[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 983-986]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                     NOMINATION OF SENATOR ASHCROFT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the Speaker's 
kindness. I rise to join my colleagues who have spoken of their concern 
about the recent executive order that eliminates the opportunity of 
international family planning. My fellow colleagues have been extremely 
eloquent, and I would for a moment just like to expand that opposition 
to that decision by the administration to carry forth my opposition to 
the nomination of former Senator John Ashcroft to the position of 
Attorney General of the United States of America.
  I would hope that this representation and opposition clearly will not 
be characterized as personal. I testified in the Committee on the 
Judiciary on my position, and it is a passionate position on the 
importance of the fundamental rights, civil rights, the right to vote, 
freedom of choice, all the law of the land. I might suggest to my 
colleagues that I believe that this USA Today, People for the American 
Way advertisement, captures my concern. Should a man who misrepresents 
the facts under oath be our Attorney General? And the facts are there. 
Again, it is not to personally suggest that Mr. Ashcroft may not 
believe in what he has said, but his actions speak louder than words.
  When asked repeatedly whether he would be able to support Roe v. 
Wade, he indicated it was the settled law of the land but yet 
consistently throughout his Senatorial career, gubernatorial career and 
his other career, this individual showed that he was not in support of 
the law of the land, the Constitution of the United States, which gives 
a woman the right to choose.
  In a decision dealing with voluntary desegregation in St. Louis, it 
was noted that in the first representation of his testimony he said the 
State was not liable and was not involved and, in fact, the State was 
involved and it was attributed to his position that caused this delay 
in a resolution of this desegregation order where the parties at hand 
voluntarily decided to resolve this.
  His position as Attorney General or governor caused it to continue to 
be at odds, because he fought against the voluntary agreement.
  Do we believe in integration in this country? Do the laws provide us 
the opportunity for civil rights? Yes. And I believe the actions of 
this nominee do not speak well for him being able to enforce the law of 
the land.
  Might I suggest that several other items come to mind and that, of 
course, is one that many of us have heard over and over again, that is 
the nomination of Judge Ronnie White and the comments being made by 
Senator Ashcroft that he was pro-criminal or had a criminal bent when 
over 60 percent of the time Judge White agreed with the nominees of 
then-Governor Ashcroft in confirming the death penalty.
  Might I read this insert by Congressman William Clay as he introduced 
Judge Ronnie White before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary upon 
which Senator Ashcroft said, I might cite one incident that attests to 
the kind of relationship that Judge White has with many and that is 
with a member of this committee Senator Ashcroft. When I recommended 
Judge White to the President for nomination and the President nominated 
him, one of the first people that I conferred with was Senator John 
Ashcroft. At a later date, he told me that he had appointed 6 of the 7 
members to the Missouri Supreme Court. Ronnie White was the only one he 
had not appointed. He said, meaning Senator Ashcroft, he had canvassed 
the other six, the ones that he appointed. They all spoke very highly 
of Ronnie White and suggested that he would make an outstanding Federal 
judge. So I think that this is the kind of person we need on the 
Federal bench. These were the confirmation hearings on Federal 
appointments, hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary 
105th Congress.
  Yet on the floor of the Senate, Senator Ashcroft vigorously opposed 
Judge Ronnie White, for what reason we do not know; and this nominee 
came out of the Committee on the Judiciary twice victoriously. One 
wonders whether or not in his explanation that the reason he opposed 
him was his record, when his record was clear, Judge White's record was 
clear. He was an independent justice who reviewed the facts and 
supported the facts and was well respected in his State.
  Then we have the situation of Ambassador Hormel, who we have heard 
recently who has a different life-style, and because of a different 
life-style he opposed him.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues for this unique 
opportunity to offer a few observations on the nomination of Mr. John 
Ashcroft for attorney general of the United States. As Martin Luther 
King once stated, ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice 
everywhere.'' That is why I am here today to speak out not only as a 
member of Congress, but as a citizen of our diverse and vulnerable 
nation.
  The Senate is moving closer to taking final action on Mr. Ashcroft's 
nomination. This causes me great anxiety that a growing number of 
Americans are demonstrating in every state of the Union.
  Based on Mr. John Ashcroft's voting record of aggressive opposition 
to women's rights, civil rights, and the unfortunate handling of the 
nomination of Judge Ronnie White, the Senate Judiciary Committee and 
its colleagues should vote down his nomination for the sake of unifying 
America. The attorney general for the United States should support laws 
that protect all of America's people. It is unfortunate that ratings by 
the Christian Coalition, the National Right to Life Committee, and the 
American Conservative Union show that throughout his six years in the 
United States Senate, John Ashcroft has been a consistent and reliable 
vote in opposing the certified law of the land.
  Let me be absolutely clear. I am not questioning Mr. Ashcroft's 
personal probity; I am vigorously questioning his suitability for the 
job for which he has been selected.
  Mr. Ashcroft's record on matters of race has been simply 
disappointing. According to the Washington Times, Ashcroft received a 
grade of `F' on each of the last three NAACP report cards because of 
his anti-progressive voting record, having voted to approve only three 
of 15 legislative issues supported by the NAACP

