Aaron Douglas, Emperor Jones

Narrator: These woodblock prints were inspired by a commission Aaron Douglas received from Theater Arts Monthly to design a series of woodblock illustrations for the Eugene O'Neill play Emperor Jones in 1926. The play helped launch the career of actor, singer, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, whose abstracted, powerful form appears in each of these images. The play tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African American man and former Pullman porter. In the story, Jones is jailed for murder, but escapes to a small Caribbean island, where he becomes the emperor. 

LeRonn Brooks: Here, Douglas captures the silhouette or the two-dimensional style of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic forms. And he also captures the physiognomy of Sub-Saharan African sculpture. He's capturing Robeson as the Emperor Jones in the Caribbean, but also Robeson as an African American. 

Narrator: Writer and art historian LeRonn Brooks.  

LeRonn Brooks: This aspect of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics is something that here we see Douglas use as a storytelling element. That this character is not just a character bound to this moment, but this character has a history that brings the weight of this particular situation. And so this is a colonial moment in which the Emperor Jones is the Emperor of an island that frees itself of the colonial powers. It also connects to the sort of power of the ancestral world.

In many ways, Aaron Douglas was before his time in the telling of African Americans having a deeper history than one of enslavement in the United States.