A monument to freedom: Hale Woodruff's Building Savery Library

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:04][music] >> We're in the museum on the campus of Talladega College looking at an extraordinary series of paintings by Hale Woodruff produced beginning in 1939 three large canvases but then there was a second set. Let's take a close look at the building of Savery Library which was the place where these paintings were hung. Savery Library sits high on a hill as you're coming into the city of Talladega. Its purpose was for Gallagher and for George Crawford to build a library but more importantly to build a memorial to freedom and to think about the contribution of the founders Savery and Tarrant the two formerly enslaved men who had this idea of establishing a college. There was this terrible idea that slavery could reassert itself and that one of the best ways that they could ensure that this didn't happen is to make sure that education was available to the black public. The freedmen had attained emancipation education was a means of assuming the responsibilities for keeping it. They were in the throes of Jim and Jane Crow.

[00:01:21]They were still in the segregated South.

[00:01:25]Memorials were being built to honor the notion of the lost cause. So there were these Confederate monuments going up all across the South. This would be a bricks and mortar building that would symbolize that they wanted to ensure that they didn't go back. This memorial this building is not a statue. It's not something that is passive. It's an active space for learning. It is a living memorial. The idea learning to read, the idea of learning in general, was outlawed during the institution of slavery. I'm fascinated by the choices of the artist made in terms of the composition. The library stretches from the left about 2/3 of the way towards the right and moves back slightly in space. That allows for a foreground where we have large figures. These are heroic, monumental figures. This is a celebration of education ultimately, but in the immediate sense, it's a celebration of the dignity of labor.

[00:02:30]Woodruff places the viewer inside the scene. You're part of the building of this library. Understanding that everyone has a contribution from the plumbing to the carpentry work, to the design of the building itself. It is the incorporation of the geography, the topography of the place in the midst of these human beings building something that would be a memorial to freedom.

[00:02:58]Look at the arms of the man who holds the sign that says Savery Library. It's not just a representation of the man's strength, of his musculature, but of his energy and in fact of the dynamism of the canvas as a whole. You can almost hear the cacophony that's taking place of the hammers, of the bricks being laid down. The bricks feel hard and sharp and cold. The nails feel sharp. Look at the delicacy and the time that the artist has taken to delineate the sawtooth of the wood saw that rests right next to the toolbox. This just a kind of detail that shows a love of representation, a love of illusionism and of representing different kinds of textures. It is a choreographed scene of men dancing through this canvas. You can see it in the bodies. You can see it with the gentleman who is holding the large lumber on the left-hand side with the green shirt and red scarf. There's the complexity to the way in which he's holding that large 2 by 4. It also is in the bending of the bricklayer, the body of the gentleman with the pipe, the pulling of the rope with the gentleman on the horse. It is the movement. It is a dance. The artist has set the building's facade at an angle, and then you see the framing of the windows where the bricks have not yet been laid, and they're being propped up by these sticks. But it does suggest that this is an unfinished project, that the construction of this library, and more importantly what it represents, will not necessarily come to fruition, that we have to work at it. Interestingly, it was the contribution of the African-American citizens, but it was also the contribution of the white citizens to pull this together, building this memorial to freedom. And the artist does such a beautiful job of expressing determination in the profile of the man who walks with a large piece of pipe on his shoulder, or the man who's in charge of the building of the campus, who we see in a green jacket walking beside the man who's checking the blueprints with his T-square and triangle. I can't imagine a more fitting painting to hang in Slocum Savory Library's lobby. As students of generation after generation walk into that library and take inspiration from the message that is being given in this painting as they walk into the reading room. And those people were not only studying for themselves, but they were taking that back into community. And that is the piece that it is so incredibly important that Woodruff and the leaders here at this institution sought to understand that there needed to be a representation. There needed to be a reminder of why you're here. You learn all that you can to take that back into community.

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