A testimony to Samella Sanders Lewis’s memories of growing up in Louisiana under Jim Crow, the lithograph Together We Stand shows African American adults and a young girl—who may represent the artist—united around a banner emblazoned with words taken from Maya Angelou’s “Our Grandmothers.” In the harrowing poem, an enslaved woman directs her children to remain strong despite the injustices inflicted on them by others: “However I am perceived and deceived,/ however my ignorance and conceits,/ lay aside your fears that I will be undone,/ for I shall not be moved.” Lewis often depicted women in her work not by capturing their physical likenesses but by representing their beliefs and ideals.
Like Angelou, Lewis was a lifelong civil rights advocate. She was also a teacher, a curator, and an art historian—the first African American woman to obtain a doctorate in fine arts and art history at Ohio State University. Throughout her career, she worked to support Black artists in Los Angeles, the city where she lived for most of her life. As Lewis stated, “I fight against segregation, discrimination, racism, brutality, and depravity because these things deny people their rights as human beings.”
Claudine Dixon
2023
