Jacob Lawrence’s Paintings of John Brown Show That Failure is Not The End
Jacob Lawrence, No. 21 After John Brown's capture, he was put to trial for his life in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). From the series The Legend of John Brown (1977). Part of Washington's State Art Collection. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Washington State Arts Commission. Screen print on paper, 25 7/8 inches x 20 inches. This artwork was acquired by the Washington State Arts Commission in partnership with Departments of Natural Resources and Labor and Industries. It is located at University of Washington.
© 2024 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Foredoomed to fail in all but the prophetic task?
- Robert Hayden
It’s only on the other side of folks who are interested in social transformation and change where failure is not supposed to be spoken about or a sign that you’re horrible or that your ideas don’t have merit.
- Mariame Kaba
In life, failure is always an option. However, failure is not synonymous with the end.
The Harlem-raised, Seattle-based artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) explored the relationship between freedom and failure in his paintings. There were times where Lawrence leaned heavily in the direction of a triumphant freedom, depicting recognizable heroes such as the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouveture, underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, and civil rights advocate Fredrick Douglass. But Lawrence also sought to depict the protracted struggle for freedom hidden in the quotidian, focusing on the lives of workers, migrants, and Black and brown communities in America. “I don’t think that struggle has to be overly dramatic,” Lawrence once said, “it can be a creative kind of a thing. It can be a search. It can be very quiet.”
Architecture critic for The New York Times Michael Kimmelman, observes that Lawrence “pursued a middle path” between abstractionism and social realism in his paintings. Lawrence credited his unique style–sometimes called dynamic cubism–to the shapes and colors he saw growing up in Harlem. While his colors are vibrant, and his shapes dynamic, it is ultimately the stories about the history of the United States that add a third dimension to his work. The history that Lawrence portrays in his paintings invites viewers to carry within themselves the concomitant realities of failure and freedom. Here enters Lawrence’s series, painted in 1941, The Legend of John Brown.
John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859 for treason, murder, and inciting enslaved people to rebel. Brown was a white man. He was a Christian, convinced he’d been given a divine mandate to abolish American slavery. He was a debtor most of his life, unable to succeed in various trades and business ventures. He was a guerrilla fighter, unafraid to terrorize slaveowners and their sympathizers. But most importantly, Brown was a man of failure. The raid on Harpers Ferry–the unsuccessful plot to secure the town’s armory, arsenal, and rifle factory which could then be used to aid Brown and his men in freeing enslaved people in the South–is the epitome of failure. Slavery did not end, Brown lost men, and among them were two of his sons. God did not smote Pharaoh and while Brown may have imagined himself as Moses, he parted neither of the rivers surrounding the town.
Why did Lawrence think to dedicate 22 prints to the life and times of such a failure? About the subjects he painted, Lawrence once said, “If we examine the figures throughout history, of any period or any country, there is this element of struggle that goes on which adds further quality and dimension to a life.” In my view, Lawrence was able to illuminate this quality and dimension of life in his paintings of the struggling John Brown.
The penultimate image in the series, No. 21, is the one I carry with me everywhere I go. Here we see Brown in prison. The background is a mustard yellow, Brown’s figure takes up almost half of the canvas and he wears a black cloak. His hair is disheveled and black, save for a few prominent white streaks. His hands are clasped together, and the almost pink color suggests to me that they are clasped too tightly. He has a death grip on a red cross. It seems as though he cannot let it go. Or is it that the cross refuses to let him go? Is he bowed in prayer or is he bowed in defeat? Is there a difference? Ultimately, when I look at Lawrence’s No. 21, I see a man who continued to stay true to his convictions despite impending doom.
Religion scholar Ted A. Smith notes in his book Weird John Brown that “Brown’s execution sparked a spiral of reactions and reactions to reactions that polarized North and South and helped push the nation into [a civil] war.” Brown could not have anticipated the domino effect of his execution, as it led the nation into a war over slavery that would eventually result in its abolishment. Brown’s execution in 1859 was an affirmation that the institution of slavery would exist in perpetuity. But then, just a few years into John Brown’s body moldering in the grave, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863, effectively ending slavery.
I know a lot about failure. I’m a writer, so most of my days are spent submitting pitches and then shaking off the rejections, only to repeat the same process ad infinitum. I live in the United States, a nation built on prisons. I’m a Christian, and no matter what you might think or what other Christians may have told you, Christianity is a religion for cross-carrying losers. As a Christian, I’m also an abolitionist and so I hold the indelicate conviction that the hell of prison and policing must be abolished so that we can put resources toward creating a more just society. A movement being labeled a failure because it does not immediately produce broad political popularity or an immediate platform, rejects the historical reality that the struggle for freedom requires failure.
When I think about carrying on the tradition of John Brown, I think about what it means to work for something that might fail to materialize in my lifetime. I imagine that people told Brown, just as people tell prison and police abolitionists today, that abolishing slavery was politically nonviable. Maybe it is for now. But also, maybe abolitionists today resemble the dynamic figures in one of Lawrence’s paintings: creative, quiet, searching, struggling, and failing toward freedom.
Josiah R. Daniels (he/him) is the associate opinion editor at Sojo.net. He is a native of the southwest suburbs of Chicago but currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. He covers race, religion, and politics. His commentary has appeared on Vox, CNN, and NPR.
