1. African American Dreams Poets, Painters, Singers, and Other Visionaries

2. Activity Goals:
To explore connections between works of art and primary sources;
To consider how the African American experience in the English colonies and later in the United States differs from that of the colonists and immigrants who came voluntarily; and
To offer activities for practicing critical thinking, reading comprehension, and writing skills.

3. What is a primary source?
A primary source is something written, created, or recorded at the time of a period being studied or considered. Primary sources can include documents, poems, essays, works of art, and artifacts.
Primary sources provide evidence of what the people who lived in a particular time thought and wrote about the world around them, which in turn helps us understand historical developments. Of course, secondary sources can be important as well!

4. What is a secondary source?
A secondary source is a work that is based on various primary sources. It organizes and interprets information to help form understandings of the past. Examples of secondary sources include textbooks, encyclopedias, histories, essays, and other writings that analyze and bring together information about the past.

5. Colonial and Revolutionary Periods
1685–1789
Document Box, American (New England),
ca. 1685–1720, Artist Unknown, Oak and pine,
The Mary Morton Parsons Fund for American Decorative Arts,
Document Box, ca. 1685–1720, Artist Unknown, American, Oak and pine,

6. Dreaming of a Better Life
What do you think was kept in this box?
What kinds of documents do you think the early colonists brought with them to the new colonies in the Americas?
The adventurers who came voluntarily to the new English colonies were in search of new opportunities. They dreamed of acquiring wealth, property, and land—or perhaps of practicing a particular kind of religion.
This box might have held a family Bible, birth records, wills and testaments—all documents that were connected with the dream of building a better life.

7. Landing of Negroes at Jamestown from a Dutch Man-of-War, 1619
Illustration created for Harper’s Weekly by Howard Pyle in 1917.
From PBS Africans in America
Resource Bank
What kinds of dreams do you think the Africans who came to America against their will bring
to the colonies?
Is this image a primary source?
Text and image from:
Howard Pyle illustrated many historical and adventure stories for periodicals, including Harper's Weekly. In 1917, he created this depiction of the 1619 arrival of Virginia's first blacks.  Howard Pyle studied at the Art Students League in New York City. His work, noted for its colorful realism and attention to historical detail, gained him a large following. He also illustrated books for children, including The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and Treasure Island, and wrote and illustrated his own folktales, including The Wonder Clock, all of which have become classics.  In this image, the Dutch sailors, who have captured the blacks from a Spanish ship, are negotiating a trade with the Jamestown settlers for food. No record of the ship's name was made at the time.  Image Credit: The Library of Virginia

8. Reading from letter from John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, January 1620
About the letter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope, his Pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett with the Trer [another ship] in the West Indyes, and determyned to hold consort shipp hetherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualles (Whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could. He hadd a lardge and ample comyssion from his Excellency to range and to take purchase in the West Indyes.
Passage above taken from:
Further information from:
Arrival of "20 and odd" Africans in late August 1619, not aboard a Dutch ship as reported by John Rolfe, but an English warship, White Lion, sailing with a letters of marque issued to the English Captain Jope by the Protestant Dutch Prince Maurice, son of William of Orange. A letters of marque legally permitted the White Lion to sail as a privateer attacking any Spanish or Portuguese ships it encountered. The 20 and odd Africans were captives removed from the Portuguese slave ship, San Juan Bautista, following an encounter the ship had with the White Lion and her consort, the Treasurer, another English ship, while attempting to deliver its African prisoners to Mexico. Rolfe's reporting the White Lion as a Dutch warship was a clever ruse to transfer blame away from the English for piracy of the slave ship to the Dutch.

9. Why do we keep returning to primary sources when we have secondary sources?
Re-examining primary sources make it possible for each generation to reconsider what earlier generations have written about the past.
For example, many early history texts focused mainly on politics and wars, without including other kinds of social history.
Many aspects of our interpretation of the past changed once historians began to include things such as accounts of daily life, works of art, artifacts, and other types of data in their consideration of past eras.

