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on the road. It was a cloudy night, with no stars or moon, Hale turned to me and said:

"I'm going to show you something".

He pulled the car to the side of the road and turned off the headlights. The night suddenly fell on us, dense, dark, as if the world was blindfolded. An old proverb says the day has eyes, the night has ears. There was something about the pitch darkness that took me back to another time and another aspect of Afro-American history--I imagined Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman as fugitives making there [[their]] way north to freedom amid the souts [[shouts]] of the pursuers and the baying of the blood hounds. When I mentioned this association to Hale he just laughed in that high pitched way many of you will remember, and we drove on. What I experienced, I'm sure, was what Hale had anticipated.

During Hale's student days in Paris he visited Henry O, [[.]] Tanner, at Tanner's summer home on the Brittany coast. This house was a good distance from Paris and difficult to find. Tanner was beseiged [[besieged]] with visitors in Paris, during the summer months and needed the comparative isolation in which to work. Hale found his way there, however, and when Tanner learned he was a young, serious artist, Hale was invited into the home and the two men had a long, interesting talk. Incidently [[Incidentally]] Hale wrote a very informative account of this visit for the Crisis magazine. It was again very indicative of Hale's sense of history that he would record this visit for posterity.

Of the artists, I myself knew, who had personal contacts with Tanner: Aaron Douglas, James Porter, Palmer Hayden and Countee Cullen and who formed a link between my generation of Afto[[Afro]]-American artists and that great master, only Hale remained as the sold flesh and blood survivor.

During the 1960's at the height of the Civil Rights movement, a group of artists known, as the Spiral Group, met each week to talk