ABSTRACT
The African-American spirituals Albert Barnes heard at a religious revival awash in feeling led him years later to another art form—the construction of a collection of magnificent paintings and sculpture. Contemporary analysts of the vernacular tradition of black expression have described “the much needed psyche escape from the workaday world” that spirituals offered African Americans. One of the first American pharmaceutical firms to develop therapeutic agents through laboratory science, H. K. Mulford was an early proponent of hospital-based drug trials and maintained close ties to the mainstream medical community. Residential segregation had long been the rule, and a state law enacted in 1854 required separate schools for black children in districts where there were more than twenty African-American pupils. African Americans who found jobs tended to be employed in outdoor occupations such as street cleaning and garbage collecting or as laborers handling grease and tallow, materials shunned by those with greater options.
