LEST WE FORGET
Images of The Black Civil Rights Movement
By Robert Templeton
Exhibition of “Lest We Forget…” at the Housatonic Museum, Bridgeport, CT 2002
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Table of Contents
About Robert Templeton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
Frederick Douglass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Booker T. Washington. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Founders of the NAACP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Asa Philip Randolph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Benjamin Mays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Ralph Emerson McGill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Roy Wilkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Hubert H. Humphrey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Rosa Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Mohandas K. Gandhi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Whitney Moore Young, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Ralph David Abernathy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
Lyndon B. Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
The Detroit Riots – Time Magazine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Black Power or Non-Violence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
The Young Blacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
From Despair to Rage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
Must Riots Continue? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
Solidarity Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Eldridge Cleaver. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Eighty Years in the Black Civil Rights
Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
©2013 All Rights Reserved
Robert Templeton Collection
Robert Templeton in his
Woodbury, Connecticut Studio
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About Robert Templeton
Robert Templeton was born in Iowa in 1929, at the onset of the Great Depression, into a poor farming family.
Life was hard, but his parents allowed themselves one small luxury: a subscription to the Saturday Evening
Post. The whole family looked forward to its arrival, especially young Templeton, who was fascinated by
Norman Rockwell’s covers. They instilled in him early on a love of art, and, unconventional for a farmboy, the
desire to pursue art as a career. Between school and chores at the farm he managed to find time to fill his
sketchbooks with pencil sketches, which already showed great promise. This came to the attention of his
high school principal, Mary Buffington Summers, who helped him to apply to the Kansas City Art Institute as
a National Merit Scholar. The Kansas City Art Institute awarded him the Vanderslice scholarship two years
in a row. He was barely seventeen. At that time Thomas Hart Benton had already resigned from KCAI, but
still occasionally made the rounds of the classrooms, looking over the students’ shoulders. His influence on
Templeton was unmistakable as evident still years later when Templeton painted the 40 ft. mural ‘Portrait of
America’ at the army base in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri during basic training, when he was drafted during
the Korean War. Benton sat for Templeton to do a charcoal portrait of him, which both he and Templeton
signed.
On a summer trip to Santa Fe, NM, Robert befriended John Sloan, the New York urban artist. They continued
their friendship when Templeton went to New York City to study at the Art Students League. Sloan acted as
a mentor, and he and his wife Helen often invited Templeton over for Sunday tea, to enjoy conversations
about art and life. It was on John Sloan’s recommendation that Templeton received a Ball Grant to the NY
Art Students League, twice.
At the Art Students League, from 1950 to 1952, Templeton studied under Louis Bosa and Reginald Marsh,
among others. He was drafted into the army in 1952, during the height of the Korean War, and underwent basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, before being
sent to Germany. There he took advantage of his furloughs to visit the great museums of Spain and Italy. He further developed his artistic skills by painting murals at
Army bases, in addition to his duties as a Signal Corps photographer. His photographs and sketches appeared in The Stars & Stripes, the US Army newspaper.
It was in Germany that Templeton met and married his wife, Leonore. They returned to New York City in 1955, and Templeton resumed his career as an artist, sharing
a loft on the Lower East Side with two artist friends from his Art Student League days, where Templeton began to do portrait commissions.
In 1963 he moved with Leonore and his young son Mark back to his native Iowa, where he painted for two years in the small rural town of Corning. The paintings
became the basis of the “Machine Man” series, which debuted to critical acclaim as a one-man show at the Banfer Gallery in New York City in 1964. The work reflected
his fascination with the ribbons of interstate highways cutting through the Midwestern landscape, man’s relationship to the automobile, and Templeton’s love of trucks.
In 1965, the Templeton family, which now numbered two-year old Kevin and two month old Tim, moved to Connecticut, where Templeton had purchased a parcel of
land with an early 19th century house, where he built his studio.
