1928: ONE YEAR, TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

“Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world. It can lead peoples through the darkness and help them from being afraid of the darkness. Art is a guide for every person who is looking for something.” –Thornton Dial

My friend and docent at the De Young Museum in San Francisco recently emailed me about an important new acquisition by the museum—a 60-piece collection of Black art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, whose most recognizable artist is Thornton Dial.  If you don’t know Dial’s work, as I didn’t, this art obituary in the online magazine, Culture Type, which reported his death on January 25, 2016, describes it well:

Dial created densely structured wall reliefs and mixed-media works exploring a range of subjects from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and race and social justice issues, to more mundane matters of everyday rural life. Drawing on his own experiences and also referencing broader global issues, his diverse practice spanned assemblage works composed of found objects such as metal, stuffed animals, discarded clothing, rope and electrical wire, and dramatically textured paintings, as well as muted neo-expressionist works on paper executed in pastels, charcoal and watercolor. His works are steeped in expressive abandon, moderated by studied sense of color and rigorous attention to composition and balance.

My friend sent two links in his email, both of which are well worth reading.  One is the Dial Interview, in which Dial chronicles in his own voice his life growing up in the Deep South.  The other is a video-formatted curatorial investigation of one of Dial’s most important works, Blood and Meat:  Survival for the World, shown above.  You will be amazed how much is going on in this painting!

Both links are revelatory, but what immediately jumped out at me was Dial’s birth date:  September 28, 1928.  That got my attention because my mother was born on October 7, 1928.  Although they were born just nine days apart, any convergence in their lives ended there.  Theirs is a story about one year and two different worlds.

ONE YEAR

In 1928, prosperity and economic progressivism were in.  Real wages soared, doubling between 1918 and 1945, as unions gained strength.  The Federal Radio Commission issued the first television license and Disney Studios introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse.  Electrification reached cities and small towns, and major infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam were built.  Prohibition and speakeasies thrived in the Jazz Age, and Black culture flourished in New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and New York.  The times were heady, but just one year later, the Dow Industrial Average would drop 68 points over two days, ushering in the Great Depression.

Presaging this economic downturn was a dark undercurrent of racism and white nationalism coursing through the land in 1928.  Fear of foreigners was rampant.  Alfred E. Smith was the first Catholic to be nominated for the presidency but was beaten by Protestant Herbert Hoover.  Charles Lindbergh, a white supremacist who would later favor the Nazi cause, was nonetheless awarded the Medal of Honor.  Immigration from Southern Europe slowed to a trickle after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, and Asians and Indians were prohibited from entering the country altogether.

In Alabama, where Dial was born, the KKK reached the apex of its power in 1926.  While the Klan unleashed its terror against Catholics and Jews in the state, Alabama Blacks were still a favorite target, especially those who had achieved middle class status as physicians and educators.  Many left the state in the Great Migration to find work and relative tranquility in the North, and by 1928, the Alabama Klan’s power was on the wane.  It remained inactive during the '30s and ‘40s, until Brown vs. Board of Education integrated public schools in 1954.  Then all Hell broke loose as a new era of Jim Crow was ushered in.

TWO WORLDS

Apart from their shared birth year, and the fact that Thornton Dial and my mother each died in the state in which they were born, each still married to their respective spouse, their lives could not have been more dissimilar. 

My mother was born in Paterson General Hospital.  She grew up in a two-bedroom, one bath, brick house with a detached garage, a neat yard, and a screened-in porch in very White, very safe Fair Lawn, New Jersey (below), a small town located about ten miles from New York City.  Hers was a two-parent household; her mother was a first grade school teacher and her father was a claims adjuster who worked for The Hartford Insurance Company in Manhattan.

In other words, her parents were "professionals" and her decidedly middle class life was (except for the outbreak of WWII) predictable and comfortable.  My mother graduated from high school, married a Navy man, had me at not quite 19, earned a college degree in English along the way, taught high school, and later worked at Bell Laboratories as a technical editor. “Everything she knew came out of a book,” as my father used to say.  She died in 1995 at age 66. 

Dial, in contrast, was delivered by a midwife in Emelle, Alabama (below), in a house in the middle of a field with a roof that let the rain in.  He grew up on a former cotton plantation in a very Black, very precarious world of sharecropping, a type of legalized slavery.  His daddy was rumored but unconfirmed.  Dial's teenage mother couldn’t keep him, as she had no husband and needed to work.  His world was matriarchal and his upbringing was guided by several surrogate mothers--his grandmother, an aunt, and several other women, some related and some not.  His family structure was fractured, another legacy of slavery.

Dial got next to no formal education in the Jim Crow South, and as a 13-year-old in second grade, he was told to learn his numbers and how to write his name, because that was as far as a Negro could go.  He farmed, did odd jobs, skipped school, and faithfully labored as a metal worker at the Pullman Railway plant in Bessemer, Alabama, until it shut down in 1981.  He married and had five children.  He said of himself that everything he knew he learned by observing and doing.  After Pullman closed its doors, Dial began making art in earnest for his own pleasure, and he had his first show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993. He died in 2016 at age 87.

Thornton Dial and my mother were contemporaries, born in the same year but not really in the same country.  The difference between Dial's world and my mother's results not so much from geography as from two principal things:  race and poverty, but not just any poverty, a pernicious poverty that was created and perpetuated deliberately, ruthlessly, using race as the reason:  You keep them down because they're Black.  And because you've kept them down, they're poor.  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces a false narrative of nascent inferiority that can squander talent, distort lives, and perpetuate a national legacy of shame.  I know this.  And I am bone-tired knowing it, because although there are signs of change, it is in some places among some people as true today as it was in 1928.  How can this be?!

And yet, in the face of this shocking story of one country and two worlds, Dial’s spirit and talent were not extinguished.  I ask myself, how can a man with no education, who worked in the cotton fields as a little boy, who was told he wasn’t fit for school, and who labored in a steel company as a man, somehow, some way manage to keep his good will flowing and his creative spirit intact and then give us both as the twin gifts of his humanity and his art?  I am humbled, and I am grateful.  I feel love for this man.  I love his strength, his perseverance, his humility, and his radiant goodness.  And I hope to see his work for real some day.

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask (but not one of Dial's KKK masks below)!

Marilyn