By Victor Greto
PIKE CREEK — This is one way a rich life in art and history starts.
You’re a poor kid from Bridgeton, N.J., and you spend a good chunk of your time sitting at the feet of your elders, reading them the latest news from the papers you deliver.
And listening.
Jim Newton’s father had a sixth grade education, but he always carried a newspaper under his arm. That acted as a signal to everyone around him that this billiard-hall owner was an educated man.
Of course, then, his son Jim knew delivering the Bridgeton Evening News was the best job he could have, handed down to him by his older brother George.
One of their neighbors, Mary Emma, to whom he delivered the paper would pretend she left her reading glasses somewhere, and asked if he could please read to her.
Even as a child, he knew she and others in the neighborhood were just too proud to tell him they couldn’t read very well.
When he finished reading her the news of the day, he stayed and listened to stories of long ago, tales of life in the South and embroidered gossip about how folks met and married and had kids and how and when they died.
Another customer, Mr. Flood, told Newton about his life sharecropping — pungent anecdotes told “in such a way that it opened up my eyes to a strong oral tradition of the South,” says Newton, 66, professor emeritus of Black Studies at the University of Delaware.
“I had to stand at attention to listen to it,” Newton says of Flood’s stories, even as he was anxious to finish delivering his papers before dark.
Like a sponge, Newton’s mind absorbed as much as it could before it became dripping wet, and he had to express himself.
Newton, who, in 1968, became the first African-American to earn a graduate degree in Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina, retired from UD in 2005 and devoted himself to his first love, his art.
His work ranges from abstract expressionism to simple but evocative cartoon-like black marker drawings, to a panoply of color celebrating an imaginative pre-Columbian past. He draws and paints freehand, mostly on simple pieces of cardboard.
“The artist should dabble in everything in order to be complete,” Newton says.
Not very many people know about his work. In part, that’s because, aside from his public role as an expert in Delaware African-American history, he describes himself as merely a “professional doodler.”
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Newton’s art combines a personal creative expression with the black oral tradition. He equates doodling as primary to drawing as oral tradition is to history. It’s a combination as complex as understanding race in America.
When talking about African-American history, Newton happily takes on the role of anecdotal storyteller, a tradition that goes back to Africa, he says. His art seems as individual.
As a child, he began drawing on napkins and McDonald’s bags. “Anything I got my hands on, including old brown paper bags, and discarded newspapers,” Newton says. Instead of getting bicycles for Christmas like other kids in the neighborhood, his mother gave him tablets with crayons.
But he had no idea he could be an artist. Between the third and fourth grade a teacher noticed his doodles, and asked him to draw for the school newsletter.
“I became the school cartoonist,” Newton says.
The teacher told him, however, he needed to add bubbles of text to his drawings, just like they do in comics.
“She sent me to the library, and I’ve been there ever since,” he says.
Newton neither sketches nor outlines his work. It’s all freehand. “That why I call myself a doodler,” he says.
He often draws in series, and the stages of his interests seem clear in retrospect. Up to high school, he did realistic and cartoon-like drawings.
In college, his earlier work is colorful and cubist, abstract, but also includes “found art,” things picked up around him that he put together to make a statement. Newton got caught up in realism again after Ed Wilson, a teacher and sculptor at North Carolina Central University, told him he needn’t be abstract to be powerful.
“All composition and design comes from nature,” Newton says, and calls illustrator and Brandywine River School painter N.C. Wyeth one of his greatest inspirations.
One of his favorite series of drawings happened by accident. In the fall of 1989, he began drawing on 8-by-11 tablet backings — he saved the back of discarded yellow tablets — mostly done after work and while watching the 5 o’clock news.
“I did it to keep my hand in art after doing UD administrative duties all day,” Newton says.
By the following year, he had done 100 of them. He called them “couch potato” drawings. Most of the images he drew came from his childhood, and included animals, fishing, baseball players and neighborhood scenes. One favorite drawing in this series is of a man lying on his side, ostensibly fishing. But, really, he’s daydreaming, his eyes like a playful shaman’s looking upwards to the sky.
“It’s about the men I knew who loved to go fishing,” he says. “But they didn’t care. It’s about daydreaming, recreation, about drinking their beverages and eating their sandwiches.”
