The Vigilant Torch of an Olympian Painter

Spark

Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and mine. Then in later years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.²

Jubilee Hall is the heart and soul of Fisk University—the symbol of its aspirations, vessel of its ideals, the architectural-hub of its history. Sheltered by the winding Cumberland, she has withstood the marching onslaught of so-called progress for nearly one and a half centuries. She is a hearkening icon of stability begotten by an engendered vision of sacrifice and inclusion. Jubilee embodies the realization of the hopes and dreams of Black Americans. She has passively witnessed the transient ebb and flow of human events as mirrored in the shifting sea of faces, minds, and ideas that have coursed through Fisk. Those of sympathetic ear can still hear the frozen music that is Jubilee Hall above the fray of modern life. She resounds with the majesty of everlasting hymns, unshaken by the stutter and mounting brevity of time collapsed into space; unwavered by the reign of quantity that presently engulfs us.

Light

In order to understand a culture it is necessary to love it, and one can only do this on the basis of the universal and timeless values that it carries within it. Nothing brings us into such an immediate contact with another culture as a work of art, which, within that culture, represents, as it were a "center." This may be a sacred image, a temple, a cathedral, a mosque, or even a carpet with a primordial design. Such works invariably express an essential quality or factor, which neither a historical account nor an analysis of socio-economic conditions can capture. These centers can convey to us immediately and "existentially" a particular intellectual truth or spiritual attitude, and thereby grant us all manner of insights into the nature of the culture concerned.³

The work of Aaron Douglas is such a center, a magnetic pole that attracts, distills and anchors our consciousness as Jubilee Hall does. His creative imagination is a rock of ages in a deep river of song, a nourishing wellspring from which many have drawn inspiration and found solace. The commanding power of his public murals and collaborative book illustrations is simultaneously rooted in the epitome of both democratic and socialist ideals. It is an art of the people, by the people, for the people; yet it is also illuminated propaganda, a powerful chronicle of the black experience from the perspective of the Diaspora. Heavily influenced by the Pan-African manifestoes of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, by the New Negro philosophy of Alain Locke and by the political stance of the Mexican muralists, Douglas became a seminal figure in the revolutionary espousal of a visual public education for the black masses. His works of art fulfilled the need for uplift and empowerment for a folk barely a generation or two removed from slavery, utterly bound to the yoke of tenant farming, oppressively menaced by the talons of Jim Crow and awakened by the veiled nightmare of migratory hardship under the heel of industrial capitalism.

Armed with an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pertinent facts and figures concerning the true origin and development of the arts and sciences, Douglas disseminated compelling and dignified images of blacks—a defiant reprisal to the proliferation of minstrel stereotype and invisibility that permeated American society. While he primarily addressed the urgent needs of his own community, Douglas was also determined to quell the rising tide of misinformed public sentiment that upheld racism as the status quo. His semi...