Breaking Racial Barriers: African Americans in the Harmon Foundation Collection

The exhibition Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin premiered in 1944 at the Smithsonian Institution and subsequently toured the United States for ten years. The purpose of the show, as conceived by its patron, New York's Harmon Foundation, was to recognize and promote the significant achievements of African Americans, encourage racial tolerance among white Americans, and eradicate segregation. In a radical innovation, the foundation commissioned both a black and a white artist, Laura Wheeler Waring and Betsy Graves Reyneau, to create the exhibition's portraits of such notables as Thurgood Marshall, Joe Louis, and Marian Anderson. Breaking Racial Barriers catalogs the 1997 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. A partial reconstruction of the Harmon Foundation's original exhibition, it includes forty-one portraits reproduced in full color, accompanied by biographical text.