This, My Brother

“Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent,” Chicagoan Charles White observed, demonstrating his belief that art could be a force in promoting racial equality for African Americans. This painting of a man with outstretched hands emerging from a demolished structure draws its title from a 1936 novel about a rural white miner who experiences a political awakening and joins the proletarian struggle against capitalism. White transformed the protagonist into a black man who breaks free from a mountain of rubble, a hopeful image of the possibility of social change.