Isaac Scott Hathaway

Isaac Scott Hathaway was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on April 4, 1872, the son of a minister. The story he told about his calling is a good one: as a child, visiting a museum, he went looking for a bust of Frederick Douglass and found that none existed. He resolved to change that — and spent the rest of his life making the likenesses of Black Americans that the country had failed to make.

He trained widely and seriously. After Chandler Junior College in Lexington he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, then took formal ceramics training at the Cincinnati Art Academy and other ceramics schools. That last skill mattered: Hathaway became one of the first people in the United States to teach ceramics at the college level, building and chairing ceramics departments at Branch Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas (today the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), at Tuskegee Institute, and later at Alabama State College in Montgomery.

By the time the U.S. Mint came calling, Hathaway had already made his name. He sculpted more than 100 busts and masks of prominent African Americans — Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Carter G. Woodson, Bishop Richard Allen, and others. His foot-tall busts became fixtures in Black households across the South. He worked often from life and death masks, which is exactly how he would later build the portrait that ended up in millions of pockets.

In 1946 Congress authorized a commemorative half dollar honoring Booker T. Washington, the educator who founded Tuskegee. The first design, by the established sculptor Charles Keck, was rejected. Hathaway's model of Washington's portrait — the obverse, the heads side — was the one the Commission of Fine Arts accepted, and he went on to design the reverse, the tails side, as well. With that, two things happened at once: Booker T. Washington became the first African American depicted on a U.S. coin, and Hathaway became the first African American to design one.

His designs do real work. On the Booker T. Washington half dollar, the reverse shows the slave cabin where Washington was born and, above it, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, where he was enshrined — joined by the inscription "From slave cabin to Hall of Fame." It is a whole biography compressed into a coin. For the portrait, Hathaway worked from a life mask of Washington, the same documentary instinct that ran through all his sculpture.

When the second coin came — the Carver-Washington half dollar, authorized in 1951 — Hathaway again designed both sides, this time placing George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington in profile side by side. The reverse carried a map of the United States and the words "Freedom and Opportunity for All." Both coins were sold to raise money: the Washington half for Washington's birthplace memorial in Virginia, the Carver-Washington half through a foundation tied to the Carver monument. The fundraising machinery around them was clumsy, and millions of authorized coins were never sold, melted, or quietly spent at face value. But the designs were Hathaway's, and the precedent was permanent.

Hathaway thought of his work in plain, human terms. He once compared shaping clay to raising children: "This reminds me of our duty to our children. They should be shaped into usefulness as they grow."

He kept teaching and sculpting into his eighties and died on March 12, 1967, at the age of 94.