The Rise of Black Potters in the Civil Rights Movement

Pull a bright stoneware bowl toward you for a moment. Feel the weight, the curve, the thumbprint where a potter once steadied the clay. For Black makers in the United States, that quiet pressure of a hand against spinning earth has long been more than craft. It has been survival strategy, family ledger, protest sign, and freedom dream — all fired to a glassy sheen.

As a Colorful Tabletop Creative and Pragmatic Joy Curator, I like to think of the civil rights story not only in streets and courtrooms, but also in jars, jugs, and everyday dishes. On the surface, a jar simply holds food. In the hands of Black potters, it also holds names that were supposed to be erased, verses that were illegal to write, and stories that museums took generations to hear.

This is the story of how Black pottery rose from enslaved labor to civil rights–era visibility, and how that legacy continues to shape the pieces you can set on your own table today.

From Enslavement to Inscription: Dave the Potter and Resistance in Clay

Long before sit‑ins and freedom marches, an enslaved potter in South Carolina was already practicing a dangerous kind of literacy.

David Drake (often called Dave the Potter) worked in the Old Edgefield District from the 1830s through the 1860s, throwing monumental alkaline‑glazed stoneware jars that could hold 25 to 30 gallons of food or water. While most stoneware jars of the period were anonymous, Drake signed and dated many of his vessels and incised them with short verses, Christian proverbs, and mysterious symbols.

South Carolina law criminalized Black literacy, with harsh penalties, yet Drake carved lines like:

“I wonder where is all my relation Friendship to all—and every nation”

onto a jar in 1857. On another, he recorded his own bondage with a blunt couplet linking his name, his labor, and his enslaver. These inscriptions turn otherwise utilitarian storage jars into historical documents that testify to forced family separations, religious faith, and a mind that refused to be reduced to property.

Archaeologists and historians now treat his jars as primary sources. The dates and initials he carved map his movement among enslavers such as Harvey and Reuben Drake, the Landrum family, Jasper Gibbs, and Lewis Miles. One jar made on September 19, 1862, while he was enslaved by Miles, can still be seen in museum collections. Each piece is a footnote to the written record of American slavery — but this time, the enslaved man wrote the note himself.

When you stand in front of one of his jars (or even scroll past an image in a book), remember: you are not just looking at a container. You are looking at an act of civil disobedience.

Face Jugs and Funerary Fire: African Spirits in American Clay

Alongside jars, another form rose from the kilns of the South: the face jug. Sometimes called “ugly jugs,” these small stoneware vessels with wide mouths, bulging eyes, and exaggerated teeth can seem whimsical at first. Underneath, they are anything but.

Scholars trace the tradition to Bakongo people trafficked from Central Africa and forced into potteries in Georgia and South Carolina in the mid‑1800s. In Bakongo cosmology, nkisi are spirit‑charged objects that help the living negotiate with the dead. In the Edgefield potteries, enslaved makers adapted that idea to the means at hand: small jugs, often about 5 inches tall, with eyes and teeth picked out in white kaolin clay.

Because enslaved people were often denied marked graves, families sometimes placed these jugs at burial sites. If a jug broke over time, it could be read as a sign that the soul had “won the battle” and reached heaven. In other words, the jugs were portable altars — subtle acts of spiritual persistence in a world designed to crush Black autonomy.

By the early 1900s, white potters began copying the form as tourist curios, turning sacred grave markers into comic folk art while erasing their African American origins. That appropriation is one of the reasons contemporary Black makers have reclaimed the face jug so fiercely.

From Forced Labor to Black Enterprise: The Wilson Brothers

If Drake and the anonymous makers of face jugs show resistance inside slavery, the story of the Wilson brothers shows what happened when legal shackles finally fell.

Hiram, Wallace, and James Wilson were enslaved potters in Texas who learned the trade at Rev. John M. Wilson’s Guadalupe Pottery, itself staffed by enslaved workers. After the Civil War, they did something radical: they opened their own business.

H. Wilson & Co., operating in Capote, Texas from 1869 to 1884, became one of the earliest Black‑owned pottery firms in the state. Using techniques carried from Edgefield through white potters Marion Durham and John Chandler, the Wilson brothers produced alkaline‑ and salt‑glazed utilitarian wares that reached customers as far away as California. Profits helped build a school, church, and cemetery for the local Black community.