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About Robert Templeton - Continued
Two years later, in the hot summer of July 1967, Templeton was in Detroit on a portrait commission, when the riots broke out, and he made sketches which were featured on
the cover of the August 4 issue of Time Magazine. This experience inspired him to make a visual record of the black civil rights movement. Through his contact with Ralph
McGill, a strong advocate for change and the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, the artist became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Mays, a friend and mentor to Dr. King and a
former president of Morehouse College. Templeton and Mays made a list of the people whose portraits would personify the record of the struggle for equal rights. Through
the next two decades, such leaders of the movement as Ralph Abernathy, Asa Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, Benjamin Mays, Ralph McGill, Hubert Humphrey and Roy Wilkins
had their portraits painted by him for this collection. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated before a sitting could be scheduled, so for Dr. King’s portrait, Coretta Scott King
helped Templeton choose the photo which would eventually become one of Templeton’s most impressive portraits.
Templeton’s work for Time Magazine continued. He was also commissioned by CBS News to provide
courtroom sketches during the Bobby Seale Black Panther trial and the Pentagon Papers trial. His other
portraits were of such national figures as President Jimmy Carter, displayed in the Hall of Presidents at
the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, and national, regional and local leaders
in industry, politics and finance. But his consistent efforts during almost twenty years were toward the
collection that he and Benjamin Mays named “Lest We Forget.”
“Lest We Forget” was first shown in 1986 at Emory University in Atlanta, with funding from the NEA and the
Georgia Council for the Arts. It was subsequently sent on a national tour under the auspices of the United
Negro College Fund, with a grant from Heublein. The tour culminated in an exhibition on Capitol Hill.
The last years of his life Robert Templeton devoted to his landscape paintings. He was fond of saying “The
world is sitting for its portrait, and I’m the one to paint it” as he was traveling, armed with sketchbook and
camera, to Puerto Rico, Germany, Greece, Egypt, France, and Italy, and he would put all his memories down
on canvas upon his return to his studio in Connecticut.
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Frederick Douglass
Oil, 1984, 40 x 30 inches
Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and government official, was born
of a white father and a black slave mother in Maryland, in 1817.
Despairing of his future under slavery, he escaped and found his
freedom in a coastal town in Massachusetts, where he learned to
read and write and to speak tellingly and with prophetic strength
about his ordeals as a slave and as a runaway. The abolitionists
were impressed with him, and he was heard on hundreds of
platforms in the US, and in Canada and England, calling for rights
for all. He opposed the colonization movement, which would have
freed slaves only for the purpose of settlement in such African
outposts as Liberia. He was a loud and clear advocate of the
uncompromising struggle for immediate emancipation in his
speeches and in the pages of his newspapers as well. He became
famous, and he numbered Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman and
Sojourner Truth among his friends and admirers.
In later years he served the US as diplomatic minister to Haiti and
as a government official in a succession of administrations. He
was Marshal in the District of Columbia for annual celebrations of
freedom. He traveled and lectured widely in the US and abroad,
and became an international figure whose judgments in speech
or print were widely respected. In his life story, ‘My Bondage and
My Freedom’, he wrote that “I have worked hardest to get equal
rights for Negroes” but this focus “does not keep me from working
to help people of all races.”
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Booker T. Washington
Oil, 1985, 36 x 30 inches
Booker T. Washington, educational leader, was born in 1856
in Virginia to a white father and a black mother who was
a slave. He was brought up in a dismal cabin and was freed
by the Emancipation Proclamation. The family moved to the
neighborhood of Charleston, West Virginia, where he attended
school, and then went off at seventeen to Hampton Institute, where
he worked his way through as a janitor. He distinguished himself
as a student, and in 1881 he was chosen to be the founding
head of Tuskegee Institute, a teacher’s school in Alabama. After
years of hard work, the school was firmly established. He lectured
widely on educational subjects and became a familiar of such
national figures as Theodore Roosevelt, whose dinner table at the
White House he shared. He had become the recognized leader
of black Americans following the death of Frederick Douglass. He
advocated social separation of the races combined with industrial
training and cooperation. For such views he was called the “Great
Compromiser” by friends and such foes as Du Bois and Monroe
Trotter, who demanded immediate and complete social equality.
It was his accommodating quality that brought him, and kept him,
at the place where he dominated the movement for civil rights,
able to raise funds and other support from former slaveholders
of the South and from a broad national community. His ‘Up From
Slavery’ is his legacy.
