Despite many disadvantages as a youth, John Miller Howard managed to become a dedicated role model for many young individuals in the Deep South. Raised by a supportive single mother, he demonstrated an early interest in art, often copying cartoons and newspaper photographs as his segregated school had no art program. When he began his career as a teacher, many of his students had similar rural backgrounds. He believed his job was “to pull from students their deep rooted and hidden talents. … It took a constant struggle to awake some; others met the challenge with ease.”
Howard was born in Alcorn, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River, and spent most of his childhood just south of the state capital in Brookhaven. Howard returned to his birthplace to attend Alcorn College (now Alcorn University), the oldest public historically Black land grant institution in the United States There he played on the baseball team, leading to a short career in the minor league. It was, however, the arts which sustained him. Although Alcorn University did not offer classes in art, Howard managed any way he could by painting the walls of his dormitory, making illustrations for biology students, and drawing cartoons for the newspaper. In his words, “Alcorn had no art, but I kept on painting.”
After college Howard served as principal of the segregated school in rural Toomsuba, Mississippi, and in addition to his administrative duties he was a quasi-public health officer for the community and built outhouses, sought sources of clean drinking water, and lectured on preventing disease. In 1936 he moved on to T.J. Harris High School in Meridian, Mississippi, where his artistic skills were recognized by the state education director who provided him with a scholarship for summer study at Atlanta University—called by some the École des Beaux Arts of the Black South. While there Howard encountered Hale Woodruff who befriended him and in 1937 offered his young protégé a scholarship and a position teaching in the university’s laboratory school.
Two years later, in 1939, the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) recruited Howard as the institution’s first art instructor. Initially he had only four students. He spent 1948 and 1949 in New York where he obtained a master’s degree in education. Over time Howard built up the art department, which by 1950 offered a major, and eventually, in 1967, got its own building thanks to Howard’s persistence. He assumed additional administrative duties as director of public relations and created floats for student parades at the university. He also held positions at the state level, serving on the Arkansas Advisory Council on Secondary Education and on the Arkansas Arts, Culture and Humanities Council.
Howard did not neglect his own work which ranged from moody scenes of his depressed environment (including an “old house series”) to more colorful and modernist still lifes, and even an occasional abstraction. In 2022 the university where he had labored for so many years mounted a retrospective; the concluding sentence in the catalogue stated: “His legacy lives on in those who follow in his footsteps, railing against racial and economic barriers to provide access to the arts and make a life filled with meaning.”