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The Freedom Principle
7
2

The Freedom Principle
Experiments in Art and Music
sRCTolom com NTe)'
Naomi Beckwith
Dieter Roelstraete
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
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Contents
d2
is)
39
58
94
114
129
165
186
201
211
248
254
260
262
Foreword
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Acknowledgments
Naomi Beckwith and
Dieter Roelstraete
The Way Ahead
Dieter Roelstraete
Only Poetry
Naomi Beckwith
Works 1
Positive Aesthetics
Rebecca Zorach
Expressive Awesomeness
George E. Lewis
Works 2
An Anecdotal Topography
John Corbett
A Collective Conversation
Naomi Beckwith, Romi Crawford,
Tomeka Reid, Dieter Roelstraete,
and Hamza Walker, with
commentary by Fred Moten
An Illustrated Playlist
Works 3
Chronology
Grace Deveney
Exhibition Checklist
Contributors
Lenders and MCA Board
of Trustees

OT ate call
a Ef
#
i FATT piece |

PREVIOUS SPREAD
Rashid Johnson Sa
Nice Guys (detail), 2014

Foreword
With The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and
Music, 1965 to Now, the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago celebrates the African American arts scene
that arose on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s
by showing how its cross-disciplinary ferment continues
to influence artists today. The exhibition and catalogue
coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM),
a collective that still actively supports the composing,
performing, and teaching of experimental music.
Echoing one AACM slogan, The Freedom Principle
travels, via its twin historical and contemporary focus,
from the “Ancient to the Future.” It brings the achieve-
ments of South Side musicians and visual artists into
dialogue with cutting-edge work from around the world.
This wide-ranging, multisensory combination of the
historical and the contemporary invites us to consider
ongoing practices of experimentation, improvisation,
and collectivity in a lively artistic tradition whose legacy
is still being produced.
While there are deep Chicago roots to this exhibition,
it also has national and global dimensions. Like the
MCA, also founded in Chicago during the 1960s, groups
such as the AACM, as well as visual arts collectives
such as the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists
(AfriCOBRA), were local stalwarts that developed strong
connections to other places. The AACM branched out to
New York City, where many AACM musicians eventually
settled, as well as to Europe, where many musicians
toured and even lived for a number of years among
admiring audiences. It also retained an active Chicago
chapter—and a long-running relationship with the MCA
itself as a presenter of AACM concerts and symposia.
In addition to these circuits of national and international
activity, many of the artists in The Freedom Principle
have contended with questions of global diasporic black
culture. Overall, the exhibition reminds us that while
the Chicago story the exhibition tells is unique, it is also
knit into larger circulations of music and visual art.
For us at the MCA, the artistic activities on the South
Side of Chicago in the 1960s remain profoundly import-
ant to issues that we and our audiences still confront
daily: How do we work together collectively to enhance
the capacity for individual expression? What kinds of
institutions do we need to build and maintain so that art
and culture remain central to the lifeblood of civic, politi-
cal, and economic justice and belonging? How do we
cultivate “freedom principles” to satisfy the urgency
a many feel for liberation—the desire we share for a world

of enhanced respect, gratitude, appreciation, and mutual
obligation toward one another?
These questions, among others, guided the develop-
ment of the exhibition by cocurators Naomi Beckwith
and Dieter Roelstraete, who combined their talents
to bring The Freedom Principle to fruition. Together they
have selected a range of artists from across place and
time, not only to recognize an important and overlooked
chapter in the history of contemporary art, but also
to remind us that there is a past to which we can turn
to address current issues of solidarity, social change,
and the pursuit of freedom.
We are deeply grateful to those who have supported
the exhibition. Lead support for The Freedom Principle:
Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now is provided
by Cari and Michael Sacks. Additional generous support
is provided by Dr. Anita Blanchard and Martin H. Nesbitt,
Lester N. Coney and Mesirow Financial, Anne and Don
Edwards, Denise and Gary Gardner, Vicki and Bill Hood,
Kevin Poorman & JKP Foundation, Linda Johnson Rice,
and Desirée Rogers. The generous lenders to the exhibition
can be found on page 262. We greatly appreciate their
willingness to loan valuable artworks and their interest
in sharing them with a wider public.
The catalogue you hold in your hands offers a robust
and enriching examination of the complex and multidisci-
plinary stories The Freedom Principle brings to light.
| thank the many contributors: Dieter and Naomi; as
well as scholar and gallerist Jonn Corbett; AACM member,
historian, and award-winning experimental composer
and musician George Lewis; and art historian Rebecca
Zorach for sharing their insights and points of view.
A roundtable conversation is also featured, with scholar
and curator Romi Crawford, AACM member and cellist
Tomeka Reid, Renaissance Society at the University of
Chicago Curator Hamza Walker. The discussion was
moderated by Dieter and Naomi, and poet and theorist
Fred Moten provided additional commentary. A curated
playlist celebrates fifty years of AACM experimentation
and related sounds. Susman Curatorial Fellow Grace
Deveney has compiled a selected chronology.
From the historical to the contemporary, The Freedom
Principle asks us to consider both what freedom is and
how we might be more principled in pursuing it. The exhibi-
tion invites us to use the arts to mix past with present
in new equations and formulations. These can help
us—experimentally, improvisationally, collectively—seek
answers to the fiery issues regarding social belonging
and democracy that roared on the scene in the 1960s
and continue to burn today.
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Pritzker Director
10

Acknowledgments
Of all the exhibitions | have had the plea-
sure of working on during my tenure at
the MCA, The Freedom Principle: Experi-
ments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now is
the one born from the purest of personal
enthusiasms. It takes its cue from a glori-
ous chapter of Chicago’s musical history,
and it was partly my affinity with this
chapter—the flowering of experimental
jazz on the South Side of Chicago in the
1960s—that helped make the city such
an alluring destination when | moved here
from Berlin in early 2012.
Meeting gallerist John Corbett and
curator Hamza Walker and reading
George E. Lewis’s magisterial history of
the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians (AACM), A Power
Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and
Experimental American Music, informed
my explorations. It was particularly inspir-
ing to read a history so firmly anchored
in the South Side neighborhood that |
called home. The decisive moment in the
exhibition’s conception occurred when
| attended a two-day conference, Black
Collectivities, co-organized by my col-
league Naomi Beckwith at the MCA in
May 2013. It became clear to me that an
exhibition inspired by the intertwined
history of two Chicago-based collectives,
the AACM and the contemporaneous
visual arts group the African Commune of
Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), had to
be a truly collective curatorial endeavor.
It has been a privilege to collaborate so
closely with Naomi on this exhibition.
Furthermore, our working with curatorial
associates Karsten Lund and Grace
Deveney has contributed greatly to
deepening my understanding of museum
work as, in essence, a team sport: an
experiment in collective thinking.
Concluding on a slightly sentimental
note, | consider The Freedom Principle
to be my blue-note salute to the city of
Chicago.
Dieter Roelstraete
WD)
Shortly after my arrival at the MCA, Huey
Copeland, professor at Northwestern
University and longtime friend and inter-
locutor, invited me to coteach a seminar
with him about black art collectives.
We also co-organized a conference on the
same topic. Because of the course’s loca-
tion in the Chicago area, the syllabus and
conference focused heavily on the history
of local collectives, such as the Organi-
zation of Black American Culture (OBAC)
and AfriCOBRA, as well as nonvisual art
collectives such as the AACM (enabled by
George E. Lewis’s timely and exhaustive
book). After the conference, my fellow
MCA curator Dieter Roelstraete revealed
that he was formulating an exhibition
revolving around the AACM and other
related cultural movements in Chicago
at that time. | shared Dieter’s enthusi-
asm for the AACM and its legacy, which
shaped my upbringing in the post-Black
Power cultural landscape of Chicago’s
South Side.
In developing The Freedom Principle,
we recognized three key principles linking
aesthetics and everyday life in 1960s
Chicago: experimentation, improvisation,
and collectivity. Experimentation is the
willingness to break with proscribed
structures; improvisation is the ability to
respond creatively and in real time-to a
set of generally unforeseen and indeter-
minate conditions. The third trope,
collectivity, for me, was more than a
collaborative organizational structure and
instead an acknowledgment that many
artists and individuals on the South Side
began to understand themselves in
relation to a growing international black
radicalism.
| thank the broad collective of Dieter,
my colleagues, and especially the con-
temporary artists in this exhibition for
helping me probe the continuing relation-
ship between culture, life, and aesthetics
in the post-1960s world.
Naomi Beckwith

Appropriately enough for an exhibition
deeply concerned with collectives and
collectivism, The Freedom Principle has
relied on teamwork. Starting at the
MCA, our thanks go to many colleagues
in different departments. Early on in
the project, Pritzker Director Madeleine
Grynsztejn and James W. Alsdorf
Chief Curator Michael Darling grasped
both the civic promise and artistic and
art-historical value of The Freedom
Principle. Their Support meant that this
important chapter of Chicago history
could be brought back home, so to speak:
it was at the MCA in the early 1970s
that the AACM enjoyed one of its earliest
moments of recognition by a cultural
institution. The MCA’s relationship
with the AACM marked an instance of
the boundaries between media and
disciplines being blurred long before
this became standard museum practice.
In the curatorial department, we
thank two trusted colleagues, Curatorial
John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958, MES Sail HTN BLN! 2h selva:
New York, Da Capo Press, 1990, featuring Susman Curatorial Fellow Grace
Albert Ayler on the cover Deveney, who complete the present-day
“art ensemble of Chicago” behind
The Freedom Principle. For their feedback
and help, we also thank Curators Julie
Rodrigues Widholm and Lynne Warren;
Curatorial Assistant Steven Bridges;
Curatorial Administrative Coordinator Alia
Walston; and former interns Hiba Ali,
Alexandria Eregbu, Lauren Fulton, and
Chiara Giulianotti. Special thanks go to
Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Michelle Puetz, who early on contributed
invaluable research to the project. So
too did Library Director Mary Richardson
and Librarian Sarah Wade. Director of
Collections and Exhibitions Anne Brecken-
ridge Barrett and her team of capable
registrars—Chris Hightower, Pamela
Richardson Jones, Liz Rudnick, and Leah
Singsank—made sure the monumental
number of artworks arrived on time and
safely. Senior Preparator Erica Erdmann
and Manager of Technical Production
Dennis O’Shea were instrumental in
turning a list of artist names, artworks,
and archival materials into an actual
exhibition, assisted in the process by
the consummate professionals on their
als}

respective teams. We extend many
thanks to our colleagues in the MCA
Performance department, especially
Director of Performance Programs Peter
Taub and Associate Director of Perfor-
mance Programs Yolanda Cesta Cursach,
for their invaluable feedback, program-
ming ideas, outreach, and, especially,
for presenting the world premiere of the
musical project Afterword, itself an
amazing collaborative project between
participating exhibition artists Catherine
Sullivan, George Lewis, and Charles
Gaines, with composer Sean Griffin.
We also thank our colleagues in the
Education Department, including Beatrice
C. Mayer Director of Education Heidi
Reitmaier; Polk Bros. Associate Director
of Education Marissa Reyes; Programmer
of Education: Interpretation Susan
Musich; Associate Director of Education:
Public Programs and Interpretive —
Practices Rosie May; and Programmer
of Education: Public Programs Michael
Green. They bring to fuller life an exhibi-
tion that is, after all, rooted in living
art forms. Thanks as well go to our former
Director of Convergence Erika Hanner,
who set the project in motion for the
entire institution. Director of Communica-
tions and Community Engagement Mat-
thew Renton, Director of Media Relations
Karla Loring, Associate Director of Com-
munications and Community Engagement
Lauren Smallwood, Media Relations
Manager Elena Grotto, and Social Media —
Manager Abraham Ritchie ensured that
an exhibition driven by private passions
became a robust public event. Finally,
our colleagues in the MCA’s Development
Department have once aealll pees a
first to thoroughly document the AACM
—John Litweiler’s The Freedom Principle:
Jazz Since 1958 (p. 13)—honors that
particular legacy in the shape of a book.
For this, we were especially fortunate to
work with former Design Director Christo-
pher Roeleveld and Editor Michael
Kramer, who shared our enthusiasm for
the culture and music paid tribute to —
in these pages. Further thanks are due,
in the Design, Publishing, and New
Media department, to Chief Content
Officer Susan Chun, Editor in Chief Lisa
Meyerowitz, Associate Editor Lindsey
Anderson, Assistant Editor Shauna
Skalitzky, current Design Director Dylan
Fracareta, Senior Designer Mollie Edgar,
Associate Director of Digital Media Anna
C. Lavatelli, Production Manager Joe
Iverson, Editorial Intern Sheila Majumdar,
with the assistance of freelance designer
Dominy Edwards and freelance proof-
reader Andrew Bolduc. Finally, we also
wish to thank MCA photographer Nathan |
Keay and Manager of Rights and Images
Bonnie Rosenberg, and Rights and
Images Assistant Lauren Reese, for their
assistance.
Our thanks are most certainly due to
the musicians so central to this project:
we are particularly grateful to AACM tr as
members Muhal Richard Abrams, Doug-
las R. Ewart, George Lewis, and Roscoe — :
Mitchell. They are not only participants =
in the exhibition but also interlocutors in
a creative, investigative process. We 4 *
turned to them repeatedly for guidance edi
and knowledge. Among the musicians’
esi! fewe pic's owe tes to

to aforementioned veteran Chicago
jazz writer John Litweiler for allowing us
to use The Freedom Principle as the
title for the current exhibition and cata-
logue; it is an unexpected afterlife of
sorts for his book. On a continued
musical note, further thanks go to Josh
Abrams, Kodwo Eshun, Peter Margasak,
and too many Chicago musicians
to mention (but probably starting with
Phil Cohran).
We must acknowledge the support
of the many lenders to the exhibition,
who entrusted us with their artworks and
whose names are listed on page 262.
Likewise, we thank the numerous people
who assisted in locating and securing
art loans (and in some cases finding
artists themselves), or offering invaluable
guidance on the presentation of works
in the exhibition: Javier Anguera Phipps,
Free Agent Media Archivist; Kevin
Beauchamp; Linda Chinfen at the Stan
Douglas studio; Amy Cosier and Hiroki
Haraguchi at Lehmann Maupin Gallery;
Patricia Cruz; Anais Daly and Sophia
Rhee at the William Pope.L studio;
Matt Dilling from Lite Brite Neon Studio;
Marc Enguerand; Alex Ernst at the Rashid
Johnson studio; Bob Faust at the Nick
Cave studio; Alissa Friedman at Salon 94;
Patti Gibbons at the University of Chicago
Library Special Collections; Taylor Ho
Bynum and Carl Testa at the Tri-Centric
Foundation; Jason Howard, former assis-
tant to Matana Roberts; AC Hudgins;
Linda Johnson Rice at the Johnson
Publishing Company; Julie Katz at the
Chicago History Museum; Hannah Liley,
Exhibitions Manager for the Otolith
Group; Brian Loftus at Marian Goodman
Gallery; David Lusenhop; Robert Masotti;
Maséqua Myers at the South Side Com-
munity Art Center; Kate Nesin, Suzanne
Karr Schmidt, Nora Riccio, Kate Howell,
and Robyn Farrell at the Art Institute
of Chicago; Erica Paparnik-Shimizu at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; William
Parks at David Kordansky Gallery; Lavon
Pettis; Lois Plenn; Lewin Quehl at the
Anri Sala studio; Pemon Rami at the
DuSable Museum of African American
History; Katie Rashid, formerly of Sikkema
Jenkins & Co.; Nicole Sachs at Corbett
15)
vs. Dempsey, and Ann Zelle.
Above all, we thank the artists for
their contributions to the exhibition—for
parting with their works or for making
works for the occasion: Muhal Richard
Abrams, Lisa Alvarado, Ayé Aton, Sanford
Biggers, Anthony Braxton, Nick Cave,
Jamal Cyrus, Lauren Deutsch, Stan
Douglas, Douglas R. Ewart, Charles
Gaines, Renée Green, David Hammons,
Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jennie C.
Jones, Leonard E. Jones, Barbara Jones-
Hogu, Rashid Johnson, George Lewis,
Glenn Ligon, Matthew Metzger, Roscoe
Mitchell, The Otolith Group, William
Pope.L, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Matana
Roberts, Anri Sala, Robert Abbott Seng-
stacke, Cauleen Smith, Nelson Stevens,
Catherine Sullivan, Nari Ward, Gerald
Williams, and Jose Williams. We are
grateful for the lasting work of Terry
Adkins and Jeff Donaldson and for
the memory of all those who have been
powerful inspirations for this project.
Dieter Roelstraete
Former Manilow Senior Curator
Naomi Beckwith
Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator

~ PREVIOUS SPREAD
Painter Wadsworth Jarrell’s group photo of AACM members,
taken in the artist’s backyard, c. 1968. The photograph was ~
uséd in the organization’s first informational brochures. Left
to right: Leo Smith, Sarnie Garrett, Wadsworth Jarrell Jr.,
Muhal Richard Abrams, Wallace McMillan, Douglas R. Ewart,
Buford Kirkwood, John Shenoy Jackson, John Stubblefield,
Lester Lashley, Martin “Sparx” Alexander, Steve McCall,
Henry Threadgill

The Way
mNalsrel@
ii alcwatstsveleirsiacelamielaudatsw-Ven\rclalersiaalslae
of Creative Musicians and
Chicago’s Black Arts Revolution
Dieter Roelstraete

They play. You listen.
No one dreams.
—Jean-Paul Sartre,
Jazz in America!
20
In the spring of 1965, four jazz musicians
from Chicago’s predominantly African
American South Side began meeting in
the kitchen of an apartment in one of the
area’s many public housing projects built
in the aftermath of World War Il. It was
the home of percussionist Steve McCall’s
parents. McCall (b. 1933, Chicago;
d. 1989, Chicago), along with pianist
Richard Abrams (b. 1930, Chicago),
pianist Jodie Christian (b. 1932, Chicago;
d. 2012, Chicago), and harpist and trum-
peter Phil Cohran (b. 1927, Oxford, MS)
met to discuss the challenges facing
black musicians coming of age in the
United States during the mid-1960s as
the period’s social conflict and cultural
dissent manifested in the jazz commu-
nity. (A quick look at the titles of some
of the era’s classic jazz aloums commu-
nicates the mounting militancy and
growing political radicalization of jazz,
which also inevitably included a height-
ened sense of racialization, a darkening
of jazz's cultural complexion: Ornette
Coleman’s Something Else!!! from 1958
and Tomorrow Is the Question! from
1959; Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom
Now Suite from 1960 and Speak, Brother,
Speak! from 1962; Jackie McLean’s
Destination Out! from 1963; Albert Ayler’s
Spiritual Unity from 1964-—it certainly
was a golden age for exclamation points.)
Although their memories of these
foundational moments diverge—in Phil
Cohran’s hoodoo-tinged origin story,
the AACM was conceived in the shadow
of Dinah Washington's final resting place
in Oakwood Cemetery’—it was during
the gatherings in McCall’s familial kitchen,
set among the familiar urban markers
of postwar aspiration, that the seeds
were sown for the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM), one of the most influential and
longest-lasting collectives in American
musical history. The organization, which
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Jazz in America,” in Robert Gottlieb,
ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage,
and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1996), 710.
2 See George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The
AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago:

c008
WE INSIST!
MAX ROACH'S ~ FREEDOM NOW SUITE
: ie z
by
FEATURING aseey LINCOLN |,
COLEMAN HAWKINS, OLATUNJ! |!
Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,
Candid Productions Ltd, 1960
continues to this day, half a century after
its founding, was dedicated to the promo-
tion of experimental (“free”) jazz and
improvised music, i.e. creative musician-
ship. (Here, the first of many linguistic
caveats is in order, as it was one of the
AACM'’s primary aims to challenge the
implicit hierarchies attached to the very
language of jazz; AACM sought to alter
the customary association of jazz with
standardized “light” entertainment—
recall Theodor Adorno’s infamous
dismissal of jazz’s signature use of
syncopation as an echo of militarized
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 97. Lewis’s magisterial
study tells the story of the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians in the greatest imaginable detail.
Lewis, himself a prolific composer and contributor to some
of the era’s landmark recordings, has been a prominent
member of the organization since the 1970s. His book is also
an invaluable source for students of postwar American musi-
cal history and anyone interested in the African American
experience in the Midwest more broadly. I will be referring
to this book throughout this article. Special thanks are due to
George for his invaluable help throughout the development
of our curatorial project, as well as for his contributions to
both the exhibition (as an exhibiting artist) and the catalogue
(as a contributing author).
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in Chicago’s South Side
Woodlawn neighborhood (a couple of blocks south of this
author’s home, in fact). It is also the final resting place of
such luminaries as Jesse Owens, the unlikely sprinting hero
of the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Eddie Harris, author of the jazz
standard “Freedom Jazz Dance”; and Harold Washington,
the first African American mayor of Chicago and a key figure
in the cultural history of black Chicago.
3. See Adorno’s notorious diatribe “On Jazz” from 1936,
reprinted in Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard
Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 470-95.
el
rationalization, of the machine age’s
very own mindlessness.° The AACM also
refused to accept the long-time margin-
alization of jazz in the historiography of
“serious” Western music.)
The AACM was effectively founded
during another meeting held on May 8,
1965 at Phil Cohran’s home on East
Seventy-Fifth Street, near Cottage Grove
Avenue, one of the historical arteries of
African American cultural life in Chicago
(nearby Sixty-Third Street had long been
home to one of the greatest concentra-
tion of music halls and nightclubs in the
Midwest). Abrams, Christian, McCall, and
Cohran—a veteran, as it so happened, of
Sun Ra’s genre-defying Arkestra during
its formative tenure in Chicago throughout
much of the 1950s—sent out invitation
postcards to the city’s African American
music community. The postcards stipu-
lated a fourteen-point agenda, with one
of the main proposed topics being the
promotion of “original” compositions, or
“creative” music. It was a decisive depar-
ture from jazz’s traditional attachment
to a more or less defined corpus of stan-
dards. Other subjects of discussion at the
initial gathering included a name, sala-
ries, places to play, dues, and order and
discipline. (The emphasis on the last item
is entirely in tune with the growing mili-
tancy of black cultural life at the time; for
instance, less than a year after the AACM
was founded, a new political movement
saw the light of day in the San Francisco
The AACM and American Experimental Music
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself:
The AACM and American Experimental Music,
University of Chicago Press, 2008

Brt ensemble
of chicago
Malachi Lester 7 a Don
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GREAT BLACK MUSIC
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20,1971- 7:309.M.
* ADMISSION 43.59
SATURDAY, AUGUST 21,1971- 3:00DM.
* ADMISSION#350 +
~ LENOX ART CENTER
LENOX, MASS

Bay Area, namely the Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense.) During these formative
early meetings, all of which were
recorded on tape, there were hardly any
mentions of terms Such as “avant-garde”
or “free jazz”; nor were there any refer-
ences to the concept of “black music,”
even though almost all of the musicians
present at these meetings were
African American, and the founding of
the AACM was inextricably linked to
the defining impulses of mid-1960s black
cultural ferment—such as the call
for cultural emancipation and greater
self-determination in the wake of a civil
rights struggle caught between the rival
drives of assimilationism and separatism,
between Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X, between the American dream
of universal brotherhood and an emer-
gent Afrocentrism spurred on by the citi-
zens of So many African countries fighting
to free themselves from their colonial
overlords. It was also around this time
that the tailored suits and clipped hair-
cuts of the Miles Davis Quintet and other
institutions of “mainstream” jazz started
to give way to Afros and dashikis in
colorful African patterns, and that such
figureheads of black America as Cassius
Clay and LeRoi Jones changed their
names to Muhammad Ali and Amiri
Baraka, respectively. The search for a
distinctly “Black Aesthetic” was on.*
Here, it is worth considering two
slogans that have long been identified
with the AACM: “Great Black Music”
and “Ancient to the Future,” both rallying
cries that were coined in the context
of early recordings by the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, which is perhaps the best-known
music group to have come out of the
AACM (and early adopters, if somewhat
paradoxically, of the aforementioned Afro-
aesthetic). The unease felt among some
(early) members of the AACM vis-a-vis the
4 The Chicago-based publication Negro Digest, which
in 1970 changed its name to Black World, was one of the
foremost public platforms for the discussion surrounding
the notion of “black aesthetics,” culminating in the
publication of Addison Gayle Jr.’s landmark collection of
essays The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1971). The publication was a cornerstone of the Johnson
Publishing empire, which continues to print Ebony and Jet.
23
s. Edited by.
Addison Gayle, Jr
Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic,
Doubleday, 1971
“Great Black Music” moniker in particular
reflects the organization’s complicated
relationship with black nationalism,
on the one hand, and its dedication to
the universalist aspirations of color-blind
music-making, on the other. Although
overwhelmingly black, the AACM has had
its fair share of white members over the
years, and historically the AACM’s musical
output has swayed between the symbolic
extremes of African-inspired rhythmic
patterning and austere, white-identified
modes of musical high modernism.>
The broad temporal sweep implied in
“Ancient to the Future,” meanwhile,
points to the AACM’s deep awareness of,
and indebtedness to, preceding musical
traditions—African drumming and
Louis Armstrong, Delta blues and Duke
5 The musical trajectory of Anthony Braxton, an influen-
tial early member of the AACM, neatly encapsulates the
many ambiguities and complexities characteristic of the
AACM’s handling of tradition, and of blackness in music
specifically: an admired interpreter of Charlie Parker,
Braxton is also known for his idiosyncratic graphic scores,
the sonic effects of which are often much closer in spirit and
timbre to the sound world of Karlheinz Stockhausen and
Anton Webern than anything resembling “the blues” or
“swing” as conventionally understood. As George E. Lewis
notes about his oft-contested colleague, “Braxton’s work was
respected across a broad spectrum of experimental fields,
but he remained something of a polarizing figure as far as
the jazz world was concerned. For some, adjectives such
as mathematical’ and ’Varese-like’ served to problematize
his jazz bona fides, as critics suspended the more typically
macho language related to swinging, punching, and driving
in favor of musicology-influenced depictions of the music’s
structure and organization.” See Lewis, A Power Stronger
than Itself, 342.

Ellington—as well as a radically anti-nos-
talgic embrace of what is yet to come, of
“the way ahead.”°In this, the Art Ensemble
of Chicago and other AACM affiliates were
obviously not alone: Sun Ra laid much
groundwork in this regard (born Herman
Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama,
Sun Ra was a resident of Chicago from
1945 until 1961, and it was in Chicago
that Blount legally and spiritually changed
his name to Ra). His syncretic marrying of
Egyptological imagery and science fiction
was fundamental to the coining, much
later, of the term “Afrofuturism.”’ And
shortly thereafter, as the race to the
moon started to gather pace and Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
hit the big screen, similar futurological
concerns would be picked up by a certain
George Clinton, of Parliament-Funkadelic-
founding fame, in New Jersey and then
Detroit. Indeed, it seems only logical to
consider Parliament-Funkadelic’s
Afrofuturist aesthetic in tandem with the
emergence of various similarly themed
groups out of the ferment of Chicago’s
AACM around the same time.
Artists associated with the AACM—
Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton,
Roscoe Mitchell (whose group would
eventually reinvent itself as the Art
Ensemble of Chicago), Henry Threadgill
(who would go on to found the influential
trio Air with AACM co-founder Steve
McCall), and many others—remind us
that one of the main critical achieve-
ments of the free jazz revolution, with
its twinned emphasis on grassroots,
community-based cultural production
6 Here, a deeper explanation of the essay’s title is in order.
The Way Ahead is another one of those programmatically
titled jazz albums—33 1/3 rpm manifestos, really—from the
genre’s golden age of experimentation. Recorded and
released in the halcyon year of 1968, the album by New York
City free jazz stalwart Archie Shepp features a longer track
tellingly titled “New Africa,” inspired by the redrawing of the
map of the black continent in the epochal wake of the post-
war independence movements. For more on this subject, see
Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz
and Africa (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7 On the subject of Egyptology, it is worth pointing out
that, after quitting the AACM, the mercurial Phil Cohran,
formerly a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, would go on to
found a soul/jazz/funk outfit called The Pharaohs—which
would itself eventually morph into Earth, Wind & Fire.
Cohran continues to perform in faux-pharaonic garb to
this day.
24
and the seditious spirit of DIY (a decade
and a half, moreover, before the phrase
was popularized by punk pioneers),
consisted of the decentralization of the
jazz landscape beyond New York. It is no
coincidence that around the time the
AACM saw the light of day in Chicago,
similar initiatives were founded in cities
such as Detroit (clustered around the
Tribe record label) and St Louis (home to
the Black Artists Group from 1968 to
1972), while free jazz also rejuvenated
and politicized musical communities in
Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities
long associated with the decidedly more
Griot Galaxy, Opus Krampus,
Sounds Aspects, 1986
|_ART ENSEMBLE OF ChCAGO
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Art Ensemble of Chicago, Tutankhamun,
Sony Music Entertainment, 1969

fair-skinned cool jazz movement.® What
set cultural developments in Chicago
apart from those in New York first and
foremost, however (quite apart from a
highly distinctive musical aesthetic, which
may have some relation with the utterly
different spatial makeup of East Coast
congestion and compression versus
Midwestern spread and sense of space’),
was the AACM’s dedication to the devel-
opment of an aesthetic program in which
music only played one (if foundational)
part. The AACM’s members were
dedicated to the interweaving of music,
performance, poetry, and visual arts
in a veritable Gesamtkunstwerk, or total
work of art—one seeking the utopian
dissolution of art into life (“lifestyle”) and
vice versa.
Perhaps the most spectacular
expression of this interest in bringing
the arts together into a total work was
the organization’s strong sense of the
need for a radically new visual identity.
The AACM embedded their music in
anew visual language and an expanded
theatrics. One sees this in the
8 It is worth noting that in the year of the AACM’s found-
ing in Chicago, the traditional heartland of Los Angeles’
African American community went up in the flames and
smoke of the Watts riots. (It was a momentous year in many
regards: months earlier, in February 1965, Malcolm X was
assassinated.) An Angeleno counterpart of the AACM
could be found in the Underground Musicians Association,
founded by pianist Horace Tapscott in 1963. It later changed
its name to the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists
Ascension. UGMAA’s roots can be located in turn in one
of Tapscott’s earliest ensembles, the Pan Afrikan Peoples
Arkestra—note the orthographic nod to Sun Ra’s Arkestra.
See Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Commu-
nity Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).
9 ‘This dialectic is alluded to in the chapter John Litweiler
devotes to the 1960s Chicago jazz scene in his book The
Freedom Principle titled “Chicago, Sound in Space, and St.
Louis”: opposing these Midwestern developments to “the
main line of avant-garde development... the energy music
of the second-wave New Yorkers, as heard in Cecil Taylor’s
works, the [Albert] Ayler groups, and [John] Coltrane’s
Ascension,” Litweiler characterizes the early recordings of
AACM groups such as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet’s Sound
(1966) as illustrative of “the discovery and relation of sounds
‘within the natural force of silence,” noting that “music is
the tension of sounds in the free space of silence.” See John
Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (1984;
reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 175-76. Such a
spacious conception of sound is obviously much more easily
realized in a city of Chicago’s vast horizontal scale than in
the jam-packed, frenetic concrete jungle of New York City,
where silence is rarely a creative option.
25
Muhal Richard Abrams,
Levels and Degrees of Light, 1968
i BS —_ See aresin na
ae a oa =e oe nITAGE ER yay,
pe DA ET
Facade of the Affro-Arts Theater
(at Thirty-Ninth Street and Drexel Avenue), Chicago, 1968.
The marquee reads “We are closed by deceit”
and “Philip Cohran & The Artistic Heritage Ensemble.”
Photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke

performances of the Art Ensemble of
Chicago and other groups and collectives,
such as the Artistic Heritage Ensemble,
the New Horizons Ensemble, and the
Affro-Arts Theater founded by Cohran
after his departure from the AACM (as a
side note, collectivism clearly constituted
a key ingredient of the cultural politics of
the Black Arts Movement). Among other
approaches, they created their own inter-
pretations of African dress, face paint,
chants and incantations, developing a
novel conception of musical performance
as a multimedia affair. Musicians collabo-
rated with visual artists, broadening their
creative scope to also include visual
art forms. Tellingly, an early Art Ensemble
of Chicago concert in Paris, where the
group was based from 1969 to 1972,
was described by a journalist writing for
Le Nouvel Observateur as “a living sculp-
ture.” Many of the AACM’s key members,
of the organization’s first, second and
third generations, were (and are) both
musicians and visual artists, often
disinclined to conceive of their creative
output as subject to disciplinary catego-
ries. AACM founder Muhal Richard
Abrams, for instance, has been active as
a painter throughout his fifty-year-plus
band-leading career, and many of his
paintings have graced some of the new
music’s better-known releases, from
Levels and Degrees of Light (1968,
p. 202) to Sound Dance (2011). Early
AACM members Joseph Jarman (another
member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago),
Lester Lashley, Wallace MacMillan, and
Roscoe Mitchell were all avid painters.
Douglas R. Ewart has been a key figure
in the organization’s daily life since the
1970s; his tireless activity as a reeds
player and band leader is only matched
by his extensive sculptural output.
Moreover, Ewart is also well known locally
as an instrument builder, combining
his practical knowledge of music with his
mastery of material form. The AACM’s
enthusiasm for purpose-built instru-
ments—along with its deliberate expan-
sion of the traditional arsenal of jazz
instruments to include countless “ethnic”
percussion instruments such as bells,
chimes, and gongs, the music’s so-called
26
“little instruments” —should be viewed in
the context of the organization’s critique
of the Eurocentric power structures still in
place in the world of “serious” music.
Likewise, the experiments in musical nota-
tion that characterize the graphic scores
of Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry
Threadgill, or younger representatives of
this tradition, such as Matana Roberts,
could also be considered in the framework
of the AACM’s broader aesthetic ambitions
to embed their music within a new, Afro-
modernist visual language, as could the
myriad brochures, concert posters, leaflets,
magazines, and other graphic materials
produced by the Association during its
half-century-long existence. They are testa-
ment to the collective’s self-image as an
expansive art movement with a multifac-
eted cultural politics all its own.
Coming out of a nationwide surge
of cultural activity associated with
the so-called Black Arts Movement, the
founding of the AACM and its deliberate
adoption of certain ambitions and aspira-
tions in the realm of visual culture found
a close counterpart in another cornerstone
of Chicago’s community of African
American cultural producers, the collective
known as AfriCOBRA, or the African
Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. Indeed,
the histories of the AACM and AfriCOBRA
intersect and entwine on more than a
few occasions: at a certain point, both
organizations shared the same address in
the Chicago community area of Woodlawn,
and the organizations’ respective co-
founders, Abrams and Jeff Donaldson,
had known each other since collaborating
on a number of community arts projects
in the early 1960s—a friendship enshrined
in Donaldson's exquisite JamPact/JelliTite
(for Jamila) (pp. 84-85), a psychedelic
painting from 1988 depicting Abrams
(among others) improvising at the piano.!”
Another prominent AfriCOBRA member,
10 This painting is the subject of a close reading by George
Lewis in the essay “Purposive Patterning: Jeff Donaldson,
Muhal Richard Abrams, and the Multidominance of Con-
sciousness,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 5
(1999): 63-69, published by the Center for Black Music
Research at Columbia College Chicago. Lewis writes: “This
is what the works of Muhal Richard Abrams and Jeff
Donaldson ultimately address: an open-ended, polyphonic

BOTTOM ne) : :
Roberto Masotti, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bergamo Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams in concert,
Jazz Festival, Italy, 1974 presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
April 19, 1977
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Wadsworth Jarrell, has also painted
portraits of Muhal Richard Abrams, as
well as a group portrait of an AACM
ensemble in performance mode featuring
Abrams, Fred Hopkins, Steve McCall,
Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill (pp.
142-43). Jarrell’s Coolade Lester (1970,
p. 43), portrays another early member of
the AACM, bass player Lester Lashley—
a highly regarded visual artist in his own
right. In fact, AfriCOBRA was for a time
plainly called COBRA, or the Coalition
of Black Revolutionary Artists, which
itself emerged from an earlier collective
called OBAC, the Organization for Black
American Culture, in which Donaldson
had likewise played a pivotal part; its
stated aim, in his words, had been “to
organize and coordinate an artistic cadre
in support of the 1960s bare-bones
struggle for freedom, justice, and equality
of opportunity for African Americans in
the United States.” In OBAC’s founding
manifesto, “cultural expression [was
viewed] as a useful weapon in the
struggle for black liberation. The group
agreed that the essential function of
a people’s art’ was to build self-esteem
and to stimulate revolutionary action.”"!
\\
process of identity formation that comprises the social, the
political, the ideological, the spiritual, and the phenomeno-
logical in the service of an integrative perspective” (68).
11 Quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 167.
12. On the black artist community’s organized response
to Picasso’s steel behemoth, which the artist himself
famously never saw in person, see Rebecca Zorach,
“Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the
Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011):
78. The museum referred to in the title of Zorach’s essay is
none other than the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
itself. In the early years of its history (the MCA opened
its doors in 1967), the institution frequently collaborated
with prominent representatives of South Side culture.
In the 1970s, the MCA initiated a working relationship with
the AACM that has continued to this day; for more than
forty years now, musicians affiliated with the AACM
have been regular guests of the museum’s performing arts
program. As Zorach explains, the well-known African
American poet Gwendolyn Brooks was commissioned
to pronounce a dedication at Picasso’s gargantuan
sculpture’s unveiling in August 1967; less than two weeks
_later, her colleague Eugene Perkins had this to say at
the unveiling of the Wall of Respect: “Let Picasso’s enigma
of steel/fester in the backyard of the/city father’s cretaceous
sanctuary/It has no meaning for black people, / only
showmanship to entertain/imbecilic critics who judge all
art by/European standards.../The WALL is for black
people.”
13. Quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself, 168.
29
The undisputed crowning achieve-
ment of OBAC’s short-lived career in
the black agitprop business was without
a doubt the famed Wall! of Respect (pp.
32-33), a twenty-by-sixty-foot outdoor
mural, created in the populist spirit of
such muralists as Diego Rivera and Hale
Woodruff. It was painted on the side
of a building on the corner of Langley
Avenue and Forty-Third street in Chicago
and depicted a colorful parade of black
heroes such as Muhammad Ali, Stokely
Carmichael, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy,
W. E. B. Dubois, Charlie Parker, and
Malcolm X. Donaldson was particularly
involved in the mural’s jazz section; other
contributors included the aforementioned
Wadsworth Jarrell and William Walker.
The Wall of Respect was unveiled in 1967,
the same year, ironically, that saw down-
town Chicago welcome a giant Picasso
sculpture to what is now called Daley
Plaza. The Wall quickly became a focal
point for South Side community life;
in fact, it was even featured prominently
in a 1970 special issue of Time magazine
devoted to the Black Arts Movement.!”
About its inauguration and unexpectedly
short lifespoan—the Wall was torn down
in 1971 after the building on which
it had been painted, formerly a nightclub,
caught fire— Donaldson reminisced:
Curiosity seekers, uneasy tourists, art
lovers and political activists of every stripe
congregated daily and in ever-increasing
numbers. Musicians played as the work
proceeded. Writers recited their works.
Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) and Gwendolyn
Brooks composed special poems in tribute
to the Wall. Dancers danced, singers sang,
and the air was charged with camaraderie and
pioneering confidence. Before the Wall was
finished on August 24, 1967, it already had
become a shrine to black creativity dubbed the
“Great Wall of Respect” by writer John Oliver
Killens, a rallying point for revolutionary rhetoric
and calls to action, and a national symbol of
the heroic black struggle for liberation.?
These were the feverish heights of
“Nation Time” indeed, to paraphrase
the title track of Amiri Baraka’s
jazz-backed spoken-word album from

1972.'* Baraka helped popularize the
slogan, which led a creative life of its own
in early 1970s black America, showing
up in a painting by Gerald Williams
(pp. 244-45) and a widely disseminated
screen print by Barbara Jones-Hogu (both
founding members of AfriCOBRA) and
inspiring Joe McPhee’s 1971 scorching
free-jazz classic Nation Time, itself
the source of inspiration for a similarly
named painting by Chicago-born painter
Christopher Wool from the mid-1990s.
Wool is one of many artists who has
mined a private enthusiasm for late
1960s and early 1970s free-form, experi-
mental jazz to drive his own creative
purposes, and it this process of influence
and exchange that is at the heart, in part,
of The Freedom Principle: Experiments
in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.
“It’s nation time, time to get together,’
Baraka orates against the thunderous
backdrop of what the Art Ensemble of
Chicago liked to call “little instruments,”
a hundred gongs, drums, chimes, and
bells clattering together. They are the
chimes of freedom inaugurating a trans-
formative moment in African American
history that would have been unimag-
inable without the coming together of
art, music, and politics in radically new
communal forms, such as Chicago’s
own Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians—which, half a century
after its founding, is still, thankfully,
looking ahead, way ahead.
2
Christopher Wool, Nation Time, 2000
t
14 Sporting a cover steeped in Egyptological imagery and
featuring one track titled “Come Back Pharoah,” It’s Nation
Time: African Visionary Music was released on a newly
founded subsidiary of Motown called Black Forum, which
was later to release such oddities as Guess Who’s Coming
Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam as well
as spoken word albums by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panther Party chairman
Elaine Brown. (Black Forum folded in 1973, soon after the
aforementioned release.) /t’s Nation Time: African Visionary
Music featured a backing band of sixteen musicians, includ-
ing spiritual jazz figureheads Gary Bartz, Idris Muhammad,
and Lonnie Liston Smith. Baraka’s poem “Nation Time,”
which inspired and appeared on the album, dates back a few
years earlier; his volume of poetry, titled /t’s Nation Time,
was published by Third World Press in 1970.
30

31
A version of this essay was first published as “The Way
Ahead: The Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians and Chicago’s Black Arts Revolution,” Afterall 37
(Autumn/Winter 2014): 112-19. The title is a reference to a
1968 record by jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp (see note 6)
and it was originally.imagined as the name for the exhibition
that this publication accompanies. The exhibition was later
renamed The Freedom Principle—an allusion to an important
book by Chicago jazz critic John Litweiler chronicling the
history of avant-garde jazz. See John Litweiler, The Freedom
Principle: Jazz After 1958 (1984; reprint, New York: Da Capo
Press, 1990). Thanks to everyone at Afterall, and to Melissa
Gronlund in particular, for granting permission to reprint
this essay in revised form.

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AAC M NEWSLETTER THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMEN
; OF CREATIVE MUSICIANS
rere 1059 W. 107th Pl. Chgo. 111.
TO THE PEOPLE XXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXAXAXXAXARAAAX. ‘
6-15-74
THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF CREATIVE MUSICIANS '' is a non-profi
ization chartered by the state of Illinois. Our goal is to collectively dete
destinies of our people thereby creating a new day for our people. Our prima
cerns are survival accountability d achievement. Through these channels we
create an atmosphere conductive to the continued-e ence of our music.
THE AACM NEWSLETTER is a monthly publication containing some of the experienc
members.
A AC M CONCERT SERIES THINGS WE SHOULD KNOW
JLNE 4, FRED ANDERSON SEXTET UNCLE TOH'S CABIN
JUNE 16, THE LIGHT The Rev. Josiah Henson, the crigin
ee nt aes Tom, escaped from slavery, became
S OF CRE/ , ,
JUNE 23, SOURCES OF CREATIVITY and helped in the Underground Rail
JUNE 30, BLACK ARTIST GROUP Meeting Harriet Breecher Stowe by
JULY 7, BENEFIT FOR BROTHER WES aa pea Sndiiecame: thie
Refreshments to be sold EQ SS OSS
<< Next in popularity to the minstrel
a Satine £70) So pene years were the ''Tom Shows'’ -dramat
CEE: Saas ig Harriet Breccher Stowe's Uncle Tom
the book which London implied help
about the civil war, and which bec
worlds best seller next to the bib
As a play, it became an enormously
tear jerker. It was performed thr
North for many years.
The Negroes sang plantation songs
scum as Little Eva went to heaven,
bloodhounds chased Eliza across th
principal actors were customarily
including those who played Uncle T
TIGERS OF THE SUN GUNG FU
AT The Parkway Community Center
500 E. 67th St.
TIGER MANTIS SYSTEMS
Wed. 5:45-8:30 p.m. Sat. 1
Instructor: Wallace McMillian
Send all contributions to the above addre
SXXXXXXXXX XX" XXXXAXAXXXXXXXXXXAARKAAARAAKA

Kim On Wobq and
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Philin Cohran
and “THE ARTISTIC HERITAGE ENSEMBLE”
in an Exciting and Bold Stage Show
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E FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 1967 Curtain: 8 P.M.
NN. SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1967 Curtain: 8 P.M.
T Sunday, June 4, 1967 - Matinee; Curtain Time: 2 p.m.
S Sunday, June 4, 1967 Curtain: 8 P.M.
36 Regal Theatre — 47th & South Park

PAGES 32-33
Wall of Respect, 1967, outdoor mural
(destroyed), photograph by Robert Abbott
Sengstacke
PAGES 34-35
AACM Tenth Anniversary Festival poster, 1975
Concert of Modern Music: Richard Abrams
Experimental Band poster, 1965
Neighborhood residents and artists during the
creation of the Wall of Respect, 1967,
photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke
AACM Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 3
Air Trio flyer, N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago,
CH 973
Handwritten note, “Roscoe’s Paintings... .”
PAGE 35
Phil Cohran at the Affro-Arts Theater, 1968,
photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke
PAGE 36
Sixty-Third Street Beach Concert, 1967,
photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke
Proof for Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool,” for
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1959
Poster advertising Kim On Wong and the Joseph
Jarman Co., Chicago, 1970
AACM business card and concert announce-
ment for Philip Cohran, 1967
Si

