Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers

CHAPTER 1. EARLY YEARS: 1924–1949

8 u CHAPTER 1 EARLY YEARS: 1924–1949 Mural painting is architectural. It’s part of the building. One of the marvelous things about the medium is that you have to go to the building to paint, if it’s really done right. Murals that can be painted directly on the walls, to me, are the greatest expression…To me it’s a medium in which to express the community… If you do the painting for people, and you feel that you are part of the culture, that is the greatest thing that can happen to you. Everyone in the community becomes a part of that mural. John Thomas Biggers, quoted in Felts and Moon, “Artists Series: An Interview with John Biggers” u u u gastonia, North Carolina, 1924–1941 John Thomas Biggers was born on April 13, 1924, the youngest of the seven children of Paul and Cora Biggers.The family lived in the Negro area of Gastonia, North Carolina, a mill town in the heart of the segregated South, where Paul Biggers worked as a teacher, preacher, cobbler, blacksmith, and farmer. Although poor in worldly goods, Paul and Cora Biggers created a rich and loving home life that placed high value on religion, education, and creative endeavors . John Biggers recalled whole summers “building a complete city from clay soil, sticks, rocks and moss in a cool space under our house.”1 With great pleasure, he described vivid childhood memories of his mother and grandmother quilting, his brothers drawing pictures from the Bible and magazines, and his father studying quietly. “I had a marvelous father. He was very stern, hard man, because he’d come out of a very hard way of life, but there was a wonderful relationship between him and Mama. Mama was the boss of many things but he was the source behind the throne.”2 When John was in his early teens, he lost his father to the complications of diabetes, as well as his sister Lillian. John’s older sisters, Ferrie and Sarah, and his brothers Joe, Jim, and Sylvester (fig. 1.1) took over much of the responsibility of rearing their little brother, while their mother worked to support her large family by taking in laundry. As John grew older, his daily routine included lighting fires under his mother’s large iron washpots and helping her hang the heavy wash out on the lines to dry. Early Years: 1924–1949 u 9 Later, when he was sent to high school with his brother at nearby Lincoln Academy, John stoked the furnaces there as well to pay for his tuition. Lincoln Academy, a Congregational boarding school, had been founded in the late nineteenth century for freed slaves and their children. Paul and Cora Biggers had met as students there, and John’s siblings Sylvester and Ferrie had also attended the school. Although a good student, John Biggers recalls that his older brother Jim had to rescue him from occasional scrapes with school authorities. At Biggers’s fiftieth high school reunion, his former principal, Dr. Henry McDowell, laughed when he saw his old pupil: “John Biggers was never supposed to come to this point—we nearly had to send him home before his senior year.”3 Biggers completed his high school at Lincoln Academy, and was accepted at Hampton Institute, a highly regarded college for Negroes in Hampton, Virginia. His goal was to learn plumbing, but his plans soon changed considerably. u u u hampton institute, 1941–1946 The world that John Biggers knew as a young college student in the fall of 1941 was far different from today’s world.The United States had not yet entered World War II. Public schools, colleges, and the military were racially segregated, with great inequities between the Negro and the white systems. In the South, Jim Crow laws stood firmly in place, while the North practiced a nebulous apartism that achieved the same result. Negroes were expected to “know their place” as a subservient class, and were kept there through fear, brutality, lynchings, and other terrible injustices. Although exceptional individuals were planting the seeds of change, the great accomplishments of the Civil Rights era lay in the future. Fig. 1.1 John Biggers with his older brothers, c. 1950s. Left to right: John, Joe, Jim, Sylvester walls that speak 10 u The status quo must have been particularly frustrating to gifted young Negroes like John...