Oliver LaGrone

Family of origin

Clarence Oliver LaGrone was born December 9, 1906, in McAlester, in Indian Territory, the year before the Territory became part of the new state of Oklahoma. His father, William Lee LaGrone, born ten years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, to formerly enslaved parents, had settled in Indian Territory because of the relative freedoms it afforded. William LaGrone had left Mississippi in 1895, in fear of his life following an altercation with two white men over their attack on William's mother. William had married Lula Evelyn Cochran in Alabama after she and her parents helped him recover from his flight. They migrated to Texas, seeking safety from potential pursuers.

LaGrone's normal school-educated father served on the school board and as an ordained pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. Education was important to William LaGrone, particularly educating Blacks in the worth of their heritage. "My father was a gifted writer, and also a builder, and extremely creative," LaGrone recalled. "He regaled us with his poems. I was brought up in an environment like that."

The LaGrone family owned property and were community leaders. In 1930, repeated dangerously expressed jealousy over their accomplishments drove them to move from the several small towns in which they had hoped for peace in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Howard University

LaGrone's older brother, Hobart, had attended Fisk University. After graduation he worked in Washington, D.C., and in 1928 invited his younger brother, Oliver, to live with him and work for a degree. In the fall Oliver LaGrone enrolled at Howard University, planning to become a lawyer.

LaGrone interacted closely with faculty member Carter G. Woodson, "Father of Black History". During the summer of 1929 he served as an assistant to Woodson, interviewing people in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma for Woodson and Greene's upcoming volume, The Negro Wage Earner. Additionally, LaGrone sold books on black culture promoted by Dr. Woodson. Oliver LaGrone also absorbed interest in unionism from a political science faculty member, young Dr. Ralph Bunche.

New Mexico

The country's Great Economic Depression led to LaGrone having to leave Howard University after completing only his first year. The precipitous death of his father, and the disabling effects on his mother of a car accident, meant his earning power was essential at home. LaGrone and his older brother, Hobart, opened a funeral parlor to help support the family. This opportunity to study anatomy later informed Oliver LaGrone's sculpting talents. He also sang for three years with a semi-professional quartet on radio programs.

LaGrone felt drawn to create, sculpting in the mahogany-like pinyon pine so plentiful in the New Mexico landscape. In 2005 the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg received a letter from an elderly New Mexican man who had met LaGrone while both were attending the University of New Mexico. He was hoping to find LaGrone's 1930 sculpture, "Black", carved from pinyon wood. Sixty-five years after first seeing the sculpture, he wrote, "I was shocked and speechless at the grandeur of the figure; then I walked around to look at the back of it and immediately started crying. This magnificent human being, standing so proud, had his hands chained behind his back. It was the most striking thing I had ever seen that depicted the condition of the black race living in this country. My emotional response broke down any barriers that might have existed between us. . . . During that period, there was no way I could buy any of his work, but if I could find the black man with chained hands, I would try to find whatever amount of money was required to own it for the few years I have left." The work had been long since purchased and later was given to the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but its image remained potent over 75 years later. "Black" may well have been the same displayed sculpture that several years later led to LaGrone's return to college.

University of New Mexico

Oliver LaGrone was working in Albuquerque at odd jobs in the household of a civil engineer, whose spouse admired LaGrone's gracious manner. After seeing one of his sculptures, she took LaGrone to the president of the University of New Mexico (UNM), to assure that the young black man would be enrolled. His previously un-nurtured artistic talent came to the fore when in 1934 he began to attend the University of New Mexico, majoring in sociology and minoring in fine arts. As assistant to a teacher of sculpture, William Emmit Burk, Jr., he launched into a lifetime of expressed reflection on the intersection of sentiment and form.

Among LaGrone's UNM professors was a man who was friends with the roving journalist Ernie Pyle. From 1935 to 1941, Pyle was visiting America's small towns, creating Scripps-Howard syndicated newspaper columns as he went. The two men stopped by a university art exhibit which included work by LaGrone. Pyle then devoted one of his 1938 columns to LaGrone's sculptural talents.