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Founders of the NAACP
Oil, 1984, 30 x 50 inches
Moorfield Storey, lawyer and author, practiced law
in Boston, where he was a reformer and a strong
supporter of civil rights. He wrote a number of
books and pamphlets including ‘Legal Aspects of the
Negro Question and Problems of Today’, in which he
discussed race prejudice. He was among the sixty
prominent Americans who responded to the call of
Mary White Ovington to meet in February 1909, on the
occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Abraham Lincoln, to protest the recent frightening riot
in Springfield, Illinois, and the many decades of such
oppressive acts of terror as burnings and lynchings. He
became the first national president of the NAACP.
Mary White Ovington, reformer and the spirit behind that meeting, was born in Brooklyn in 1865, where she grew up in an atmosphere of abolitionism
and women’s rights. She worked in settlement houses and came to know the depth of the problems of the blacks. In 1911, she published her 1904
study ‘Half a Man: The Status of the Negro’. By that time, she had seen her 1909 meeting evolve into the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. For more than forty years she served as board member, executive secretary, and chairman, and served as conciliator among the
various factions that threatened to destroy the movement.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, scholar and activist, was born in western Massachusetts in 1868. He attended local schools where he was usually
the only black. He went off to Fisk University, graduated, and enrolled at Harvard College as a junior. He stayed on through his doctorate in 1895. He
taught at the University of Pennsylvania while doing the research for his magisterial ‘Philadelphia Negro’ in 1899. He taught at Atlanta University and
became the ideological rival to Booker T. Washington upon the publication of his ‘Souls of Black Folk’. He was the first NAACP director of research
and publications and he founded Crisis, of which he was editor for two dozen years.
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Asa Philip Randolph
Oil, 1978, 44 x 30 inches
Asa Philip Randolph, labor leader, was born in 1889 in Florida. After
high school, he went to New York City and studied at City College.
He was active in the Socialist party, and in 1925 he organized the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. From that position of power
he was influential in the formation of the Fair Employment Practices
Committee. During these New Deal years, he threatened a march
on Washington by a hundred thousand black people, to protest
discrimination in the defense industries. He opposed discrimination
also in the armed forces, and in 1955 he became a member of the
AFL-CIO executive council. Two years later he was a vice president
and in regular opposition to George Meany, the union leader who was
lukewarm on civil rights in the unions.
It was during this active period that he was called the “most
dangerous Negro in America” by those who feared his power. He
was an organizer of the August 1963 march on Washington, sharing
leadership responsibilities with Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and James Farmer. In later years
his socialism became more moderate and he became active in the
Urban League and the Liberal party. To carry on his commitment to
his causes, he founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute, advocating
the power of the black worker. He died in 1979, recognized for his
many solid contributions to the civil rights movement.
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Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oil, 1964 - 1985, 96 x 84 inches
Martin Luther King, Jr., clergyman, was born in 1929 in Atlanta where he was
brought up, and he entered Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. There he
fell under the good influence of Benjamin Mays. He was ordained in his father’s
Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1947, and received his bachelor’s degree in sociology
the next year. He then went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where
he was student body president and valedictorian of his graduating class. He went
on to Boston University for his doctorate, received in 1955. It was there that he
studied in depth the nonviolent resistance beliefs of Gandhi and others and settled
upon a philosophy to guide his life.
He took a pulpit in Montgomery, where he came to early fame as an organizer of the
Montgomery bus boycott. He became the national spokesman for the nonviolent
wing of the civil rights movement and an organizer of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. In 1959, he joined his father as co-pastor in Atlanta.
He traveled and lectured widely and spent some time in the Birmingham jail following
a series of nonviolent demonstrations. He was one of the leaders of the 1963 March
on Washington, where at the Lincoln Memorial he delivered his memorable “I Have a
Dream” speech. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He led the Memphis
to Jackson March that followed the murder of James Meredith. In March 1968, he
proposed the Poor People’s March on Washington, but the next month he was shot
by an assassin and died in the hospital. The manner of his death led to the outbreak
of riots in over a hundred cities in America.
He is remembered through his writings and the many studies about him. Those
studies agree that it was the adoption of the passive resistance and nonviolent
protest approach of Gandhi that gave leadership to King throughout his civil rights
career, adding conviction to his eloquence.
