Black Sis-tory Profile: Madame E. Toussaint Welcome, reshaped the image of African American soldiers in WWI
Madame E. Toussaint Welcome, born Jennie Louise Van Der Zee, the self-proclaimed, “foremost female artist of the race,” was indeed a diva of the arts and one of the only Black women filmmakers during the silent movie era.
She was born in Lenox, Massachusetts on January 10, 1885, the oldest of six children. As a teenager, she studied music and art.
Her parents, John Van Der Zee and Elizabeth Van Der Zee, worked as butler and maid for President Ulysses S. Grant in New York until 1884, when they returned to Lenox.
In the early 1900s, Jennie, her father, and two brothers moved to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, also called the “New Negro Movement.”
Britannica.com describes the period as “Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, (African Americans) sought to reconceptualize ‘the Negro’ apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other.”
In one of the few photographs of Jennie that exist—taken by her brother, James Van Der Zee, famed Harlem photographer—she is young, slender and light-brown skinned, fashionably dressed in a wide-brimmed black hat, ankle-length black silken dress, and a tan and brown fur boa draped across her neck; she holds a bouquet of mixed flowers.
Her wealth and status derived from three companies that she, with her husband Ernest Touissiant Welcome, an inventor and entrepreneur, established: the Toussaint Conservatory of Art and Music (TCAM), the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange (TMPE), and The Toussaint Pictorial Company (TPC).
The UK-based Hundred Heroines, a museum/ gallery dedicated to women in photography, noted, “The (Conservatory) in Harlem -- an art school and photographic studio---ran for over 40 years. (It’s) first advertisement appeared in the first issue of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s (NAACP) journal, The Crisis, in 1909….”
The conservatory offered lessons in sketching, watercolor, oil painting, piano, voice, and reed/brass instruments and served as a photographic studio for her brother, James.
Jennie was the first African American owner of a business in Harlem, populated at the time by foreign-born whites; she was dubbed, “The Legendary Harlemite.”
A major impetus behind the Toussaint Welcomes’ entrepreneurship, however, was the dismantling of demeaning stereotypes about African Americans troops serving in WW1.
On June 8, 1916, the TMPE produced Doing Their Bit, a 12-part documentary about African American soldiers overseas, which recognized their military participation in the war. (There has been speculation that racist depictions of African Americans in the 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, also fueled their creative projects.)
According to Harlem World, “Between 1917 and 1918, (TPC) published A Pictorial History of the Negro in the Great War, a memorial book that featured her work; Charge of the Colored Division. A Pictorial History of the Negro in the Great War…” which included photos of 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment, the legendary “Harlem Hellfighters.”
In addition, TPC published one million patriotic postcards of African American soldiers.
Near the end of WWI, the War Savings Stamp Committee accepted Jennie’s painting, Charge of the Coloured Division: Somewhere in France, to advertise the 1918 Liberty Loan campaign to sell bonds for the war effort.
The Committee published close to 100,000 “We Are Doing Our Bit” posters, depicting an African American war hero with the 15th’s insignia on his canteen and his bayonet in the chest of a German soldier, were distributed across the country.
Despite their prolific output, no physical copies of their work are known to exist. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jennie, “best known today as a pioneer African American filmmaker, died in 1956.”
Photo: U.S. Army Corps photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (A picture of African-American soldiers in an all African division, marching in France, during WWI).
