Unity in Scottsboro: an Interview with Don Howard
The Critical Fish editor Barnaby Haran interviews caricature artist Don Howard about his mural depiction of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ story, which was recently installed in Scottsboro, Alabama.
The Scottsboro case is one of the pivotal stories in the history of racial injustice in the United States of America. It began on March 25th 1931 with a fight on a freight train cutting through northern Alabama, between two groups of hoboes, white and black respectively. Complaints from the defeated white cohort, forcibly ejected from the train, led to the sheriff of Paint Rock, Alabama ordering the vehicle to stop. His posse of deputies seized nine of the black travellers for questioning. Aged between thirteen and nineteen, they were heading to Memphis, Tennessee to find work (and consisted of two separate groups unknown to each other, many of whom were not involved in the fight). Shortly afterwards, police discovered that two white hoboes from the train were actually women dressed in men’s clothing. The women claimed that the nine youths had raped them on the train, probably to divert attention from their own vagrancy and impropriety infringements. The police transported the accused to Jackson County Jail in nearby Scottsboro, where a furious lynch mob gathered via the ‘mountain telegraph’, allayed only by the intervention of the local sheriff and the arrival of the Alabama National Guard later that evening. Nevertheless, in the ensuing weeks eight of the nine received death sentences (the exception was thirteen year old Roy Wright). A complex process of overturned judgments, appeals, and retrials carried on for years, until the release of the last of the so-called ‘Scottsboro Boys’ in 1950. The state of Alabama eventually pardoned all nine—in most cases posthumously—though, needless to say, the Scottsboro case had ruined their young lives.
Throughout the years of their incarceration, a massive international publicity campaign on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys attracted representations by writers, playwrights, poets, and artists. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird took inspiration from the trials. More recently there have been a novel and a musical about the story. The ninetieth anniversary of the arrest, March 25th 2021, sees the unveiling of a new mural picturing the Scottsboro Boys, in an unexpected yet immensely significant location—in Scottsboro, on a wall opposite the courthouse in which Judge A.E. Hawkins sentenced eight of them to die in the electric chair at Kilby Prison. Scottsboro City Council hired Don Howard, a successful caricature artist from nearby Huntsville, who once worked at Disney, to create a mural marking the occasion, including the proclamation ‘a unified find’ with a view to fostering civic pride by confronting, rather than ignoring, this infamous case.
He initially painted the scene on an illustration board measuring twenty by forty inches, with high quality watercolour paints. The image was then scanned and printed on adhesive vinyl at the larger scale of twelve by twenty feet, whereafter Howard and his colleagues mounted the mural on a specially designed structure. Though the mural bears Howard’s distinctive style, I glean traces of murals from the history of public art in America: the New Deal art projects decorating schools, hospitals, and government buildings (including the great African American painter Charles White), the regional populist schemes of John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton (whose own caricatural forms of black people provoked angry responses in some quarters), the epic cycles of the Mexicans Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros in the United States, as well as more recent examples, most notably Paul Deo’s ‘Planet Harlem’ (2012).
The case resonated with Howard as a black teenager coming of age in an era when the Civil Rights movement was growing in strength, and speaks to him again in this current moment, when the legacies of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation and violence remain sadly present. Witnessing his impressive abilities as a caricature artist, Howard’s mural encapsulates the power of public art to confront the traumas of the past and generate new dialogues, respectfully and meaningfully. Howard shows the Scottsboro Boys above three important figures in the story (left to right: Judge Edwin Horton, who in 1933 enabled retrials that led to their freedom, their charismatic New York lawyer Sam Liebowitz, hired by the controversial Communist group International Labor Defense, and Sheriff Matt Wann, who stood up against the lynch mob). Below them, the train frames a tableau juxtaposing past and present scenes—the arrest of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 and a prayer walk held in the town in June 2020—to address these events of ninety years ago and America’s ongoing conflicts with the message of ‘unity’.
BH: I want to start with a few questions about your back story. When did you decide to become an artist? On your website profile you talk about art supplies being a brown paper bag. It sounds like you didn’t have that much equipment to hand when you were young.
DH: I come from a very large family and grew up during the time when all the supermarkets were using brown paper bags. There was no money for conventional art supplies, so I found that if I unfolded the bags and used an iron to take out some of the creases, I would have a pretty big canvas. My mother was very supportive of what I did and would buy me giant boxes of crayons. I recall being enamoured with dinosaurs and had these bigger than life dinosaurs on my wall. It was kind of neat. All my friends used to come by to see them. Being an artist was all I ever wanted to be.