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Benjamin Mays
Oil, 1969, 40 x 32 inches
Benjamin Elijah Mays, educator, was born in 1895 in South Carolina,
and graduated from Bates College in Maine in 1920. He went to the
University of Chicago for his masters degree and doctorate, and while
he was working on those degrees, he was ordained into the Baptist
ministry. He taught at Morehouse College and at South Carolina
State College. From 1934 to 1940, he served as dean of the Howard
University School of Religion and then moved on to the presidency of
Morehouse College, a position he distinguished for the next quarter
of a century. He also served his community well, becoming the first
black president of the Atlanta school board. He spoke early and often
against segregation and for education. He received nearly thirty
honorary doctorates and other honors and awards including election
to the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations, one of a dozen major
leaders so honored. He had been a model for one of his Morehouse
students, Martin Luther King, Jr., and he served the young minister as
an unofficial senior adviser.
He gave the eulogy at King’s funeral. Among his books were the first
sociological study of African-American religion, ‘The Negro’s Church’,
published in 1933, ‘The Negro’s God’, of 1938, ‘Disturbed about
Man’ of 1969, and his autobiographical ‘Born to Rebel’, of 1971.
These books reveal a combination of sharp intellect with religious
commitment and prophetic conviction.
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Ralph Emerson McGill
Oil, 1984 (from 1969 photo shoot),
40 x 30 inches
Ralph Emerson McGill, newspaperman, was born in Tennessee in
1898 and studied at Vanderbilt University between 1917 and 1922,
with time out for service in the Marines during 1918 and 1919.
Upon graduation, he joined the staff of the Banner in Nashville where
he worked for a half-dozen years before he moved to Atlanta and its
Constitution. He spent the next decade as its sports editor, before
becoming executive editor for another four years. He was the editor
from 1942 to 1960. In those years, he had become an outspoken
critic of bigotry and segregation.
For the decade of the 1960s, he was the publisher of the Constitution,
and his writings led to his being called the ‘Conscience of the South.’
In these years many honors came to him, including the Pulitzer Prize
for editorial writing, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and
honorary degrees from about twenty colleges including Harvard,
1961; Morehouse, 1962; Notre Dame, 1963; Brown, 1964; and
Atlanta and Tufts, 1965. He was a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace. His adopted city of Atlanta honored him by
changing the name of a street to Ralph McGill Boulevard, after it had
carried for decades the name of the first imperial Wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan. His books include ‘The South and the Southerner’, and
‘No Place to Hide: The South and Human Rights’. His writing had
chronicled the South’s ‘Second Reconstruction’.
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Roy Wilkins
Oil, 1984, 42 x 32 inches
Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, was born in Missouri in 1901. He
was brought up in Minnesota, where he worked his way through the
University, with a number of jobs from stockyard worker to editor. Upon
his graduation, he began to work on the Kansas City Call, a major black
newspaper. He became active in the NAACP there and was secretary
of the local city chapter. Recognized for his leadership qualities, he
became the assistant executive secretary of the national NAACP under
Walter White, and soon succeeded W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of Crisis,
the major organization publication. He was a consultant to the War
Department during the Second World War and served with Du Bois and
White as advisers at the 1945 San Francisco conference that founded
the United Nations. He continued to lecture and write, and upon the
death of White in 1955, he was appointed executive secretary of the
organization he had seen grow to 1300 branches and chapters and a
quarter-million members.
During his own stewardship, the NAACP reaffirmed its profound
commitment to the democratic process and integration, condemning
separatism and violence. He served in the administration of Lyndon
Johnson as an adviser, and he was awarded the Medal of Freedom,
the nation’s highest civil honor. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960,
1964, and 1965 were strongly supported by Wilkins and his NAACP.
He retired in 1977, covered with honors, and was succeeded by
Benjamin Hooks.
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Hubert H. Humphrey
Oil, about 1970, 51 x 37 inches
As a US Senator from Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey was an active
liberal with a creative program to advance equal rights, one of the
first in the Capitol to recognize the need for a strong bill of civil
rights for blacks. Beyond Congress, he helped to write a strong civil
rights plank into the platform of the Democratic party. He supported
the Peace Corps, urban renewal, aid to health and education, and
many other causes as senator, and from 1965 to 1969, as the vice
president of the United States during the Great Society administration
of Lyndon Johnson. His attempt to succeed Johnson in the election
campaign of 1968 failed, and he turned for a time to teaching at
Macalester College, and at the University of Minnesota.
