Who Is:

[leeg]

Isaac Scott Hathaway?

 

 

 

 

He was the designer of the Booker T. Washington and Washington-Carver Half Dollars.

 

 

Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

 

A coin in my collection

 

 

Isaac Scott Hathaway, an artist, sculptor, educator and ceramist, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on April 4, 1872. He served as head of the ceramic department at Tuskegee Institute (1937-47) and Alabama State Teachers College (1947-66) in Montgomery. His widow, Umer, who resided at Tuskegee Institute, was in her own right a skilled ceramist and sculptor who shared her talents with her husband. (Alert, highly intelligent, knowledgeable, and a lively conversationalist with a knack for detail, she is listed in Who’s Who of American Women and Men and Women of Distinction.)

 

Among his many achievements, Isaac Scott Hathaway accomplished several “firsts” during his lengthy career as an educator and artist. He is known as America’s first accomplished Black male sculptor, a pioneer who introduced ceramics into the black college curriculum and preserved the anthropological interests of his race by making “life” and “death” masks of many well-known blacks and sculptures of prominent personages in Africa, Asia, Europe, the West Indies and the United States. He performed noteworthy work in the Anthropological division of the Smithsonian Institute while preparing a government exhibit for the Chicago World’s Fair exposition. The Sorbonne, a college of the University of Paris, invited Hathaway to exhibit his work, especially busts of Frederic Douglas, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.

 

 

Courtesy of The Commission of Fine Arts