Charles White Was a Giant, Even Among the Heroes He Painted

His 1940 study for a never-executed mural called “Struggle for Liberation (Chaotic Stage of the Negro, Past and Present)” includes an image of a lynching. A 1946 drawing, “The Return of the Soldier (Dixie Comes to New York),” illustrates the segregationist violence visited on black veterans of World War II. (White was one, discharged from the Army when he contracted what would become chronic tuberculosis.)