Issue 40, Spring 1996
On the cover: Frances Bell, an ex-slave, was a favorite subject of a Huntsville artist Maria Howard Weeden, who turned to painting to supplement the family’s meager income after the Civil War. (Courtesy Burritt Museum, Huntsville)
Features
To Teach the Negro
By Judith Hillman Paterson
In 1878 a young, self-educated Scottish immigrant arrived in Marion, Alabama, to assume the reins at Alabama’s first state-assisted black institution of higher learning, the American Missionary Association’s Abraham Lincoln School. With his wife, Maggie, William Burns Paterson spent the next ten years nurturing a remarkable institution while often facing racially motivated hostilities. In 1887 following an act of arson, the state legislature voted to move the school — then called the Alabama State Normal School for Colored Students — to Montgomery, where the Patersons worked to maintain a balance of liberal arts education along with industrial training. In 1969 the school became Alabama State University, attaining university status almost one hundred years after its creation at Marion.
The Art of Howard Weeden
By Kay Cornelius
Nineteenth-century artist Maria Howard Weeden could have been just another maiden lady who used her talent to eke out a living after the Civil War. Like many Southerners of her day, Weeden found her comfortable life of only a few years earlier gone forever. Faced with the prospect of financial ruin, she determined to use her talent to supplement her family’s meager income. Weeden’s portraits of former slaves departed from the comic “minstrel” representations of her contemporaries, however, conveying great strength and dignity. Showings of Weeden’s work in Berlin and Paris brought her international acclaim. In 1899 Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of “Uncle Remus,” described Weeden’s portraits as “powerful” and “charged with feeling.” Now, almost one hundred years later, Cornelius’s generously illustrated article lets us see for ourselves just what he meant.
Alabama Heritage Profile: Dr. James D. Hardy
By J. Mack Lofton Jr.
On April 12, 1945, Henry “Red” Erwin, a radioman with the U.S. Army Corps, was en route to Koriyama, Japan on a bombing mission when the phosphorous bomb he had dropped through the plane’s open chute turned, lifted, and exploded in his face. Three hundred feet above the Pacific, Erwin was instantly engulfed in flames. In an act of selflessness that would save the plane’s officers and crew and earn him the Medal of Honor, Erwin grabbed the fifteen-hundred degree bomb, carried it through thick smoke to the cockpit, and hurled it from the plane, collapsing soon afterward. Military brass awarded Erwin the Medal of Honor only two days after he saved his crew. No one expected him to survive much longer. They just didn’t know Red Erwin.
Departments
Art in the South
A Greensboro Belle
By Robert O. Mellown
Lelia Jane McCrary (Otts) of Greensboro as about sixteen years old when William Carroll Saunders of Huntsville painted her portrait c. 1860. Saunders was the artist behind several full-length portraits, and these paintings display a meticulous attention to settings and accessories, making his paintings windows into a vanished world.
The Nature Journal
The Eastern Glass Lizard
Although it looks like a snake, the eastern glass lizard is merely a snake mimic, possessing as it does such non-serpentine features as eyelids and ear openings. It moves with less grace and may jettison hits tail to escape pursuing predators. L.J. Davenport examines the life-cycle of this curious lizard.
