Biography |
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Romare Bearden (1911–1988)Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the seat of Mecklenburg County, on September 2, 1911, Romare Bearden grew up in a middle-class African-American family. His parents Bessye and Howard were both college-educated, and it was expected that Romare would achieve success in life. About 1914, his family joined the Great Migration of southern blacks to points north and west. In the early twentieth century, jim crow laws kept many blacks from voting and from equal access to jobs, education, health care, business, land, and more. Like many southern black families, the Beardens settled in the Harlem section of New York City. Romare would call New York home for the rest of his life.In the 1920s, Harlem was a rich and vibrant center of cultural and intellectual growth and the focal point of African-American culture. Romare's mother was the New York editor of the Chicago Defender, a widely read African-American weekly newspaper, and became a prominent social and political figure in Harlem. |
Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and other
well-known artists, writers, and musicians were frequent visitors to
the Bearden family home. Such social and intellectual gatherings would
become a mainstay in Romare's life. Also, his encounters with these legendary
talents must have fostered his lifelong interest in jazz and literature. Throughout his childhood, Bearden spent time away from Harlem, staying most often with relatives in Mecklenburg County and Pittsburgh. His memory of these experiences, as well as African-American cultural history, would become the subjects of many of his works. Trains, roosters, cats, landscapes, barns, and shingled shacks reflected the rural landscape of his early childhood and summer vacations. Scenes of his grandparents' boardinghouse, bellowing steel mills, and African-American mill workers recalled his Pittsburgh memories. |
"From far off some people that I have seen and
remembered have come into the landscape… Sometimes the mind
relives things very clearly for us. Often you have no choice in
dealing with this kind of sensation, things are just there… There
are roads out of the secret places within us along which we all must
move as we go to touch others."
Bearden family photograph. Estate of Romare Bearden, courtesy
of the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York
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