With the Ghosts of Segregation in Columbia, Missouri Two Visionary Spirits Find Rest

With the Ghosts of Segregation in Columbia, Missouri
Two Visionary Spirits Find Rest
by Mike Martin

Special to the Columbia Missourian, Muse Section, Sunday, June 5, 2005

Montgomery, Alabama attorney Fred Gray, Sr. has long championed civil
rights.

When authorities arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city
bus to a white person, Gray was her defender.

When 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. led a boycott of those same
buses and faced legal action, 25-year-old Gray was the lawyer at his
side.

For 623 men -- unwitting experimental subjects for forty years -- Fred
Gray won more than $9 million when he settled claims surrounding the
U.S. government's infamous "Tuskegee syphilis experiment."

But Gray has also long championed an African-American icon of a
different sort -- a man who almost single-handedly brought black
history to museums, schools, and public institutions around the
nation -- sculptor Isaac Scott Hathaway.

Hathaway left a valuable, significant -- and before now -- undiscovered part of his
artistic vision at Douglass High School in Columbia, Missouri: a bust of the hero
that first inspired him, abolitionist and newspaper editor Frederick Douglass.

"The bust at Douglass High School is one of those rare finds that sets
a community apart," said VSA Arts Missouri executive director Lisa
Kemper in Columbia.

Students and Masters

Gray -- who spoke in Lexington, Ky. at the March 26, 2004 "Celebration
of the Life of Isaac Scott Hathaway" -- was Hathaway's student,
friend, and later, his estate attorney.

Lexington-born in 1874, Hathaway was a small man who "looked like an
artist," Gray said.

Sculpture became Hathaway's chosen calling when at age 9 he was
touring a Cincinnati museum with his father.

Hathaway left his father's side -- and returned crestfallen.

"What's wrong? Where were you?" his father asked.

"I was looking for a statue of Frederick Douglass," the boy said. "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."

On leaving the museum -- with its busts and statues of prominent white
Americans -- Hathaway told his father, "I am going to model busts of
eminent Negroes and put them where all people can see them."

Hathaway pursued this singular vision the rest of his life.

He studied ceramics and sculpture at Pittsburg Normal College in
Pittsburg, Kansas; the Art Department of the New England Conservatory
of Music; the Cincinnati Art Academy; and the College of Ceramics of
the State University of New York.

He taught elementary school in Kentucky, preparing plaster of Paris
models for science lessons and later, intricate anatomical models for
medical schools.

From his first art studio -- a converted chicken coop -- Hathaway
quietly broke racial barriers. Most of his commissions came from
prominent white academic and political officials.

In 1904, William Marshall Bullitt -- US Attorney General under
President William Howard Taft -- commissioned Hathaway to create the
largest plaster crime scene model ever used in a court of law up to that
time -- a job three other sculptors termed "impracticable." The model
turned out so realistically that the judge had to repeatedly over-rule opposing
counsel's loud objections.

That same year, the State College of Kentucky hired Hathaway to
recreate the Bath Furnace Meteorite, as it might have looked before
its fiery plunge to Earth in Sharpsburg, Ky. The Smithsonian
Institution later exhibited the model.

For seven months in 1912, Hathaway was the sculptural designer for the
Smithsonian Institute's National Museum, where Pathe -- the famed
black-and-white movie newsreel company -- filmed him making a
reproduction of the human fetal brain -- the first motion picture of a
black professional at work.

Hathaway's notoriety spread and he formed the Afro Art Company,
later the Isaac Hathaway Art Company. For schools and public places,
he hand-produced limited edition busts of prominent African-Americans,
including educator Booker T. Washington, scientist George Washington
Carver, and Frederick Douglass.

After he married, Hathaway returned to teaching.

He founded the Departments of Ceramics at Alabama's Tuskegee
Institute; Alabama A&M College; and Alabama State College.

On August 7, 1946, President Harry S. Truman commissioned Hathaway to
create a fifty-cent piece "to commemorate the life and perpetuate the
ideas and teachings of Booker T. Washington."

Another U.S. Mint commission followed with Hathaway's design of the
George Washington Carver commemorative fifty-cent piece in 1951.

Today, two prominent museums bear his name: the Isaac Hathaway Art
Institute at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff; and the Isaac
Scott Hathaway Museum in Lexington, Kentucky.

Alongside his sculptures, those museums exhibit another Hathaway
specialty -- facemasks, in life and death, of prominent
African-Americans including NAACP founder W.E.B DuBois; poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar; and educator Mary McLeod Bethune.