Today, over a thousand stamped H. Wilson & Co. pieces are thought to survive. A dedicated museum in Seguin, Texas, preserves the factory site and tells the story — while also struggling to raise funds to buy back pieces that long ago entered private collections.

This is where clay meets policy. Some scholars, noting that a single David Drake jar sold in 2021 for $1.56 million with no compensation to descendants, have proposed reparative frameworks such as the “Turner Inheritance Act of 1619,” which would return functional or decorative clay objects made by enslaved or newly freed Black potters to their documented families, with museums and teaching institutions exempted. Whether or not such a law ever passes, the proposal itself is a civil rights argument molded in mud: cultural theft deserves material repair.

Clay as Civil Rights Portraiture: David Mack’s Heritage Face Vessels

Fast‑forward to Maryland in the late 20th century, where a functional potter and retired Army lieutenant colonel named David Mack decided that bowls and mugs were no longer enough.

Influenced by mentors at historically Black colleges and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mack shifted in 2004 from everyday ware to large, wheel‑thrown face vessels depicting Black historical figures. His “Heritage Face Vessels” series turns jars into busts: Harriet Tubman’s determined gaze, Sojourner Truth’s steady stare, George Washington Carver’s thoughtful profile, Crispus Attucks frozen in the moment before his death in Boston.

The vessels are technically demanding — some originally weighed 30 to 40 lb and required complex firing and glazing processes — but their real power lies in what they do on a table or a plinth. They make it impossible to discuss American history without also discussing Black agency, sacrifice, and brilliance.

Mack’s work is explicitly abolitionist in spirit. He has argued in print that artifacts made by enslaved artists should be returned to their descendants, connecting his clay practice to contemporary legislation like the effort to remove the statue of Roger Taney (author of the Dred Scott decision) from the U.S. Capitol and replace it with one of Thurgood Marshall. In this sense, every face vessel is also a policy brief.

Set one of his pieces at the center of a dinner table, and you no longer have neutral decor. You have a conversation starter about who gets remembered, who gets paid, and who gets invited to the feast.

“The Black Potter”: Jim McDowell and Ancestral Face Jugs

Jim McDowell, who calls himself “the Black Potter,” has been making face jugs for more than three decades, often in overwhelmingly white clay communities. His work is an emotional bridge between the African roots of the form and the blunt realities of modern racism.

McDowell learned of his four‑times great aunt Evangeline, an enslaved Jamaican potter who made face jugs, at a family funeral. That story anchors his practice in ancestral obligation. He describes himself as carrying the “pain and DNA” of enslaved people in his own body and insists that being Black is a matter of culture, morals, and historical consciousness, not just skin color.

His jugs are intentionally “ugly”: asymmetric noses, deep‑set eyes rimmed with molten glass “tears,” and broken thrift‑store china for teeth. He rejects the white kaolin eyes of older Edgefield pieces because they remind him of blackface caricatures, opting instead for features that feel raw and contemporary.

Like Drake, McDowell writes on his pots. Sometimes he echoes Drake’s double incised lines around the mouth. Sometimes he engraves names and stories of Black people killed by police or erased from textbooks. His lectures connect face jugs to a long timeline: capture in Africa, the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights marches, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

If Drake’s stoneware jars are quiet resistance, McDowell’s face jugs are full‑throated sermons.

Black Women, Clay, and Liberation Aesthetics

The civil rights movement also reshaped the possibilities for Black women working in clay — and they, in turn, reshaped the medium.

An exhibition like “Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art,” held at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, makes that lineage visible. The show gathered three generations of Black women ceramicists whose work braids domestic function, bodily metaphor, and political edge.

Nigerian potter Ladi Dosei Kwali’s water jars, made in the mid‑20th century, fuse indigenous coil‑building with studio glazing and kiln firing techniques she learned at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre. Her pots carried water in local households while also carrying African ceramics into the global fine‑art conversation.

Magdalene Odundo, born in Kenya and working in Britain, developed a vocabulary of burnished, smoke‑fired vessels whose silhouettes subtly recall the human body — a tilt of shoulder here, a swell of hip there. Their forms nod to African pots, pre‑Columbian artifacts, and European modernism all at once, proving that Black women’s clay work is central, not peripheral, to contemporary sculpture.

More recent artists push even further. Simone Leigh’s domed stoneware forms from her Village series reference Black women’s braiding traditions, expanding “hair” into architecture. Adebunmi Gbadebo uses soil from a South Carolina plantation and Black hair to construct vessels that function as memorials to enslaved ancestors and land theft.