[[Page 984]]

and other civil rights groups. This explains why such a broad number of 
groups are so strongly united against his confirmation as the next 
attorney general of the United States.
  Mr. Ashcroft opposed the approval of Judge Ronnie White to the 
Federal Bench. In 1997, President Clinton nominated Judge White of the 
Missouri Supreme Court to be a United States District Court Judge. At 
the hearings on his nomination in May 1998, Judge White was introduced 
to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Republican Senator Christopher 
Bond, who told the committee that Judge White ``has the necessary 
qualifications and character traits which are required for this most 
important job.'' See Confirmation Hearings on Federal Appointments: 
Hearings Before the Senn. Comm. On the Judiciary, 15th Cong., 2d Sess. 
7-8 (1998).
  In 1962, Dr. King once said that ``[it] may be true that the law 
cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I 
think that's pretty important.'' But have we learned from his 
admonition? We all know that John Ashcroft led a campaign to defeat the 
nomination of Missouri's first African-American Supreme Court Justice, 
Judge Ronnie White, to the federal bench. Mr. Ashcroft seriously 
distorted White's record, portraying it as pro criminal, and anti-death 
penalty, and even suggested, according to the London Guardian, that 
``the judge had shown a tremendous bent toward criminal activity.'' 
Ironically, Judge White had voted to uphold the death sentence in 41 of 
the 59 cases that came before him, roughly the same proportion as 
Ashcroft's court appointees when he was Governor.
  In fact, of these 59 death penalty cases, Judge White was the sole 
dissenter in only three of them. As a matter of fact, three of the 
other Missouri Supreme Court judges, all of whom were appointed by Mr. 
Ashcroft as Governor, voted to reverse death penalty case sentences in 
greater percentage of cases than did Judge White. Ashcroft also failed 
to consider or mention that in at least fifteen death penalty cases 
Missouri Supreme Court Justice, Ronnie White, wrote the majority 
opinion for the court to uphold the death sentence. America owes an 
apology to Judge White and I admire his ability to move forward with 
his life. This is a judicial nominee for which Mr. Ashcroft had no 
substantial reason to oppose--and it is time that America knows the 
facts.
  I took my responsibility in helping shed light on Judge White's 
confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 17th 
of January of this month with great seriousness. I felt compelled to 
have my voice heard on behalf of Judge White who had never been given 
the chance to defend himself from vicious attacks on his impeccable 
judicial record. More importantly, each Senator and Representative now 
knows that when Judge White's nomination was brought to the Senate 
floor in October 1999, Senator Ashcroft spearheaded a successful party-
line fight to defeat White's confirmation, the first time in twelve 
years (since the vote on Robert Bork) that the full Senate had voted to 
reject a nominee to the federal bench.
  In contrast to that effort, as former Congressman William L. Clay 
introduced Judge Ronnie White before the Senate Judiciary Committee he 
said the following: ``I might cite one incident that attests to the 
kind of relationship that Judge White has with many, and that is with a 
member of this committee--Senator Ashcroft. When I recommended Judge 
White to the President for nomination and the President nominated him, 
one of the first people that I conferred with was Senator Ashcroft. At 
a later date, he told me that he had appointed six of the seven members 
to the Missouri Supreme Court. Ronnie White was the only one he had not 
appointed. He said he had canvassed the other six, the ones that he 
appointed, and they all spoke very highly of Ronnie White and suggested 
that he would make an outstanding Federal Judge. So I think that this 
is the kind of person we need on the Federal bench,'' Confirmation 
Hearings on Federal Appointments: Hearings before the Sen. Comm. On the 
Judiciary, 105th Cong., 2d Sess. 7-8 (1998).
  I am further saddened to learn that Mr. Ashcroft accepted an Honorary 
Degree from Bob Jones University. In 1999, Ashcroft accepted an 
honorary degree from Bob Jones University, which critics have rightly 
called racist and anti-catholic. Bob Jones University lost its tax-
exempt status in 1970 for refusing to admit African-Americans. The 
school then changed its policy but still prohibited any interracial 
dating or marriage. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court supported an IRS 
decision to remove tax-exempt status from the school for its dating 
policy, which included rules such as ``students who date outside their 
own race will be expelled.''
  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ashcroft even opposed gathering statistics for 
