Patriots

This terrifying image, depicting a hanged man with hooded figures in the background waving an American flag, was part of an outcry in the early 20th century where artists and intellectuals demanded lynching stop and criticized the brutality of race relations in the United States. The NAACP took a leading role in this movement. Some specific contexts for this print include James Weldon Johnson's 1924 Article 'Lynching, and American Disgrace', the 1924 and 1925 Ku Klux Klan parades in Washington DC, Billie Holiday's 1939 song 'Strange Fruit', and the 1935 anti-lynching art exhibition 'An Art Commentary on Lynching' sponsored by the NAACP and College Art Association.

The artist, Abraham Jacobs, a painter and printmaker, was active in Cleveland from about 1930 to 1937. Much about his artistic career remains largely unknown. Jacobs' works exhibit a passionate concern for the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, and the persecuted, seldom expressed with such fervor, even during the Depression, in the work of other Clevelanders. The print is the second impression in an edition of 25. Signed "By: Abraham Jacobs" in pencil in lower right; title in lower left.