BH: You started out on a football scholarship at Hampton University in Virginia (graduating in 1970). And were you carrying on doing art at the time?
DH: Oh yes, I majored in art at Hampton. It was very difficult because my hands would get stepped on or jammed during practice, and I still had to compete with some very talented people majoring in art at Hampton. At that time Hampton had the reputation of having the best art department of any of the traditionally black colleges. One of the reasons I chose Hampton was because I had been in integrated schools all my life and the opportunity to go to a ‘black school’ was very interesting to me. I didn’t want to attend a larger white university where there were social limitations. The “starving artist” myth that existed did not deter me – I knew that some people were making a living from art so why not me? From the time I started drawing on paper bags, through elementary and secondary school and even college, I knew that being an artist was going to be my primary pursuit in life.
BH: And you started making a living with Disney.
DH: I started working for Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, CA right out of college [from 1974-1984]. Even though it’s been over 30 years since I left Disney, that’s still the biggest thing on my resume. And that will get me five minutes with just about anybody.
BH: Well, it’s a very impressive thing to have on a resume. So, were you hand painting?
DH: I wasn’t the top designer on anything because there were guys that had been there forever. But there was so much other stuff to be done—for instance, I was known for being able to “cute up” a character. They would take the initial drawing and turn it over to the ‘king of cute’. I also did a lot of background painting, which I still enjoy. I probably would have retired from Disney if my mother hadn’t got terminally ill. I took a sabbatical from Disney to be with my family and when my mother passed a year later, I decided to make Huntsville, AL my home. Shortly thereafter I started Don Howard Studios.
BH: How did you come to caricature?
DH: I used to do caricatures when I was in high school. They were cute but I decided to really professionalise them and to build a product. I look at my individual drawings not only as a piece of art but a product that can be reprinted and shipped all over the world—and that’s basically the way my wife and I run Don Howard Studios.
BH: You want the works to be seen as fine art as well, something you would go to a gallery to see.
DH: We have had two or three gallery shows that have been very well-received. Part of it is because of the familiarity of the subject matter and part of it is because we have placed the caricature on a level to where people will accept it as fine art. Most times when you mention the word caricature, they are either thinking from a journalistic standpoint or an amusement park caricature. You have to understand that I’m living in one of the most conservative areas of the country. When you mention that you are an artist, the first thing that pops into their minds is that you just sit around with oil paint and do subject matter that they are familiar with (landscapes and portraiture). I also have a portrait following, but we’re finding that the caricature is the bucket that carries our water.
BH: I think the familiarity and the accessibility of caricature can take away some of the more potentially pompous aspects of art, if you will.
DH: Well said, because that’s a feeling that I have always had. What I have seen is that it has expanded the market of art to where in some of the showings that we have had, age range can go from 8 to 80. That’s a good feeling, so it’s more inclusive. I believe that the art of caricature is probably the oldest form of art. When you look at cave paintings in France and other places, or petroglyphs or whatever, these weren’t realistic, so they were basically a caricature. They didn’t have photographs to reference. They generally expressed particular things that stuck out in their minds and exaggerated them and that to me is a caricature. A caricature is about your ability to exaggerate carefully and still keep a likeness. I think that the likeness is the most important part of my caricatures. How I ‘caricature things’ would be basically from a level of proportion—I do one third head, one third torso, and one third arms and legs. And that right there is inherently funny. I do exaggerate very, very carefully those areas that I want to really show.
BH: Just to move to the mural, you juxtapose the arrest of the Scottsboro Boys coming out of the train with a contemporary unity march.
DH: As far as I was concerned, the boys coming off the train was the pivotal moment in the mural. These were fourteen, sixteen, and nineteen-year-old boys who were just trying to find work. Being taken from the train must have been a traumatic moment for them since lynching of black males in the Jim Crow South was common.
BH: It is so interesting to include the masks in the unity march.
DH: Yes, exactly. It is the kind of piece that you would look at say ‘hey, we are marching towards the future’, and basically, that’s the kind of feeling that we wanted. I definitely wanted to include the masks because, let’s face it, this is the biggest story that we are going to live through for some time. Even the restrictions associated with the pandemic didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the participants in the prayer walk whose goal was to bring peace and unity to Scottsboro.
BH: How did the mural project come about?