racial profiling studies. After learning of the importance of law 
enforcement efforts to stem these unlawful activities in a number of 
states, Mr. Ashcroft's views appear not only out of touch with 
mainstream America but with existing consent decrees by law enforcement 
to rid the nation of this practice. As a member of the House Committee 
on the Judiciary, this troubles me immensely. In 1999, Ashcroft opposed 
legislation for gathering racial statistics on traffic violations after 
chairing the Subcommittee hearing on it, favoring ignorance over 
information. Mr. Speaker, how can Mr. Ashcroft be attorney general if 
he fundamentally disagrees with this fundamental human rights issue? 
That is sad and further evidence of his insensitivity for basic matters 
concerning equal protection and justice for all.
  The President-Elect's selection for Attorney General has certainly 
been no friend of reproductive rights for women in America. Ashcroft 
would not be a guardian of women's right to reproductive choice as 
provided by the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. On the 
contrary, Mr. Ashcroft supports a constitutional amendment that would 
outlaw abortion even in cases of incest and rape and that would 
criminalize several commonly used forms of contraception.
  As Missouri attorney general and governor, and more recently in the 
Senate, he repeatedly used his office as a United States Senator to 
push through severe new restrictions on women's reproductive freedom as 
part of an effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. It 
is fair to say that many women in America have a right to be concerned 
because as attorney general, Ashcroft could use the power of the 
Federal government behind new strategies to defeat the right to an 
abortion in the Supreme Court. It is also reasonable to express doubts 
about whether he would fully enforce laws that insure access to 
abortion clinics by limiting violent or obstructive demonstrations by 
abortion opponents.
  We all look to the attorney general to ensure even-handed law 
enforcement and protection of our basic constitutional rights: freedom 
of speech, the right to privacy, a woman's right to choose, freedom 
from governmental oppression and other vital functions. We cannot deny 
the attorney general plays a critical role in bringing the country 
together, bridging racial divides, and inspiring people's confidence in 
their government.
  Accordingly, as I review the series of questionable acts that can be 
found in Mr. Ashcroft's record as a public servant, I find such action 
by Mr. Ashcroft to be inconsistent with the kind of vision and 
tolerance that the next top law enforcement officer will need to 
exhibit. Mr. Ashcroft's record on desegregation in the State of 
Missouri is one of those examples that makes me truly sad as an African 
American and I have an obligation to emphasize this very grave matter.
  John Ashcroft, as Attorney General and as Governor of the State of 
Missouri consistently opposed efforts to desegregate schools in 
Missouri, which for more than 150 years, had legally sanctioned 
separate and inferior education for blacks.
  Missouri has a long and marked history of systematically 
discriminating against African Americans in the provision of public 
education. During forty-five years of slavery, the State forbid the 
education of blacks. After the Civil War, Missouri was the most 
northern state to have a constitutional mandate requiring separate 
schools for blacks and whites. This Constitutional provision remained 
in place until 1976. For much of its history, Missouri provided vastly 
inferior services to black students.
  After the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the 
Missouri Attorney General's office, rather than ordering the 
dismantling of segregation, simply issued an opinion stating that local 
districts ``may permit'' white and colored children to attend the same 
schools, and could decide for themselves whether they must integrate.'' 
Local schools districts in St. Louis and Kansas City perpetuated 
segregation by manipulating attendance boundaries, drawing 
discriminatory busing plans and building new schools in places to keep 
races apart.
  The now well-known St. Louis case, which is under such debate in 
these proceedings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was filed in 
1972. St. Louis had adhered to an explicit system of racial segregation 
throughout the 1960s. White students were assigned to schools in their 
neighborhood; black students attended black schools in the core of the 
city. Black students who resided outside the city were bused into the 
black schools in the city. The city had launched no effort to 
integrate; it simply adopted neighborhood school assignment plans that 
maintained racial segregation.
  Senator Ashcroft then, the Attorney General, challenged the 
desegregation plan. He argued

