“Why? What? Who? The most challenging aspect of art is when you search for the answers to these questions and sometimes the artist is not that concerned about finding out the answers, but the search is so beautiful, the search is so magnificent… the search for human dignity.”

—Charles White

Charles White’s Let’s Walk Together, 1953, is a meticulously rendered work that powerfully embodies the artist’s dedication to portraying the dignity and resilience of Black life in America. The composition presents seven figures in a tightly unified formation, their expressions conveying quiet strength and understated warmth. At the center, a man stands confidently with a jacket draped over his shoulder, while a woman beside him lightly rests her hand on his arm—a gesture of solidarity and connection. The textured clothing, dramatic interplay of light and shadow, and emotive power of their gazes showcase White’s mastery of charcoal, while the sculptural precision of their forms and emphasis on enlarged, expressive hands reinforce his signature themes of labor, community, and perseverance.

As vital today as when it was created, White’s imagery continues to resonate with contemporary audiences and shape the visual vocabulary of socially engaged artists. From 1965 until his death in 1979, he served as the first full-time Black faculty member at Los Angeles’ Otis Art Institute. During this time, he mentored a new generation of artists—including Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons—guiding them not only in technical mastery but in cultivating a way of seeing and representing the world with clarity, conviction, and humanity. “No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did,” Marshall wrote. “Charles White kept common cause with the great masters of art history, holding up his end and passing the torch to the generations that followed him.” Let’s Walk Together can be seen as a distillation of this artistic mission—a fusion of universal human themes and urgent social realities. White’s call for dignity, solidarity, and transformative vision—preserved in both his drawings and the artists he mentored—endures in the evolving practices of contemporary artists and remains embedded in the critical and institutional frameworks that shape how his work is understood today. 

Rare, historically significant, and thematically resonant, Let’s Walk Together stands as a testament to White’s enduring artistic and cultural legacy. The work debuted at ACA Gallery in New York as part of the artist’s landmark exhibition, Charles White: Recent Paintings, in February 1953. Acquired directly from the gallery in 1956 by a friend of the artist, this important picture has remained in the same private collection for over six decades and has not been publicly exhibited since this first appearance. Of the eight drawings shown at ACA Gallery in 1953—all of which draw attention to workers’ universal struggles for rights, centering on Black experiences in America, combating racial and economic injustice with images of strength and resolve—three are now in the permanent collections of prestigious art institutions: Harvest Talk, 1952 at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Mother, 1952 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Preacher, 1952 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The auction record for White’s work, across both paintings and drawings, is held by Ye Shall Inherit the Earth, 1953, which sold for $1.76M in 2019, underscoring the enduring appeal of this pivotal group of works.

 “The happy, hopeful faces in Let’s Walk Together make you feel that these drawings really do function for the purpose and time in which they are done—a time when the hope for mankind must be asserted daily to counteract the fears, the uncertainty which are to be seen in so many faces everywhere around us today.”

—Phillip Evergood, Masses & Mainstream, 1953 

Let’s Walk Together in Print and for Everyone

Progressive publications, recognizing White’s purpose and trademark bold, powerful subjects, continued to take a particular interest in his work. In 1953, the New York–based leftist press Masses & Mainstream published the portfolio Charles White: Six Drawings, featuring lithographic reproductions of six recent works, including Let’s Walk Together. In his introduction, the artist Rockwell Kent called the selection “essentially a documentation of human dignity,” emphasizing industry, love, peace, cooperation, and beauty.ⁱ

White saw art as a powerful tool for social change, a conviction reflected in how his works were distributed. He intentionally priced the portfolio affordably to ensure access for working-class and marginalized communities. White took deep satisfaction in knowing his images reached “tens of thousands of miles away,” resonating with people who identified with his subjects and their struggles.ⁱⁱ He recalled, “When I heard that a group of sharecroppers and factory workers in Alabama had combined whatever coins they had to buy a portfolio, shared the pictures among themselves, and passed them from home to home, I felt that I had made a ‘success.’”ⁱⁱⁱ

“[White’s] strokes are bold, courageous and affirmative. His lines are clear, his people are alive… the story of living manifest in their faces and their bodies.”

—Harry Belafonte

Shortly after White’s death, Let’s Walk Together appeared on the cover of a December 1980 brochure by Ray O. Light, a producer of Marxist-Leninist material, titled The Founding of The Black United Front and Its Revolutionary Potential. In the mid-1980s, Angela Davis featured the drawing as the sole image on the cover of The Black Family: The Ties That Bind, co-authored with her sister, Fania Davis, which addressed the importance of the “Black Family” in the Reagan era. In 2014, Let’s Walk Together was reproduced on the cover of Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, a book that reexamines the overlooked influence of 1950s leftist politics on African American writers and artists, underscoring the artwork’s lasting cultural resonance.

“Charles spent some time in Mexico and he talked about how pivotal Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera were… that their art was important because people could see it. They could touch it. They could feel it. And he wanted the same for his art.”

