The acclaimed multimedia art exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice comes to Vanderbilt University from February through May 2025. This exhibition and its related programs celebrate more than 100 years of influential Black writers, from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights era, at several campus galleries.
Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, which debuted in September 2022 at Chicago’s American Writers Museum, highlights 20 prominent authors including Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou with original portraits created for the exhibit by contemporary Black artists Omari Booker, Dorothy Burge, Lakesha Calvin, Dayo Johnson, Damon Reed, Dorian Sylvain, Bernard Williams.
Vanderbilt’s Office of the Vice Provost for Arts, Libraries and Global Engagement is organizing the campus exhibit and programs, which is made possible by the American Writers Museum as well as generous support from The Efroymson Family Fund and Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.


Literary Figures on Display
Vanderbilt University Museum of Art
- Frederick Douglass
- Ida B. Wells
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
- Harriet Jacobs
- James Weldon Johnson
Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center
- Ma Rainey
- Nella Larsen
- Langston Hughes
- Zora Neale Hurston
- E.B. Du Bois
- Nikki Giovanni
Jean & Alexander Heard Libraries
- Maya Angelou
- James Baldwin
- Ralph Ellison
- Ethel Payne
- Richard Wright
- Malcolm X
Divinity School
- Pauli Murray