‘Portraits’ reflects a vast contribution

The funny thing is, and this is where the secret comes in, the African-American contribution to American culture is so vast it long ago came to be taken for granted. One of the many virtues of “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits,’’ which runs at the Museum of African American History through Jan. 10, is the potent and exciting reminder it offers of how much the content of our national character owes to those once considered unequal.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture organized the show, which is drawn from the photographic holdings of the National Portrait Gallery. It consists of 69 portraits. Some are by very famous photographers: Irving Penn, Garry Winogrand, Edward Weston, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks. And many of the subjects are even more famous: Frederick Douglass, Ray Charles, George Washington Carver, Bessie Smith, Joe Louis, Louis Armstrong, Toni Morrison, Richard Pryor.

A nice sense of just how varied the sitters and their accomplishments can be, even within a single field, comes with a juxtaposition at the end of the show of Leontyne Price, the Supremes, and Sarah Vaughan. Talk about raise every voice!

An even slyer juxtaposition comes a few feet before that. Penn’s portrait of Jessye Norman - eyes shut, mouth open, a vessel filled with liquid song - derives from Richard Avedon’s famous image of Marian Anderson, also with eyes shut, mouth open, and transported to another realm. What’s next to the Norman picture? One of Anderson, though not the Avedon (it’s by Ruth Orkin, and the singer’s rehearsing with an orchestra conducted by a very young Leonard Bernstein).

There’s an engaging interplay between familiar images (Jesse Owens in a sprinter’s stance at the Berlin Olympics, say, or Duke Ellington in his dressing room) and unfamiliar ones. George Tames’s 1966 shot of US Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Stokely Carmichael sharing a laugh in a Capitol hallway is a true when-worlds-collide moment. Winogrand shows a recently retired Jackie Robinson in a suit and tie tossing a baseball while talking on the telephone: the boy of summer in winter.

Artistry and celebrity, impressive though each is here, are secondary concerns. The show’s title comes from an exhortation by the African-American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet: “Let your motto be resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.’’

Resistance, like heroism, can take many forms. Example can be as powerful as activism, and we see numerous instances of both in “Let Your Motto Be Resistance.’’ Judith Jamison, her skirt in full swirl, demonstrates a power no less formidable than that evident in Danny Lyon’s blurred, moody view of Robert “Bob’’ Moses, the legendary civil rights organizer. The abolitionist Sojourner Truth simply staring at the camera makes as forthright a political statement as A. Philip Randolph, the labor leader, walking a picket line. Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion, flexing his biceps may outdo them both.

There are two photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. Dan Weiner shows him with a quite foxy-looking Coretta Scott King and their daughter Yolanda standing near the Alabama state capitol in 1956. They’re in focus, the capitol is not (a nicely sly bit of political commentary). A dozen years later we see King lying in his casket, with Yolanda, one of her brothers, and their 5-year-old sister, Bernice. They gaze at their murdered father. The look of surprise on Bernice’s face is heartbreaking. A lesson is being learned. Sometimes the dirtiness of dirty little secrets surpasses imagining.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.