In 1970, he was returned to the Senate, where he continued his
liberal campaigns. He earned the name of the Happy Warrior, and
he was happiest when he was charging toward another liberal goal.
The great federal programs in the area of civil rights from 1949 to the
late 1970s owe more to him than to anyone else. Among his books
are ‘The Cause is Mankind: A Liberal Program for Modern America’
(1964), and his autobiography, ‘The Education of a Public Man’, of
1976.
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Rosa Parks
Oil, 1970, 35 x 28 inches
Rosa Parks, seamstress and symbol, was born in Tuskegee in 1913
as Rosa McCauley, and attended Alabama State College. She married
Raymond Parks in 1932, and was active in the Montgomery chapter of
the NAACP, serving as secretary and youth adviser from 1943 to 1956.
She came to the notice of the world when in 1955 she refused to yield
her seat in the white section on a Montgomery bus. She was promptly
arrested, and this led to a boycott of the city bus system organized by
two local ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy. Their
newly organized Montgomery Improvement Association oversaw the
year-long boycott that ended segregation in the bus system.
Throughout her life, she gained many honors including the Springarn
Medal of the NAACP in 1979, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Award, the
Service Award of Ebony, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace
Prize. She earned ten honorary degrees including one awarded by Shaw
College in Detroit, where she worked as secretary and receptionist in the
office of Congressman John J. Conyers, Jr.
Part of the citation for her Mount Holyoke degree read, “When you led,
you had no way of knowing if anyone would follow.” In 1984, she received
the Eleanor Roosevelt Woman of Courage Award. In 1990 her seventyseventh birthday was held at the Kennedy Center with three thousand
black leaders, government officials, and others celebrating her life.
Her autobiographies included ‘Rosa Parks: My Story’ and ‘Quiet
Strength’. Rosa Parks died in October 2005. Her birthday, February
4th, has become commemorated as Rosa Parks Day in California and
Ohio.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi
Oil, 1980, 28 x 40 inches
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Whitney Moore Young, Jr.
Oil, 1980, 38 x 31 inches
Whitney Moore Young, Jr., executive, was born in 1921 in Kentucky,
where he graduated from Kentucky State College. He took his Master’s
degree in 1947 at the University of Minnesota. Degree in hand, he joined
the staff of the Urban League of Saint Paul, Minnesota, as the director of
industrial relations and vocational guidance programs. Three years later
he became executive director of the Urban League in Omaha, where he
was also on the faculty of the School of Social Work at the University of
Nebraska.
During the fifties he also taught at Creighton University and at Atlanta
University. In 1960 he held a Rockefeller Foundation grant that gave him
a postgraduate year at Harvard University, and this leave was followed
by appointment in 1961 as the executive director of the National Urban
League. He was a strong force for good in that important position, and in
1963 he was one of the organizers of the March on Washington. A book
of his essays entitled ‘To Be Equal’ was published in 1964 and throughout
the 1960s he continued his work. In 1971 that work took him to Lagos,
Nigeria, to a conference sponsored by the African-American Association,
where he died at fifty years of age. Under his leadership the National
Urban League had grown to about a hundred affiliate organizations in
over thirty states.
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Ralph David Abernathy
Oil, 1964, 30 x 24 inches
Ralph David Abernathy, clergyman, was born in Alabama in 1926,
and received his bachelor’s degree from Alabama State College,
after having served in the Army during the Second World War. He
did his graduate work at Atlanta University, and became a minister in
Montgomery, where he had as a colleague Martin Luther King, Jr. In
1955, he organized the Montgomery Improvement Association, and
a short time later, he and King became known nationally because
of their leadership of the successful bus boycott. It was then that
they organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, soon
the nation’s leading advocate of nonviolence, resisted strenuously by
militant factions. Upon King’s death, Abernathy succeeded him as
president.
He organized the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington where
Resurrection City was built, a group of huts in the center of the
nation’s capital. He was jailed for twenty days for refusing to obey
the police order to remove the huts. He went on to organize the
SCLC Operation Breadbasket, to exert financial pressure against
companies that had poor records in extending equal opportunities to
blacks. In 1961 he had become pastor of an Atlanta church and his
honors came to include honorary degrees from such institutions as
Long Island University, Alabama State University, Morehouse College,
and Kalamazoo College. His autobiography is ‘And the Walls Came
Tumbling Down’, published in 1989.