—Stan Wilson

White’s Time in Mexico and His Trip to the USSR

Beginning in 1939, White was employed by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, first in the easel division and then as a muralist. In April 1946, White traveled with his then-wife, the artist Elizabeth Catlett, to Mexico City to work at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura “La Esmeralda” and the Taller de Grafica Popular, a renowned collective that championed socially and politically conscious graphic art. Living briefly with David Alfaro Siqueiros and engaging with master muralists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, White absorbed the influence of artists he described as “working to create an art about and for the people.”^iv “Mexico was a milestone,” he later reflected; “that had the strongest influence on my whole approach.”^v White’s travels also took him to the Soviet Union in 1951, an experience that deepened his engagement with leftist ideology and, in turn, drew the scrutiny of McCarthy-era U.S. authorities.

Let’s Walk Together embodies these influences through its heroic figures, expressions of quiet resolve, and an emphasis on the muscular forearms that symbolize strength and unity. The subjects’ proud stances and timeless comportment align with White’s commitment to Social Realism and American Regionalism, movements that prioritized legible, content-driven narratives. His deep respect for labor—shaped by his own upbringing as the son of a railroad and steel worker and a domestic worker—is palpable in this work, where the enlarged hands and the group's indivisibility reflect ideals of solidarity and social justice.

“Done with a combination of charcoal and carbon pencil, [White’s works on paper] have such a wealth of fine detail, a variety of tones and finesse of drawing, that they can be called not drawings, but ‘paintings’ in black and white. It is in these works that the depth and beauty of his human subjects are best disclosed, as well as his ability to give them expressive gestures that for all their seeming simplicity, have an epic character.”

—Sidney Finkelstein, 1953

Draftsmanship, Materials, Technique, and Process: The Power of Charcoal

 By the early 1950s, White had shifted primarily to charcoal, ink, and lithography. Let’s Walk Together exemplifies his mastery of charcoal and carbon pencil, showcasing his precise cross-hatching and control over the medium’s expressive power. Despite its scale, the work carries the impact of a mural, demonstrating White’s talent for conveying grand narratives within intimate formats. In his 1955 essay Path of a Negro Artist, White described his meticulous process: “My drawings are built up slowly, like my paintings, and I make many preliminary sketches for a finished drawing.”^vi This labor-intensive approach is evident in the wealth of fine detail and tonal variation that imbues Let’s Walk Together with a profound sense of humanity and strength. As art critic Sidney Finkelstein observed, White’s drawings possess an “epic character,” bridging the simplicity of drawing with the grandeur of painting.^vii

“[White’s] most accomplished drawings achieve true perfection… I can’t help remembering a Shaker motto… ‘Hands to work, hearts to God.’ The terms art and work gain embodied meaning in the best of his pictures.”

—Kerry James Marshall

White’s Influence: A Legacy of Artistic and Cultural Impact

White’s contributions to American art encompassed not only his own practice, but the generations he mentored. At the Otis Art Institute, he helped redefine the role of the artist-educator, guiding future luminaries such as Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, Kent Twitchell, Judithe Hernández, Suzanne Jackson, and Richard Wyatt. These students were drawn not only to White’s technical prowess but to his ethos—a belief in the power of art to engage history, politics, and lived experience.

His reach extended well beyond the classroom. Among the artists, writers, actors, and activists whose lives he touched were pioneering actor Sidney Poitier, who eulogized White in 1979; singer Harry Belafonte, a close friend during White’s Los Angeles years; poets Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois; fellow alumni of the Art Students League in New York, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence; American Social Realist painter Philip Evergood, who served with White on the Committee for the Negro in the Arts; and renowned portraitist Alice Neel. Neel, who exhibited alongside White throughout the 1940s at New York’s ACA Gallery, honored his legacy in a 1980 issue of Freedomways, writing that his “fine drawings and his dedication to his people will always be remembered,” and concluding that he “gave honor and dignity to the lovers of mankind.”^viii

Collector’s Digest

• Lithographs of the present drawing are held in prestigious collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., and the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina.


• Charles White’s Preacher, 1952, was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Edges of Ailey exhibition, celebrating the life and work of choreographer Alvin Ailey, which ran through January 2025.


• White’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at major institutions, most recently in the career survey Charles White: A Little Higher at the Cincinnati Museum of Art in 2024.


• In 2018, the landmark touring retrospective Charles White: A Retrospective, co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, debuted at the Art Institute before traveling to MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through 2019. That same year, Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift was presented at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Christian-Green Gallery at The University of Texas at Austin.

ⁱ Rockwell Kent, quoted in Charles White, Charles White: Six Drawings, New York, 1953, n.p.
ⁱⁱ Charles White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream, April 1955.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Charles White, quoted in John Pittman, “He Was an Implacable Critic of His Own Creations” Freedomways 20, no. 3, 1980, p. 191. See also: Alison Cameron, “Buenos Vecinos: African-American Printmaking and the Taller Grafica Popular,” Print Quarterly 16, no. 4, December 1999, pp. 353-367.
^v Ibid.
^vi Charles White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream, April 1955.
^vii Sidney Finkelstein, “Charles White’s Humanist Art,” Masses & Mainstream, vol. 6, no. 2, February 1953, p. 45.
^viii Alice Neel, quoted in Veronica Roberts, Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift to the University of Texas, Austin, 2019, p. 100.