The Progress of the Negro Race

By Daniel Gillette Olney, a terra cotta frieze, Langston Terrace Dwellings, 21st Street and Benning Road N.E. Washington DC.

Background

Wikipedia; “Langston Terrace was the first federally funded housing project in Washington, D.C., and one of the first four in the United States.[2] It was part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration and was named in honor of John Mercer Langston, a 19th-century American abolitionist and attorney who founded Howard University Law School, and served as a U.S. congressman from Virginia. The project cost the government $1.8 million and rooms were available for $6 per month or $4.50 per month without utilities.[3] The complex was co-designed by Bauhaus-trained Washington architect Hilyard Robinson and Los Angeles-based architect Paul Revere Williams in the International Style.[4][5] The site planning and landscape design were completed by landscape architect David Williston.[6] Unlike Techwood Homes, the first public housing project in the U.S., Langston was open to African American families.” 

Daniel Gilette Olney, a white artist, was commissioned to create this frieze at Langston  Terrace Dwellings, one of the first Federally supported housing projects for African Americans.

Visual description

The overall frieze, flanking and over and archway in the building, consists of at six elements or groupings, arrayed in what may be roughly chronological sequence. From the bottom left, moving clockwise, these are:  

• In the section of the frieze depicting the history of agricultural workers, evidently in slavery and perhaps in the sharecropping er: six Black figures are shown bent over, facing  the stalks of a large plant, possibly a cotton plant.

• Four figures in the uppe left , perhaps at the moment of Emancipation. A woman on the right inclines her head down, looking into the past, down towards the enslaved grouping.The tallest figure, a male, stands erect, his hand extended towards the three central groupings over the archway, which all seem to depict family groupings in freedom. He thus seems to pointing  the way forward into the future 

• The third grouping is shown gathered around a small plant, evidently nurturing growth on their own land.

• In the central group, over the archway, a group is gathered around a man hewing wood with a saw, presumably building the family’s first home

• A proud father holds his growing song, as the mother reclines to the side

• On the far right wall, a mother with two small children grasping her legs. All three figures  lift their eyes towards the sky

Interpretive notes

Note the pivotal imagery of the family, gender, and labor in the symbolic progression of the frieze. In all of the first five groupings, a male figure predominates, first in slavery and then as the family, and the Race, move towards self-improvement.  It is interesting to note in this light that the stand alone grouping to the far left, only has anadult mother, and no father, perhaps to emphasize the abiding role of Black women in supporting the Race. 

It should be noted that consistent with the emphasis on vocational and technical training most associated with Booker T Washington, the emancipated figures are engaged in manual labor, planting crops and sawing wood. There are no indications of them reading, writing, or engaging in non-manual pursuits. 

Black history here starts with enslaved labor; there are no signs of the Middle Passage or the direct horrors of slavery, such as physical terror or slave auctions. 

Prompts for Closer Looking

• It would be interesting to compare The Progress of the Negro Race with  the relief sequence in *Our Mother of Africa Chapel,” by Ed Dwight (National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception), which begins with the violence of the slavery era and culminates with a prayerful Black family.  How are these sequences similar and different? 

• Another interesting comparison would be with James Weldon Johnson’s lyrics for  “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (The Black National Anthem): In what ways does the ‘plot’ of the frieze conform or differ from the sequence of Black history outlined in Johnson’s famous song?

• Reflect on the depictions of men, women, and children in the various groupings of the frieze.  What is implied here about gender and generation in Black history?

• Viewers may wish to compare the depiction in the first grouping of enslaved agricultural workers, their backs all bent over, with that in such works as Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, who contrasts the reactions of two Black agricultural workers. One woman in the Homer painting is bent over and the other lifts herself up, her eyes to the distant horizon.

  
  

  

  Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, 1876.

• It would also be interesting to compare the moment of Emancipation in the second grouping of the frieze with the depiction in Thomas Ball of the newly freed, kneeling man in the Emancipation Memorial by Thomas Ball in Lincoln Park.. 

  
  
  
  

  Learning Resources

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gillette_Olney 

  
  

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Terrace_Dwellings

  
  

  https://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!325491!0