"Sculpture records the deeds of nations and individuals," said
Hathaway biographer Odelia Walker. "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."

Douglass at Douglass

When, as a 2005 school board candidate, I visited Douglass High School
in Columbia, principal Brian Gaub greeted me with an intrigue.

The school, he said, had one of the nation's oldest pieces of
African-American art.

We toured the building. Gaub explained how the school -- in a
predominately African-American neighborhood -- had been segregated,
until Brown v. the Board of Education put black and white education on
the same footing in 1954.

In the hallway, I saw the art to which Gaub referred -- a nearly
3-foot tall, exquisitely detailed bronzed plaster bust of Frederick
Douglass in a glass case.

It had been in the building for "as long as anyone could remember,"
Gaub said, but only in the case for "about the last 12 years."

I asked if he knew anything about the bust's creator. "Not really,"
he said.

"I wonder if we can find a signature," I said.

Mr. Gaub and I moved the glass case slightly away from the wall and I
saw this inscription: Isaac Hathaway; the date 1918; and a circled
letter "c" -- the international copyright symbol.

International law has long dictated that, "all sculptors should
copyright their work by affixing to the sculpture the international
copyright symbol, their name, and the year of the cast."

Frederick Douglass High school was built in 1916; Hathaway was
teaching in nearby Arkansas at the time; and the marks looked
authentic.

I knew from the Antiques Road Show that African-American art had
recently surged in value and significance, so I did some research on
Google, finding entries for Hathaway at the Long Island University Art
Institute; Kentucky Historical Society; and many other locations.

I sent local newspaper photos of the Douglass bust to several
prominent art historians and curators, along with a brief history of
the high school and information about the inscriptions.

"I don't see why this wouldn't be an authentic piece, especially given
what Mr. Hathaway's company was all about -- providing inexpensive
sculptural portraits of famed black Americans to schools, etc.," said
Pennsylvania State University (PSU) African-American art expert Joyce
Henri Robinson.

Art history professor Tritobia Hayes Benjamin compared the photos
with an identical bust on display at the Howard University Art museum
in Washington, D.C.

"Yes -- it's the same piece, in fact," said Benjamin, associate dean
of the Howard University division of fine arts. "Mr. Hathaway made a
few of these, but I don't know how many."

How, I asked, could these curators be certain the piece was authentic
without physically viewing it?

"As far as I know, there wouldn't be a market for fake Hathaways, so
that seems most unlikely," said Robinson, curator of the Palmer Museum
of Art and associate professor of the PSU Department of Art History.

"No, it's not a fake. Why would it be?" added Henri Linton, curator of
the Isaac Scott Hathaway Museum of Fine Arts at the University of
Arkansas, Pine Bluff. "It was probably commissioned by your
institution. Isaac used to sell a small version of these busts door
to door back before he made the larger versions."

Linton followed his comments by sending me a full-color catalog of
Hathaway's work. The identical Frederick Douglass bust is on the
cover.

"The piece should be insured for no less than $50,000 to
$100,000.00 -- conservatively," Linton told me. "It should be kept in
a very safe case, not easily jostled or knocked over."

I informed Gaub and senior members of the Columbia Public School
administration about the bust, and offered help in seeing it
authenticated.

I did not receive a response. "But we like it and we're going to keep
it," Gaub later told me.

A Single River

"The art of a people," Hathaway said before his death in 1967, "not
only conveys their mental, spiritual, and civic growth to posterity,
but also can best portray their feelings, aspirations, and desires."

Without revealing specific information about the Douglass bust, I
explained my take on Hathaway's art at an NAACP school board
candidate forum in Columbia.

By setting sculptures of black Americans alongside white Americans,
Hathaway brought black and white history together.

The Bill of Rights and civil rights, as he saw them, were two results
of a single march to freedom that begin with Americans at home
fighting a British king and continued with a man named King fighting
to make America the home he knew it could be.

But Hathaway did not view black history as merely a struggle for civil
rights. His sculptures reflect a panorama of historical achievement
in law, politics, theology, education, business, engineering, and
science.

Nor was he a fiery and eloquent orator like his hero Frederick
Douglass.

Rather, Isaac Hathaway "was a man of few words," Fred Gray later
recalled. "He was a profound man who went about doing his work very
quietly," sharing an artistic vision of black America and white
America, flowing together through history on a single river of time.

Pix and more about Isaac Hathaway