A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present,by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Pantheon Books, New York 

The flyleaf of this book describes it in the following terms:

A landmark work of art history: lavishly illustrated and extraordinary for its thoroughness, A History of African-American Artists -- conceived, researched, and written by the great American artist Romare Bearden with journalist Harry Henderson, who completed the work after Bearden's death in 1988 -- gives a conspectus of African-American art from the late eighteenth century to the present. It examines the lives and careers of more than fifty signal African-American artists, and the relation of their work to prevailing artistic, social, and political trends both in America and throughout the world.

Beginning with a radical reevaluation of the enigma of Joshua Johnston, a late eighteenth-century portrait painter widely assumed by historians to be one of the earliest known African-American artists, Bearden and Henderson go on to examine the careers of Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, Edmonia Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Hale A. Woodruff, Augusta Savage, Charles H. Alston, Ellis Wilson, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Horace Pippin, Alma W. Thomas, and many others.

Illustrated with more than 420 black-and-white illustrations and 61 color reproductions -- including rediscovered classics, works no longer extant, and art never before seen in this country -- A History of African-American Artists is a stunning achievement.

Certainly, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Pantheon Books, New York deserves to be regarded as the leading overview of African American artists' histories, consisting of detailed, substantial overviews of visual arts practices over the span of two centuries, up to thje late 20th century. The book inevitably contains a chapter on Charles White and as is typical of this uncommon scholarly endeavor, the chapter in question is packed with informative, clear, detailed and nuanced perspective - including biographical - on White. If there is one chapter in a book of this type that comes close to articulating  the breadth of White's practice, it's the one contained in A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. Extensively illustrated, this is a wonderful; rerflection on White, written with wonderful clarity.

Charles White appears in a number of other pages in this book, including a photograph of White working on his 1939 mural, Five Great Americans, or Progress of the American Negro.

Three early extracts (all from page 405) as follows:

Although White won many national awards, he was ignored by leading critics during the reign of Abstract Expressionism because of his single-minded traditional style and focus on black working people. In that period he got more attention abroad than at home. However, during the civil rights struggles White's moving portraits of black men and women against a background of old runaway slave WANTED posters effectively expressed the feelings of millions.

One of the most distinctive and unusual aspects of White's work is his unswerving focus on social themes and humanistic values for about forty years. His work belongs to that spectrum of graphic commentary on social issues associated with Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, and Jean-Louis Forain. While some WPA artists, such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, became famous innovators, White must be recognized as one of the few artists who kept the tradition of social themes alive in American art despite the enormous shifts in art - the rise and fall of many movements - since the 1930s.

One of the finest draftsmen in contemporary America, White was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1972, the second African-American artist to be so recognized since the 1927 election of Henry Osawa Tanner. With its passion and scrupulous style, the appeal of his work crossed all racial lines/ when in 1976, the High Museum in Atlanta presented a major exhibition entitled "The Work of Charles White," it was subtitled "An American Experience."