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Hale Woodruff: Memorial

I am speaking about the work of a friend, a distinguished artist, teacher, and versatile man who has done so many things ably and with great honor.

I first met Hale Woodruff in Atlanta during the early 1940s, through his close friend and colleague, the late Charles Alston. At that time Hale was teaching at Spelman College, indeed he had founded its Art Dept.; presently an integral part of the art curriculum of the five colleges that comprise Atlanta University. 

In those days Hale was also teaching one day a week at Talla dega [[Talladega]] College, in Alabama. One afternoon he drove me there and took me to the school library to see his Amistad murals that depicted scenes of the mutiny, the trial, and the eventual freedom of Prince Cinque and his fellow Africans. This episode in our history is now fairly well known, but when Hale painted these murals little documentation was available. I mention this because the few details I will relate I certainly owe to Hale, and they are indicative of the throughness [[thoroughness]] with which Hale approached everything he did in art and also his abiding interest in the historical as1/2ecpts [[aspects]] pf [[of]] jos [[his]] craft,

In determining the accuracy of these murals, Hale found that an artist named Joycelyn, who worked in the early 19th Century, had made portraits of all the Africans involved in the trail. With these details and some early photographs, most of the personages are depicted in rather accurate likenesses. I say, most all, because one of the attorneys, for whom Hale could find no likeness, was painted in a rear view. A young girl was shown in two of the murals. In actual life, she was returned to Africa and later married, and her son became the first African to graduate from an American college--the Yale School of Divinity.

That night, on the way back to Atlanta, Hale's car was almost alone