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40
When you think back over all of our past
lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast
emptiness created by men.
—Inmate letter from Norfolk Prison Colony,
Norfolk, Massachusetts, 1949!
Funny that an incarcerated citizen in the
mid-twentieth century United States
believed that “only poetry” was the best
response to historical trauma. The senti-
ment seems foreign to contemporary
readers. But words to this effect were
exactly what one inmate at Norfolk Prison
Colony wrote in 1949. It is even more
startling that the man who penned this
letter was Malcolm Little, soon to be known
as Malcolm X, and eventually as El-Hajj
Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm X is best
remembered as a political leader, a black
nationalist, a perspicacious firebrand,
and a spokesman for the Nation of Islam.
He was assassinated in 1965, just after
he embraced traditional Sunni Muslim
beliefs and began to adopt a more egali-
tarian perspective. That same year, in a
manner that Malcolm X, an inveterate jazz
fan in his hipster youth and a proponent of
self-determination in his later years, would
have appreciated, four African American
musicians on Chicago’s South Side
founded the Association for the Advance-
ment of Creative Musicians (AACM). Just
two years later, the AACM’s closest peer
in the visual arts, the African Commune of
Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), also
emerged in Chicago. Both the AACM and
AfriCOBRA exemplified a more widespread
collaborative turn in art practice during
1 Quoted in Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention (New York: Viking Penguin, 2011), 92.

the 1960s.’ For the two organizations,
cooperative art making connected to the
rising black nationalism of the day and
its attendant black cultural nationalism,
which emphasized what historian
Manning Marable calls, “a deep pride
in African antiquity, history, and culture,
together with the celebration of rituals
and aesthetics drawing upon Africa and
the black diaspora.”* Just as importantly,
the AACM and AfriCOBRA appeared in
a specific location: Chicago’s South Side,
a localized manifestation of the multiva-
lent Black Arts Movement.
Fifty years later, the historical context
of these two organizations still matters,
particularly to contemporary artists who
reference the forms and rhetoric of black
cultural nationalism. The perceived arc
of blackness in relationship to art tends
to move from the development of an
“authentic Negro art” in the earlier part of
the twentieth century to multiculturalism,
postcolonialism, and later, identity politics
in the 1990s, yet contemporary artists
have reached back to language, forms,
terms, and concerns related to demo-
cratic possibilities that surfaced promi-
nently in the 1960s. They continue to
contend with what Malcolm X identified
as early as 1949 as the connections
between the collective “past lives” of a
people and the redemptive necessity of
poetry or art making. In various ways,
they seem eager to explore the legacy
of the integrationist civil rights and the
separatist Black Power movement by
asking how art mattered in that moment
of urgent political struggles and how one
2 According to art historian and curator Dan Cameron,
“the 1960s changed many an artist’s conception of him/herself
in the world, and that decade’s heady share of social utopia-
nism might be held at least partly responsible for the boom
in collaboration that it produced.” Cameron goes on to state
that the collaboration of that moment was “earmarked by
improvisation.” While Cameron makes this comment specifi-
cally to point to the failings of collaboration, he rightly sug-
gests that an optimistic ideology of cooperative work, formed
in opposition to an overwhelming hegemony, engendered
many cultural practices. He also contends that these prac-
tices were the product of artists reimagining themselves as a
different type of social being who could, in turn, imagine
their art “as a type of sociopolitical strategy.” See Dan Cam-
eron, “Against Collaboration,” Arts Magazine 58, 7 (March
1984): 85.
3 Marable, Malcolm X, 81.
41
Glenn Ligon, Give us a Poem, 2007
might imagine the arts as integral to a
project of collective liberation today.
The question we might ask is why
certain contemporary artists continue to
draw upon and engage with the black
nationalism of the 1960s for inspiration,
critique, elaboration, or rejection. Why, for
instance, does Rashid Johnson include
AACM albums in his multi-object installa-
tions (pp. 144-47)? Why do Lisa Alvarado’s
large-scale paintings (pp. 64-65) mirror
the formal and chromatic qualities of works
by AfriCOBRA? These artists revisit a histor-
ical moment not only when the arts were
considered integral to a broader social
project, but also when someone could, as
Malcolm X did, speak unequivocally about
all “our” past lives. The interest in the
1960s allows us to rethink contemporary
notions of collaboration and collectivity—of
an “us”—as a form of social identification,
and not merely as a multi-artist creative
process. If we understand collectivity more
broadly as a relationship between the artist
and the social sphere, then we see black
cultural nationalist work attempting to

coalesce a disparate group of people into
an uncontoured yet recognizable (even if
imagined) black community. By so stri-
dently connecting the aesthetic and the
social, black cultural nationalists took up
the quest of the twentieth-century avant-
garde, which sought to integrate art into
life, but these art-makers and activists
from the 1960s also gave it a particular
spin. Rather than asking how art and
life could be fused, they posed a different
question: how can black life produce
black art?
Much of the political urgency that
motivated the art of fifty years ago has
dissipated, or perhaps shifted into other
forms, and artists rarely presume to
speak to and for “the people,” yet artists
are still working through the relationship
between the aesthetic and the individual
on the one hand and the social and
collective on the other. No wonder, then,
that Glenn Ligon turned to another
important figure from the black nation-
alist moment, the boxer and devout Amer-
ican Muslim, Muhammad Ali, to create
a contemporary work, Give us a Poem
(2007, p. 155). Ali was asked by a
student to recite a poem after a speech
at Harvard University in 1975. Thinking
at once politically and aesthetically,
Ali articulated a similar understanding of
the “all” in what Malcolm X had called
“all our past lives,” but he did so in even
more pithy language. Ali simply declared:
“Me. We.”
Ligon’s sculpture presents Ali’s two
words in a new context: as a neon sign,
with the words placed one above the
other; the mirrored letters of “ME” and
“WE” flash in alternating moments. Ali’s
statement unhesitatingly linked his indi-
vidual saga to that of a collective struggle,
whether it be that of all black Americans
or of all humanity. By contrast, Ligon’s
rendering retains a connection between
self and group but suggests that the rela-
tionship is now less concrete than was
once historically imagined. Ligon seems
far more hesitant about the project of
creating a new black nation, or any collec-
tive social formation, yet he and many
other contemporary artists continue to
tread the terrain Malcolm X first probed
42
in 1949: how can art speak to the “vast
emptiness created by men”?
It’s Nation Time:
Rethinking AfriCOBRA
Until very recently, there was a critical
lacuna in the politically engaged visual art
of the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps
because art movements in the subse-
quent decades explicitly rejected what
appeared to be the essentializing
impulses of movements such as black
cultural nationalism. AfriCOBRA and
similar artists were seen as populist and
propagandistic or, at worst, overly
prescriptive both about the role of the
artist and the very definition of blackness.
As George E. Lewis and Rebecca Zorach
both note, black nationalist visual art has
often been relegated to the art-historical
rear guard.’ There is a tendency to see
(and write off) AfriCOBRA as a rejection of
high art in favor of a particular definition
of the black vernacular. But if we instead
examine AfriCOBRA’s articulation of
collectivity, of how the art group under-
Stood itself and its relationship to a larger
social identity, we can begin to see how
it put forward a far more sophisticated
understanding of the relationship
between artist and viewer, artist and
collective, individual and community.
This understanding of AfriCOBRA’s vision
better explains the lasting influence of
the 1960s black nationalist moment
for contemporary artists and, more signifi-
cantly, shows how the ongoing aesthetic
and political project of black nationalism
4 Rebecca Zorach, in an article on the collaborative art
project between the MCA and the Conservative Vice Lords
street gang, makes the case that these Chicago-based move-
ments have been incorrectly relegated, vis-a-vis the New
York avant-garde, as “belated” and “premodernist.” See
Rebecca Zorach, “Art and Soul: An Experimental Friendship
between the Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, 2 (Sum-
mer 2011): 66-87. To correct these critical oversights, Lewis
locates important parallels in the collective methodologies
and aesthetic values of the AACM and AfriCOBRA. See
George E. Lewis, “Purposive Patterning: Jeff Donaldson,
Muhal Richard Abrams, and the Multidominance of Con-
sciousness,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 5
(1999): 63-64.

continues to matter.
Founded as COBRA (Commune of
Bad Relevant Artists) in 1968 by a
group led by artist and art historian Jeff
Donaldson, AfriCOBRA (named as such
in 1970) was a coalition of visual artists,
fashion designers, and graphic designers
who had often met and worked together
in prior capacities. Most notably, many
were members of the interdisciplinary
Organization of Black American Culture
(OBAC, pronounced oh bah’ see), and
they collaborated on the Wall of Respect,
a large celebratory mural created in 1967
in response to riots on Chicago’s South
Side. Outwardly political, with pop art
sensibilities, AfriCOBRA’s works and its
members sit comfortably beside late-
1960s psychedelia, yet the aesthetic
of AfriCOBRA did not come primarily from
engagements with the larger art or pop
cultural worlds, but from local and
collaborative levels. The parameters of
AfriCOBRA’s collective ethos emerged
from deep ties among its members, who
shared, critiqued, and revised their indi-
vidual creations (which often concerned
a common theme) until a common visual
language developed. AfriCOBRA’s iconic
images are mosaics emanating light and
movement. In them, blocks of color,
usually interspersed with letters, rever-
berate outward into fractals that typically
radiate from a central, heroicized figure.
Critically important is the fact that,
instead of putting forward a founding
manifesto and proceeding from its
abstract principles, AfriCOBRA worked
in the opposite direction. Its formalist
guidelines only appeared after extended
individual and collective art making.
It was not until 1969, two years after its
founding, that Donaldson even created a
document outlining the centrality of black
life to black art and allied AfriCOBRA with
the “new international consciousness”
of a 1960s-era Pan-Africanism and the
Black Arts Movement.° Barbara Jones-
Hogu—one of AfriCOBRA’s leading makers
and voices—only wrote a “founding”
5 Napoleon Jones Henderson, “Remembering AfriCO-
BRA and the Black Arts Movement in 1960s Chicago,” Nka:
Journal of Contemporary African Art 30 (Spring 2012): 88.
43
h ; ote
ae Tah
@ %e ete ~
wadswnithl Jathell
Wadsworth Jarrell, Coolade Lester, 1970
manifesto in 1973. Her document
“Inaugurating AfriCOBRA” mapped out
how aesthetic commitments were
as important as social and philosophical
commitments and called for works in
“bright, vivid, singing Cool-ade colors of
orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime,
and grape. Pure vivid colors of the
sun and nature. Colors that shine on
Black people.” She borrowed language
from music, calling for works to make
“use of syncopated, rhythmic repetition
that constantly changes in color, texture,

shapes, form, pattern, movement, [and]
feature” that “mark the spot where the
real and the unreal, the objective and the
nonobjective, the plus and the minus,
meet. A point exactly between absolute
abstractions and absolute naturalism.”°
Two remarkable features arise from
the formal qualities that Jones-Hogu
lists as crucial to AfriCOBRA. First, the
works produced by the collective can
be described (in Eurocentric terms) as
fauvist. In a historic moment concerned
with positive and uplifting representa-
tions of black people, AfriCOBRA artists
insisted on depicting black subjects,
yet they moved between abstraction and
figuration. They rejected the notion that a
truly representational work must resort to
naturalism or realism. Perhaps this move
was inspired by a black “vernacular” that
AfriCOBRAists in turn sought to identify
and extend. Fauvist figurations and
fractal, supposedly syncopated abstract
qualities were already present in the
work of African American painters such
as Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence,
and Romare Bearden, all involved in
the Harlem Arts Workshop, which itself
was central to Donaldson’s doctoral
thesis. AfriCOBRA also referenced these
formal dimensions in the works of Bob
Thompson (right) and Alma Thomas.
Thompson’s art had in fact been on
display in Chicago in 1964. In the after-
math of the 1960s, many politically
engaged artists who retained an interest
in a global black aesthetic, such as
Emilio Cruz, himself a former studio-mate
of Thompson, who also lived and
worked in Chicago for a time, remained
committed to the radical possibilities of
abstraction. AfriCOBRA was very much a
part of the continued but underappreci-
ated relevance of abstraction to the
Black Arts Movement.
The second significant feature
mentioned in Jones-Hogu’s document
is the inclusion of text and language
in most of the artworks. Most of these
creations initiate a complex semiotic
6 Barbara Jones-Hogu, “Inaugurating AfriCOBRA His-
tory, Philosophy and Aesthetics,” Nka: Journal of Contempo-
rary African Art 30 (Spring 2012); 92-94.
44
Bob Thompson, Deposition, 1963
interplay between text and image, neces-
sitating a new form of interpretive literacy
in which both elements are read with and
against each other simultaneously. On
one level, this is the technique of adver-
tising, crudely feeding into the notion
that AfriCOBRA was creating “low” art
for “masses” of black people. On another,
in a moment when structuralism anda
nascent post-structuralism were entering
US academies (as a graduate student,
Donaldson was likely aware of these
developments), the combination of text
and image was not merely populist—or
pop art. Rather, it put pressure on the
location of meaning. The audience of
a work became at once a viewer (of the
image) and a reader (of the text) set ina
complex encounter with an artwork based
on reading as a mode of seeing and
vice-versa. Such ideas, mostly attributed
to the semiotic theories of Ferdinand
de Saussure or Roland Barthes or
mentioned in analyses of the contempo-
raneous works of Ed Ruscha, are figured
in AfriCOBRA works as well. Text and
figure intersect and disrupt each other in
dynamic ways.
Jones-Hogu’s belated manifesto lists

a set of “philosophical concepts” as well.
Her central idea was that the group’s
works were “visual statements,” and
these “statements,” echoing Donaldson,
must be “functional,” bolstering the
historic avant-garde argument against art
as an autonomous aesthetic object that
was hermetically removed from any rela-
tionship to or function in the social world.
The question then follows: What work
must the artwork, or the “visual state-
ment,” accomplish? According to Jones-
Hogu, it “must communicate to its viewer
a statement of truth, of action, of educa-
tion, of conditions, and a state of being
to our people. We wanted to speak to
them, and...express our total existence
as a people.”’ The function of AfriCOBRA
art was to unite diasporic Africans,
to call forth a renewed people. Or as the
common refrain went for many black
poets, artist, and musicians in the
mid-1960s, it was “Nation Time” (right).®
“Unite!” reads one of Jones-Hogu’s
prints from 1971 (produced, in fact,
before she joined AfriCOBRA). Unlike
other artworks of her peers, in which
lettering is embedded into images to form
patterns, Jones-Hogu’s poster produces
art “by and for black people” by both
figuring a black ensemble of anonymous
figures (rather than heroes)—a mirror to
its perceived audience—and then making
a verbal demand on said audience,
underscored by the figure turned toward
us. Even by insisting that an artwork be
read, Jones-Hogu (and other AfriCOBRA
artists) preemptively acknowledged
the presence of a viewer or audience.
The work emulates call-and-response, a
feature of many black musical traditions,
while also expressing an awareness of
how artworks must register the “spatio-
temporal matrices in which they’re
embedded,” as conceptual art pioneer
7 Ibid.
8 lowe an immense debt of gratitude to my colleague,
Dr. Huey Copeland, and students of our Black Collectivities
seminar at Northwestern University for helping me develop
a formal analysis and vocabulary around AfriCOBRA works.
See also, Imamu Amiri Baraka’s poem “Nation Time”
(1970), which spawned multiple quotations and references
for many artists after its publication.
45
Gerald Williams, Nation Time, 1969
Adrian Piper put it.? Like Piper, the
AfriCOBRA artists turned to language to
pull art out of the self-referential,
modernist modes predominant in the
mid-twentieth century. They moved
toward an intersubjective communication
with the viewer. As with so many of
AfriCOBRA’s combined image/text works,
Jones-Hogu’s Unite (AfriCOBRA) contains
an imperative to call into being a psychi-
cally transformed person—in this case,
one newly committed to black soli-
darity—while also presuming that this
person addressed by the poster already
existed, ready to be recognized in
the moment of encountering the poster.
Jones-Hogu recognizes and invokes
a collective subjectivity that at once
includes and exceeds the artist and her
public: here is a “we.”
The intersubjective efforts of
AfriCOBRA artists coincided with a new
awareness of context, subjectivity, percep-
tion, and performativity erupting from art
reacting against high modernism.
Collectively, the work drew its power from
an understanding that the artist is also
the subject of the work: she is subjected
to the same directives and pronounce-
ments as her audiences, so that she too
is transformed along with the viewers of
9 Adrian Piper, “On Conceptual Art” (1988), in
Adrian Piper: Out of Order, Out of Site, vol. 1: Selected
Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996), 241.