[[Page 985]]

that there was no basis for holding the State liable and that the State 
had taken the ``necessary and appropriate steps to remove the legal 
underpinnings of segregated schooling as well as affirmatively 
prohibiting such discrimination.'' The courts rejected his attempts; 
even the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiori.
  In 1983, the city school Board and the 22 suburban districts all 
agreed to a ``unique and compressive'' settlement, implementing a 
voluntary five-year school desegregation plan for both the city and the 
county. Importantly, the plan was voluntary--it relied on voluntary 
transfers by students rather than so-called ``forced busing.'' The 
district court approved this plan.
  Attorney General Ashcroft, representing the State, was the only one 
that did not join the settlement. He opposed all aspects of the 
settlement. In fact, he sought to have it overturned by the Eighth 
Circuit. The Eighth Circuit upheld most of the provisions of the plan, 
and emphasized that three times over the prior three years, 
specifically held that the State was the primary constitutional 
violator.
  We need a nominee that enforces the civil rights laws of the Nation, 
that brings strength and confidence to the top law enforcement post of 
our great country, and to affirm equal protection and fundamental 
fairness in the United States of America. We owe at least that much to 
the working people of America and all those who believe the United 
States remains an example of basic fairness and justice for all.
  I strongly believe that the philosophy and beliefs of Senator John 
Ashcroft are archaic and obsolete. This country has come so far in 
improving civil rights and fundamental fairness. The confirmation of 
John Ashcroft will set us years back after all the improvements that 
have been made. This would be a travesty.


