Black History
Thelma Johnson Streat 1912—1959
A
very influential multidiscipli-
nary painter, Thelma Johnson
Streat combined fine arts with
dance and performance. Born in Yaki-
ma, Wash., in 1912, Streat moved to
Portland, Ore., as a child and studied at
the prestigious Portland Museum Art
School in the 1930s.
During the early parts of that
decade, Streat made a name for
herself with her canvas paintings,
particularly “Rabbit Man,” which
was purchased by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York during
the early 1940s.
But soon Streat became even
more famous for her murals. A
Works Progress Administration
artist during the Great Depression,
producing
canvases
about
African-American history and civil
rights, Streat’s mural, “Death of a
Black Sailor,” painted in 1943, report-
edly earned her threats from the Ku
Klux Klan.
One of the lucky few painters who
achieved renown in her lifetime, Streat
traveled all over the world and even
worked with Mexican art icon Diego
Rivera; Rivera’s style influenced
Streat’s own, as did her study of
indigenous art of the Haida Indians.
Streat’s mural, ‘Death of
a Black Sailor,’ painted in
1943, reportedly earned
her threats from the Ku
Klux Klan
In 1945 Streat relocated to Chicago
where she taught art to children; she
also had several major shows in Chica-
go and New York during this time. By
1947, she was one of only a handful of
Black artists with major New York art
openings under her belt.
Her work was collected by Queen
Elizabeth of England, Diego Rivera,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Fanny Brice, and
many rich and influential collectors all
over the world.
She died at age 47, in Hawaii,
where she and her second husband,
Edgar Klein, established a children’s
art project working with community
youth.
Today you can see examples of
Streat’s paintings at the Tyler Fine
Art Gallery in St. Louis, Mo.,
including her pencil and ink portrait
of opera singer Marian Anderson,
the 1938 pastel on paper portrait of
Thelma Bushnell, her pencil and ink
drawings for the mural series “The
Negro and Professional Life,” and
many Diego Rivera inspired paintings
depicting Northwest and Hawaiian
indigenous cultural figures.
Thelma Johnson Streat
Books: ‘American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights’
and white youngsters has been codified by the culture as
reflected in literature, art, music and minstrelsy.
For example, in a discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pub-
lished in 1852, she points out how the Caucasian heroine
Eva was the “emblematic child-angel,” pale, pious and
cloaked in innocence. By
contrast, her black coun-
terpart,
Topsy,
was
B OOK
portrayed as the polar
opposite, as having been
“hardened and made
wicked” by slavery.
Sadly, such characteriza-
tions survived into the
20th Century, as typified
in film by the recently-
deceased Shirley Temple, the bright-eyed, dimpled icon
who often played the naive waif opposite relatively-world-
ly wise black children and adults alike, most notably, Bill
“Bojangles” Robinson. In 2006, Dakota Fanning, the reign-
ing blonde child actress, was asked to present Temple with
a Lifetime Achievement Award as the screen legend’s heir
apparent.
It is important to note that Dakota carried a Shirley Tem-
ple doll she inherited onstage, stating, “My mom loved her,
I love her, and I know
someday, my daughter
will, too.” The problem is
R EVIEW
that the effort to maintain
the sentimental image of
the chaste white child con-
tinues to come at the
expense of black ones who
by Robin Bernstein end-up subtly portrayed as
deserving of suspicion,
marginalization, criminal-
ization and second-class status.
Telling traditional depictions of black and white tykes
serving as chilling proof that the post-racial utopia is yet to
be realized in American society.
Racial Innocence:
Performing American Childhood
from Slavery to Civil Rights
By Kam Williams
Special To The Skanner News
“Whiteness… derives power from its status as an
unmarked category… [It] never has to acknowledge its
role as an organizing principle in social and cultural
relations. This silence about itself is… the primary pre-
rogative of whiteness, at once its grand scheme and
deep cover.
Childhood, I argue throughout this book, is a primary
material in the historical construction of that cover.
Childhood innocence—itself raced white—secured the
unmarked status of whiteness, and the power derived
from that status. ”
— Excerpted from the Introduction (page 7-8)
W
hy is innocence automatically attributed to white
children in the U.S. while black kids are just as
easily presumed to be malevolent, almost as if
good and evil are color-coded in each group’s DNA? That
is the question explored by Robin Bernstein in “Racial
Innocence,” an annotated, historical opus in search of an
explanation for the lingering discrepancy.
The author, a Professor of African-American and
Women’s Studies at Harvard University, blames a deep-
rooted racism which can be traced all the way back to
slavery. She suggests that the divergent attitude about black
February 19, 2014 The Portland Skanner ~ Black History Edition Page 5