her work. In other words, there is always
a response to the call, even if itis a
personal, Subjective transformation,
rather than a public or political response.
Jack Halberstam describes this intersub-
jective condition as a “wild place,” a
set of conditions (as he quotes Stefano
Harney on the London Riots of 2011),
that “do not separate out ‘the request,
the demand, and the call’—rather, they
enact the one in the other.” According to
Harney, as quoted by Halberstam, “I think
the call, in the way | would understand
it, the call, as in the call-and-response,
the response is already there before the
call goes out. You’re already in some-
thing.”'° Halberstam and Harney’s
musical example structurally mirrors
the anticipatory optimism of AfriCOBRA,
whose fusion of multiple impulses—the
politically iterative and the exuberantly
re-imaginative—were fueled by a sincere
belief that a “we” already exists as a
people, and that this “we” could, through
art, be unified with a greater international
family of the black diaspora to free the
collective entity and the nation.
Contemporary Returns
and Refusals
Between AfriCOBRA’s expanded collec-
tivity in the late 1960s and early 1970s
and now, several possibilities have been
lost to history: one can hardly imagine
any artist today creating a prescriptive
manifesto that precisely articulates an
aesthetic at the service of a sociopolitical
end; fewer people believe in art’s power
to invoke psychical or spiritual transfor-
mation; and finally, it is now rare for
members of collectives to share as
many social similarities as the earliest
members of the AACM or AfriCOBRA or
be subjected to the same socioeconomic
pressures. In an age in which many are
10 Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and for the
Undercommons,” in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies (New
York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 7.
46
wary of identity politics, there is a sense
that the primary relational frame for an
individual no longer lies with intrinsic
belongingness to one cultural group, a
single nation-state, or a localized sociopo-
litical class. Rather, people seem to feel
membership in cross-border networks
of like-minded individuals, perhaps with
similar interests, as they experience
multiple global economic and political
forces. In other words, it’s no longer
possible to speak, in an unproblematic
way, of a definitive and unconditional
collectivity of “we” or of “the people.”
However outmoded black cultural
nationalism may seem now, its forms and
participants (indeed the radicalism of the
1960s and 1970s in general) resurface
often and they have taken on increased
relevance for contemporary art and
thought.!' How does one, from today’s
vantage point, unpack what Fred Moten
calls the “metapolitical surrealism” of
black radicalism? Why does it retain a
symbolic currency even as the radicalism
of the black-nationalist moment feels so
far gone?” Perhaps it is possible to map
AfriCOBRA’s models of art practice onto
the current moment: the insistence on
an intersubjective dialogue with the audi-
ence, a semiotic approach to the art
object, an ambiguity toward naturalism as
a representational tool, the dispersal of
the heroic author into an egoless group,
the turn to accessible, mass-mediated
modes of production and reception? To
do so might lead to insights into the
11 While this is clearly the case for artists, it also holds
true for curators and museums. Consider this list of recent of
exhibitions retracing the terrain of the 1960s: Summer of
Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in 2007; After 1968: Contemporary Artists and
the Civil Rights Legacy at the High Museum of Art in 2008;
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2009
(curated by artist Sam Durant); West of Center: Art and the
Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 at the
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2011; Witness: Art
and Civil Rights in the Sixties at the Brooklyn Museum in
2014; and, most relevantly, the 2013 trio of exhibitions,
AfriCOBRA in Chicago, at the South Side Community Art
Center, the DuSable Museum of African American History,
and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
12 Fred Moten, “Planning and Policy,” in Harney and
Moten, The Undercommons, 73.

reiterations, appropriations, and reinter-
pretations of the black cultural nationalist
moment in contemporary art.
The 1960s serves both as inspiration
for and foil against the current moment.
For instance, Jamal Cyrus’s set of albums
from the fictional “Pride Records” series—
with titles such as DMFD—6 Minutes Till
Nation Time !!! and Shaniqua Hameed
Sings the ABCs of Revolution—are canny
in their simultaneous parody of and
nostalgia for that period. The historical
black cultural nationalism depended on
an imaginary—an image of a people. Yet,
as contemporary artists take up notions
of black radicalism, the black vernacular
tradition, and political expression, they
distance. Ward thus suggests that the
project of democracy in the United
States, the project of making “a people,”
is multiperspectival. This is no unified
collective. Opinions of its successes
and failures depend on vantage point.
So too, Ward’s materials and process
suggest that the achievement of democ-
racy is labor-intensive and fragile, much
like the fabrication of this art object.
David Hammons similarly compli-
cates the use of nationalist, particularly
black nationalist, symbols. The colors of
his U.N.I.A. Flag (p. 138) are extracted
from the flag created in 1920 for
the influential political leader Marcus
Garvey and his Universal Negro Improve-
Nari Ward, We The People, 2011
posit both a set of references to and
refusals of the aesthetic principles of
AfriCOBRA.
Their primary refusal is the idea of a
coherent people or “nation”; their second
and interdependent rejection is the idea
that uncomplicated/unmitigated speech
acts can call out to, resonate with, and
bring together said people. Language
remains a tool for contemporary artists,
as it was for Jones-Hogu and others
in AfriCOBRA, but it is often imbued with
doubt. Sometimes it is not even wholly
apprehensible at all. Nari Ward’s We
The People (above and pp. 240-43), for
instance, renders the famous opening
words of the US Constitution in humble,
dripping shoelaces drilled into a wall.
Ward sizes the iconic script of the original
up to a monumental scale. Viewed up
close, it becomes a mass of drooping color
and only reads as coherent text from a
47
Jamal Cyrus, Untitled, 2010
ment Association. Horizontal bands of
red, black, and green run across Garvey’s
flag, which serves as a symbolic banner for
the early twentieth-century Pan-Africanist
and black nationalist movement that
rejected the US democratic project as
a false effort. Hammons’s flag cross-fertil-
izes the Pan-Africanist colors with the
patterning of the standard US flag,
synthesizing the two national symbols
into one hybrid object that references a
collective black nation lurking within the
United States. Or perhaps the flag is a
folly, pointing toward the absurdity of the
effort to reconcile these two nation-
building projects. As Hortense Spillers
has written regarding black nationalism,
“In short, the apparent homogeneity of
the mass, which black life offered to
the imagination in the late sixties, is more
or less revealed now as the necessary
fiction that has come unraveled at the

Jamal Cyrus, DMFD—6 Minutes Till Nation Time !!!, Pride Catalog #2217, 2009

Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics

combine with each other to form salts in the presence of water,
especially if one or both are difficultly soluble in water, as in the
present instance. The behavior of aluminium hydroxide, in this
respect, is part of a much larger and more general question, growing
out of the fact that water is a very weak acid and base, as has been
seen, and, to a greater or lesser extent, reacts as such with salts,
which are dissolved in it. This action of water plays an important rôle
in many analytical reactions, and especially, also, in the reactions of
aluminium salts. We shall, first, discuss this larger question of the
action of water, as an ionogen, on salts, and then return (p. 187) to
the problem of the self-neutralization of an amphoteric hydroxide.
Hydrolysis of Salts
Ionization of Water.
—We may first consider, very briefly, the evidence that water is
ionized even to the extent indicated by the ionization constants
given in our tables. It may be said that the purest water ever
prepared
361
shows a minimal conductivity, from which the
concentrations of its hydrogen and hydroxide ions and the value of
the ionization constant may be calculated. For the ionization of water
we have
[H
+
] × [HO
−
] / [Nonionized water] = K
Ion
.
As the concentration of pure water, or of the water in dilute
solutions, may be considered nearly a constant, we may put
[H
+
] × [HO
−
] = K
H
2
O
.
This is the relation most commonly, and most conveniently, used.
It is free from all assumptions as to the molecular weight of the
nonionized water, the calculation of the concentrations [p177] [H
+
]

and [OH
−
] being independent of any such assumption. The value of
K
H
2
O increases decidedly with an increase in the temperature,
362
whereas the ionization constant of an ordinary acid, such as acetic
acid, is affected very little by changes in temperature. This peculiar
increase of the ionization of water at higher temperatures is
undoubtedly due to the increasing dissociation of the complex water
molecules into hydrol molecules (see p. 66), which, presumably, are
most easily ionized. Now, the value of the constant K
H
2
O
, at any
temperature, may be determined in some half a dozen different and
independent ways, including the conductivity method mentioned,
and one of the most remarkable developments of the theory of
ionization is that all of these methods lead to concordant results.
363
Aside from considerations based on its ionization, water may be shown, by its
chemical behavior, to have the functions of an acid and of a base, and the
conclusions reached are in complete accord with those reached with the aid of the
theory of ionization.
Water is An Acid.
—If the oxide of a metal such as copper, lead or calcium, is treated with an acid, a
salt is formed by the combination of the two; for instance, we have
PbO + HCl → Pb(OH)Cl,
Pb(OH)Cl + HCl → PbCl
2
+ H
2
O,
PbO + 2 HCl → PbCl
2
+ H
2
O,
CaO + 2 HCl → CaCl
2
+ H
2
O.
Water will combine with a number of oxides very much in the same manner and
sometimes with such vigor, that considerable heat is evolved, as in the slaking of
lime (exp.):
CaO + HOH → Ca(OH)
2
.
Water in this, and similar actions, takes the place of and plays the rôle of, an acid,
and the metal hydroxides or bases appear as its salts.
364
It is a very weak acid,
which can easily be driven out of its salts by any stronger acid (neutralization of
bases), but that does not alter the conclusions reached. Considered from the point

We have
of view of the theory of ionization, the relation [p178] would be expressed by saying
that in the common bases the positive hydrogen ion of water has been replaced by
some other positive or metal ion. The salt of any acid could be defined in exactly
the same way.
Water as a Base.
—Acid oxides, such as carbon dioxide, silicon dioxide, arsenious oxide, combine
more or less readily with bases, such as sodium hydroxide, to form salts:
CO
2
+ NaOH → NaHCO
3
,
As
2
O
3
+ 2 NaOH → 2 NaAsO
2
+ H
2
O.
A number of acid oxides combine with water in exactly the same manner, and
sometimes with such tremendous vigor, that great care must be taken in bringing
the two together, as is the case when sulphur trioxide or phosphorus pentoxide
are added to water (Exp.).
P
2
O
5
+ HOH → 2 HPO
3
.
It is evident that in such actions water may take the place of, and play the rôle of,
an ordinary base, forming the acids, which may well be defined as hydrogen
salts.
365
It is true that the basic properties of water are so weak, that the metal
ion of even a weak base, like ammonium hydroxide, will replace the hydrogen-ion
in its salts, the acids, quite readily (HCl + NH
4
OH ⥂ NH
4
Cl + H
2
O). But such a
weak base, in turn, will have to give way, of course, to still stronger bases; for
instances, NH
4
Cl + NaOH ⥂ NaCl + NH
4
OH. From the point of view of the theory of
ionization, the hydrogen-ion is positive, like all the other metals ions whose
hydroxides are bases.
There should be no difficulty, therefore, in considering water to have the
chemical properties of a base as well as of an acid. Its chemical activities as such,
weak as they may be, must be satisfied whenever it is present. These activities
lead to the hydrolysis or the decomposition of salts by water, in greater or lesser
degree, whenever water is used as a solvent for salts.
Action of Water on a Salt of a Strong Base and a Strong Acid.
—If sodium chloride, a typical salt formed from a strong base and a
strong acid, is dissolved in water, it is ionized to a considerable
extent. Considering the solution from a mechanical point of view, we
would expect that the sodium ions, moving in all directions, would

collide occasionally with hydroxide ions, which are formed from the
water and are present in minute but definite quantity. Some of the
collisions must result in the formation of sodium hydroxide, as we
have no reason to suppose that the result would differ from that in
other cases where positively charged particles meet with negatively
charged ones. However, since sodium hydroxide is an ionogen, with
a very great tendency to ionize, and since there is present only a
minute concentration of the hydroxide-ion, the [p179] equilibrium
conditions will be satisfied when only traces of the nonionized
hydroxide are formed. In a similar manner, we must expect to have
traces, and only traces, of nondissociated hydrochloric acid formed
by the union of chloride ions with some of the hydrogen ions of the
water. Since hydrogen chloride and sodium hydroxide show
practically the same tendency to ionize (tables, pp. 104 and 106),
the two kinds of ions which water forms, the hydrogen-ion and the
hydroxide-ion, will be used up to a very slight and practically equal
extent to form nonionized sodium hydroxide and hydrogen chloride,
but the ions will be immediately regenerated, and in equal
concentrations, from the nonionized water which is present. All the
equilibrium requirements will be satisfied when traces of sodium
chloride have been converted into nonionized sodium hydroxide and
hydrogen chloride. Such a solution, containing no excess of the
hydrogen- or the h ydroxide-ion, would react neutral. The action may
be expressed by the equation
366
NaCl ⇄ Na
+
+ Cl
−
H
2
O ⇄ HO
−
+ H
+
Na
+
+ HO
−
⇄ NaOH
Cl
−
+ H
+
⇄ HCl.