10. Early Republic and Jacksonian Eras
1790s – 1830s
Alexander Spotswood Payne and His Brother, John Robert Dandridge Payne, with Their Nurse, ca , Unknown Artist (Payne Limner), American, Oil on canvas, Gift of Miss Dorothy Payne, 53.24

11. Alexander Spotswood Payne and His Brother, John Robert Dandridge Payne, with Their Nurse, ca , Unknown Artist (Payne Limner), American, Oil on canvas, Gift of Miss Dorothy Payne, 53.24
This painting features two sons of the Virginia planter Archer Payne and his wife, Martha Dandridge Payne. Archer Payne was the master of New Market, a large plantation located in Goochland County, just west of Richmond. At the time the painting was made, Payne was a successful man of property who owned a two-story manor house, over a thousand acres of productive farm land, and about two dozen enslaved laborers. The young man holding the bow and arrows in his right hand and a woodpecker in his left is eleven-year-old Alexander Spotswood Payne, who eventually inherited his father’s plantation. He is greeted by his younger brother, John Robert Dandridge Payne and the family dog.
Alexander Spotswood Payne and His Brother, John Robert Dandridge Payne, with Their Nurse, ca , Unknown Artist (Payne Limner), American, Oil on canvas, 53.24

12. On the far right of the painting, a young African American girl leans forward, ready to support the toddler, who still wears his linen infant shirt. She is dressed in a jacket and petticoat, the typical outfit of an enslaved plantation house servant. Although the painter was likely representing a particular person, the girl’s presence in the painting symbolized the family’s prosperity. She appears to be about the same height as Alexander, so she is probably also around eleven—but she is already serving as the family nursemaid.
This painting was created around 1790 or 1791, just a few years after the American Revolution, which took place from 1765 and Even though this revolution was inspired by ideas such as liberty and freedom, the new United States ratified a constitution that extended the slave trade for another twenty years. In fact, when the U.S. Constitution was put into force in 1789, the number of each state’s congressmen in the House of Representatives was based on population and the constitution allowed each enslaved man, woman and child to be counted as 3/5 of a human being.
We don’t even know the name of this enslaved nursemaid—although scholars continue to examine surviving records and artifacts looking for clues to her identity and her life story.

13. Phillis Wheatley 1753–1784 Phillis Wheatley,
as illustrated by Scipio Moorhead 
for the frontispiece to her book 
Poems on Various Subjects.
By the time the Payne family painting was made,
Phillis Wheatley had already become the first African American poet to publish a book.
What do her poems tell us about her dreams?
Frontispiece image from:
Related readings: Phillis Wheatly:
Massachusetts Historical Society:

14. Excerpt from Phillis Wheatley’s poem On Imagination
African American poet (1753–1784)
Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.
Poem from:

15. Antebellum Years
1830s
The Quarry, ca , Robert Seldon Duncanson,
American ( ), Oil on canvas, Gift of The Council of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Commemoration of their Fiftieth Anniversary,

16. The Quarry, ca. 1855-63, Robert Seldon Duncanson,
American ( ), Oil on canvas, Gift of The Council of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Commemoration of their Fiftieth Anniversary,
The Quarry, ca , Robert Seldon Duncanson,
American ( ), Oil on canvas,

17. Robert Seldon Duncanson
( ) was a free African American who earned an international reputation as a landscape painter—a status no other African American artist had achieved in the years before the American Civil War.
Image of painting from:
Image from:
From the website about Robert S. Duncanson, created and maintained by curator and art historian Joseph D. Kettner II.
From the main page of this website:
My publication The Emergence of the African American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson (University of Missouri, 1993) earned recognition as an “Outstanding Academic book for 1994” from Choice magazine of the American Library Association. The book and the exhibition remains the definitive publication on this antebellum era African American landscape painter. The exhibition that I curated in 1995 and 1996 traveled across the United States and concluded its tour as an official cultural event of the Atlanta Olympics.
Recently, I have curated exhibitions on Duncanson for the Thomas Cole House (2011), and for the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University (2012). And, I published a modest catalogue with the Cole House and an article for Antiques Magazine (November 2011) with new biographical and interpretative information accumulated over the nearly twenty years since the monograph was published.
I maintain a database of all of the art works by Robert Duncanson that I have encountered over the past 35 years.
Land of the Lotus Eaters, 1861, Swedish Royal Collection, Stockholm

18. Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass became one of the most famous social reformers of his day. After escaping from slavery in 1838, he became an influential lecturer and abolitionist in the North and abroad.
His major works include Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave (1845) and
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). He also cofounded and edited North Star, an abolitionist newspaper.
Image from: "Frederick Douglass portrait" by Photograph by George K. Warren (d. 1884). - This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.English | Español | Français | Italiano | Македонски | മലയാളം | Nederlands | Polski | Português | Русский | Slovenščina | Türkçe | Tiếng Việt | 中文（简体） | 中文（繁體） | +/−This scan from DOD War and Conflict CD collection.A lossless version is here. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons -

19. From “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress,”
a speech given in 1857
by Frederick Douglass (ca. February 1818–1895)
The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others,
or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone
From:

20. Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

21. Civil War and Centennial Eras
1860s – 1870s
Center Table, 1850s, Thomas Day (attributed to), American ( )
Mahogany veneer, tulip poplar, marble top, brass casters, Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund ,

22. Thomas Day (attributed to), American (1801–1861)
Center Table, 1850s
Thomas Day (attributed to), American (1801–1861)
Mahogany veneer, tulip poplar, marble top, brass casters
Dressing Bureau, ca. 1855
Mahogany, mahogany veneer, rosewood veneer; yellow pine, tulip poplar, Cedrela veneer (Spanish cedar); mirrored glass (replaced),
Center Table, 1850s, Thomas Day (attributed to), American ( )
Mahogany veneer, tulip poplar, marble top, brass casters, Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund ,
Dressing Bureau, ca. 1855, Thomas Day (attributed to), American ( )
Mahogany, mahogany veneer, rosewood veneer; yellow pine, tulip poplar, Cedrela veneer (Spanish cedar); mirrored glass (replaced). Gift of an anonymous donor in celebration of VMFA's 75th anniversary,

23. at the North Carolina Museum of History
Statue of Thomas Day
at the North Carolina Museum of History
In 1827, Day advertised his products in the Milton Gazette & Roanoke Advertiser newspaper:
“THOMAS DAY, CABINET MAKER, Returns his thanks for the patronage he has received, and wishes to inform his friends and the public that he has on hand, and intends keeping, a handsome supply of Mahogoney, Walnut and Stained FURNITURE, the most fashionable and common BED STEADS, & which he would be glad to sell very low.
All orders in his line, in Repairing, Varnishing, & will be thankfully received and punctuallo attended to.”
Image from:
Information below from:
In 1830, Thomas Day married Aquilla Wilson, a free black woman from Virginia just across the state line from Milton. A North Carolina law prohibited free blacks from migrating into North Carolina, so Aquilla was prohibited from moving to Milton to live with her husband. Sixty-one leading white Milton citizens signed a petition to the state legislature requesting that Aquilla Wilson be exempted from the migration law.
Romulus Saunders, the state attorney general who was a Milton resident and acquaintance of Day attached an affidavit to the petition stating that Thomas Day was “of very fair character–an excellent mechanic, industrious, honest and sober in his habits” and noted that “in the event of any disturbance amongst the Blacks, I should rely with confidence upon a disclosure from him as he is the owner of slaves himself as well as real estate.” The legislature accepted the petition and Aquilla was able to reside with Thomas in North Carolina.

24. Excerpt from:
The Emancipation Proclamation
January 1, 1863
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord
one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States,
shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

25. Expatriates and the Gilded Age
1880s – 1900s
Moonlight Marine, 1885
Edward Bannister, American ( )
Oil on canvas, J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane Fund for American Art ,

26. Moonlight Marine, 1885, Edward Bannister, American (1828-1901),
Oil on canvas, J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane Fund for American Art ,
Moonlight Marine, 1885, Edward Bannister, American ( ),
Oil on canvas,

27. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Bannister image from:
Du Bois image from:
W. E. B. Du Bois, circa 1907
Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
(1868–1963)
Edward Bannister
(1828–1901)