               Tribute to the Legendary Dr. John Biggers

  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, let me also say in closing 
that I pay tribute to Dr. John Biggers and would insert my comments 
concerning the loss of this great artist into the record. I am sorry I 
had to put it in conjunction with my opposition to Senator Ashcroft.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to one of Houston's best 
known and most beloved artists and teachers, and one of my 
constituents--Dr. John Biggers. Dr. Biggers passed away this month in 
his Houston home. He was one of the most renowned and beloved residents 
in our city, and there is no doubt that his death will leave a hole in 
our community and in the art world--a hole that will never be filled.
  According, to an article written in our local newspaper the Houston 
Chronicle, John Bigger's life began in racially divided Gastonia, N.C., 
a rural community near Charlotte, where he was a teacher, traveler, 
author and artist. Dr. Biggers was born in 1924, the youngest son of 
Paul and Cora Biggers' seven children. His father was the son of a 
white plantation owner who at age 18 had the opportunity to attend a 
school for freed slaves and their children. There he met his future 
wife, Cora, and began preaching the gospel, accepting eggs and never 
money, for his ministries.
  John Biggers arrived in Houston in 1949 to establish the art 
department at the Texas State College for Negroes, known today as Texas 
Southern University. At 25 years old, he had a bachelor's and master's 
degree from Penn State and had received an honorable discharge from the 
U.S. Army.
  John Biggers would go on to change his world and ours through 
painting. He has used his gift as a tool to paint the mosaics of life. 
He turned canvasses into stories of life and was able to share with 
young and old people a continuing and colorful history of America. His 
art has received international and national acclaim. He traveled to 
Africa and brought back the dreams and aspirations of those who lived 
there in the form of unbelievably life like and moving art. He has 
shared them with those of us who live around the United States giving 
us a peek into the lives of others through art. More importantly, he 
has opened the eyes of children, including inner city children, who no 
longer wonder if they too can paint with a brush and turn a blank 
canvass into life in pictures.
  I hope that Dr. Biggers' life and his work will serve as an 
inspiration not only to Texans who have treasured his work for many 
years, but also for all Americans, throughout the United States.
  For his dedication and success to teaching art in our community, Dr. 
Biggers received many awards and grants during his lifetime. Among the 
most prestigious was a 1957 UNESCO Fellowship that allowed him to study 
in West Africa. In March, he was to receive the first Texas Medal of 
Arts Award from the Austin-based Texas Cultural Trust. But these awards 
simply mark points in a larger than life existence--the life of Dr. 
John Biggers.
  I extend my deepest sympathies to his wife Hazel Hales Biggers, his 
sister Ferrie Arnold of Florida, his nieces and nephews, and his entire 
family, including the families of strangers he touched during his 
remarkable journey.
  Mr. Speaker, the passing of Dr. John Biggers is a great loss to the 
State of Texas and the United States. His contributions to national and 
local culture will be sorely missed for generations.
  I hope that many others learn from and follow his example of creating 
beauty for all to enjoy.
  I thank my colleagues for this opportunity to pay tribute to this 
admirable man in the permanent history of this body. I also encourage 
my colleagues to take a few minutes to read the following article about 
Dr. Biggers, which appeared in the Houston Chronicle on February 16, 
1997. The article does a fine job of capturing Dr. Biggers life in 
words as his art has captured life in pictures.

              [From the Houston Chronicle, Feb. 16, 1997]

       Fame Is Fine, but Artist John Biggers has More on his Mind

                        (By Patricia C. Johnson)

       John Biggers smiles warmly as he opens the door to his 
