Charles Alston (1907-1977) was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, although little-known today. Born the son of a previously-enslaved father in rural North Carolina, Alston's family moved to New York in 1915 as part of the Great Migration northward. After graduating from high school, Alston attended Columbia University, graduating from their Fine Arts Program in 1929. 

Perhaps Alston's most famous artwork is his 1970 bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. When it was installed in the White House in 1990, it became the first representation of an African American to be put in the White House, over a century after the abolition of slavery and just under 500 years after the first enslaved peoples were brought from Africa to 'The New World' in 1501. The Smithsonian Magazine has wrote great article about the bust yesterday, as an original casting joined the collection of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

These images all come from the Alston collection Artworks and Mockups for Cartoons Promoting the War Effort and Original Sketches by Charles Alston, ca. 1942 - ca. 1945, now stored at the National Archives, College Park, MD. You can see browse through the complete digitized collection through the everyday miracle of the internet, and the tireless efforts of librarians, archivists, and others to bring these collections to the public at the click of a button. ​

Throughout this article, all images and names link to a larger version of the cartoon on the National Archives website.

During World War II, Alston worked as a staff member within the Office of War Information (OWI). His job was to create patriotic cartoons and visual materials that would be distributed to black newspapers and publications across the county. His work was meant to rally African Americans to join in the war effort and 'fight for freedom' for those countries under control of the Axis Powers, even as people of color were denied basic freedoms at home in the USA.

Alston's cartoons clearly grapple with the difficulty of the task before him; he never hid or obscured America's ugly racial past, often including references to slavery. However, he focused on the accomplishments and achievements of blacks in the war -- and sought to frame them as part of a long and continuing tradition of selfless sacrifice and crucial contributions to the nation from the black community. Alston believed firmly in the power of history, and in the power of the press, where his cartoons were published.

The largest group of Alston's cartoons is a series of biographical sketches of black Americans, naming their accomplishments and linking their efforts to the success of the United States in war and in peace. While he included such canonical black Americans as reformer Frederick Douglas and scientist Dr. George Washington Carver, he was careful in his couching of them. He painted Douglas in patriotic hues by mentioning the Liberty Boat named after him currently fighting the Axis powers, even while noting that both had been born into slavery. 

Most importantly, though, Alston ​also gestured to lesser-known black Americans, such as Austin Curtis, 'successor' to Dr. Carver. [see cartoon above]

Alston introduced his readers to a veritable pantheon of black professionals with advanced degrees, national recognition, and awards. Indeed, his choices of subject skewed heavily toward what W.E.B. DuBois conceived of as the "Talented Tenth" in 1903 -- that small percentage of black and formerly enslaved Americans who were able to succeed within the pre-existing, white, systems of prestige and achievement. Alston shied away from and de-emphasized stories of black success that went outside conventional routes of achievement -- those who dropped out of school, were unable to afford education, and managed to achieve success despite these obstacles. Invariably, he mentioned the alma mater of his subjects, emphasizing their academic pedigree as well as their subsequent accomplishments. [See above and below]

However, in the context of the current war effort, Alston was more open to featuring heroes of less-extraordinary caliber, to emphasize to his readers that their everyday actions could affect the outcome of the war. While he was still happy to boast of Benjamin Davis, West Point class of 1936, and son of the highest rank black US army officer, he also celebrated black men in the armed services without pedigree, nonetheless performing great acts of heroism and earning medals along the way, such as Elvin Bell. Given the long tradition in the black community of expecting equal rights for equal service in the military, Alston's emphasis on men in the military makes sense; he may also have been reacting in protest against the segregation of the Army by color in the Second World War.

More surprising, then, is Alston's single cartoon acclaiming a factory worker on the assembly line in the home front war: Charles H. Fletcher - Soldier of Production. While the martial framing of Fletcher as a soldier played into rhetorics of sacrifice in war, another link between the army and the factory in World War II is that both were struggling with race relations. In the shortage of war workers, doors to high-paying jobs and work were open to black americans that hadn't been previously -- much to the anger of certain unions, employers, and Americans. In industrial Detroit, these tensions exploded in the Race Riots of 1943; at the height of World War II, 6,000 federal troops were called out to stop the rioting. Emphasizing the patriotic contributions and value of a black worker might have been Alston's subtle response.

​Alston did not confine himself to World War II combatants -- not content to merely gesture toward black service to the nation in the present, he set out to document black military service throughout United States history. The epitome of this trend can be seen in his sketch of William E. Lew, who not only joined the merchant marines at age 78 during the Second World War, but whose family history of service stretched back to Bunker Hill and George Washington's inauguration!

