The following passages are excerpts from the forthcoming print catalog that will accompany this exhibition.
The Early Years Cliff Joseph was born in Panama in 1922. His father, Samuel Joseph, was Antiguan, and worked on the Panama Canal, and his mother, Leontine Ellis, was Jamaican. When Cliff was 18 months old, his family immigrated to the United States, traveling through Ellis Island, and settled in Harlem. As a teen, Cliff took day trips down to 57th Street to look around at “art shops”. He had a natural ability to draw, and was already making drawings to either give to people in his neighborhood or sell. One owner of an art shop gave Cliff restoration projects, repairing artworks that were damaged. He was also commissioned by small business owners in Harlem to make signs for advertisement. Cliff’s older brother wanted to become a police officer, and Cliff looked up to him because he was always looking out for the people of the neighborhood, especially the ladies. Cliff noticed how hard his brother worked, studying to get into the police academy. On the day he was accepted, his brother was murdered standing up for his girlfriend, who was being disrespected by another man. The death of his brother made Cliff the oldest boy of the family. After trying for some time to find work in the neighborhood, Cliff decided to join the army: “not because I wanted to be a soldier, but my family needed money, and they were paying something like $24 a month.” In 1942, while Joseph was still training stateside, boxer Joe Louis crossed paths with Cliff’s unit. Louis had enlisted as a private in the army at Camp Upton, Long Island. Joseph recalled the champ bringing in some boxing gloves one day and telling he (Joseph) and another man to put them on
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and spar a little. The army eventually realized Louis’ value in raising the morale of the troops and instead of sending him into combat, he was placed in a Special Services Division, traveling and staging exhibition bouts. Louis became the focus of a media recruitment campaign encouraging African American men to enlist, despite the military’s segregation. When he was asked about it, Louis replied, “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.” The boxer also appeared in a musical, The Well-Dressed Man in Harlem, which emphasized the importance of African American soldiers and promoted their enlistment. Joseph traveled overseas to England, France and Belgium with a field artillery unit. He saw the war as a terrible, frightening experience. He told a story of guarding some German soldiers while in Belgium: “One day a prisoner asked me for an orange because he was very hungry. I obliged the man and he was so grateful he gave me his Leica camera!” Joseph realized “the people we were trying to defeat were human beings just like us.” It is likely that much of Joseph’s experiences in wartime influenced his later convictions toward helping create better conditions for people at a disadvantage—whether it was inequality due to race, religion or gender; or the treatment of those who were incarcerated. After serving 7 years in the army, Joseph boarded a ship to return home to the United States. He said the journey home was difficult, and he wasn’t convinced they would make it through the stormy seas. On the worst night, he believes he was visited by the spirit of his older brother, who left him reassured.