Studs Terkel, Jacob Lawrence and Coming of Age

Activist, author, and great talker Studs Terkel would have been 97 on May 16th, had he not signed off forever this past Halloween. Studs was born in New York with a given name of Louis; he came to Chicago when he was eight years old with his parents and made the city his home base for the rest of his life.

Studs had a long-running radio show on Chicago’s WFMT, on which he did many an interview in his characteristic raspy voice. Terkel also wrote several books, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and often used the oral history format in order to keep the full power of a person’s words and experiences.

In Terkel’s Coming of Age, he conducted interviews with a wide range of older Americans to give a collective portrait of how they felt about growing older, and what they had witnessed in their particular slice of the 20th century. One of the interviews in Coming of Age is with Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), a talented and prolific African-American artist who created such great works as the Migration of the Negro series, as well as portraits of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and another series detailing the life of abolitionist John Brown.

Since May is Older Americans Month, and since Studs sadly isn’t around to remind us about his book, I thought that an excerpt from Jacob Lawrence’s interview would be apropos:

How I became an artist? In elementary school, we were given crayons, poster paint, and were encouraged to put down color. In the great 1930s, I heard stories from older people…[t]hey’d talk about Marcus Garvey, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. I’d walk the streets of Harlem and hear corner orators talk about these people. It inspired me. I realized I couldn’t tell their lives in one story, so I painted a series of their lives....

When I was a youngster growing up, a person would never attack an older person, a weaker person, because of the fear of God. Now an older person is vulnerable because of something lost, a sense of morality, of ethics…I’m not pessimistic. I think about these things. I talk about them. I feel as long as there’s one person or two people who are aware of the quality, of our capacity to think and feel, we’re on pretty sound ground. I hope so.

From Coming of Age, Studs Terkel (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)