University of North Carolina professor Marvin Saltzman asked Newton to do a show of his work at the university. He chose to do an exhibition of the couch potato drawings. It was successful, earning a large spread in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
He recently completed a cartoon-like series of “Red Hatter” images, the society of women older than 50 to which his wife belongs. His latest series is called “They Came Before Columbus,” based on a 30-year-old book that argues there existed an African-Indian mix of cultures in America before whites sailed here in the late 15th century.
The works are a spectacularly colorful mesh of Native American and African designs and imagery, done in bold, emotional strokes.
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Newton was one of nine children.
After a 3-year stint in the Army in Germany as an MP, he attended the all-black North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C., where he earned a B.A. degree in art and German, a language he learned while in the service.
He wanted to go the mostly-white University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, but his teachers at North Carolina Central said he didn’t have a chance to get in the art program there because there were no blacks in it.
“I was a walk-in,” he says.
That is, instead of applying, he took a portfolio of his work and presented it to professors at UNC. “Artists tend not to be prejudiced,” he says.
He was accepted.
Newton was poor, but professors supported him by purchasing his work, as well as secretly providing him with supplies. “I’d wake up in the morning and there would be the materials to work with,” he says. “Like an elf had come in the night.”
He was arrested twice for “impersonating a student,” says LaWanda Newton, his wife of 40 years.
“I don’t like to tell that story because it bothers me,” Newton says.
The white police officers couldn’t believe a young black man carrying art and drawing materials on a North Carolina campus could have been a student. There was barely a handful of black graduate students there in the mid-1960s. One time, the police even critiqued his work by shining a flashlight on one piece, and then another.
“They liked one painting, but not the other one,” Newton says, shaking his head.
He graduated from UNC with a Master in Fine Arts in 1968. He held exhibitions and consistently sold his work, but he chose to pursue an academic career and do his art without being restricted by what might sell.
He had to support his wife and a growing family. The Newtons eventually had three daughters, one of whom graduated from Wellesley and two who graduated from Villanova. Newton earned a doctorate in education in art at Illinois State University in 1972.
He worked for a while as a graphic designer in New Castle, but followed LaWanda to her home town, West Chester, Pa., where she found a job as an elementary school teacher. She eventually made a career as a school counselor in Delaware and in Chester, Pa.
Newton taught art at the college in West Chester, before getting a job as assistant professor of education at UD in 1972. The following year, he was named associate professor and director of black American studies. He stayed in that position for 20 years.
In 1994, he became a senior fellow at the Center for Community Development and Family Policy for UD. He retired in 2005 after contracting diabetes.
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Newton has a hard time getting around now because of his illness. He hobbles when he walks. To work, he sits in his basement studio, lays the cardboard flat on the table, and draws. He uses materials he always has used, ever since his junior high school days: crayons, pencils, thick black markers, acrylic paints. Only occasionally will he use a brush.
In a sense, Newton has lived parallel lives as both an artist and a historian and folklorist.
“I was always an artist,” he says now, “but I got into passing on the tradition because of the respect I had for the people who told me those stories. It opened my eyes to another world-view.”
It’s a world that contains a dual heritage, both African and American, and whose complex dimensions are as multifaceted as a great work of art. That’s how he visualizes American culture.
Newton has authored two books, including, “The Principles of Diversity: Handbook for a Diversity-Friendly America,” “A Curriculum Evaluation on Student Knowledge of Afro-American Life and History,” and has co-edited, “The Other Slaves: Mechanics, Artisans, and Craftsmen.”
That idea of mixing colors on cardboard, on a palette, is akin to the miscegenation of American culture and people during the more than two centuries of American history. Like a population of determined art critics, Americans have been evaluating each other’s colors since the beginning.
“America always has been wrapped up in a challenge of race and color,” Newton says. “The beauty of America is in its diversity. and within its diversity also is perhaps the most challenging and most complex of its social issues.”
Newton says that black Americans are the catalyst for American democracy. “We look at the success of black Americans to see how well America has fared,” he says. America and its “web of color complexity should be viewed as a challenge to American democracy,” Newton says.
America is a cultural mosaic.
“Instead of isolating the pieces, we should see how they all fit together.”