     studio. It is the private world where he has conceived and 
     executed monumental murals, drawings and easel paintings for 
     50 years of his life. The radio is tuned to a jazz station, 
     and the music fills the air, bouncing off walls lined with 
     partitions covered with paintings. African masks and figures 
     he's collected through the decades cram shelves at one end of 
     the room, and the large table in the center disappears 
     beneath a load of books and catalogs, opened and unopened 
     mail, sketches and pens, even an occasional African carving 
     that's strayed.
       It's been two years since the retrospective of his work 
     premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, an event the 
     artist described then as ``miraculous.''
       Forty-five years earlier, he was not allowed inside the 
     museum to receive the prize awarded his drawing in the 
     museum's annual juried exhibition, for in the segregated 
     city, blacks were allowed inside only on specified times and 
     days. The special arrangements that were made for Biggers and 
     a colleague to view the show in advance became moot when the 
     museum changed its admission policy a few months later to 
     open its doors to everyone at all times.
       Now ``John Biggers: View From the Upper Room,'' has been 
     traveling cross-country from Los Angeles to Boston's MFA, 
     gathering marvelous reviews along the way. It opens at 
     Hampton University (Virginia) later this year, completing one 
     cycle in the artist's rich career.
       And when the University of Texas Press reissued his 
     landmark book, ``Ananse: The Web of Life,'' last month, 
     another cycle began to inspire a whole new generation.
       ``You make art one piece at a time,'' Biggers says today. 
     ``Fifty years is a lifetime, it is a long time. And 50 years 
     is very short. You have to reckon with all of that. You may 
     be impressed with the great quantity of work. But, what about 
     the dream?''
       Giving form to that dream has been the consuming passion of 
     a lifetime dedicated to making art that is meaningful.
       The artist's oft-told story begins in racially divided 
     Gastonia, N.C., a rural community near Charlotte, where this 
     teacher, traveler, author and artist was born in 1924, the 
     youngest of Paul and Cora Biggers' seven children. His father 
     was the son of a white plantation owner who at age 18 had the 
     opportunity to attend a school for freed slaves and their 
     children. There he met his future wife, Cora, and began 
     preaching the gospel, accepting only good things, such as 
     eggs, never money, for his ministries. When he died in 1937, 
     Cora took in laundry to help support her family.
       John Biggers was drawing and shaping things from the mud 
     beneath his house from the time he was a child. When he set 
     out for Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in 1941, 
     however, it was with the intention of becoming a plumber. 
     Fortunately for everyone, a forward-looking professor, Viktor 
     Lowenfeld, redirected the young man's goals. Lowenfeld, a 
     Jewish refugee from Hitler's Austria, an artist and 
     psychologist, had left Harvard for Hampton, an all-black 
     school, and organized its first art classes. He taught his 
     students that art could be the road to self-realization. When 
     he transferred to Pennsylvania State University, Biggers 
     followed him.
       ``I began to see art not primarily as an individual 
     expression of talent,'' Biggers stated in ``Black Art in 
     Houston'' (Texas A&M Press, 1978) ``But as a responsibility 
     to reflect the spirit and style of the Negro people.''
       That realization would become his credo and the foundation 
     for his art.
       John Biggers arrived in Houston in 1949 to establish the 
     art department at the Texas State College for Negroes, known 
     today as Texas Southern University. He was 25 years old, had 
     bachelor's and master's degrees from Penn State and an 
     honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. His wife, Hazel, was 
     with him.

