His parents were Aaron and Elizabeth Douglas. In 1922, he graduated from the University of Nebraska School of Fine Arts in Lincoln. Who thought that this man would rise to meet W.E.B. Du Bois's 1921 challenge, calling for the transforming hand and seeing eye of the artist to lead the way in the search for the African American identity. Yet, after a year of teaching art in Kansas City, Missouri, Douglas moved to New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1924 and began studying under German artist Winold Reiss. His mentor discouraged Douglas's penchant for traditional realist painting and encouraged him to explore African art for design elements would express racial commitment in his art. The young painter embraced the teachings of Reiss to develop a uniq

ue style incorporating African- American and black American subject matter. He soon had captured the attention of the leading black scholars and activists.

Douglas completed, for the New York Public Library in 1934, a series of murals depicting the entire African- American experience from African Heritage, the Emancipation, life in the rural South, and the contemporary urban dilemma. Three years later after Charles S. Johnson (an activist in the Harlem Renaissance joined the Fisk University faculty and became the University's president in the 1940's and a fellow black artist) recruited Douglas to establish an art department in Nashville's Fisk University. Edwin Harlston of Charleston, South Carolina completed a series of highly significant murals. These murals depicted the course of Negro History. Douglas taught painting and was chair of the art department at Fisk from 1937 until his retirement in 1966.

In God's Trombones, Douglas achieved his mastery of hard- edge painting using symbolized features and lines. Through his use of these things he was able to bring to life the stiffness in the figures which symbolized Art Deco. But, unlike the decorative programs that exist in Art Deco, most of Douglas's work capitalized on the movement that was influenced by the rhythms of Art Nouveau. Each of the paintings in the God's Trombone series expresses the humanist concerns of Douglas. For example, in Judgment Day, one of the seven Negro sermons Douglas illustrated for James Weldon Johnson, he planned to place emphasize on the positive appearance of Black power. In this painting, Gabriel, who represents the archangel, sounds the trumpet to awaken the dead from their spiritual rest. He

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