by Mike Martin for the Columbia Business Times
When Parkade Center Manager Ben Gakinya asked me to write
about what black history means to me for a mall collage in honor of
Black History Month this February, Mary McLeod Bethune—who
overcame her parents' slavery to establish an all-black women's college and
become one of the country's greatest educators—came to mind.
Remembering Bethune reminds us that black history in the
United States isn't just about struggle.
It's also about triumph, particularly the flourishing of
ideas, culture, art, science and education that marked a decades-long interlude
between slavery and segregation. The Harlem Renaissance exploded onto the
American scene, and a larger Black Renaissance nationwide gave America doctors,
lawyers, preachers, teachers, painters, writers, politicians, philosophers and
educators where enslaved field hands had stood before.
Immortalizing that period—from about 1870 to 1930—became
the life's work of sculptor Isaac Scott Hathaway, (right) who left a
masterpiece at Douglass High School in Columbia: a bronzed
ceramic bust of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Hathaway sculpted dozens of black leaders with exquisite
care. His sculpture reminds of that intellectual and spiritual renaissance and
the way it lighted for subsequent generations, one of which would include
America's first black president.
Chosen calling
Legend has it that 9-year-old Isaac was touring a
Cincinnati museum with his father in 1883 when he discovered a terrible truth:
Black history didn't exist.
"I was looking for a statue of Frederick Douglass,"
Hathaway told his father. "My teacher said only the truly great are perpetuated
in stone and bronze, and Frederick Douglass was a great man."
"That may be," his father said. "But we’ll have to grow
our own sculptors."
Working feverishly to grow into that role, Hathaway
studied at the New England Conservatory and eventually graduated from his first
art studio—a converted chicken coop—to important and fascinating
commissions.
In 1904, Kentucky attorney William Marshall Bullitt, who
went on to become U.S. attorney general, hired Hathaway, a Lexington, Ky.,
native, to create the largest plaster crime scene model ever used in a court of
law up to that time.
Eight years later, the Smithsonian Institution's National
Museum hired Hathaway as its official sculptor. Pathe, the black-and-white movie
newsreel company, captured Hathaway molding a reproduction of the human fetal
brain and advertised the film as "the first motion picture of a black
professional at work."
Through the Isaac Hathaway Afro Art Company, he
hand-produced limited edition busts of prominent African Americans. At the
height of Hathaway's fame, President Harry S. Truman commissioned Hathaway to
create 50-cent coins "commemorating the life and perpetuating the ideas of
educator Booker T. Washington and scientist George Washington
Carver."
Today, Hathaway sculptures memorialize prominent African
Americans such as NAACP founder W.E.B DuBois, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and
Bethune in the Isaac Hathaway Art Institute at the University of Arkansas, Pine
Bluff and the Isaac Scott Hathaway Museum in Lexington.
Back to school
As a 2005 school board candidate, I visited
once-segregated Douglass High School, where principal Brian Gaub (left, with bust, Columbia Tribune photo) showed me what
he called "one of the nation’s oldest pieces of African-American
art."
I hadn't heard of Hathaway, but I instantly recognized
something special—a nearly 3-foot tall, masterfully detailed bust of Douglass
that had been in the building "for as long as anyone could remember," Gaub
said.
We carefully moved the glass display case away from the
wall and saw the inscription: "Isaac Hathaway, 1918" and © —the international
copyright symbol.
Frederick Douglass High school was built in 1916 when
Hathaway was teaching in nearby Arkansas, but how the bust —one of only three he
made—ended up in Columbia remains a mystery.
To confirm its authenticity, I sent pictures to
Pennsylvania State University African-American art expert Joyce Henri Robinson;
Howard University art history Professor Tritobia Hayes Benjamin; and Henri
Linton, curator of the Hathaway Museum at the University of Arkansas, Pine
Bluff.
"It was probably commissioned by someone connected to the
high school," Linton told me.
Hathaway biographer Odelia Walker sums up the great
artist's life: "Sculpture records the deeds of nations and individuals. Isaac
Hathaway understood this and created for us a heroic record of distinguished
African Americans. In the process, he left a legacy for and about all
races."
UPCOMING HATHAWAY EXHIBIT:
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