It’s Black History Month in the UK, but our goal is to ensure the accomplishments of Black people worldwide are celebrated and studied all year long. A reader of Heroes Sung and Unsung: Black Artists in World History recently sent us an email with her feedback, which we wanted to share with you:

“Heroes Sung and Unsung really speaks to the reader, and every story you’ve included brings that person back to life.  What I find is that I’m reading a chapter, and then the stories will trickle around in my mind, and send me back to re-read a story and see what else I can find out about the person.  

“Two of them stand out for me in particular.  

“The most heart-wrenching story I’ve so far come across in your book is that of  Richard Lonsdale Brown.    He seems to have been so modest in his own estimation of his abilities, needing to seek out George de Forest Brush, the artist in New York, to bravely approach him and ask if de Brush thought that he could ever become an artist.  Imagine how differently things would have turned out, had de Brush not been so encouraging and taken on Brown as a pupil, and taken him to de Brush’s summer home in New Hampshire to paint the scenery there.   After all the discouragement that Brown received when he tried to make his way on his own in New York, at least we know that his skill in landscape painting was at last recognised, and an exhibition of his work was held on Fifth Avenue.    However, although the obituary on page 51 indicates that the exhibition netted him a sufficient sum to begin his studies”, other mentions on the internet indicated that he struggled to pay his way as an artist, and ended up returning to live with his parents for precise reasons which nobody seems to know.     Before leaving New York, he seems to have expanded his repertoire beyond landscapes to design and decoration, such as an illustration for the front cover of the Christmas Crisis of 1915, with a powerful, bold and colourful illustration of ‘The Star of Ethiopia’ (reproduced in the link below).    There was also an interview he gave in 1913, also reproduced in the link below, in which Brown sets out his thoughts on how Negroes (to use the term he gave in the interview) were perceived:

May I say without being thought guilty of egotism or a desire to boast, which is far from my intention, that I think that what I have accomplished and what has been accomplished by other negroes in other lines gives proof that the negro is capable of worthy things, and that the conception of many white persons that the negro is good for nothing but manual labour and such other work as does not call for much mental effort is not only unfair but incorrect?  After a people have been held down for centuries, as we have been, is it to be expected that we should in only fifty years of freedom equal or even approach the white race in every particular? Many persons, even today, gain their ideas of the negro from story books, while it is a fact that many educated persons who have not had the opportunity to know the negro at close range still regard him as but little more removed from the position in society he occupied while a slave.

The link to the article below contains a clue as to why Brown left New York and returned to his parents in Oklahoma – his interest was expanding beyond landscape painting to watching people: “In West Virginia he only loved landscape.  Now he watched faces, saw the bright girls as they went to high school, their books under their arms, interested, alert.  Saw them deteriorate, their ambition lost as they saw no chance for advancement.   He watched the great procession of Harlem and wanted to be able someday to paint it.”   According to the article below, he appears to have been unable to make a living as an artist, “like many black artists in that time”.    So this severe set-back and realisation that he might not be able to make a living as an artist in New York, may also have led to his return to the parental home.  

“Tragically, while staying with his parents in Oklahoma, he appears to have caught pneumonia (despite his young age), from which he died in 1917.   Du Bois, writing of Brown in editorials after the young man’s death, writes of his frustration at the loss of Brown’s talent, and appears to have blamed this on people not being willing to financially support the creativity of the artists in their midst.  Du Bois in 1922 writing in The Crisis: ‘There is a deep feeling among many people and particularly among colored people that Art should not be paid for.   The feeling is based on….a dream that the artist rises and should rise above paltry considerations of dollars and food’.

“In the case of Blind Tom, I was struck by the way that his superb gift for music shone through.   Although he appears to have had no formal musical education (a German musician in Columbus giving his opinion that Tom didn’t need any teaching as he would ‘work it all out by himself’!), he could identify every note when a number of chords were struck simultaneously, and he learned to play music on his master’s piano after listening to others perform those pieces.     Listening to the rain running down a gutter, and claiming inspiration from ‘what the wind said to me’ or ‘what the birds said to me’, shows how his sense of music encompassed the sounds of nature, as much as the more formal concept of instrumental music and song.   The Wikipedia article on Blind Tom Wiggins adds a rather bitter taste, explaining how Tom’s master, the lawyer Bethune, made a great deal of money out of Tom, touring him extensively and making him perform for up to four times a day.    The concert promoter to whom Bethune hired out Tom apparently marketed Tom as a ‘Barnum-style freak’, and frequently compared him to a bear, baboon or mastiff.   Very sadly, Blind Tom would usually introduce himself onstage in the third person, repeating what his managers had said about him (e.g. that he was non compos mentis) without any apparent understanding of how derogatory such a label was.  

“I have much more to read of this book, but I wanted to let you know how interesting I’m finding it.”