The decomposition of sodium chloride by water, which one may
predict on the basis of these theoretical considerations, may be
demonstrated, slight as it is, by the following experiment.
367
Exé. A pinch of sodium chloride is brought into a platinum crucible, which is
previously heated in a blast lamp to a bright yellow heat (1100°); then 1 c.c. of
water is introduced, drop by drop. A steam cushion is formed at once
(Leidenfrost's phenomenon). After about half of the water has been evaporated
(half a minute), the water is poured into a solution colored with blue litmus; it is
changed to red by an excess of hydrochloric acid in the water. The crucible is
cooled, and the salt remaining in it is dissolved in a little water and the solution
poured into a red litmus solution; the latter turns blue.
The sodium chloride has obviously been partially decomposed, by
the water, into its base and its acid; the decomposition is favored by
the high temperature and by the fact that the hydrogen chloride
[p180] formed can pass through the steam cushion into the water,
while the sodium hydroxide is left behind. The removal of a product
of the decomposition would favor its progress (see. p. 114).
The conclusions concerning salts of the type of sodium chloride
may then be summarized in the statement, that salts formed by the
union of a very strong base with an equally strong acid are only very
slightly decomposed by water and their solutions show a neutral
reaction.
The decomposition of a salt by water into its component base and
acid is called hydrolysis and the salt is said to be hydrolyzed in the
action.
Action of Water on the Salt of a Strong Base with a Weak
Acid.
—The relations are similar in principle, but quite different in degree
and in net result, when the salt of a very strong base, combined with
a weak acid, is dissolved in water. Potassium cyanide is a typical salt
of this kind, and the study of its hydrolysis will illustrate the behavior

of this class of salts. The hydrolysis takes place according to the
equations
KCN ⇄ K
+
+ CN
−
HOH ⇄ HO
−
+ H
+
K
+
+ HO
−
⇄ KOH
CN
−
+ H
+
⇄ HCN.
When the cyanide is dissolved in water, we must obtain, for the
same reasons as were developed in the discussion of the hydrolysis
of sodium chloride, a little nonionized potassium hydroxide, from the
union of potassium ions with hydroxide ions, formed by the water.
Potassium hydroxide being a strong, easily ionizable base, there will
be only a slight tendency towards this union. Hydrocyanic acid, on
the other hand, is an exceedingly weak acid. The value of its
ionization constant K
HCN
= [H
+
] × [CN
−
] / [HCN] is only 7E−10, as
compared with a similar ratio approximating 1 for potassium
hydroxide ([K
+
] × [HO
−
] / [KOH] = 1; see the tables, p. 104 and p.
106 and see pp. 106–7). The hydrogen-ion, formed from the water,
must therefore combine with cyanide-ion, to form nonionized
hydrocyanic acid, much more completely than the hydroxide-ion
combines with potassium-ion. With the disappearance of the ions of
water, in this case notably of its hydrogen ions, more water must
ionize to satisfy the ionization constant [p181] for water (p. 176), and
the formation of hydrocyanic acid will continue, towards the
satisfying of its own constant. It is important to note that, for the
reasons given, the hydrogen-ion of water is used up to a far greater
extent than is the hydroxide-ion; the latter therefore accumulates,
and this accumulation results in the formation of smaller and smaller
concentrations of the hydrogen-ion, by the water. Since [H
+
] ×
[HO
−
] = 1.2E−14 (at 25°; p. 104), as [HO
−
] grows larger, [H
+
] must

grow proportionally smaller. The suppression of the hydrogen-ion by
the accumulation of the hydroxide ion will, ultimately, make [H
+
] so
small, that the equilibrium ratio [H
+
] × [CN
−
] / [HCN] will equal the
equilibrium constant. Since the union of the hydrogen-ion with the
cyanide-ion, to form little ionized hydrocyanic acid, is the main
moving cause for the changes, the latter will then come to a
standstill and equilibrium will be established. The net result of the
action of water on potassium cyanide may be said to consist in the
formation of practically nonionized hydrocyanic acid and the
liberation of (chiefly) ionized potassium hydroxide, until all the
equilibrium constants of the system are satisfied. We note that
potassium cyanide solution must react strongly alkaline (exp.) and
that a free acid (e.g. HCN) may well exist in the presence of a free
base (e.g. KOH), provided the acid is present in a nonionized, and
therefore chemically inactive, condition (inactive as an acid).
Ignoring the (practically) unimportant formation of small quantities
of nonionized potassium hydroxide, we may summarize the action in
a single equation, which shows the main action:
CN
−
+ HOH ⇄ HCN + HO
−
.
Whereas water, as an acid and as a base, is so exceedingly weak,
that it can form but traces of its own salts, sodium hydroxide and
hydrochloric acid, when acting on sodium chloride and competing for
the base with such a strong acid as hydrochloric acid and for the
acid with such a strong base as sodium hydroxide (see p. 179), the
result, evidently, is quite different when water competes for a base
with so weak an acid as hydrocyanic acid. In this case, we note that
a considerable quantity of (ionized) potassium hydroxide, the salt of
water in its rôle of an acid, is formed as a result of the action of
water on potassium cyanide. [p182]

The theory of ionization, with the aid of the law of chemical equilibrium, gives
us the means for accurately defining the relative concentrations of the products, in
the final condition of equilibrium.
368
For the weak acid, hydrocyanic acid, we have
the condition of equilibrium
[H
+
] × [CN
−
] / [HCN] = K
HCN
= 7E−10.
The symbols [H
+
], [CN
−
] and [HCN] denote the final concentrations for the
condition of equilibrium, indicated in the equations on p. 180; in such a mixture
[H
+
] is not equal to [CN
−
], as it is in pure solutions of hydrocyanic acid in water.
[CN
−
], representing the total concentration of the cyanide-ion, is very much larger
than [H
+
], since the salt, potassium cyanide, produces the cyanide-ion in large
concentrations.
For water, we have [H
+
] × [HO
−
] = K
HOH
= 1.2E−14, at 25°. Here, again, the
symbols represent the final, total concentrations of the ions in the mixture and
[HO
−
] is much larger than [H
+
], since hydroxide-ion is formed in large quantities,
as described above.
Combining the two equations, we have:
[CN
−
] / ([HCN] × [HO
−
]) = K
HCN
/ K
HOH
= K
Hydrolysis
.
The cyanide-ion, whose concentration is expressed by [CN
−
], is formed
practically altogether by the ionization of potassium cyanide, which is an easily
ionizable and almost entirely ionized salt; the hydroxide-ion, whose concentration
is expressed by [HO
−
], is formed by the ionization of potassium hydroxide, which
is an easily ionizable base, ionized to practically the same degree as is the
potassium cyanide in the solution. If we represent the total concentration of the
potassium cyanide, ionized and nonionized, at the point of equilibrium, by [KCN]
and its degree of ionization by α
1
, and if we represent, similarly, the total
concentration of potassium hydroxide by [KOH] and its degree of ionization by α
2
,
the equilibrium equation may be written:
α
1
[KCN] / ([HCN] × α
2
[KOH]) = K
HCN
/ K
HOH
= K
Hydrolysis
.
Since the degrees of ionization of the two strong electrolytes are practically the
same, we have further simply
[KCN] / ([HCN] × [KOH]) = K
HCN
/ K
HOH
= K
Hydrolysis
.

The mathematical equations give us a measure of the extent to which water
must decompose or hydrolyze the salt in question, as expressed in the chemical
equations (p. 180). The extent of the hydrolysis, clearly, depends on the relative
ionization constants of hydrocyanic acid and water, the two acids competing for
the base.
From the known values of the constants, one may calculate that, at 25°, in a
solution of 6.5 grams potassium cyanide in a liter (0.1 molar), almost 1.3% of the
cyanide is decomposed into potassium hydroxide and hydrocyanic acid. Since
every molecule of hydrolyzed salt forms one molecule of [p183] the hydroxide and
one molecule of the acid, we may put [KOH] = [HCN] = x and [KCN] = 0.1 − x. The
ionization constant, K
HCN
= 7E−10, and K
HOH
= 1.2E−14, at 25°. Inserting these
values into the equation [KCN] / ([HCN] × [KOH]) = K
HCN
/ K
HOH
we have: (0.1 −
x) / x
2
= 7E−10 / 1.2E−14. Here x = 0.0013. This is 1.3% of the 0.1 mole of
cyanide used.
One may convince himself, as follows, that the constants are satisfied when the
decomposition of the cyanide has proceeded to this point: the degrees of
ionization of the potassium cyanide and potassium hydroxide, α
1
and α
2
, may be
taken as 85% (the same as the degree of ionization of the similar electrolyte KCl
in 0.1 molar solution). Then [HO
−
] = 0.85 × 0.0013 = 0.0011; [CN
−
] = 0.85 × (0.1
− 0.0013) = 0.083; [H
+
] = 1.2E−14 / [HO
−
] = 1.1E−11. For [H
+
] × [CN
−
] / [HCN]
we have then: 1.1E−11 × 0.083 / (0.0013) or 7E−10, the value for the ionization
constant of hydrocyanic acid. It should be noted that, whereas in pure water at
25° [H
+
] = [HO
−
] = √(1.2E−14) = 1.1E−7, in the solution under consideration
[HO
−
] has increased to the value 0.0011 and [H
+
] is only 1.1E−11.
The relation developed for the hydrolysis of potassium cyanide is a general one,
holding for the hydrolysis of salts, of the type MeX, of a weak acid with a strong
base. It may be expressed in general as follows: for the hydrolysis of a salt
according to MeX + HOH ⇄ MeOH + HX, where HX is a weak acid and MEOH a
strong base, we have:
369
[Salt] / ([Acid] × [Base]) = K
Acid
/ K
HOH
.
It is clear, from the equation, that the weaker the acid of the salt (measured by
the ionization constant K
Acid
, the numerator on the right), the more will water,
ceteris paribus, be able to drive it out of its salt and form its own salt, the base

(the smaller the numerator on the right, the larger must be the denominator on
the left).
The conclusions may be summarized in the statement that the
salts of strong bases with weak acids are more or less decomposed
by water (hydrolyzed) and the resulting solutions must react
alkaline. We find, as a matter of fact, that aqueous solutions of
potassium cyanide, sodium carbonate, sodium sulphide, borax (see
the table, p. 104), all react strongly alkaline to litmus (exp.).
Conversely, it may be said, that if the sodium or potassium salt of an
acid dissolves in water with a decidedly alkaline reaction, it is the
salt of a weak, poorly ionized acid.
370
[p184]
Action of Water on a Salt of a Strong Acid with a Weak Base.
—Exactly similar relations obtain in the case of salts of strong acids
with weak bases:[1] they are decomposed, to a greater or less
extent, into the free, strong, largely ionized acid and the free,
scarcely ionized weak base, the decomposition being stopped by the
accumulation of the free strong acid (more exactly, of the hydrogen-
ion). Such solutions react strongly acid, as in the case of the
chloride, nitrate, sulphate of aluminium, of iron (ferric), of
chromium, and of similar salts of weak bases.
For MeX + HOH ⇄ MeOH + HX, where MeOH is a weak base and HX a strong
acid, we have as before:
371
[Me
+
] / ([H
+
] × [MeOH]) =
[Salt] / ([Acid] × [Base]) = K
Base
/ K
HOH
.
Action of Water on a Salt of a Base and an Acid, Both of
which are Weak.
—We will now turn to the consideration of the action of water on the
fourth class of salts, the salts of a weak base with a weak acid.
372
Like all salts, such a salt, say MeX, would ionize very readily, when
dissolved in water (the few exceptions to readily ionizable salts are

not under consideration), and, in this case, both the positive and the
negative ions would have to combine respectively with the hydroxide
and the hydrogen ions of water to form the nonionized weak base
and the nonionized weak acid, and satisfy two very small constants,
K
Base
and K
Acid
:
[Me
+
] × [HO
−
] / [MeOH] = K
Base
and [H
+
] × [X
−
] / [HX] = K
Acid
.
Both the hydrogen and the hydroxide ions of water would disappear,
and in approximately equal quantity, if the base and acid were
approximately equally weak, and the ions would be regenerated
from water with no accumulation of either one to suppress the
other, as in the two previous cases considered. Under these
circumstances, the decomposition by water must proceed very much
further than in the previous cases. For instance, in the hydrolysis of
potassium cyanide in 0.1 molar solution, at 25°, we find the
concentration of the hydrogen-ion [H
+
] reduced
373
from 1.1E−7, its
[p185] value in pure water, to 1.1E−11, as a result of the
accumulation of potassium hydroxide (the hydroxide-ion), and only
this small value for [H
+
] appears in the equation for the formation of
the free acid, HCN (first equation, p. 182; vide the calculation, p.
183). But, in the present case, the factors [HO
−
] and [H
+
], in the
equations on p. 184, maintain practically their original value, about
the same as in pure water, and the formation of nonionized MeOH
and HX must go correspondingly further to satisfy the constants
K
Base
and K
Acid
. Just how far the action must proceed, can be
formulated with the aid of the theory of ionization and the law of
chemical equilibrium,
374
much in the same way as for the hydrolysis
of potassium cyanide.
The final equation, as developed by Arrhenius, reads:

[Me
+
] × [X
−
]
=
α
2
[Salt]
2
=
K
Acid
× K
Base
= K,
[HX] × [MeOH][Acid] × [Base] K
HOH
in which K
Acid
and K
Base
represent the ionization constants of the acid and the
base, as given in the tables (pp. 104 and 106), and α is the degree of ionization of
the salt.
For the cyanide of a base, which is as weak a base as hydrocyanic
acid is an acid, we find that the decomposition by water, at 25° in a
0.1 molar solution, must comprise 99.35%
375
of the salt, in order to
establish equilibrium. In the case of potassium cyanide, in 0.1 molar
solution, only 1.3% of the salt is decomposed (p. 182).
Now, if both the free base and the free acid are very difficultly
soluble, then the concentrations [MeOH] and [HX], respectively, in
the solution cannot go beyond a certain minute limit. In view,
376
then, of the very small value, K
Base
, of the ratio [Me
+
] × [HO
−
] /
[MeOH] and the minute value that the second term [MeOH] has
under these conditions, the first term [Me
+
] × [HO
−
] must have a
correspondingly smaller value. It is clear, therefore, that in such a
solution neither the nonionized base, MeOH, nor its ion, Me
+
, can
exist in more than minute quantities when the equilibrium constants
are satisfied. The same conclusion is reached regarding the [p186]
possibility of the existence of the difficultly soluble acid HX and its
ion X
−
, in more than minimal quantities. Since, then, neither the ion
Me
+
nor the ion X
−
can be present in more than traces, their salt,
MeX, which is considered readily ionizable, also cannot exist in
aqueous solutions, except in traces.
The quantitative relations are evident from the equilibrium equation (p. 185):
[Me
+
] × [X
−
] / ([HX] × [MeOH]) = α
2
[Salt]
2
/ ([Acid] × [Base]) = K
Acid
× K
Base
/
K
HOH
= K. It is evident that the concentration of the salt, [Salt], which is capable
of existence in aqueous solution, is, in the first place, the smaller the smaller the
values for K
Acid
and K
Base
are, i.e. the weaker the acid and the base are; and, in

the second place, it is the smaller the smaller the values for [Acid] and [Base] are,
which, in the present instance, represent the concentrations of the difficultly
soluble acid and base in saturated solution, i.e. their solubilities.
We reach the conclusion that salts of very weak bases and very
weak acids are very considerably decomposed by water, and, if both
the acid and the base are difficultly soluble in water, the
decomposition is practically complete. Conversely, such a very weak,
difficultly soluble base will not combine with a very weak, difficultly
soluble acid to form a salt in the presence of water. An instance of
the first kind is found in the case of aluminium sulphide, the salt of a
very weak, difficultly soluble base, aluminium hydroxide, with a
rather little soluble, weak acid, hydrogen sulphide (see table, p.
104). We find that when a piece of aluminium sulphide, prepared by
dry methods, is dropped into water (exp.), a precipitate of
aluminium hydroxide is immediately formed and evolution of
hydrogen sulphide occurs. We have
Al
2
S
3
⇄ 2 Al
3+
+ 3 S
2−
,
6 HOH ⇄ 6 HO
−
+ 6 H
+
2 Al
3+
+ 6 HO
−
⇄ 2 Al(OH)
3
↓
3 S
2−
+ 6 H
+
⇄ 3 H
2
S ↑.
An instance where a very weak insoluble acid will not combine,
appreciably, with a very weak insoluble base, is found in the case of
aluminium hydroxide. A development of the equilibrium equations
for its ionization as a base and its ionization as an acid would show,
that all the constants would be readily satisfied, when a very minute
quantity of dissolved ionized aluminium aluminate is formed. [p187]
Self-Neutralization of Amphoteric Hydroxides.
—We may consider a saturated solution of aluminium hydroxide, in contact with
the solid hydroxide. For the acid ionization,
377
Al(OH)
3
⇄ AlO
2
−
+ H
+
+ H
2
O, we

have
[AlO
2
−
] × [H
+
] / [Al(OH)
3
] = K
Acid
.
Similarly, for the basic ionization,
378
Al(OH)
3
⇄ (AlO)
+
+ HO
−
+ H
2
O, we have
[AlO
+
] × [HO
−
] / [Al(OH)
3
] = K
Base
.
The formation of traces of nonionized (basic) aluminium aluminate would satisfy
the equilibrium requirements for AlO
+
+ AlO
2
−
⇄ AlO(AlO
2
), since the aluminate,
like other aluminates, is presumably readily ionizable in aqueous solutions.
Aluminium hydroxide, as a base and as an acid, would yield in the first moment
greater concentrations of the hydroxide and hydrogen ions than would satisfy the
equilibrium constant for water (p. 176); the excess of these ions must combine to
form water, until the product of their concentrations is equal to the ionization
constant of water. The neutralization of these first quantities of hydrogen and
hydroxide ions would destroy the momentary condition of equilibrium between
aluminium hydroxide and its ions and would lead to its further ionization, both as a
base and as an acid, and to the solution of some aluminium hydroxide (see the
above equilibrium equations). However, since AlO
+
and AlO
2
−
remain practically
uncombined and therefore accumulate in the solution, the concentrations of the
hydroxide and hydrogen ions formed grow smaller and smaller; for an increasing
excess of the ion AlO
+
will allow only smaller and smaller values for [HO
−
],
according to the equilibrium equation for K
Base
, and, similarly, an increasing
excess of the ion AlO
2
−
will permit [H
+
] to reach only smaller and smaller values,
according to the equilibrium equation for K
Acid
. When the values for [HO
−
] and
[H
+
] have in this way become small enough to make [HO
−
] × [H
+
] = K
HOH
,
equilibrium is reached. It is evident that in such a solution, in the condition of
equilibrium, [HO
−
] is not equal to [AlO
+
], as it would ordinarily be, according to
the ionization equation Al(OH)
3
⇄ AlO
+
+ HO
−
+ H
2
O, but is much smaller.
Similarly, [H
+
] is much smaller than [AlO
2
−
].
Just how much aluminium aluminate must be formed by a self-neutralization of
the amphoteric hydroxide will depend on the values for K
Base
and K
Acid
and on
the solubility of aluminium hydroxide (nonionized Al(OH)
3
). The two equilibrium
equations may be combined:

[AlO
+
] × [AlO
2
−
] × [H
+
] × [HO
−
]
= K
Base
× K
Acid
.
[Al(OH)
3
]
2
[p188]
Since [H
+
] × [HO
−
] = K
HOH
, and since [AlO
+
] and [AlO
2
−
] may be taken to
represent each the concentration of the practically completely ionized aluminium
aluminate AlO(AlO
2
), we have
379
[Alum. Aluminate]
2
=
K
Base
× K
Acid
,
[Alum. Hydroxide]
2 K
HOH
or
[Alum. Aluminate]
= √ (
K
Base
× K
Acid
).
[Alum. Hydroxide] K
HOH
It is clear, that the smaller the ionization constants K
Base
and K
Acid
are, and the
smaller the solubility of nonionized aluminium hydroxide [Alum. Hydroxide] is, the
smaller must be the concentration of the aluminate formed to satisfy the
conditions for equilibrium.
Aluminium hydroxide is a typical amphoteric hydroxide, and the relations
developed may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the conditions of equilibrium for
analogous amphoteric hydroxides, such as zinc, lead, chromic hydroxides, and so
forth. Salt formation or self-neutralization will depend, in every instance, on the
strength of the base and the acid formed, and on the solubility of the
hydroxide.
380
With the aid of the preceding considerations the analytical
reactions of aluminium, which are used to separate it from other
elements and to identify it, may be readily understood. They will be
discussed in connection with the analysis of the "Aluminium and Zinc
Groups."
The Analysis of the Aluminium and Zinc Groups.
—The groups of metals which are here called the [p189] "Aluminium
and Zinc Groups" consist of two groups, which ordinarily are
precipitated together in qualitative analysis, and which are then
separated from each other. We may distinguish the "Aluminium

Group" of trivalent metal ions, including aluminium, ferric and
chromium ions, and the "Zinc Group" of bivalent metal ions,
including zinc, nickelous, cobaltous, manganous and ferrous ions. Of
the two groups, the ions of the second group, in agreement with
their lower valence (see p. 172), form the stronger bases, and, as
such, they are all capable of forming comparatively stable salts even
with such very weak acids as hydrogen sulphide and carbonic acid.
Ammonium sulphide, added to a solution of a salt of any one of the
ions of the zinc group, precipitates the corresponding sulphide,
sodium or ammonium carbonate precipitates the corresponding
carbonate.
381
We have, for instance:
FeCl
2
+ (NH
4
)
2
S → FeS ↓ + 2 NH
4
Cl,
FeCl
2
+ Na
2
CO
3
→ FeCO
3
↓ + 2 NaCl.
Only one member of this group, zinc, forms an amphoteric hydroxide
and advantage is taken of this in identifying zinc.
The members of the aluminium group form hydroxides, which are
much weaker bases than are the hydroxides of the bivalent group
just considered. Their salts with strong acids are considerably
hydrolyzed and react strongly acid, and their salts with very weak
acids, like carbonic acid and hydrogen sulphide, are decomposed so
readily by water, that only ferric sulphide is capable of existence in
its presence. When the sulphide, Al
2
S
3
, prepared by heating
aluminium with sulphur, is added to water, it is totally decomposed
into the hydroxide and hydrogen sulphide (p. 186); and if aluminium
chloride is treated with ammonium sulphide in aqueous solution,
aluminium hydroxide, and not its sulphide, is precipitated. The latter
result may be interpreted in two ways, both of which, in the ultimate
analysis, mean that hydrogen sulphide is too weak an acid to form a
stable sulphide with aluminium hydroxide in the presence of water,

the difficult solubility of aluminium hydroxide and the limited
solubility of hydrogen sulphide being favoring factors (see p. 186).
In a solution of aluminium chloride, the salt of a very weak base
with a strong [p190] acid, more or less of the salt is hydrolyzed, and
we have a condition of equilibrium as expressed in the equation
AlCl
3
+ 3 H
2
O ⇄ Al(OH)
3
+ 3 HCl. The addition of ammonium sulphide
to such a solution would neutralize the free hydrochloric acid, and
the action would proceed to completion towards the right, hydrogen
sulphide being liberated, by the action of the acid on the ammonium
sulphide. As hydrogen sulphide is too weak an acid to combine,
appreciably, with aluminium hydroxide, and as the latter is difficultly
soluble, the hydroxide is precipitated. According to the degree of
dilution, more or less of the hydrogen sulphide also escapes. Besides
this interpretation of the precipitation of aluminium hydroxide under
these conditions, we may also consider the following: any aluminium
sulphide, formed the first moment, would remain largely ionized and
would be immediately converted, by the ions of water, into
aluminium hydroxide and hydrogen sulphide. The net result of the
action is the precipitation of aluminium hydroxide and the evolution
of hydrogen sulphide:
2 AlCl
3
+ 3 (NH
4
)
2
S + 6 H
2
O →
2 Al(OH)
3
↓ + 6 NH
4
Cl + 3 H
2
S ↑ or
2 Al
3+
+ 3 S
2−
+ 6 HOH → 2 Al(OH)
3
↓ + 3 H
2
S ↑.
A similar result is obtained when the solution of a chromium salt is
treated with a solution of ammonium sulphide. Only ferric hydroxide
is capable of forming a sulphide, ferric sulphide, Fe
2
S
3
, which is
precipitated when solutions of ferric salts are treated with
ammonium sulphide.
382

Ammonium sulphide will, consequently, precipitate aluminium and
chromium hydroxides and ferric, ferrous, nickel, cobalt, manganese
and zinc sulphides, from a solution of the chlorides of the metals.
Now, both the sulphides and the hydroxides of the alkaline earths
and alkalies are sufficiently soluble not to be precipitated by
ammonium sulphide, or by a mixture of it with ammonium
hydroxide, if ammonium chloride be added to the mixture to prevent
the precipitation of magnesium hydroxide (see p. 168), which is the
least soluble of the hydroxides of the alkaline earth group. [p191] A
mixture of ammonium sulphide, ammonium hydroxide and
ammonium chloride will, therefore, precipitate the aluminium and
zinc groups together, separating them from the alkaline earth and
alkali groups.
383

Separation of the Aluminium Group from the Zinc Group by
Means of Ammonium Chloride and Ammonium Hydroxide.
—The precipitation of the two groups together makes their
subsequent separation necessary. Some analysts attempt to avoid
the extra operations involved, by making use of the fact that the
hydroxides of the bivalent group, although difficultly soluble, are, like
magnesium hydroxide, still sufficiently soluble not to be precipitated
by ammonium hydroxide in the presence of sufficient ammonium
chloride, while the hydroxides of the trivalent metals of this group
are so insoluble that they may be precipitated quantitatively by such
a mixture (p. 170). The trivalent hydroxides may be first precipitated
by ammonium hydroxide, in the presence of ammonium chloride,
and, subsequently, the sulphides of the bivalent metals may be
precipitated by ammonium sulphide, the two precipitates being
collected separately. The method has the disadvantage that it is not
always accurate. The acid character of aluminium and chromium
hydroxides (and even of ferric hydroxide, see p. 195), as well as of
zinc hydroxide, leads, to a certain extent, to the precipitation, from
such alkaline solutions, of salts of these amphoteric hydroxides with
the basic hydroxides of the bivalent group; the latter are thus liable
to be lost in the analysis. It will be recalled, that the equilibrium
conditions in alkaline solutions favor the ionization of amphoteric
substances in the acid form (Part III), and alkaline solutions would
favor the precipitation of aluminates, chromites, etc., of the ions of
the zinc group. Methods have, therefore, been devised to separate
the two groups in neutral, or very slightly acid, media, and they give
quantitative separations and are preferable to the method just
described. The separation by means of suspended barium
carbonate, in which carbonic acid is liberated and the solution is
practically neutral, will be discussed below on page 193. A second
method, frequently used in quantitative analysis, is based on the

[p192] decomposition of the acetates of the aluminium group by
boiling water, acetic acid being liberated.
384
Separation of Cobalt and Nickel from the Other Members of
the Zinc and Aluminium Groups.
—When the aluminium and zinc groups are precipitated together, by
means of a mixture of ammonium sulphide, hydroxide and chloride,
the precipitate, obtained from a solution containing, say, the
chlorides of all the ions of the groups, would consist of the following
compounds:
Aluminium Group: Fe
2
S
3
, Al(OH)
3
, Cr(OH)
3
.
Zinc Group: NiS, CoS, FeS, MnS,
385
ZnS.
If such a precipitate is treated, in the cold, for a short time with
quite dilute (1 to 1.2 molar) hydrochloric acid, all of the hydroxides
and sulphides dissolve, excepting the greater part of the nickel and
cobalt sulphides, which dissolve very much more slowly than do the
other compounds. Advantage is taken of this fact, to separate these
two elements from the remaining members of these groups, and if
the treatment is carried out with care, the separation is usually
satisfactory. In all cases, however, since it is a question of delayed
solution only, at least traces, and sometimes considerably more than
traces, of the sulphides of nickel and cobalt go into solution with the
other compounds. No sacrifice of analytical accuracy is involved, if
this possible loss is kept in mind and provision made for the later
detection of these small quantities of nickel and cobalt.
The question of the slow solution, or apparent lack of solubility, of
nickel and cobalt sulphides in dilute hydrochloric acid has formed an
interesting problem for investigation. While nickel and cobalt
sulphides are precipitated by ammonium sulphide, these sulphides,
in common with those of all the other members of the zinc group,

are not precipitated by hydrogen sulphide in the presence of a small
excess of hydrochloric acid.
386
We would have [p193]
NiCl
2
+ x HCl + H
2
S ⥃ NiS + (x + 2) HCl
as representing the condition of equilibrium, if we start with nickel
chloride, hydrochloric acid and hydrogen sulphide; the amount of
sulphide NiS, formed, is insufficient to supersaturate the solution and
form a precipitate. In reversible reactions the final condition of
equilibrium must be independent of the order in which components
are mixed (p. 91), a conclusion which is borne out by experience.
One should expect, then, that nickel sulphide, when treated with
dilute hydrochloric acid, would dissolve and give nickel chloride,
hydrogen sulphide and an excess of acid, and thus produce the
same system, found to be in equilibrium, when one starts with the
chloride, hydrogen sulphide and hydrochloric acid. As a matter of
fact, the same condition of equilibrium is finally reached, only it is
reached slowly,
387
much more slowly than ordinarily in such cases,
much more slowly, for instance, than with ferrous sulphide,
hydrochloric acid and hydrogen sulphide (exp.). By taking advantage
of this slow return to equilibrium and by working with the system
during the process of slow change (collecting the undissolved nickel
and cobalt sulphides on a filter), one can separate the sulphides of
nickel and cobalt from the other components of the mixed
precipitate, which dissolve much more rapidly.
Separation of the Aluminium and Zinc Groups by Means of
Barium Carbonate.
—The solution, obtained by treating the mixture of the sulphides and
hydroxides of the aluminium and zinc groups with dilute hydrochloric
acid (p. 192), contains aluminium, chromium, manganous, zinc and
ferrous chlorides, all the iron being now present in the ferrous
condition because of the reducing action of hydrogen sulphide on

the ferric-ion (Part III). The chlorides of nickel and cobalt are also
present in small quantities (see above). The further treatment of the
solution is directed toward a separation of the bivalent ions of the
zinc group from the trivalent ions of the aluminium group, and the
intention is to have all the iron go with the trivalent metals. The
ferrous is, therefore, oxidized to the ferric-ion. After a part of the
solution has been tested to show the presence or absence of ferric
salts, the two groups are separated by means of a suspension, in
water, of finely [p194] divided barium carbonate. The theory of the
separation may be developed as follows:
When zinc chloride, which may be taken as a representative of the
bivalent group, is treated with sodium carbonate, a difficultly soluble
carbonate is precipitated, since zinc hydroxide, like the remaining
bivalent hydroxides, is a sufficiently strong base to form a fairly
stable carbonate.
388
When ferric chloride, a representative of the
trivalent group, is treated with a solution of sodium carbonate, ferric
hydroxide, mixed with some basic ferric carbonate
389
Fe
2
(OH)
4
CO
3
,
is precipitated and carbon dioxide escapes (exp.). The trivalent
hydroxides are too weak bases
390
to form stable salts with so weak
an acid as carbonic acid.
2 FeCl
3
+ 3 Na
2
CO
3
+ 6 H
2
O ⥂
2 Fe(OH)
3
↓ + 3 H
2
CO
3
+ 6 NaCl
3 H
2
CO
3
⇄ 3 H
2
O + 3 CO
2
↑.
Since the bivalent metal ions are precipitated by sodium carbonate
as carbonates and the trivalent ones as hydroxides, the reagent,
obviously, cannot be used to separate the two groups. But barium
carbonate is so little soluble in water that it will not precipitate
manganous, zinc, nickel, cobalious and ferrous carbonates
391
from
solutions of their chlorides or nitrates. We have, for instance, ZnCl
2