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Lyndon B. Johnson
Oil, 1968, 30 x 24 inches
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 37th president of the United State, was
as dedicated and aggressive a politician that ever rose to prominence
in America. His early years growing up on a farm in Stonewall, Texas,
were spent in poverty. From that experience, sprang a lifelong empathy
for the poor and the disadvantaged. His political career officially began
in 1937 as Texas state representative. In 1949, he was elected United
States senator and served until 1961, holding the posts of Senate
Majority Whip and Senate Majority Leader. Johnson was selected to
be Kennedy’s running mate in the 1960 Presidential election.
After Kennedy’s tragic assassination in 1963, LBJ became president
and embarked on designing and implementing what he called the
“Great Society.” During his Presidency, he pushed for and signed
legislation that created Medicare, the War on Poverty, Medicaid, an
increase of public funding for education, public television, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 among
many other accomplishments. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed
most forms of racial segregation, and was signed on July 2, 1964.
The National Voting Rights Act outlawed voting discrimination, and
was instrumental in allowing millions of blacks to vote for the first time.
Johnson also showed his strong support of civil rights with his 1967
nomination of civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall to be the first
African American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Many of the bills he signed, in particular the Civil Rights legislation,
continue to have a positive effect on America to this day.
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Malcolm X
Oil, 1985, 56 x 42 inches
Malcolm X, clergyman, was born Malcolm Little in Nebraska in 1925.
He spent much of his youth in foster homes and state institutions before
he finished the eighth grade and left for Boston, where a half-sister
lived. He became lost in a life of drugs and crime and was sentenced
to ten years in prison by the time he became twenty-one. After learning
to read and write while inside, he corresponded with Elijah Muhammad,
the leader of the Black Muslims.
By 1952, he was out on parole and speaking out about his belief that
the white Christian world was intrinsically evil and dangerous, and that
the only way for blacks to survive was to separate themselves from
it. He adopted the name by which he is remembered, Malcolm X, and
founded mosques in Philadelphia and Harlem. His increasingly radical
statements led to his expulsion from the Black Muslim movement and
to the formation of his own nationalist groups, the Muslim Mosque and
the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
He was seen by friends and foes alike as an angry young man who
took pride in his controversial social views including racial separation.
He considered the nonviolence advocates to be utterly wrong, and he
became famous for saying so. In this way, he helped the nonviolent
movement by making it appear to be a more palatable alternative for
moderate blacks and whites.
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By 1965, Malcolm X had become slightly more moderate in his own
views, after a 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, when he was killed in New
York City by members of a rival black group. His ‘Autobiography’ was
published shortly after his death, and in 1992, a movie on his life was
a popular success.
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The Detroit Riots Time Magazine
Acrylic, 1967, 31 x 24 inches
The riots in Detroit in the late sixties were an epiphany for Robert
Templeton. They came out of a long tradition of blacks in that city.
Early in the nineteenth century, it was the last stop on the Underground
Railroad for fugitive slaves heading for freedom in the part of Canada
that abutted Detroit, and later the goal for waves of blacks migrating
from the South for well-paying jobs in the auto industry. There they
mixed with immigrants from Europe on the assembly lines and in
the city, and violence broke out often, as they found themselves
competing for jobs.
During World War II, the riot begun at Belle Isle was a terrible racial
confrontation. The riot of 1967 had Twelfth Street as its epicenter
with looting, setting of fires, and pitched battles with guns and knives,
making the area a no- man’s-land. It was here that Templeton
sketched for Time, before the National Guard, numbering about ten
thousand troops, was sent in by Governor Romney, and President
Johnson had sent a contingent of paratroopers.
Forty-three people were killed, seven thousand were arrested, and
property damage at twenty-two million dollars did not include much
that was lost by those in the area that had become a charred and
waterlogged and rubble-strewn disaster area. These studies by
Templeton show the tense situation on Twelfth Street, firemen battling
out of control flames, looters, Guardsmen, and the Governor’s press
conference.
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Black Power or Non-Violence?
