ABSTRACT
“History must restore what slavery took away”. So wrote Arthur Schomburg, a writer and bibliophile, for the Harlem Issue of the March 1925 Survey Graphic and later published in Alain Locke’s New Negro. He amassed a collection of scholarly books, literature, slave narratives, and art, which he transferred to the New York Public Library in 1926. Three Washington, DC–based African American cultural figures—Freeman Henry Morris Murray, Alain Locke, and James A. Porter —embraced the agenda of earlier public intellectuals and took the next step by writing books that would shape art history. James Smalls, in his recent essay “Freeman Murray and the Art of Social Justice”, builds on Albert Boime’s and Richard J. Powell’s observations. Powell continues by praising Murray for taking on the white establishment’s art writers, such as Henry T. Tuckerman, James Jackson Jarves, Lorado Taft, and Charles Caffin.
