Georgette Seabrooke Powell – “And the Wall Yields Testimony”

“And the Wall Yields Testimony” – Georgette Seabrooke Powell (August 2, 1916 – December 27, 2011)

Something pulled me to the wall. Maybe it was the mural’s muted but still intense colors. Perhaps it was life’s dance caught in full flower and promise as children played sidewalk games near a woman leaning out her window to taste life on the street below. A cameo of scrubbed teens, the pride of tomorrow, harmonized in a church pew. A few vignettes away, an agile male star, reminiscent of Cab Calloway, accompanied by gossamer-dressed caramel chorines, delighted an adoring, soigne crowd.

The name on the plaque in the hall was one I had never heard before, and it belonged to a woman, Georgette Seabrook. What I learned was that Seabrooke was the youngest of four master artists commissioned to paint murals for Harlem Hospital in the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.

I had just given a talk upstairs on the evolution of Harlem theatre in the Herbert Cave Auditorium surrounded by murals created by the other three master artists, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden’s older cousin, whose bow-tied demeanor reflects his refined, upper middle-class aspirations; Atlanta-born Vertis Hayes, represented by eight murals entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness,” showing the progress of an African Diasporic people seen as democratic rejects but nevertheless adamantly and consistently choosing to live their happiness birthright; and Sicily-born Alexander Crimi, who recalled the Harlem Hospital doctors hating and reviling the artists, branding them free-loaders and dole collectors.

Georgette Seabrooke, the creator of Recreation in Harlem, was not only the youngest of the four. She was the only woman. When tapped, in 1937, to be one of the four master artists, she was a student at Cooper Union, where she had won a silver medal for the highest merit the year before. But when it came time for her to graduate, however, Cooper withheld her degree, citing her failure to satisfactorily complete course requirements. And yet none of her stellar professional experiences were credited.

Her diploma might have been withheld because of a controversy that arose in conjunction with the murals. Alston and Hayes, along with Seabrooke, were faulted for highlighting darker faces in their work. The hospital administration argued that the Harlem population was subject to change and it was wrong to include representations of the then current demographic so prominently in the murals. Seabrook complied with the letter of the complaint, including eight faces without melanin in her mural but turning several such faces away from the viewer. Technically, they were present but their depiction was, at best, on the edge of compliance. Crimi’s mural included only white faces. Alston, Hayes, and Seabrook, all benefiting from the Migration, argued all the way to the legal end, and ended up winning.

Decades later, Cooper relented, finally granting Seabrooke her degree at the end of the 20^th century. By then, she had studied theater design at Fordham and earned a baccalaureate from Howard University when she was seventy-three years old, the widowed mother of three talented and achieving offspring, still continuing to create until her hands were no longer able to obey her desire. Always an activist and an artist, Seabrooke, aka Mrs. Powell, relocated to the nation’s capital with her doctor husband, devoting the rest of her life looking out for the artistic aspirations of a younger generation and ministering, through art, to the mental health needs of the community in the southern city she considered home.