+ BaCO
3
↓ ⥃ BaCl
2
+ ZnCO
3
. Barium carbonate has, however, the
same effect on ferric chloride (exp.) and on the other chlorides of
the trivalent group, as has sodium carbonate, i.e. it precipitates their
hydroxides. By means of barium carbonate [p195] we can, therefore,
precipitate the hydroxides of the aluminium group without
precipitating the ions of the zinc group. The separation is carried out
in a, practically, neutral medium (free carbonic acid in excess is
evolved; barium carbonate alone, when treated with water, is slightly
alkaline) and thus avoids the error of facilitating the precipitation of
the bivalent metals in the shape of salts of the acidic forms of the
trivalent metals, i.e. as aluminates, chromites, and so forth.
Manganous salts are liable to oxidation to manganic salts, when
exposed to the air, especially in alkaline, neutral or slightly acid
solutions, and prolonged exposure of the barium carbonate mixture
to the air may result in the precipitation of manganic hydroxide,
Mn(OH)
3
, with the other trivalent hydroxides. Provision is made for
its detection in the systematic analysis.
Analysis of the Aluminium Group.
—The precipitate of the aluminium group may contain aluminium,
chromium and ferric hydroxides (possibly traces of manganic
hydroxide) and their basic carbonates. A color test for ferric-ion has
already been made (see p. 193) and chromium (and manganese) is
readily found and identified by oxidation to the intensely colored
salts of chromic (and manganic) acid (Part III, q.v.). In ascertaining
whether aluminium hydroxide is present or not, advantage is taken
of its amphoteric character. Chromium hydroxide, like aluminium
hydroxide, is amphoteric; but, in agreement with the greater atomic
weight of chromium, it is an even weaker acid than is aluminium
hydroxide. Its sodium salt, sodium chromite, is completely
decomposed by boiling water, chromium hydroxide being

precipitated in a less hydrated, insoluble form. Ferric hydroxide,
whose metal has the highest atomic weight of the three elements
under consideration, has so little acid character, that it is not
perceptibly soluble in solutions of potassium or sodium hydroxide.
(That it has slight acidic properties is shown by its capacity to form
ferrites, e.g. Me(FeO
2
)
2
, which may best be obtained by dry
methods, and of which ferrous ferrite or magnetic iron ore, Fe
3
O
4
or
Fe(FeO
2
)
2
, is the most important representative.) Of the three
hydroxides, aluminium hydroxide is, therefore, the only one that will
dissolve in boiling sodium hydroxide. In this solution we can best
identify it, by converting the aluminate into an aluminium salt, by
means of an excess of acid, [p196] and by a final precipitation of
aluminium hydroxide with ammonium hydroxide. Aluminium
hydroxide is too weak an acid to form a stable aluminate with so
weak a base as ammonium hydroxide, when the latter is used only
in slight excess (p. 186). If we attempt to prepare ammonium
aluminate, by adding ammonium chloride to a solution of sodium
aluminate, a precipitate of aluminium hydroxide is obtained (exp.).
For exact work, an excess of ammonium hydroxide is to be avoided
and its strength as a base should be weakened by the addition of
some ammonium chloride or nitrate (pp. 114, 169 and Lab. Manual,
p. 9, § 6).
We have, in this instance, the case of a very weak, difficultly soluble acid,
aluminium hydroxide, forming a salt with a weak, soluble base, ammonium
hydroxide. The conditions determining the solubility of aluminium hydroxide in
ammonium hydroxide, as an aluminate NH
4
AlO
2
, may be shown as follows: for the
acid ionization of aluminium hydroxide, Al(OH)
3
⇄ AlO
2
−
+ H
+
+ H
2
O (p. 172); the
solubility-product for a saturated solution is [AlO
2
−
] × [H
+
] = K
Ac.S.P.
. Further,
from [H
+
] × [HO
−
] = K
HOH
, we find [H
+
] = K
HOH
/ [HO
−
]. Then [AlO
2
−
] = [HO
−
]
× K
Ac.S.P.
/ K
HOH
, which shows that the solubility of aluminium hydroxide, as

aluminate, is proportional to the concentration [HO
−
] of the hydroxide-ion in the
solution. For NH
4
OH we have [NH
4
+
] × [HO
−
] / ([NH
3
] + [NH
4
OH]) = 0.000,018
(p. 161), and consequently, [HO
−
] = 0.000,018 × ([NH
3
] + [NH
4
OH]) / [NH
4
+
].
Then [HO
−
] is the smaller, the smaller the excess of ammonium hydroxide used
(which is approximately equal to ([NH
3
] + [NH
4
OH])) and the greater the
concentration [NH
4
+
] of the ammonium-ion, i.e. of the added ammonium salt.
The solubility of Al(OH)
3
, as aluminate, in ammonium hydroxide and ammonium
chloride is, therefore, directly proportional to the excess of ammonium hydroxide,
and indirectly proportional to the concentration of the ammonium salt present.
392
The Favorable Conditions for a Maximum Precipitation of an Amphoteric
Hydroxide.
—The precipitation of aluminium hydroxide depends also on the solubility-product
of aluminium hydroxide, ionized as a base. For Al(HO)
3
⇄ Al
3+
+ 3 HO
−
, in a
saturated solution, [Al
3+
] × [HO
−
]
3
= K
Bas.S.P.
. It is evident, that an excess of the
precipitating hydroxide-ion would be favorable to the precipitation in this form,
and that the reduction of the concentration of the hydroxide-ion, while acting
favorably, as just shown, in preventing the solution of the hydroxide as an
aluminate, must be, to some extent, detrimental to a maximum precipitation of
the hydroxide as a base. One may ask, therefore, what the most favorable
concentration of the hydroxide-ion must be for a quantitative precipitation of
aluminium hydroxide. The problem may be treated as follows: According to the
solubility-product relation for the basic ionization, we have, in a solution saturated
with aluminium hydroxide, [p197]
[Al
3+
] = K
Bas.S.P.
× [HO
−
]
−3
.
I
For the sake of a certain simplicity in the result, we will, for the moment, consider
aluminium hydroxide to ionize as an acid according to Al(HO)
3
⇄ AlO
3
3−
+ 3 H
+
,
which would resemble the basic ionization. Then we would have
[AlO
3
3−
] × [H
+
]
3
= K′
Ac.S.P.
, and, using the relation [H
+
] = K
HOH
/ [HO
−
], we
have
[AlO
3
3−
] = [HO
−
]
3
× K′
Ac.S.P.
× K
HOH
−3
.
II
Adding equations I and II we find

[Al
3+
] + [AlO
3
3−
] =
K
Bas.S.P.
× [HO
−
]
−3
+ [HO
−
]
3
× K′
Ac.S.P.
×
K
HOH
−3

III
Aluminium hydroxide will be most completely precipitated when [Al
3+
] + [AlO
3
3−
]
is a minimum, the values [Al
3+
] and [AlO
3
3−
] measuring the solubility of
aluminium as aluminium-ion and as aluminate-ion. If we put [Al
3+
] + [AlO
3
3−
] = y
and [HO
−
] = x, we can find the value x (the concentration of the hydroxide-ion)
for which y is a minimum. We have y = K
Bas.S.P.
× x
−3
+ x
3
× K′
Ac.S.P.
× K
HOH
−3
,
and find, by means of the calculus,
393
that y is a minimum, when x = +(K
HOH
3
×
K
Bas.S.P.
/ K′
Ac.S.P.
)
1/6
.
If aluminium hydroxide were as strong an acid as it is a base, i.e. if K
Bas.S.P.
=
K′
Ac.S.P.
, we would have, simply, x = [HO
−
] = ((1.2E−14)
3
)
1/6
= √(1.2E−14) (at
25°), which is the concentration of the hydroxide-ion in pure water at 25° (p.
176). In other words, a perfectly neutral solution would then give us the
conditions for as complete a precipitation as possible. But aluminium hydroxide is
a stronger base than acid, K
Bas.S.P.
> K′
Ac.S.P.
, and consequently we find for x =
[HO
−
] = (K
HOH
3
× K
Bas.S.P.
/ K′
Ac.S.P.
)
1/6
, a value somewhat greater than the
concentration of the hydroxide-ion in pure water, i.e. we must use a slightly
alkaline medium—which agrees with common practice. In other words, there is
less danger of losing aluminium hydroxide in the form of aluminate, owing to the
weaker acid character of the hydroxide, than there is of losing it in the form of
aluminium-ion. The most favorable degree of alkalinity for the precipitation would
depend on the relation of K
Bas.S.P.
. and K′
Ac.S.P.
.
The exact values for K
Bas.S.P.
and K′
Ac.S.P.
, the two solubility-product constants,
and for the corresponding ionization constants, which would show the same ratio,
are still not known. But, if, for the sake of an illustration, we take recourse to
assumed values for these constants, we find that the solubility of aluminium, as
aluminium-ion and as aluminate-ion, is, by calculation, as anticipated, a minimum
for a solution, which contains the concentration of HO
−
calculated (for x) in the
manner indicated above. And the further interesting conclusion is reached that this
minimum loss of aluminium [p198] hydroxide would occur when [Al
3+
] = [AlO
3
3−
]—
which would correspond to a saturated solution of aluminium aluminate, Al(AlO
3
).

When the ionization of aluminium hydroxide, as an acid, is considered to take
place according to Al(OH)
3
⇄ AlO
2
−
+ H
+
+ H
2
O, which agrees best with its real
behavior (p. 172), we can find, similarly, that [Al
3+
] + [AlO
2
−
] is a minimum,
when aluminium hydroxide is precipitated in such a way, that an excess x of the
hydroxide-ion is used, and x = [HO
−
] = (3 K
HOH
× K
Bas.S.P.
/ K
Ac.S.P.
)
0.25
,—where
K
Ac.S.P.
represents the solubility-product constant for [AlO
2
−
] × [H
+
]. That a
minimum loss of aluminium hydroxide would be suffered when the favorable
excess of the hydroxide-ion (x) is calculated on the basis of the equation as given,
may readily be seen by again assuming definite values for K
Bas.S.P.
and K
Ac.S.P.
. It
also appears that this minimum loss
394
of aluminium includes one-third as many
Al
3+
ions, as AlO
2
−
ions—a relation corresponding, again, to a saturated solution
of aluminium aluminate, Al(AlO
2
)
3
.

Chapter X Footnotes
[354] When all three of the hydrogen atoms in the hydroxide are ionized, an
aluminate ion, AlO
3
3−
is formed: Al(OH)
3
⇄ AlO
3
3−
+ 3 H
+
. But, as in the case of
other weak polybasic acids, a single hydrogen atom is far more readily ionized
than are the remaining two (p. 102), and the ion Al(OH)
2
O
−
, which is formed by
the primary ionization, readily loses water and forms the anhydride ion AlO
2
−
.
The most important aluminates are derivatives of this ion.
[355] See the table at the back of Smith's Inorganic Chemistry, or p. 149 of
Remsen's Inorganic Chemistry.
[356] The displacement of hydrogen by a metal, like sodium, is the result of the
displacement of the hydrogen-ion (see Chapters XIV and XV). The hydrogen-ion
in fused sodium hydroxide is probably formed chiefly by the secondary
ionization of the hydroxide-ion (HO
−
⇄ H
+
+ O
2−
) (see Chap. XIII). We cannot
have positive ions, Na
+
, with negative ions, O
2−
, without having some ions
NaO
−
. (O
2−
+ Na
+
⥂ NaO
−
), NaOH, undoubtedly, is much too weak an acid to
form salts with bases in the presence of water. Such salts would be
decomposed by water (see below, p. 180), as sodium oxide, indeed, is
decomposed; we have Na─O─Na + HOH ⇄ 2 NaOH (see Chapter XIII for a
detailed discussion of this action). These relations sufficiently account for the

fact that salts of sodium hydroxide, in which it has the functions of an acid, are
not commonly formed. (Cf. Abegg, Anorganische Chemie, II, (1) p. 247.)
[357] See J. J. Thomson, Corpuscular Theory of Matter, pp. 103–141.
[358] See Mendeléeff, Principles of Chemistry, I, 22 (1891), in regard to the
rôle of "even" and "uneven" series in the system.
[359] In regard to the indications of the amphoteric character of stronger acids,
see Chapter XV.
[360] An elaborate treatment of this problem is given by Walker, Z. phys.
Chem., 49, 82 (1904), 51, 706 (1905).
[361] Kohlrausch and Heydweiller, Z. phys. Chem., 14, 317 (1894).
[362] See the table, p. 104.
[363] See p. 53 and van 't Hoff's remarks, ibid.
[364] This suggests a much broader, natural definition of a base than the
conventional one. All salts of very weak acids, to a certain degree, which is
determined by the weakness of their acids, do exactly what the ordinary bases
do, e.g. neutralize acids. Metal derivatives of acids weaker than water, metal
amides, like Zn(NH
2
)
2
, metal alkyls, like zinc methyl, Zn(CH
3
)
2
, react more
vigorously than the hydroxides do, e.g. in neutralizing acids, and water attacks
them and acts upon them, exactly as ordinary acids interact with metal
hydroxides. We have, for instance, Zn(CH
3
)
2
+ 2 HOH → Zn(OH)
2
+ 2 CH
4
.
[365] See footnote, p. 177. Similar considerations apply to the conventional
definition of an acid.
[366] The symbols in heavy type indicate the chief components of the final
system. Vide Smith's General Chemistry for Colleges and Inorganic Chemistry,
for the form of equations used.
[367] Emich, Ber. d. chem. Ges. 40, 1482 (1901).
[368] Arrhenius, Z. phys. Chem., 5, 16 (1890); Shields, ibid., 12, 167 (1893).
[369] See below for the corresponding equation, developed by Walker for a salt
of a weak base and a strong acid.
[370] Potassium sulphate, K
2
SO
4
, reacts faintly alkaline in aqueous solution, the
secondary ionization of sulphuric acid (table, p. 104) being somewhat weaker

than the ionization of potassium hydroxide. We have: K
2
SO
4
+ HOH ⇄ KHSO
4
+
KOH or SO
4
2−
+ HOH ⇄ HSO
4
−
+ HO
−
.
[371] Walker, Z. phys. Chem., 4, 319, (1889); Arrhenius, loc. cit.; Bredig, ibid.,
13, 321 (1894).
[372] Arrhenius, loc. cit.
[373] See p. 183.
[374] Arrhenius developed the relation for aniline acetate, loc. cit.
[375] Putting x = [Acid] = [Base], we have [Salt] = (0.1 − x), and (0.1 − x)
2
/ x
2

= (7E−10)
2
/ 1.2E−14. Then (0.1 − x) / x = 0.0064 and x = .09935, which is
99.35% of the total salt used. The degree of ionization, α, of the salt, in the
extremely dilute solution, is taken to be 100%.
[376] See the equations for K
Base
and K
Acid
, on p. 184, and their premises.
[377] See p. 172. The concentration of water may be considered a constant and
is included in K
Acid
(and K
Base
, below).
[378] Only the primary ionization (of aluminium hydroxide) is considered in the
text, because only that is involved, as a rule, in the neutralization of very weak
bases by very weak acids (see footnote 2, p. 194). The relations are also
simpler and clearer, if we limit the discussion to the formation of a salt
AlO(AlO
2
).
[379] See the similar equation, p. 185.
[380] Amphoteric substances of a different class are also known, which have, at
the same time, moderately strong acid and moderately strong basic functions.
Glycocoll, H
2
N.CH
2
COOH, a derivative of acetic acid and ammonia, contains an
acid group, the —COOH group, the hydrogen of which is approximately as
ionizable as the hydrogen in the corresponding group in acetic acid, CH
3
COOH.
The ammonia residue, H
2
N—, in glycocoll, forms with water a hydroxide,
corresponding to ammonium hydroxide, which likewise is approximately as
ionizable as is ammonium hydroxide. In the hydroxide of glycocoll we have,
consequently, both a moderately strong acid, and a moderately strong basic,
group. In this, and in similar cases, salt formation between the acid and the
basic groups of the amphoters takes place to as great an extent as if the
functions were attributes of distinct compounds. Glycocoll in aqueous solution is

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The Freedom Principle Experiments In Art And Music 1965 To Now Naomi Beckwith

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