Flying! When she returned to the United States, Reyneau was horrified by the treatment of African Americans, finding it akin to German fascism. She moved South and became active in civil rights causes. Her first portrait of a Black subject was of a young garden worker, Edward Lee, in 1942. That same year she went to the Tuskegee Institute to look for pilots to paint as subjects. Not finding any, she encountered George Washington Carver there who became her first and most famous subject. Her portrait of him in 1944 entered collection of the Smithsonian Institution, the first of a Black man in a national American collection. "Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin" The Smithsonian connected Reyneau with the Harmon Foundation, which had been supporting African American art and artists for at least two decades. Reyneau and Foundation curator Mary Beede Brady headed the traveling exhibition that became “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” sponsored by the foundation, enlisting Black artist Laura Wheeler Waring, a foundation beneficiary, to do some of the portraits and to connect Reyneau to further subjects. Reyneau and Brady saw the show as a deliberately didactic way to change the views of white Americans, with Reyneau calling it a "visual education project." As the show traveled throughout the U.S. in the 1940s, including the Brooklyn Museum, Reyneau added more paintings to the collection, so that it totaled 50 by 1954 (Waring passed away in 1948). Though it was an "intensely popular" exhibition, African American scholar at Harvard University Steven Nelson noted that the show's call for equality was lost on both the American press and the audience. Some journalists also assumed that Reyneau was Black. The reviewer for the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, however, wrote "Directors of museums that showed the paintings advanced the opinion that in some communities a noticeable lessening of racial tensions took place following the art display." With the abolishing of legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Harmon Foundation ended with tour. The foundation, however, did donate most of the collection to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in 1967. Gallery Other Reyneau portrait subjects in the collection Hugh Mulzac Harry Thacker Burleigh William Ayers Campbell James Weldon Johnson Helen A. Whiting Dr. Anna Arnold Hedgeman May Mills Jane Mathilda Bolin Richmond Barthé Other collections and legacy Copies of the poster Reyneau