIAL PROTEST tieth century, race was a defining aspect of black experience. Because of the stigma at- With John Dewey, Alain Locke believed tached to blackness, African Americans could that “the moral function of art . is to remove not choose to ignore race; insofar as African prejudice, do away with the scales that keep Americans were beginning to realize and cel- the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to ebrate the distinctiveness of black culture, wont and custom, perfect the power to per- however, they could choose to emphasize race ceive.”12 If art was to tap the African-Ameri- as a positive factor in experience. can experience, artists had to learn to see that Before African Americans could address experience afresh, setting aside the racist con- black cultural experience in all its diversity ventions that prevented the perception of and complexity, they had to be in a position beauty in blackness.13 From a pragmatist per- to acknowledge and understand that experi- spective, posing a rational challenge to deficit ence on its own terms. Having learned to think conceptions of blackness was unlikely to make like whites, educated African Americans were a significant difference in how either blacks or among those least likely to understand their whites perceived the “race problem.” Because experience outside the deficit terms set by the appeals to reason can only engage us in terms dominant social order.9 So successfully had of what already makes sense to us—thereby whites framed blackness as a problem, Locke appealing to the very assumptions that chal- said, that “the thinking Negro” had been led lenges to old ways of thinking are meant to to neglect his own experiential standpoint as unsettle—they cannot induce shifts in our a basis for knowledge.10 Confirming Locke’s overall system of beliefs but can only effect emphasis on the need to overcome the effects adjustments between existing beliefs. African- of mis-education, Aaron Douglas commented American art grounded in an authentic folk enthusiastically on Winold Reiss’s portrayal culture, however, offered the possibility of re- of African Americans in his drawings for The orienting both white and black thinking. New Negro. In order for African-American artists to achieve freshness and spontaneity of percep- Many colored people don’t like Reiss’s draw- tion, Locke advocated that they return to ings. We are possessed, you know, with the sources largely untouched by white influence: idea that it is necessary to be white, to be the ancestral legacy of Africa and the contem- beautiful.
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