© Burton Philip Silverman/ VAGA for ARS, New York, NY. Photograph and digital image © Delaware …

E. D. Nixon, Montgomery

Date1956

Artist Burton Philip Silverman (American painter, illustrator, born 1928)

MediumGraphite on paper

Dimensionscomposition: 10 × 7 in. (25.4 × 17.8 cm)
sheet: 11 1/16 × 8 3/8 in. (28.1 × 21.3 cm)

Credit LineGift of the Robert Lehman Foundation Inc., 1994

Object number1994-70

On View

Not on view

ClassificationsDRAWING

Label TextIn 1956, New York artist Burton Silverman and his fellow artist Harvey Dinnerstein recorded events of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her seat to a white man on the racially segregated city bus system. Together Silverman and Dinnerstein made over 90 reportorial drawings of the activities and people involved in the Boycott, including the twenty‑six year old Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Several of the drawings were published in magazines and exhibited in museums. The artists stated: “Our decision to record the events, as artists, was motivated in part by the virtual absence of photographic recording of the Boycott. We felt that this was the first real opportunity to show the efficacy of the artist's eye in evoking the emotional as well as factual realities of an important human event.”

Civil rights activist E. D. Nixon (1899–1987) was a Pullman porter by profession. He worked with Rosa Parks and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in initiating and strategizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He also held leadership positions in the NAACP and the Voters League.