‘I Dream A World’ celebrates the timeless, urgent vision of Black Women

There’s a timelessness to the 14 black-and-white portraits of Black women evenly spaced along the partitions of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The photographs, a part of an exhibit titled “I Dream A World,” draw you in with a precision and resonance that feel custom-made for this moment, regardless that the photos are a long time old, and a few of these women now belong to the ages. It makes it that way more powerful to look into their eyes, and to feel them speak of courage anew.

“Don’t be afraid to feel as indignant or as loving as you may, because if you feel nothing, it’s just death,” reads the quote accompanying the portrait of Lena Horne. The Tony Award-winning actress and singer, the primary African American to sign a long-term contract with a serious movie studio, is as regal and as composed as we remember her, framed by gauzy linens and nestled in pastel cushions. She is dressed all in Black, gazing into the near distance, and the web effect is to amplify her elegance with steadfastness, reminding us of her refusal to lend her beauty and talent to the reductive, stereotypical roles Hollywood had in mind for her.

Lena Horne

Barbara Jordan

Leontyne Price

Maya Angelou

Alice Walker

Courtroom lights play across the long black robes within the portrait of Constance Baker Motley, an NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund lawyer who in 1966 became the primary Black female federal judge. “Something which we predict is inconceivable now isn’t inconceivable in one other decade,” she told us, she Black told us, and her words helped conjure the seat Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson became the primary Black woman to occupy.

The photographs are a part of a 75-portrait collection, “I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Modified America,” first published in 1989 by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Lanker. (The title was taken from a poem by Langston Hughes.) They were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 2019, a present, partially, from Lanker’s widow. The gallery is exhibiting 28 images from the gathering in two installments.

“A lot of the women that were chosen for this installation and that may also appear for the second iteration that’s going to open in February, in the event that they weren’t super well-known back within the ’80s, they at the moment are,” said Ann M. Shumard, senior curator of photographs on the gallery. She cites the portrait of Motley as especially fortuitous. “We selected that portrait for the show before Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the [Supreme] court, so it was similar to, yes! It’s so great that she should cite her as a mentor and someone she had admired and someone she should pattern her aspirations after.”

It’s a testament to the vision of Lanker, who spent two years photographing and interviewing Black women — writers, entertainers, athletes, activists and politicians. The present exhibit includes photos of civil rights activist Rosa Parks, U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, opera luminary Leontyne Price, Leah Chase, “the undisputed ‘Queen of Creole Cuisine.’ ” There’s also actress Beah Richards, who said, “It’s as much as women to vary their roles. They’re going to have to jot down the stuff and do it. And they’re going to.”

It includes poet and writer Maya Angelou, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, who I remember my mother taking me to see at a Chicago theater as a young child, and whose transcendent artistry makes every sound of her voice a wonder.

Even in her stillness, her bare shoulders, her easy gold hoop earrings, Wilma Rudolph, who battled illness as a toddler and have become the primary American woman to win three track and field gold medals in 1960, appears poised for movement. Her gaze is fixed, yonder, perhaps on races yet to be run. “I feel that my contribution to the youth of America has far exceeded the girl who was the Olympic champion. The challenge continues to be there,” Rudolph said. (She was certainly one of three athletes in the gathering, including the primary African American Grand Slam winner, Althea Gibson, and Wyomia Tyus, the primary person to win consecutive Olympic gold medals within the 100-meter dash.)

Wilma Rudolph

Septima Poinsette Clark

Althea Gibson

Cicely Tyson

Odetta

There’s Shirley Chisholm, the primary Black woman elected to Congress, who also ran for president. “I went to the Democratic convention in 1972 and did my thing and commenced to open the best way for ladies to think that they’ll run [for president],” she said.

That their ideas now feel preordained or blessed can can help you forget that they were amongst those that first sang or spoke them or thought them. Or that they led the chorus charged with telegraphing brave ideas to succeeding generations.

“I felt the necessity to forestall these historical lives from being forgotten,” Lanker wrote of his original project. “Most of the women opened ‘the doors’ and lots of advanced America through the fashionable civil rights and girls’s movement.”

Their distinctions are a part of their timelessness. But an almost eerie resonance to the portraits testifies to the vision and struggle of Black women’s lives, in ways each grand and prosaic, that at all times include a fight for justice. And whatever that justice looks like, it’s at all times just beyond us, wherever we’re. It gives Black women’s lives an everlasting quality that comes with the work of speaking things into being. Of placing yourself on the correct side of a history, a herstory, knowing it to be something you is not going to likely live to see.

The signature image of “I Dream a World” stays the quilt of the unique book, a portrait of educator and activist Septima Poinsette Clark, her face turned in profile. She helped the NAACP win pay equity for Black and white teachers alike, and helped train generations of community leaders through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Her hand, underneath her chin, is an extension to the uncompromised set of her jaw, her grey hair, cornrowed from the start, extends to wispy, unfinished ends. “I’ll tell children of the long run that they should rise up for his or her rights,” Clark said.

And just as powerfully because it did three a long time ago, her words, her visage, the rightness of her being feels certain to stay resonant, viscerally true, precisely up up to now, at whatever moment you might be capable of see her.

Liner Notes

Part I of “I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women” might be on view on the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and G streets NW, Washington, D.C., through Jan. 29, 2023. Part II might be on view from Feb. 10, 2023, through Sept. 10, 2023.

Lonnae O’Neal is a senior author at Andscape. She’s an writer, a former columnist, has a rack of youngsters and she or he writes bird by bird.