Six years ago, Barry Bauman and his colleague Margaret Nowosielska pulled up in front of the YMCA on South Wabash, a gloomy five-story redbrick building with boarded-up windows. Mark Marshall, a YMCA development consultant, greeted them outside, then tussled with the rusty padlock and chain that secured the wooden doors. Turning on flashlights, they walked into the pitch-black building.
Unlike most other African-American children, Scott attended an elementary school for whites. “If a black family lived near a white school or there were two black families, they could go to the local white school,” explains William Taylor, who teaches at Indiana University and curated an exhibit on Scott at the Terra Museum of American Art in 1996. “But if there was a concentration of blacks, they had to go to the nearest black school.”
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Scott then went to France, where he hoped to improve his craft. In Paris he met Henry O. Tanner, a preeminent expatriate African-American artist who’d been included in the Great Salon Exhibition and had studied with the impressionists. He invited Scott to his summer home in Normandy, and Scott became one of only two artists to study with him. “You’ll read in various articles that so-and-so studied with Tanner,” says Taylor. “Well, it may have been a day of evaluation or something. Scott studied with Tanner for months. William Harper, another Art Institute of Chicago student, also studied with Tanner. They must have exhibited some special ability to gain this privilege.”
Scott got his share of attention in France, not only because he was talented, but because he was physically striking. At about six feet, he towered over most Parisians, and he wore a goatee and a beret. The Parisians considered him exotic, and that opened doors everywhere. “There was freedom, no restrictions, no segregation,” says Taylor. “The only restriction was a language barrier. He went to a restaurant, and he wanted pork chops. He ended up drawing a picture for the waiter, but ended up getting horse meat.”
The honor boosted Scott’s profile. The foundation helped launch the Harlem Renaissance, which consisted largely of artists it recognized during the 1920s. Chicago artists Archibald Motley, Hale Woodruff, and John Wesley Hardrick were among those honored. Most of the younger artists, who were in their 20s and 30s, were more daring in their work than Scott, then 43, who would stick to the traditional style he’d developed for the rest of his life.
Scott painted the mural at the Wabash YMCA in 1936, though it’s not clear who commissioned it because the Y doesn’t have a record. Becker says it’s not on the list of local WPA works, so it wasn’t funded by the government. Perhaps it was commissioned by the YMCA, which had hired him to do an oil-on-canvas mural for the 135th Street YMCA in New York City–a work that’s also now deteriorating.
The Wabash YMCA ended its programs in 1969, after the much bigger Washington Park Y was built. It reopened briefly in the 70s, but was shuttered again in 1981, when it was bought by Saint Thomas Episcopal Church. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, but it was still almost torn down in 1994. Then in 1997 Saint Thomas and a group of area churches pooled their funds and began the long process of rehabbing the building, restoring part of it as a Y and turning the rest of it into a single-room-occupancy hotel; all of the rooms are now filled, most of them by formerly homeless men. Each room was given a kitchenette and a bath, and the rooms once used for job training became a community center, a fitness center, and a day-care center.