WPA

LaGrone was among artists competitively chosen by the Federal Art Project arm of the Works Progress Administration. In 1937 he created a sculpture for the then new Carrie Tingley Children's Hospital[1], an institution created to address the increasing incidence of infantile paralysis.

The sculpture Mercy reflects LaGrone's Oklahoma memories of his mother caring for him during repeated childhood bouts with malaria. His 1937 cast marblestone sculpture was recast in bronze in 1991 for display in Albuquerque. One casting was placed in the Richardson Pavilion of the University of New Mexico hospital housing the previously relocated Tingley Hospital, on the floor dedicated to inpatient children's services. Another casting of Mercy is displayed in the sculpture garden of the Albuquerque Museum.

Marriage

LaGrone graduated from the University of New Mexico's School of Education in 1938 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Also in 1938, he married Irmah Cooke. Her father had been the editor of the Gary Sun, an Indiana newspaper. A decade earlier, he had been murdered after advocating that his African American readers not purchase from businesses where African Americans were forbidden to work. To be with Irmah's remaining family, the couple took up residence in Michigan. There LaGrone joined the family real estate business. A daughter, Lotus Joy (married surname Johnson) was born in 1940.

Cranbrook Academy of Art

By 1941 the young family had moved to Detroit. At his wife's encouragement, LaGrone explored Cranbrook Academy of Art in nearby Bloomfield Hills. The result of the inquiry was an personal invitation from Swedish sculptor Carl Milles to work as his protege. LaGrone thereby became the first African-American to attend Cranbrook, from November 1941 to July 1942. Milles arranged that LaGrone receive a McGregor Fund grant for advanced study in sculpture. Milles supplemented the grant from his personal funds. His tuition was covered by a scholarship from the Student Aid Foundation of Michigan. Cranbrook's archives received, after LaGrone's death, papers and photographs donated by his daughter in 1997.

United Auto Workers

Oliver LaGrone felt responsibility and desire to actively oppose the advance of fascism by joining the U.S. effort in World War II in 1942. An old football injury prevented him from joining the armed services, so in 1942 he took a production job at Ford Motors' huge River Rouge complex. However, recurrent work accidents led to his employment with the United Auto Workers union. From 1943 to 1948, he was their director of visual education, supervising a department, and speaking and showing films to union auto workers across the country.

Internal tension between LaGrone's artistic side and his humanitarian sentiments resurfaced. His interests brought him into Detroit's renaissance of black artists, not unlike the Harlem Renaissance in New York. Both cultural movements focused on literature, music, theater, art and politics. During this time he wrote his first poetry, reflecting on his Detroit experiences. He gathered them into a collection for his 1949 volume Footfalls.

During his union staff days, in 1947, he divorced.

Paul Robeson

LaGrone and Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and civil rights activist, knew each other. Their lives both included interests in football, law, and the arts. Robeson performed Shakespeare's Othello on Broadway in 1943, in the first-ever American production to feature a black actor with an otherwise all-white cast. When the anti-communist Detroit Loyalty Committee asked LaGrone to inform on Robeson, LaGrone refused. Resulting harassment, and physical threats, by Detroit police, also resulted in LaGrone's losing employment, forcing him to resort to selling pots and pans door-to-door to survive. Later, he drew on his personal relationship with Robeson, to create for The Pennsylvania State University's main campus, under commission from the PSU Alumni Association, a bust of Robeson. Unveiled in 1986, it is featured in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center of the Student Union in State College, Pennsylvania.

Public School Teacher

From 1954 through 1969, Oliver LaGrone taught in Detroit public schools. He was first an emergency substitute, then a specialist in arts and crafts, and, by 1967, a high school instructor in African-American history. From 1956 through 1960, he enrolled at Wayne State University, earning the equivalent of a master's degree in special education.

