Although African American Romare Bearden is now considered one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, his early work has never received the attention it deserves. This may be because its aggressive political messages contrast too much with his later, less activist, and more mainstream work. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, Bearden contributed some of his most interesting material to the pages of the Crisis, the flagship journal of the NAACP. Under the editorship of the towering African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, the Crisis was a vehicle where black visual artists could advance the cause of equality. As an artist profoundly interested in questions of memory and identity, Bearden had a commitment to the advancement of black equality that went back to the political cartooning he did as a young man attending New York University, a period when he was greatly influenced both by Du Bois and German artist George Grosz, who had fled Nazi Germany, and was working in New York . Du Bois's views on memory and identity and ideas about the role of art in the struggle of African Americans and George Grosz's work on remembrance shaped Bearden's inclinations when he was a young artist.
This paper examines the political cartoons of Romare Bearden, which used images of Nazis and Nazi oppression in the 1930s to highlight the oppression of Black Americans. The use of Klansmen, Nazi symbolism and the comparison of Nazi oppression to racial terrorism in the United States was an effective way to show a lack of support for federal legislation outlawing lynching and other forms of racial terrorism. The images used in the 1930s have reappeared today, in 2020 America under the leadership of Donald Trump. How was this imagery used in the 1930s, and why has it appeared today during the Black Lives Matter movement? We will examine the imagery in the years that lead up to World War Two, and how it is relevant in struggles with Racism and racial oppression, today.