Acrylic, 1967, 72 x 48 inches
The civil rights struggles of all people throughout all time have
required that the choice among contradictory philosophies and tactics
be made. For blacks in America, the polarization of conflicting views
began in the period before the Civil War, between those who favored
gradual manumission of slaves for colonization to Africa, and those
who demanded complete and immediate abolition by whatever means,
violent if need be. Early in this century the accommodating views of
a Booker T. Washington ran afoul of the clearly impatient demands
of a W.E.B. Du Bois, and this creative tension continued through the
twentieth century, and will continue.
Here, Templeton portrays this dilemma in an evocative study from
the late sixties, in which the extreme factions in the struggle for civil
rights are embodied in the placement and choice of images, in the
dramatic use of color, and in strong graphics and type. On the left the
black power impulse of such an activist as H. Rap Brown called for
an uncompromising, impatient, and aggressive demand for justice.
Against this stands the non-violent commitment of such a leader
as Martin Luther King, Jr., favoring a belief in passive protest and
continuing dialogue, while also continuing to rely on the justice of the
courts.
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The Young Blacks
Oil, 1967, 40 x 30 inches
This collective portrait of a generation that came of age in the sixties
evokes the vital and conflicting spirit of those interesting years.
They were portrayed here as primarily urban blacks encompassing
such contradictory slogans as “Burn, Baby, Burn” and “Supercool.”
They expressed the optimistic idealism of youth with its attendant
impatience. Although they shared youth and enthusiasm with the
white hippie flower children, they saw the need to do their “own
thing.” The newness of that was offset by their search for their
traditions through interest in the antiquity of their African origins and
their history in American slavery. Their sense of oneness led them to
address one another as Soul Brother or Soul Sister. The term Negro
with them gave way to be replaced by the term black and the Afro
haircut became a symbol of self identity and Black Pride.
The artist evokes this exciting period with a choice of images that
include anchor fencing, mounted police, the stare of Malcolm X, the
various approaches to reaching audiences with their messages, and
the youthful forthrightness of the young man and woman. It was a
formative time for many leaders.
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From Despair to Rage
Acrylic, 1968, 26 x 20 inches
From Despair to Rage is another Templeton image to emerge from that
tense period of the late 1960s, a period that saw a decline in militancy
from the middle of that decade to the middle of the 1970s. The riots
of 1968 ended the belief of most that violence could achieve anything
of importance, and the summers of 1969 and many that followed were
“cool.”
Some militant groups, among them the Black Panthers, were able for a
brief moment to attract the attention of the media, but their particular
messages of despair and anger were ignored generally in the black
communities. They faded away. A series of Black Power Conferences
pressed for going beyond the traditional goals of civil rights, and instead,
gaining black control of all black affairs. But while these conferences went
forward, gains were achieved beyond them. Ironically, one conference
was held in a city that had a black mayor elected by blacks and whites;
more followed soon in other cities. By 1972 there were enough black
congressmen to make the Black Caucus an important force. Other black
leaders found that the poor, both black and white, had common needs
that could be addressed by such an approach as that of George Wiley
and his National Welfare Rights Association. And so it continued through
the seventies, and into the Reagan years and beyond. The question of
despair and rage remains, still not answered but still addressed.
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Must Riots Continue?
Oil, 1968, 50 x 38 inches
Must Riots Continue? became a question for national attention, and
President Johnson appointed a Commission on Civil Disorders with
Governor Kerner of Illinois as its chairman. The report came out ahead
of schedule and found that mass hysteria and great exaggeration had
taken the reports out of all true proportion and created an atmosphere
of mindless fear.
There were riots and disorders and they were analyzed. Most of
the rioters were young men between fifteen and twenty-five, school
dropouts, who had never lived anywhere but in the ghettos and
were full of hostility toward the middle class, black and white. They
distrusted the political system and the police who were its enforcers.
These neighborhoods had crime-rates as high as thirty-five times
that of some white neighborhoods, a chronic shortage of adequate
health facilities with a corresponding infant mortality rate, poor trash
collection that led to an alarming rate of rat-bites, and the simple
compression of larger and larger numbers of blacks into already
crowded ghettos. The list went on.