DH: I have a good reputation in the area and a colleague, who currently lives in Scottsboro and was formerly on the City Council, contacted me. He told me about the Prayer Walk for Unity they had and now they wanted to do something that would highlight that event as well as shine a light on what happened to the Scottsboro Boys.
BH: Art can help to reshape the identity of a place, not by covering over the past, but by actually engaging with it.
DH: Absolutely, the mural is located right across from the county courthouse where the Scottsboro Boys trial was held. It is also very symbolic that this mural is on the wall of the main law firm in the area.
BH: When you were doing the mural, did you get comments from people in the street?
DH: It took approximately four hours to hang the mural so it was a complete surprise to the people. The process of painting a mural of this size on a wall would have taken approximately two months. I drew it on illustration board and it was then scanned and printed on very high-tech vinyl (the same stuff they use to wrap cars with). Prior to installation, we had a hanging system designed and put on the building to accommodate the mural.
BH: When you were doing the caricatures of the faces, what were you wanting to get over? Caricature can be more comedy based, but obviously this is a serious story, and what strikes me is how you are able to balance that so well.
DH: I didn’t want to put nine frowning, dejected, bigger than life black boys hovering over their town. My goal was to give them a pleasant demeanour, circumstances notwithstanding. I wanted to make them kind of predominant, so that you could actually see the expressions. Keep in mind that I am sure that there is a faction in the city who doesn’t want this mural up.
BH: And you have said that you were about fourteen when you first heard about this case.
DH: It affected me dramatically at the time. I didn’t know that I would be included in the story like this in later years. When I found they wanted me to create the artwork for the mural, I felt it was a gift from God, because this is something that has always been in the back of my mind, since I was fourteen.
BH: Have you had reactions from people in Scottsboro?
DH: I think they’re very proud of themselves, and I am very proud of them too. If you think about it, something like this just doesn’t happen. I think they love the work because it’s the kind of piece that you would look at and say ‘hey, we are marching towards the future’. And basically, that’s the kind of feeling we wanted.
BH: I think that comes over. It’s really interesting to see that you could make a work that engages with this quite horrible story, but actually make it conciliatory.
DH: As hard as I tried to convey that in the mural, I know we still have a big problem in this country. The novelty of me being a black artist has been a benefit to me, but I would be less than honest to say that we have dealt with the question of racism, simply because nobody will want to talk about it. You go to an interview and you didn’t get the job and then you wonder if it’s because you’re black. Or you do something else and the cops stop you. You are immediately afraid.
BH: And often when people do want to talk about it, the discussion can be very antagonistic. It’s something that is happening here with arguments around the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, one of the city fathers involved in the slave trade. There were people saying that protestors were vandalizing the statue to rewrite history. Yet it might have been useful to acknowledge his past, rather than pretend it didn’t happen.
DH: That’s the same question that we are having here in the U.S. regarding the Civil War heroes. They want to remove certain monuments and statues, and with the same recurring theme: ‘well, you are trying to rewrite history’. It’s a situation where you have to respect the fact that this is a historical champion to a certain element. Do you deny them the right to do that? We just don’t believe they should be in public places like courthouses and other official government agencies. It’s like putting a statue of Mussolini or Hitler in a public place in London.
BH: One of the things I get from your mural is that it doesn’t make an angry argument.
DH: I am so glad that you said that because it was meant as an historical feature without a lot of the pain involved.
BH: The graphic representations made at the time, in the 1930s, almost always make the Scottsboro Boys look totally dejected to convey how much they are victims, as to show them smiling would work against that argument.
DH: I didn’t want to make them just out and out grinning, but I did want to start from the historical photos of them to where it would be more acceptable. They said they had never seen photographs of the Scottsboro Boys with those kinds of benign expressions. I explained that I had to adapt them to fit the scene in which I was putting them in, which was angelic. We are very proud of the piece. We are pleased with the results and I think it can be a piece that will at least stir up some conversation. I think it will be beneficial to people on both sides of the railroad tracks, in a sense.
BH: What a brilliant expression to sum up the image, and so appropriate for what’s shown in the picture.
Thanks to Don and Dorothy Howard for taking time out of their working day to speak with me, for addressing email queries, and generously providing these photographs.
Dr Barnaby Haran is a Senior Lecturer in American Arts at University of Hull. He is writing articles about the uses of photography in the Scottsboro case as part of a research project funded by a British Academy Small Grant on ‘Representing the Scottsboro Boys: Labor Defender and the Racial Politics of Radical Photography’.
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