A Dream Deferred: The Art and Activism of Edwin Augustus Harleston
M. Akua McDaniel
The University of South Carolina Press
Excluded from the Charleston Renaissance because of his race and pushed to the edges of the Harlem Renaissance by geography and circumstance, Edwin Augustus Harleston was an artist caught between worlds. Despite being marginalized within his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, during his lifetime, Harleston nonetheless pursued his career as a painter, first at Charleston's Avery Institute, later at Atlanta University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In A Dream Deferred, Akua McDaniel offers the first comprehensive biography of Harleston. McDaniel considers not only his efforts to redefine the image of Black life in American visual culture, but she also examines Harleston's life as a social and political activist, including his role in founding the first NAACP chapter in South Carolina. McDaniel offers a full portrait of Harleston's life and career, one that had an outsized impact on the American art world, and beyond.