Aaron Douglas was the premier visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Part civil-rights activism, part intellectual and artistic upswelling, this cultural movement––centered in the large black population of New York City––was aided by a surge of books, popular magazines, and scholarly journals. Seeking to rekindle a sense of pride and accomplishment within the black community, this “New Negro Movement,” as it was called, sought its heritage and sense of self in an African aesthetic. Partly in response to European modernism and its appropriation of African art, Douglas and other blacks felt that, by virtue of an “essence” shared by all peoples of African descent, they were more entitled to and understood the African sensibility better than whites. The movement’s chief apologist, Alain Locke (1886–1954), Professor of Philosophy at Howard University and a Rhodes Scholar, called for what art historian Sharon F. Patton has characterized as “an identifiable racial style and aesthetic.” Yet, as Patton has argued, Locke “reduced Africa to a cultural trope for the purpose of promoting racial authenticity . . . [characterizing it] in simple formalist terms, ignoring the real complexity of its culture.” 4

After receiving his B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1923, Aaron Douglas returned to his hometown in Topeka, Kansas. There he taught art at a local high school. As a regular subscriber to journals such as The Crisis, Opportunity, and Survey Graphic, which expounded on the significance of the new Renaissance, he knew what awaited him when he left the Midwest in 1925 for the excitement and opportunities offered by Harlem. Soon Douglas himself became a regular contributor to the movement’s major publications, as well as one of the era’s leading artistic figures.

In 1935 Douglas received a commission to create a mural cycle in the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, located in Harlem. Conceived in five parts, the series, which he titled “Aspects of Negro Life,” tracks the journey of African Americans from freedom in their native land to enslavement in the United States, and from liberation after the Civil War to life in modern, urban environments. The fifth panel was to have depicted the union of black and white workers under Marxism. However, Douglas never completed this panel, because he suspected that the entire mural design would have been rejected had he included the scene. 5

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