Rejection didn’t stop a determined Augusta Savage

In 1923, Augusta Savage applied for a summer program at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts, a newly opened American-owned school in France. The all-white and all-male selection committee rejected her because she was black.

Savage didn’t just roll over at this insult. She complained to newspapers in New York, and her story was widely publicized. One of the people who took up her cause was W.E.B DuBois, an African American scholar who was founder and editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine.

I had read a lot about this incident in the life of the then-31-year-old Savage but had never seen original documents about it. That changed recently when I attended an exhibit of her works at the New-York Historical Society. In a glass case were letters written by DuBois and her other supporters, along with responses from some committee members. The letters are among the W.E.B. DuBois papers at UMass Amherst Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives.

The American-operated Fontainebleau was founded in 1921 as a summer school in France to train American music students. A fine arts school was added in 1923 with classes in painting, architecture and sculpture. The school is still operating today, primarily focused on architecture.

DuBois wrote letters to each of the committee members for clarification on the denial. Some wrote him back, he said in a Crisis article, and some did not.

Ernest Peixotto, chairman of the sculpture department at the arts school, made it very clear in an April 1923 letter that Savage was rejected because she was black. He wrote the letter to Ernestine Rose, a white woman who was head librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. She would later help secure the black history collection of Arthur A. Schomburg.

 

“To be perfectly frank with you, we did learn that Miss Savage was of the colored race and the question was put before our Advisory Committee who strongly felt in a school such as the Fontainebleau School it would not be wise to have a colored student,” Peixotto wrote. “And for this reason. Among the 200 students to be enrolled, a number come from the Southern states and from the time they embark on shipboard, they are not only thrown in close contact with each other but must room together. The same is true at the school itself where all the students mess at the same tables. You can readily see that disagreeable complications would arise and the applicant in question would perhaps suffer most from these complications, and no matter how much we regret our action in depriving a serious student of the advantages of the school, we feel we must take such action.”

DuBois quoted from that letter – as well as responses from other committee members – in a 1923 article in the Crisis. Committee member and architect J. Monroe Hewlett was among those accusing Savage of not producing quality work.

“Many of them prayed that the reason should be that Miss Savage had no ability,” DuBois wrote, “but that is disproved by the records at Cooper Union and by the fact that no very high standards of ability were required of the sensitive white Southerners.”

When she applied to Fontainebleau, Savage was at the top of her class at Cooper Union School of Art in New York. In 1929, Savage received a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to study in France.

The exhibit at the New-York Historical Society offered many examples of Savage’s sculptural talents. Most were produced during the 1930s and include the commission she received to create a sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Her work stands in testimony to her abilities: