Facing Down The Status Quo
African American Museum's Inaugural Exhibition Shows The Stalwarts of 'Resistance'

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 20, 2007

There's electricity in the air. Sarah Vaughan is in the room. So is Lionel Hampton, Bessie Smith and Ray Charles. Present is Willie Mays. So are Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jessie Owens and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

And looking over this celebrity lineup are Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is slowly lifting the curtain on how it will approach the multitude of stories about African Americans. The museum is years away from opening on the Mall. Today its first exhibition opens at its Smithsonian sister the National Portrait Gallery, whose rich materials it scoured to present images from the past 151 years.

"Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits," surveys 100 photographs, from a 1856 ambrotype, an early technique of photography, of Douglass to a 2004 snapshot of musician and composer Wynton Marsalis with a microphone in front of him, not a trumpet.

The faces are powerful and gorgeous. Their poses telegraph dignity and warmth. Their stories tell how they made steps forward as individuals to forge an image of a resilient, talented people.

Sarah Vaughan, the jazz vocalist, is dressed for the best of stages, in a bejeweled gown, one shoulder lovingly exposed. Josef Breitenbach, the German-born photographer and teacher, captured a moment in 1950 when Vaughan was lifting her arms just so, perhaps to add some balance, her eyes closed tightly in a reverie, as she let loose with "Tenderly." Dorothy Dandridge, the acting siren of the 1954 "Carmen Jones," leans into the camera of Philippe Halsman, the Life cover specialist. Dandridge's skin glows against satin. She made her strides as the first black nominated for an Oscar in a leading role, but her beauty and sensuality limited the roles she was offered.

Maybe beauty is a stretch for Jimi Hendrix, the rock genius, but Linda McCartney, photographer of the rock scene, found a teasing flirt in dark clothes and a thick, wiry halo, chewing on his sunglasses.

Sometimes, through the hallway and six galleries of the show, the dignity is etched quite clearly, and quietly.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, sat for Addison N. Scurlock in his famed Washington studio. It's a side view with the sociologist's eyes downcast, deep in thought, prompting the viewer to wonder if this was the reflection that led to the declaration: "An American, a Negro . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Both Paul Robeson, the singer and political activist, and James Weldon Johnson, the writer, were captured by Doris Ulmann, who snapped the high-class citizens of New York and the residents of Appalachia. Both, in dress suits, are sitting, but not still. They seem to want to say something to the photographer. On the other hand, George Washington Carver, the scientist, is so immersed in his laboratory that one wonders whether he noticed that Prentice H. Polk, the official photographer of Tuskegee Institute, had framed him as one element in a delicate panel of bottles, light and human figure.

But the organizers want you to stop at the portraits and hold fast to the theme of resistance. What difference did each of these people make to the whole struggle of black people in the 19th and 20th centuries?

"While it is important to celebrate those who forcefully confronted racial inequality, this show posits that African Americans resisted in a myriad of ways: from nonviolent protests, to recapturing control of their public image, to proving their worth by seizing middle-class norms and by simply recognizing that surviving is often the highest form of resistance," said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the African American Museum's founding director.

Maybe one interpretation of resistance is seen in a well-known photo of a slave, named Private Gorden, taken around 1863 in the studio of Mathew Brady. Gorden's back is scarred from a whip that left a topographical map. The portrait was used as evidence by the abolitionists to prove the horrors of slavery. Move ahead 133 years to a view of Olympic track medalist Joyner-Kersee's back taken by photojournalist Joe McNally in 1996. It is smooth, rippling with muscles, as she rests a javelin on her shoulders. Brother Gorden did not have any say in how his body was used; Joyner-Kersee had the freedom to succeed using her form, ending up a philanthropist (and even featured on a Wheaties box).

Interestingly, some photographs are not what you would expect. Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright, photographed by David Moses Attie in 1960, is leaning on her desk, gesturing, but not an actor is in sight. Jackie Robinson, by Garry Winogrand in 1961, has long left home plate and is sitting in his office, talking on the phone, tossing a baseball in the air. Arnold A. Newman found Sugar Ray Robinson, the prizefighter, in an office, wearing a dapper checked jacket.

Deborah Willis, the chair of the department of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, was the guest curator for the show. Standing by a photo of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the legendary Harlem politician, and Stokely Carmichael, the fiery leader of the 1960s black student movement, she says this candid moment forces you to rethink. They were captured by George Tames, the New York Times photographer, in a hallway on Capitol Hill. Both tall, both dressed in suits that matched their skin tones, they pause to share a laugh. "Here are two generations, two voices. 'Keep the faith, baby!' and 'Black Power!' Here you see the humor and the respect," said Willis.

She moves to a shot of Booker T. Washington, the educator, taken in Shreveport, La., in 1915 by Arthur P. Bedou, a journalist and photographer. There's a large crowd of starched and hatted black folk listening to him. "I am fascinated by the way Booker T. Washington occupied public space. Black men in public space talking was rare at that time," says Willis, of the era in which lynching was commonplace. "He hired a photographer to go with him as he traveled because he understood the power of image."

The people in the show, said Marc Pachter, the outgoing director of the Portrait Gallery, "are essential to American culture."

The gallery has been collecting photographs for about 30 years. Its founders in 1962 thought paintings and sculpture were enough. Now it has about 10,000 photographs, half of them the glass plate negatives from Brady's studio.

The acquisitions come from auctions, dealers, collectors and photographers. The most recently acquired works in this show are three of activist Octavius Catto, taken in 1871, and one of comedian Richard Pryor, taken in 1981 by Steve Schapiro. The gallery has never before shown a 1985 view of dancer Gregory Hines by Robert Mapplethorpe; the shots of cultural figures Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Ntozake Shange and Amiri Baraka, all by Anthony Barboza; or the ones of musicians Branford Marsalis and Wynton Marsalis by Philippe Levy-Stab.

Their lives are captured in wall texts, with only 140 words each. Ann M. Shumard, curator of photographs at the gallery, and Frank H. Goodyear III, assistant curator of photographs, and Fred S. Voss, former senior historian at the museum, masterfully distilled the private and public notes of these subjects. Shumard stands by a picture of A. Philip Randolph, the labor leader, on the picket line at the Republican convention in 1948. "I just love his sign: 'If We Must Die Let Us Die as Free Men Not Jim Crow Slaves,' " she says, reinforcing the message of the show.