President Johnson accepted the Kerner Report in March 1968. The
next month, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. led to another
sweep of riots through more than a hundred American cities, and
seventy thousand federal troops, black and white, were able to halt
the rioting, for a time. The 1992 Los Angeles riots and more recent
unrest in NY City and Ferguson, Missouri prove that the potential
remains and will remain until the needs outlined in the Kerner Report
are addressed. In the meantime we have Templeton’s question still
before us.
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Solidarity Day
Oil, 1968, 16 x 11 inches
During the summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr., the nation’s capital became the focus for all of the individuals
and groups from all over the country and all over the social spectrumnot just those characterized by Jesse Jackson as “the poor, the rejected,
the despised”- who wanted to express their support for solidarity. This
combination of Templeton’s images captures that variety in the multiple
figures gathered around the Solidarity Day placard with earnest black
and white faces, the intense dignity of the seated older woman with tears
glistening behind her glasses, a solid symbol of the anonymous millions
deeply affected by the moment.
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Eldridge Cleaver
Oil, 1970, 26 x 36 inches
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, one of the original members of the Black
Panther Party, was born in 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, and grew
up in California. He spent time in prison as a youth, and in 1958,
at the age of 23, was sent to prison after being convicted of assault
with intent to kill. He was paroled in 1966 after serving 8 years of a
14 year sentence. While in prison, he penned ‘Soul on Ice’, a series
of essays outlining his views on racism in America. After he was
paroled, Cleaver joined the newly-formed Black Panther Party, along
with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Cleaver became the group’s
Information Minister, serving as spokesman.
In 1968, Cleaver was involved in a shooting with police in Oakland.
Fearing conviction, he fled the county and spent seven years in
Algeria, Cuba and France. He returned to the US in 1975, renounced
the Black Panther Party and was placed on probation for the earlier
shooting. Cleaver underwent a political transformation, becoming
a born-again Christian, and embracing anti-communism. As he
reinvented himself, he ran for the 1986 Republican Senate seat in
California. He fell into poor health, and died in Southern California
in 1998.
Templeton’s unique portrait is framed by a torn screen, representing
the barriers which were torn down by the Black Panther Party.
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Eighty Years in The Black Civil Rights
Movement
Oil and charcoal, 1985, 58 x 50 inches
The unifying theme of this multiple image is the hourglass that
contains the many faces of the movement. Those of the formative
years in the bottom half of the hourglass include Douglass,
Washington, Ovington, and Du Bois among the individual portraits
created by Templeton for this exhibition and it also includes others,
black and white, who were active in the earlier days of the civil
rights movement. At the neck of the hourglass is the image of the
young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., being taken away by white
policemen from one of his many nonviolent protests, likely to spend
some time in jail as a consequence. In the upper chamber of the
hourglass are the figures of the latter half of the twentieth century,
drawn from Templeton’s individual portraits of Mays and Wilkins
and Abernathy and McGill and Malcolm X and Whitney Young and
Rosa Parks. The young blacks of the sixties are there also, the new
generation ready to accept the challenges that their predecessors
had faced and fought.
This image of the hourglass with its unstoppable flow of individual
grains of sand, or people, as is the case here, stands as a symbol for
the cumulative effect that many individuals working together have
to bring about change that cannot be ignored. Robert Templeton
and Dr. Mays shared the concern that the people who carried the
burden of the struggle for black civil rights should not be forgotten,
and named the collection ‘Lest We Forget - Images of the Black Civil
Rights Movement’.
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Acknowlegments
Robert Templeton worked on the “Lest We Forget” exhibit for over 25 years. It was a labor of love, inspired by the passion of his subjects and their
struggles against inequality. This book on the other hand was a team effort, and wouldn’t have been possible without the following people.
For expertly and painstakingly photographing the images and the gallery displays I’d like to thank my brother Kevin Templeton. For the accompanying
text, which helps us learn even more about the roles of each of the subjects, I’d like to thank Jontyle Theresa Robinson and Charles Austin Page of
Emory University. For his excellent graphic work designing and laying out this book, I’d like to thank Tom Berube. Finally, I’d like to thank my mother
Leonore Templeton, whose tireless efforts to keep her late husband and my father’s memory alive is an inspiration to all of us.
Tim Templeton, Laguna Beach, 2014
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