Across these practices, the pot is never just a pot. It is a body, a house, a grave, a manifesto. And thanks to civil rights–era gains in education, exhibition opportunities, and institutional support, these artists can now claim the gallery space their spiritual grandmothers were denied.

Museums, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Display

Clay is not only shaped in studios; it is also shaped by where it is shown and how it is labeled.

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted “Harlem on My Mind,” a centennial exhibition that attempted to honor Harlem without including any paintings, sculptures, or ceramics by Black artists. The show’s heavy reliance on photographs and wall texts, combined with its exclusion of Black creators, sparked protests from the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and helped catalyze demands for museum reform during the civil rights era.

As a partial response, The Met later invited curator Regenia A. Perry — the first African American woman to earn a PhD in art history — to organize “Selections of Nineteenth‑Century Afro‑American Art” in 1976. Perry’s exhibition mixed “fine” art with quilts, baskets, walking sticks, and face vessels, underscoring how Black creativity has always flowed through every kind of object, including clay.

More recently, institutions have taken a hard look at their own pottery holdings. The exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” presented at major museums, placed David Drake alongside more than 150 other enslaved potters and contemporary Black ceramic artists, finally giving this community a collective name and narrative.

At the same time, museums like London’s Victoria and Albert Museum are confronting racist ceramics made by white Europeans — grotesque caricatures, “blackamoor” figures, and plantation imagery that once decorated European homes. Artists such as Theaster Gates and scholars like Adrienne Childs argue that these pieces should not be hidden but interpreted honestly, so visitors understand how clay objects helped normalize slavery and anti‑Black racism.

In other words, the civil rights struggle inside museums is about more than adding a few jars by Black potters. It is about rewriting the entire wall text of who is considered an artist, who is depicted as human, and how the story of American ceramics is told.

Bringing Civil Rights Clay to Your Own Table

So what does all of this mean for your everyday plates, mugs, and serving dishes?

First, it means you can curate your cupboard as consciously as you curate your bookshelf. When you choose work by Black potters — whether a functional mug by a Nigerian American maker like Osa Atoe or a sculptural vessel inspired by face jugs — you are participating in a lineage of resistance and creativity.

Second, it invites you to ask questions of every “heritage” ceramic you encounter at flea markets or in antique shops. Is that old jug a neutral rustic accent, or is it a caricatured figure that once made a joke of Black suffering? Keeping such objects can be part of honest historical reckoning, but only if they are framed critically, not as cute decor.

Third, it encourages you to treat pottery as conversation starters. Place a reproduction of a Wedgwood abolitionist medallion, a book about David Drake, or a small contemporary face vessel next to your centerpiece. Let guests ask why. Tell them the story. Justice can be served between courses.

Finally, it nudges us toward joy. For all the grief embedded in this history, Black clay work is also an explosion of color, humor, and formal invention. From the poly‑rhythmic patterns of Ian Garrett’s vessels to the exuberant forms of Zizipho Poswa’s monumental pots, the table of Black ceramics is anything but somber. It is a feast.

When you next lift a bowl or pour from a jug, imagine the hands behind it: enslaved men throwing 40‑gallon jars after losing limbs, free brothers building a business in Reconstruction‑era Texas, women coiling forms that echo their own bodies, contemporary artists scratching new names into clay. The rise of Black potters in and around the civil rights movement is not a side dish to American history.

It is right in the center of the table.

References

1. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5801&context=jur
2. https://kam.illinois.edu/event/jim-mcdowell-lecture-african-american-face-jugs-thoughts-become-art-inspired-ancestors
3. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/300-years-of-african-american-invention-and-innovation/
4. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/facing-history-jim-mcdowell-black-potter
5. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/racist-ceramics-and-fantasies-of-blackness?srsltid=AfmBOop88p-qTneMjsG2i79y9xj-u0MiILg4PnRbf23aCJoUHPWHf4vT
6. https://www.museums.iastate.edu/virtual/blog/2020/03/17/learn-about-the-black-ware-pottery-by-maria-martinez
7. https://www.abhmuseum.org/thomas-commeraw-the-black-19th-century-potter-who-historians-assumed-was-white/
8. https://www.huntington.org/verso/resistance-and-resilience-clay-how-enslaved-african-american-potters-gave-shape-their-lives
9. https://daily.jstor.org/dave-the-potter-mark-on-history/
10. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/harlem-on-my-mind