Activist and Artist

While a public school teacher, LaGrone championed civil rights for African-Americans, as well as writing poetry and sculpting. During this period he served for two years, 1968-1970, on the Michigan Council on the Arts. He served on the African Art Gallery Fund Committee of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Oliver LaGrone's poems appeared in The Negro Digest and the New York Times Sunday Book Review, as well as other publications. He also read his poetry in public literary venues and in radio interviews. He was a regular poetry reader at Boone House, established for poetry gatherings for black poets in Detroit. In 1963 he published They Speak of Dawns, a complementary pair of poems, contrasting the "Freedom Rider" and the "Astronaut", both harbingers of the future. He was a member of a panel of poets at the 1966 Black Arts Convention in Detroit and the same year won first prize in an annual Michigan poetry contest. He appeared in seven poetry anthologies, including: Beyond the Blues, 1962; New Negro Poets: U.S.A., 1964; Ten: An Anthology of Detroit Poets, 1965; Poesie Negro Americain, 1964; For Malcolm, 1967; The Poetry of the Negro 1764-1970, 1970; The American Equation, 1972, and The Study of Literature, 1978;

LaGrone's 1958 sculpture, The Dancer, won a prize in an exhibit at Wayne State University. The piece was inspired by dancer, choreographer and anthropologist, Dr. Pearl Primus, pioneer American interpreter of African dance. LaGrone continued sculpting personally and took on private sculpting students. In 1964 the Detroit chapter of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History commissioned of LaGrone a representation of the New York poet and writer Langston Hughes. Hughes had since the 1920s been noted as a leader in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes' work celebrated the dignity and beauty of black life, in harmony with Oliver LaGrone's interests. Hughes had included some of LaGrone's poetry in an anthology. Upon Hughes' death, as part of the poet's estate, the graceful lines of Hughes' face, sculpted by LaGrone, became part of the collections of the Schomberg Center. The Center is a New York Public Library research branch on black culture. The piece can be seen by appointment with the Art and Artifacts Division.

African Influence

In 1968 LaGrone was invited by friends to establish a base in Togo to explore the history of West African culture. There he learned of the 1400s sophisticated cast bronzes of the historic kingdom of Benin, extending his understanding of African art. LaGrone much later stated to a reporter, "My African ancestors invented the lost-wax method of casting, so whenever I work in bronze I am reminded that I am carrying on the work begun by my people."

By 1970 the Detroit City Council recognized both LaGrone's "academic standing and artistic gift" and "his human sensitivity to personal, social and cultural issues" in a testimonial resolution.

On the Road

Introduction to comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who had already been drawing on portions of LaGrone's poetry in some of his speeches, inspired a new development for Oliver LaGrone. Personally encouraged by Gregory, LaGrone created "Odyssey of the Afro-American and His Art", a series which would take him across the country to scheduled speaking engagements in 24 states, arranged through the American Program Bureau. Traveling with a selection of his sculptures, he would describe their inspiration and creation, recite his relevant poetry, and promote respect for black culture and history. The lectures and gallery talks addressed topics such as, "The Odyssey of the Afro-American and his Art", "The Black Aesthetic", "Black Protest, Art, and Western Humanism", and "History's Roots in Art".

Faculty Member

One such speaking trip took him through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was invited by a friend on the faculty at the capitol campus of The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) to speak to his class. It led in 1970 to LaGrone's being solicited to offer studio art classes and to lecture on African American history. In 1972 he was appointed Special Assistant to the PSU Vice-President for Undergraduate Affairs. In 1975, he became Artist-in-Residence at PSU, traveling to conduct art seminars at all of its twenty-two campuses. By then, his large sculpture, University as Family, was installed on the library lawn of the Worthington-Scranton [2] campus of PSU. With permission, he modeled the youngest of the four figures on the face of the daughter of friends.

LaGrone was also the featured speaker at the annual convention of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in June 1974.

Representing PSU

In 1975 he was asked to represent PSU on the 21-member Pennsylvania Bicentennial Commmission. The commission donated to the Pennsylvania state museum LaGrone's bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. LaGrone is included in a 1976 volume, sponsored by Henry Ford III, featuring 100 African American leaders. The cover is a picture of LaGrone, former Ford employee and former auto workers' union staffer. Several of Oliver's sculptures are featured in the LaGrone Cultural Arts Center at Penn State Harrisburg and a small version of University as Family is in the campus's Rowland Sculpture Garden.

