Hidden Heritage. The roots of Black American painting - ACE210.2

Caption: "The Strong Men Keep A-Coming’ On. The Strong Men Git Stronger." [Quotation from Sterling Brown’s Strong Men.] Night street scene from travelling car. Driver. VO quotes: "I am a negro. Black as the night is black. Black like the depths of my Africa." and then names "Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Fats Waller. Billie Holliday. Langston Hughes. Richard Wright. Aaron Douglas. William H. Johnson." Split screen effect of black cabaret dancer and band. VO continues "Archibald J. Motley Jr. This was the Harlem Renaissance." Car. Montage of cabaret footage, musicians, dancers, etc. Commentary asks how this movement could have happened at a time when black Americans were still being lynched by whites. Driver. VO talks about telling the story of African Americans, going back to the days of the kingdoms of Ife and Benin, a long tradition which can lead to a glorious future. Driver parks car. Exterior Columbia University. Arnold Rampersand, Biographer of Langston Hughes, announces lecture by Professor David Driskell, giving biographical and professional details, particularly an exhibition called "Two Centuries of Black American Art", which he mounted at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art in 1976. Driskell waiting in the wings. Driskell goes to the microphone, slides of African American art works behind him. He talks about Aaron Douglas’s 1934 135th Street (Harlem) Public Library murals, Aspects of Negro Life. Panel One, The Negro in an African Setting, displayed behind him. Other panels; lecture continues over, describing the murals, the social history of the time, and the emergence of a black American identity. Driskell talks about black Americans being asked to confront their African roots.