28. I walk through the churchyard To lay this body down;
Excerpt from The Souls of Black Folks, 1903,
W.E.B. Du Bois ( )
Chapter XIV: The Sorrow Songs
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I ’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I ’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
From:

29. Impressionism, Realism,
and Modernism
1890s – 1930s
Photo of Douglas from:
The Prodigal Son, 1927, Aaron Douglas, American (1899–1979), Oil on canvas
J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane fund for American Art,
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1928, Richmond Barthé, American ( )
Painted plaster, L

30. Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1928 Richmond Barthé, American (1901-1989)
Painted plaster L
Dunbar photo from:
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(1872–1906)

31. Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) Following his graduation from
The Art Institute of Chicago in 1928, Barthé moved to New York City.
During the next two decades, he built his reputation as a sculptor associated with the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Barthé was considered by writers and critics as one of the leading “moderns” of his time. He once said: “...all my life I have been interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality
I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man.”
Photo from:
Richmond Barthé
(1901–1989)

32. Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) The Prodigal Son, 1927 Aaron Douglas,
Photo of Douglas from:
The Prodigal Son, 1927, Aaron Douglas, American (1899–1979), Oil on canvas
J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane fund for American Art,
The Prodigal Son, 1927
Aaron Douglas,
American (1899–1979)
Oil on canvas,

33. The Prodigal Son, 1927
Aaron Douglas,
American (1899–1979)
Oil on canvas
J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane fund for American Art

34. Photo of Weldon from: http://en. wikipedia
James Weldon Johnson
1871–1938

35. James Weldon Johnson. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
James Weldon Johnson. God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Illustrated by Aaron Douglass. New York: Viking Press Page 2. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress ( ) Digital ID # na0064p1http://

36. Interwar Years
1930s – 1950s

37. Marian Anderson, 1965 Beauford Delaney American (1901–1979)
Oil on canvas
J. Harwood and
Louise B. Cochrane Fund
for American Art,

38. Franz Rupp, Accompanist
Photo image from:
Franz Rupp, Accompanist

39. From the VMFA website section on selected works of art in the American Art galleries:
“Beauford Delaney painted this iconic portrait of the acclaimed American contralto Marian Anderson. It was his second painting to feature Anderson, an African American cultural hero whose artistic talent and integrity inspired a generation. In this “memory” portrait—painted in Paris but with an awareness of the Civil Rights struggles underway in America—Delaney expressed his ongoing admiration for Anderson’s sensitive brilliance as a performer and person. The visual harmony of the work epitomizes the artist’s exploration of painterly abstractions that featured the color yellow as a symbol of perfection and transcendence.”
[accessed July 15, 2013]

40. Portrait of American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979)
pub. 1953
Portrait of James Baldwin, 1963, by Beauford Delaney Estate of Beauford Delaney New York, New York
Photo of Delaney from:
Image of portrait from:
Cover image of book 1:
Cover image of book 2:
Portrait of American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979)
by Carl Van Vechten
pub. 1955

41. Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs,
April 9, 1939
Marian Anderson
on April 9, 1939
Washington, D.C.
Collection location: Volume 7, Page 6, Item 2
Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs, ,
Ms. Coll. 198
Date: April 9, 1939
Subjects: Marian Anderson
Place: Washington, D.C.
Collection location: Volume 7, Page 6, Item 2

42. This image is of Eleanor Roosevelt’s draft of her February 1939 letter to the DAR, resigning her membership and expressing her disappointment at the organization’s failure to “lead in an enlightened way.”
Image and information from:

43. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Image of program from:
Image of Anderson and her mother:
On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, Marian Anderson gave a free, public concert
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

44. Image from: http://www. library. upenn
Seventy-five thousand people attended. Hundreds of thousands more heard her over the radio.

45. Image from: http://www. library. upenn

46. “I Have a Dream” Wednesday, August 28, 1963
“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. waves to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during the "March on Washington."
There, he delivered the
"I Have a Dream" speech. . .”
First photo from:
Second photo and quote from

47. This PowerPoint is intended for educational classroom use only.