[[Page 986]]

       They had met at Hampton University, where both were 
     undergraduates. He courted her for years, sometimes long-
     distance, before she finally agreed to marry him in December 
     1948. Within a few years of their arrival, they settled into 
     the ranch-style brick house in the tree-lined Riverside 
     neighborhood east of the Museum District that is still their 
     home.
       The city was segregated, as was the rest of the country. 
     But, Biggers has said, ``the conditions (for blacks) in 
     Philadelphia and New York in the 1940s repelled me. Houston 
     was segregated, but we had recognition from the community at 
     large.''
       Besides, he says, Texas was close to Mexico where the great 
     muralists--Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David 
     Alfaro Siqueiros--had made a case for art as a political and 
     pedagogic tool as well as an aesthetic pursuit. And Texas was 
     in the South, where the idealistic artist felt he could 
     find--and define--himself, too.
       ``I wanted to get involved with and attempt to express the 
     lifestyle and spiritual aspirations of the black people,'' 
     Biggers once said in an interview. ``The richness of it was 
     here.''
       Complicating the issue of racism, the problem--and bitter 
     disappointment--was that at the time, the black community 
     didn't realize or understand who they were and the cultural 
     wealth it possessed. Most blacks viewed acculturation as the 
     goal. But Biggers, who had first learned about African art 
     and life from his teacher, Viktor Lowenfeld, wanted ``to 
     change old images of poverty into new perceptions of honest, 
     simple dignity,'' he states in ``Black Art in Houston.''
       ``We had to rip through veils . . . (and) understand new 
     truths,'' he said. Africa was the route to reconnecting with 
     ``our ancestors (who) were hewers of wood and drawers of 
     water, husbands of the land.'' His desire to visit Africa was 
     derided by everyone, especially his TSU colleagues, who urged 
     him to go to Paris and London instead.
       Still, the determined young artist persisted, and in 1957, 
     a grant from UNESCO enabled Biggers and his wife to visit the 
     ancestral land for six months. It was an epiphany, and it 
     changed his life and his art forever.
       ``I found a dignity (in the African people) I had rarely 
     encountered before, for I had been accustomed to living with 
     warped personalities all my life,'' he wrote in ``Ananse,'' 
     published in 1962. ``I admired the African's 
     straightforwardness, a characteristic that contrasted 
     sharply--and much in his favor--with the slippery 
     maneuverings of our culture.
       ``And when I heard the great drums call the people, when I 
     saw the people respond with an enthusiasm unequaled by any 
     other call of man or God, I rejoiced, I knew that many of 
     these intrinsic African values would never be lost in the 
     dehumanizing scientific age--just as they were not lost 
     during the dark centuries of slavery.''
       In the United States, the civil rights movement was 
     changing blacks' perception of themselves. Though art seemed 
     peripheral to it all and Biggers' emphasis on Africa ``was 
     not resting well with the more conservative faculty members 
     (at TSU),'' as Alvia Wardlaw noted in her catalog on Bigger's 
     retrospective, the artist ``continued to teach the 
     fundamentals of drawing, printmaking and paintings . . . and 
     the murals created by his students increasingly reflected the 
     movement's struggles.''
       Anything else would have been dishonest to an individual of 
     conscience and the artist of vision.
       In his own work, Biggers struggled for a unified image that 
     would reflect the ancestral legacy of Africa and the 
     realities of contemporary urban America. His figures became 
     increasingly abstract, and he incorporated personal symbols--
     the quilt, remembered from his grandmother's house, and the 
     kettle, in which his mother boiled the laundry--as he 
     searched for archetypes. His palette of earth tones became 
     lighter and almost transparent. He described complex spaces 
     with patterns combining elements of the urban landscape, 
     notably the shotgun houses symbolic of freed slaves, and pure 
     geometry based on the symmetry of the classic quilt. He 
     populated these spaces with families, mothers and children 
     especially, who shared it with magical things like the 
     rabbits and tortoises of West African creation myths and 
     celestial bodies.
       Biggers retired from TSU in 1983 and has since been 
     dividing his time between Houston and Gastonia, preferring 
     the rural simplicity and quiet of his hometown, where his 
     family also lives, to the urban cacophony. In a way, it's 
     returning to the dreams of his youth, discovering the 
     connectedness to the Earth and its rhythms that he had 
     discovered on that first visit to Africa.
       ``I like the little frogs and the birds and the trees,'' he 
     says with a laugh.
       He's delighted by the attention his retrospective is 
     receiving, and graciously attends the events that surround 
     it, most recently at the Boston museum. But he's tired, he 
     says.
       ``When you're young and have goals, you're interested in 
     reaching out and proving yourself. I'm not interested in that 
     anymore,'' he says.
       ``I'm a person who needs to work rather than celebrate. For 
     me, the payoff is the work itself. It think this work I'm 
     doing now is showing I've grown. It has greater simplicity, 
     and I like that.''
       Biggers has a mural commission, the 16th in his career, in 
     progress. He titled it ``Salt Marsh,'' and enlisted friend 
     and former student James McNeil to assist. Its final version 
     will be 10 feet by 27 feet, painted with acrylic on canvas. 
     On this cool winter morning, work is in the early stages, 
     with McNeil painstakingly translating Biggers' first small 
     but detailed pencil drawing into a larger, color-coded 
     version pinned to the studio wall.
       In a corner, a half-finished painting sits on the easel 
     waiting for the artist's return. This, too, is a commission, 
     and similarly loaded with symbols and meanings distilled from 
     decades of research and hundreds of artworks.
       He's titled it ``The Morning Star.'' There, in Biggers' 
     unmistakable crystalline colors and geometric forms, are the 
     father and mother, the son who's being born and the daughter 
     who is yet to be conceived, in a mystical space with the 
     symbolic rabbit and turtle. Ever the teacher and storyteller, 
     he explains:
       ``You see, the boy here is being born from the blue sky. 
     Those are his parents, sitting on a bench, which is on a 
     barge, their feet on the floor, which is a xylophone.'' The 
     soft voice goes on to describe the other components, their 
     shapes and their origins in ancient African myths, and their 
     timeless meaning.
       ``Individual life is very short,'' he says, ``All things 
     rise and fall, live and die.
       ``But if we agree the spirit does not die, that it 
     reinhabits the world, time takes a different dimension.''

                          ____________________