During his Pennsylvania years, Oliver LaGrone lived in the state capital, Harrisburg. The city's mayor proclaimed February 3, 1983 to be "Oliver LaGrone Day". In 1984 his respect for all brought him a position on the city's Human Relations Commission. The "LaGrone Day" recognition was repeated in 1993.

Active Retirement

After retiring, LaGrone established a studio in the Community Center of Hershey, Pennsylvania, teaching private students. Later, as Artist-in-Residence for the Boas Center for Learning, a program in the Harrisburg School District administered by the Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he continued to sculpt and teach. In 1986, the Pennsylvania Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) Holiday Commission presented LaGrone's MLK bust to the state museum. He published the volume Dawnfire and Other Poems in 1989. Columnist Chuck Stone wrote, "An awesome renaissance man -- sculptor, poet, writer, painter, scholar, laborer, inventor and teacher. Oliver LaGrone is a towering intellect, a man of prodigious creativity and physical vigor."

Single since 1947, LaGrone in 1976 married Lillian Pauline Mitchell Graham, retired principal of an Erie, Pennsylvania public school. They moved to Albuquerque, then Harrisburg, and in 1986 moved to Hamlet, North Carolina, Mrs. LaGrone's family home. LaGrone divorced again in 1992 and moved back to Detroit.

A syndicated newspaper columnist wrote, "He is a charmer, Oliver LaGrone. He is also an elegant man and eloguent speaker, with a knowing spirit. He sprinkles his prose with poetry. Of himself he softly incants: "Out of the amorphous or chaotic he coaxes order, form, beauty. He is a creator of 3-D communications."

LaGrone was active with the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg (UCH) from 1975 to 1986. His bust of Harriet Tubman (bronze) was purchased for the Church by friends and he gave the bust George Washington Carver (painted plaster) to UCH. The church has also been gifted two other LaGrone sculptures. Ballet to Disco (bronze) is composed of two separate figures, mounted so their positions can be opposed in complementary ways as intended by LaGrone. Mask (painted plaster) is an African-themed wall piece. Members recall LaGrone's positive outlook and observations, as when one time responding in conversation with, "Forgive me. I'm as thick as the Peruvian jungle". His physical strength and singing of "Old Man River" became personal hallmarks as well. While living with his daughter and family in Detroit, still sculpting and writing poetry, LaGrone died at age 89, on October 15, 1995.

Three and a half years after Oliver LaGrone's death, about two-hundred people gathered at PSU Harrisburg in March 1998, to celebrate his life contributions. It was also a dedication renaming the Minority Student Center in the student union, the LaGrone Cultural Arts Center. A PSU official stated, "Oliver was very charismatic,, very approachable. He had a command of the English language. He could see art in everything. He was so warm."

Oliver LaGrone Scholarship

Oliver LaGrone inspired the creation of a scholarship program in his name in 1974. The scholarship founders were primarily from the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg (UCH). LaGrone donated the proceeds from the sale of a bronze casting of The Dancer. Funds to establish and build the scholarship came from fundraisers large and small, with the donations of many individuals and organizations in the years to follow. A newspaper quoted LaGrone inn 1986, advising young people, "Read. Read. Read. Lives of great men and women all remind us that, when you find an area of interest, work, work, to know all you can about it and learn to both give and receive graciously."

The Oliver LaGrone Scholarship program was reconfigured in 1991, focusing funds on one graduate of Harrisburg High School. It annually offers the largest local scholarship [3] available to a graduate of the school.

Publicly Accessible

Privately Held

At least thirty-six other LaGrone sculptures are privately held, carved from pinyon pine or Honduras mahoghany, or molded in plaster, painted to resemble bronze, or cast in marblestone or bronze. The works, created from 1930 to at least 1994, include bas reliefs, twelve busts, and statuary up to forty-eight inches in height. African American themes predominate. Frederick Douglass, Aretha Franklin, Rosa Parks, and Sojourner Truth are among the persons represented. LaGrone said, "I have been faced with the need of saying something about the black presence in America . . . [as] a way to touch the psyche of America." Detail regarding privately held sculptures is available through the Unitarian Unitarian Church of Harrisburg.

LaGrone Poetry