In 1979, the artist Alan Rohan Crite explained his preference for the kind of everyday neighborhood scene like Douglass Square. He said, “I was living here [Boston] in the South End with a lot of black people around me. I was painting them as I saw them as human beings, just ordinary human beings, having ordinary lives.In the twenties and thirties the image of black people was distorted, to put it mildly. We had a “Jazz Negro” entertainer or a traumatic figure out of the ghetto or a social problem. But the ordinary human being who goes to the store, comes home, washes dishes, all the homely things—he just wasn’t registering. I felt it important for me to present the life of black people as part of the Christian dignity of man.
