Fighting on the Art Front: Visual Activism for Civil Rights in New York City, 1940–56

This paper explores the civil rights activism of a group of left-oriented visual artists in New York City in the 1940s and early 50s.  It illuminates how a very particular type of self-conscious artist-activist emerged out of the ashes of the WPA Federal Art Project and the left-leaning social realist artistic milieu of the Depression era, producing a group of visual artists who were deeply embedded in civil rights organizing in New York in the 1940s and early 50s.  These artists were committed to devoting their work to mobilizing the masses around issues of racial and economic justice in the United States and abroad. Teaching art to working-class children and adults, creating images for use in political magazines and pamphlets, and working as committed participants in civil rights and peace organizations such as the National Negro Congress and the Civil Rights Congress, they formed the cultural arm of a larger civil rights movement gathering steam during World War II and its immediate aftermath.  Looking in particular at the work of artist Charles White, this paper considers how these artists and the organizations for which they worked conceived of visual culture as a political tool, and traces the eventual demise of this brand of visual activism as a result of anticommunist persecution by the mid-1950s.  It contributes to recent efforts to examine the “long civil rights movement,” drawing our scholarship of the African American freedom struggle backwards in time, as well as exploring the contours of the movement in the North.  In addition, the paper demonstrates that the “cultural front” sensibility, which placed great faith in the power of culture to bring about social and economic change, played an important role in civil rights activity in New York City well into the 1950s.