He also drew a cartoon illustrating Robert Smalls, a black hero of the Civil War who, while piloting a Confederate transport ship, defected along with crew and cargo to the Union Cause. 

In looking to the past of black military service, Alston also offered correctives to white mainstream histories of the time, and even myths that still persist today. Once instance of this is in his pointed depiction of Col. Charles Young, a West Point graduate who, in fact, RESCUED Theodore Roosevelt and his famous "Rough Riders" at San Juan Hill -- a key element of the story overlooked in Teddy's popular and celebratory boasts of his all-white soldiers' bravery -- and not mentioned when the future president won the Medal of Honor for his charge. (Which incidentally, was really up the un-romantically-named Kettle Hill.) Read more about Charles Young here.

​[Down with the cult of Teddy Roosevelt!]

In pivoting back and forth between black visionaries living and dead, past and present, Alston sought to frame his subjects as part of a long and continuing tradition of selfless sacrifice and crucial contributions to the nation from the black community. Alston believed firmly in the power of history, and in the power of the press, where his cartoons were published. He featured two editors of black newspapers in his series: "Fred R. Moore - Humanitarian, Editor, Leader" and "Robert Lee Vann - Lawyer, Editor, Crusader". His commitment to the power of the written word, and to the importance of reclaiming, remembering, and rescuing black American history is best seen in his cartoon sketching Carter G. Woodson, who was a founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Journal of African American History. 

I wrote this post because I thought it was important to realize that the people we celebrate MATTER. Charles Alston's decisions for whom to sketch and how to frame their accomplishments were all highly political decisions. One of the things series tried to accomplish was to expand the depth and breadth of black American heroes in popular discourse.  

However, even in his drive to document overlooked black Americans, Alston only included two women in his series -- Lieut. Willa Brown [left] and Bessye J. Bearden ["Club Woman, Social Worker"].

On Martin Luther King,  Jr. Day, as we celebrate a day named for one inspirational and exceptional American, let us not forget all the countless other visionaries, artists, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, athletes, architects, patriots, workers, and protestors of color who built this nation and continue to work to making it a better, more just, and more free society. Who are we not thinking of? Whose history are we forgetting, and in so doing, considering unimportant?

Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, 1968 October 19. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Wardlaw, Alvia J. Charles Alston. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007. (Find it at your local library!)
Digital Public Library of America holdings related to Charles Alston. More photographs, images of his murals, paintings, and other artworks, and more.

This month, I had the honor of being featured in the  “Seeds: New Research in Environmental History” series cosponsored by NiCHE and Edge Effects highlighting graduate members of the American Society for Environmental History .   

For the post, the brilliant Timothy Johnson and I were paired up to talk about our respective research projects, and together tackle the new directions the field of environmental history is taking, from where our work overlaps in the history of twentieth century agriculture. 

Tim's dissertation (recently defended, bravo!), is a compelling and incisive examination of the global fertilizer industry in transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, whereas mine focuses on backyard gardens in four crucial years of war from 1941-1945. However, in discussion, we were able to find many commonalities in our intellectual premises, approaches, and contributions to the field.

At a basic level, we concured that research in the overlap between business, state, and environment is more important than ever, given the incoming political regime on January 20th. Indeed, huge numbers of businessmen and corporate interests are poised to be at the helm for the next four years, judging by Trump's cabinet picks, even as the crisis of global warming will reach new heights of urgency.

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However, other topics that came up in conversation included:

• The business community's attempts to "naturalize" capitalism in American society and practice
• Corporations as important historical actors in the ongoing American relationship with the environment, both in collaboration and conflict with the state.
• The importance of practices as well as products, of networks as well as the fruits of those relationships.
• Materiality as important to the past, especially environmental pasts; we are each in some way looking to describe how capitalist practices and products were concretized and embodied in the past.
• The American rhetoric of food production as key to construction of American abundance through corporate science and technology.

Most of all, our work each rests on the premise that agriculture is a uniquely useful site to examine the complex relationship between business, state, and the natural environment. As well as being rhetorically important to the American identity through the legacy of the yeoman farmer ideal, agriculture is a crucial domain of environmental interaction and impact: a place where science and technology meet with people and ecologies; where capitalist growth economies run up against natural limits of soil fertility and weather conditions; where disembodied global commodity chains of seeds, fertilizer, machinery, and food meet with local soil and dirt.