Word: whited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such work stands peer to Frost, Sandburg and other white American poets who are constantly recited in our schools. In fact, the black tenth of the nation has produced at least a dozen lyric voices of the most intense quality: Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson and Frank Home. Here, selected lines are ranged against the pictures, both as commentary and gloss...
...wife and children, village, home. He sits soulnaked, haltered in other men's finery. Stuart, the master ironist who gave us a grandmotherly George Washington, here portrays a burnt-cork-face minstrel in reverse. This is a handsome black musician masked, glassed, in a transparent nightmare of snow white. The score before him is withered moonlight. The snakes who wove a raft to carry him have fled away beneath the sea. He holds his flute still, as a drowning man clutches a straw. There could be no greater gulf than that which separates Stuart's Flautist from...
...black schoolgirl in Philip Evergood's painting There'll Be a Change in the Weather stands as straight as Caspar the King. She is wearing sneakers just like the other kids, so white, and a pretty school frock. But she is mocked. The children who should be her friends stick out their tongues. The beauty of the painting hurts. One al most expects the mothering earth to open and receive the girl, to save her from the hell of that schoolyard...
...thing is not the subject, it is only a convenient label. The subject is inexhaustible." Yet the label that Bellows gave to his 1909 masterpiece at Washington's National Gallery has weight. Both Members of This Club, he calls it, and there a black man and a white are trying to beat each other's brains out for money...
Black militants and white racists have since carried such struggles far beyond the ring, and a few blacks sim ply reduced the problem to a slogan: "Get Whitey!" But others, perhaps most, say as Bellows says by implication, "Let there be a struggle, but let it be between equals...