A discovery of self; Ignorance of black history fuels artist's works

For more than half of his life, Ed Dwight Jr. would readily admit that he would be the last Black person on earth who should be commissioned for a work of art representing Black history.

"I didn't know who Harriet Tubman was until I was 40-years-old," said Dwight, 72.

Yet today, Dwight's powerful and evocative sculptures of historical African American people and themes are known worldwide. His works are on display at the Smithsonian Museum, and he has created more than 80 monuments across the country, including the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Denver's City Park, and the Alex Haley -- Kunta Kinte Memorial in Annapolis, Md.

He can now add the Harold Washington statue that now stands on the corner of 47th Street and King Drive in Chicago's historic Bronzeville community, which was unveiled on Tuesday.

What is even more surprising about Dwight's personal journey through Black history is that he is an important historical fact: he was the first African American in the country's infant astronaut training program in 1962.

Even with that historical footnote, you have to wonder how this well-educated and earthy man could have missed a whole encyclopedia of Black history until middle age.

The story begins just outside Kansas City, Kan., in 1933.

Ed Dwight Jr. was the second of the four children born to Ed and Georgia Baker Dwight. Dwight Jr. was the only son.

Though the family lived in a rural area, Dwight Sr. was a second baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Baseball League. While he was on the road throughout the year, Georgia was left with the child-rearing duties.

Dwight's father was very dark-skinned; his mother was of Austrian descent.

"She looked white," Dwight said. "But I'm sure there was someone in the woodpile there," he said with a laugh.

Dwight's says his mother sheltered her only son from much of the world. A devout Catholic, she took Dwight with her to church everyday, and started his formal schooling when he was 2-years-old.

While he had some contact with his father's relatives, he spent much of his youth around his mother.

"She was brilliant," Dwight fondly recalls. "She taught me to read before I could walk and got a library card for me when I was five."

He was a voracious reader, but his reading selections didn't include Black history. "I just didn't know," he said.

"My mother raised me to think of myself as a citizen of the entire universe, not a racial one."

Georgia also instilled in her son a love of the stars and planets through astronomy. His fondness for airplanes and flying came about because the family lived near Fairfax airport in Kansas City.

"My mother would tell me stories about where the planes went, and I was fascinated because after they took off, they always disappeared," he said.

After high school, Dwight parlayed his fascination with airplanes into a career in the Air Force in the early 50s. After nine years and a promotion to the rank of captain, Dwight was appointed to the astronaut training program by the John F. Kennedy administration in 1962.

Dwight, now married, completed the four-year program but never made a space flight. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Dwight said the atmosphere at the training school "really got ugly and racist."

After leaving the program, he moved his children to New Mexico and later to Colorado.

He worked there in real estate, and for IBM and as an engineer. In 1977, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona at the age of 45.

While he had painted since childhood, it wasn't until 1974, when George Brown, the first Black lieutenant governor of Colorado, commissioned him to create a piece of art for the state capitol building. Dwight read books on sculpture and a new career was born. Brown liked the work so much he asked Dwight to create a series on the Buffalo Soldiers.

Knowing nothing about them, he started reading about the famous regiment, and then moved on to slavery and other aspects of Black history.

"I got pissed," Dwight said, mainly because he was an educated man who had never been taught Black history in schools.

Dwight's late discovery of the struggles and richness of Black history has borne fruit in his astonishing sculptures.

He has captured the musical genius of jazz greats Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, in a sometimes whimsical style. His elongated pieces of Africans are set off with shell earrings. And you can almost hear the ivories being tickled in his floating piano keyboard piece.

Many of these pieces were on display this week at the Harold Washington Cultural Center, where a reception was hosted in his honor.

After Mayor Richard Daley asked Alderman Dorothy Tillman (D-3rd) Ward to select Dwight, she initially refused, saying she didn't want an "Oreo sandwich" doing a statue of the city's first Black mayor.

Dwight laughs at her description, but admitted he fell into the category, and was thus schooled by Tillman on Washington and African Americans in Chicago.

He said before he began to work on the piece, he immersed himself in Washington's storied political life.

"I had to become Harold Washington," he said. "I had to feel him."

Dwight says this is often the game plan he uses when working on a sculpture of a figure.

"I have to become my subjects, to get inside their skins in order to flesh them out in a sculpture," Dwight said.

The 20-foot statue of Washington, the only one in the city, portrays the late mayor in a standing position, holding a rolled up newspaper in his right hand. Dwight said he came up with the pose after looking at "some killer pictures," one of which was a silhouette of him leaning on a chair. Dwight knew that was the one that captured the essence of Washington. "So, I just took his arms off the chair," said Dwight. "And I played up some of his characteristics, so here he is."

The Colorado-based sculptor said he actually helped Tillman name the center, which at one time was going to be named after singer Lou Rawls, a Chicago native.

"She'd been talking about Harold Washington, Harold Washington...I said, why not name the thing after him and put a sculpture of him in there?" Dwight asked.

"Then it really hit her about doing it this way."

The sculpture of Washington was originally planned for the lobby of the HWCC. But less than two weeks ago, as Dwight was arranging to deliver the piece, the plan changed.

"(Tillman) said, 'Ed, I want that sculpture outdoors,'" Dwight recalled. "God, I was glad she said that."

The change in the plan forced a rush of activity to create an outdoor base for the statue, and the job was finished just in time for Wednesday's unveiling.

Dwight said that it normally requires about eight to 12 months to create a work like the Washington statue. But it was done in record time.

"It happened really fast, mainly because there wasn't much funding for it," said Dwight, who Tillman said virtually did the statue for free. "I did this in about two months."

Not a bad body of work for a man from Kansas who came to learn of his "Black family history" so late in life.

Article copyright REAL TIMES Inc.

Photograph (Ed Dwight, Jr.)