John Thomas Biggers (April 13, 1924 – January 25, 2001) was an African-American muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and toward the end of World War II. Biggers created works critical of racial and economic injustice. He also served as the founding chairman of the art department at Houston's Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), a historically black college. Early life and education Biggers was born in a shotgun house built by his father in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father Paul was a Baptist preacher, farmer, shoemaker, schoolteacher, and principal of a three-room school. His mother Cora was a housekeeper for white families. The youngest of seven, Biggers was reared in a close family that valued creativity and education. When Cora's husband died in 1937, she took a job in an orphanage for Black children. She sent John and his brother Joe to Lincoln Academy, an American Missionary Association school for African-American children in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. After graduating from Lincoln, Biggers attended Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black college. Biggers planned to become a plumber (his Hampton application included boiler room drawings). His life took a dramatic change of course when he took an art class with Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish refugee who in 1939 had fled from Nazi persecution in Austria before World War II. Lowenfield introduced his students to works by African Americans and helped them understand the religious and social context of African art, of which the Hampton Museum had a significant collection. Afterward, Biggers began to study art. At Hampton, Biggers also studied under African-American painter Charles White and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. He also began to learn the work of Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera; and American regionalists Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, and Harry Sternberg. He was exposed to and influenced by Harlem Renaissance artists William Artis and Hale Woodruf, and writers W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. In 1943, Biggers was drafted and joined the U.S. Navy, which was segregated, like the other armed services. He remained stationed at the Hampton Institute and made models of military equipment for training purposes. In that same year, his talents were recognized when his work was included in a landmark exhibit Young Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Biggers was discharged in