Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s life reads like a screenplay: a young African-American artist immersed in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in love with one of its charismatic leaders and committed to changing the world. In the end, the movement would take all she had to give, the art would thrive, and the love would be lost — but the commitment to the cause would remain. O’Neal is looking at the possibility of voting for a black man for president of the United States in 2008, and that makes her smile. “I can’t tell you how often I think of (Stokely) Carmichael these days. He died five years ago. He never would have believed that this would be possible,” she says. “I don’t think any of us thought this was possible — even 50 years down the road. I say to myself, ‘Carmichael, can you believe this shit?’ I often feel his spirit with me these days.” And to think it all started with a snowball fight.

The year was 1960, and a young artist wannabe, Mary Lovelace, was enrolled at Howard University. Stokely Carmichael, who would later be called the “honorary prime minister” of the Black Panther Party, introduced himself by way of a snowball, tossing it at one of the prettiest girls on campus. He had no idea who he was dealing with, as she immediately planned her retaliation. “My window overlooked the walkway into the commons which lead to the dining hall, so I knew he would come through eventually,” Mary says. “I got my roommate to help me make iced snowballs. I put them all on the ledge and I waited and. Then I got him back.”

Carmichael (whom she always calls by his last name) swept her off her feet. She dragged him to art classes and he introduced her to a movement that would change history. “We used to call him ‘Starmichael’ because he had such star quality. He had the power to seduce,” she says. They were young, passionate, idealistic, and caught up in a volatile relationship. “We had some good fights. Right there on the steps on the art department, we would just be screaming at each other.” Even though the relationship wouldn’t last, he would have a lasting impact on her life. She became a committed foot soldier in the revolution.

Mary Lovelace was born in Jackson, Miss., on Feb. 10, 1942. Even as a child, Mary was fearless. She and her brother would drink from the “whites only” drinking fountain and run through Woolworth’s spinning the lunch stools knowing full well they were not welcome to stay or sit. Growing up black in Mississippi in 1940s and 1950s, she was “hip to the reality” very early on. “It was much more than kids being kids,” she says. “These pranks were directed right at the system. We knew damn well what that was about. It was an act of defiance. It was the kind of thing that could have gotten us killed.”

The seeds for future battles were planted early and nurtured by her parents. Her father taught music and was the highly respected choir director at Tougaloo College, and later at the University of Arkansas. It wasn’t a life of privilege, but it was comfortable. Education wasn’t an option; it was a way of life. Her dad had high expectations. “He had a temper,” remembers Mary. “But when he was really exasperated or disappointed he would write a letter. When I saw that letter on my dresser, I knew whatever it was had to cease and desist. There was no argument.”

Ariel Lovelace instilled in his children the belief that they were as good as anyone and could do anything they set out to do. But there was the flip side – he warned them about a world where equality did not exist and about people who “would do them harm.” Mary took his teachings to heart. As an artist, she has spent her life proving the first part of his message, and as an activist, fighting to change the second.

Mary lived parallel — but not yet intersecting — lives at Howard University, dividing her time between organizing rallies, giving speeches, planning voter registration drives, and spending time in the studio. Fortunately, she had understanding professors who cut her some slack when she ended up in jail rather than class. The art department was like a big family, with professors giving students a lot of personal attention, and a good kick in the pants when necessary. Mary’s advisor was noted art historian David Driskell. “One time, I had been in bed for five days because I had had a terrible critique, and the way I solved problems was I would just go to sleep until they righted themselves,” Mary says. “(Driskell) came to my dorm and said, ‘Don’t ever do this again. If you want to be a painter, then you have to be strong enough to take it. Criticism is criticism; you can accept it — sometimes it will open your eyes — or reject it, but you cannot let it shut you down. I want you back in the studio and I expect 18 pieces by the end of the semester.” Mary went back, but she was still struggling to find her artistic direction.

Driskell had a plan for his young protégé. He nominated her for a prestigious scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She would spend nine weeks in the summer of 1963 doing nothing but painting. It was a welcome break from an increasingly violent and dangerous civil rights movement.

“The movement was very painful in many ways. There was a lot of joy and excitement, but we lost a lot of people, physically and mentally,” she says. “Many snapped and never really came back. It was frightening because there was an honest-to-God threat of death. I gave a speech one night in Canton, Miss.,” she says. “It was in a little clapboard church and I looked out the open doors and saw big, beefy, white policemen sitting on their cars, arms crossed, just listening. I really thought I was going to die that night. I went through with the speech. I actually pointed to the cops saying, ‘We’re not afraid of them.’ After the speech was over we had to drive back to Jackson. I don’t think I have ever been so terrified. I got down on the floor in the back seat. Those same cops were behind us with their big spotlights shining the whole time. I thought, ‘This is it. Any minute they are going to shoot. I didn’t think we were going to make it back to Jackson.’”

They did, but others were not so lucky.

NAACP leader Medger Evers was assassinated in June 1963. Activists from all over the south met in Mississippi to formulate a response. Just hours after attending that strategy session (where she first met her future husband John O’Neal), Mary was on her way to Maine. She would miss the demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., and a massive march on Washington that summer, but she would find her artistic voice in the world of abstract expressionism. “It was an amazing learning experience,” Mary remembers. “I had no responsibilities except to paint.” She took full advantage and returned for her senior year with a new artistic language.

Mary admired the work of many of the big names working in New York at the time, including de Kooning, Rothko and Pollack. But Franz Kline had the biggest influence. His broad-brush strokes, seemingly spontaneous application of paint, and completely nonobjective approach inspired her. She even titled one of her pieces In Search of Franz Kline. Mary found freedom in abstract expressionism – a much-needed outlet for her emotions.

Her renewed artistic energy was not lost on her professors. Writing about that time, Driskell said, “Gone were the dark and unresolved passages of canvas that showed up from time to time in Mary’s art when she painted at Howard. This was her last chance as a senior to show that she was really serious about the business of art. And that she did.” The artist was thriving. The activist was about to be tested, again.

The summer after graduation was a dangerous time in the Deep South. Three local civil rights workers were missing in Mississippi and most feared the worst. Mary was working at a “freedom” school, teaching young black kids who had already seen too much violence. “These kids were tough and they knew the truth,” she says. “It seemed kind of silly teaching them to use crayons, but they worked out a lot of things and there were some fabulous pieces that came out of there that told the story. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone kept any of them. We just didn’t know the history we were making.” Or the price they and so many others would pay.

In August, the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers were found shot to death. The Ku Klux Klan was behind the murders. The case later inspired the award-winning film “Mississippi Burning.” Mary was dispatched to New York to meet with the parents of one of the boys, Michael Schwerner. She stayed with the family, actually sleeping in Schwerner’s boyhood bedroom. It was humbling and heartbreaking,

Mary was coming to the sickening realization that the fight for civil rights was going to take a very long time. Many could and would die in the process. “(At the beginning of the movement) I really thought we would be through with this thing in three or four years,” she says. “I thought we would have righted the country and everyone would have understood that it was stupid to cut out half of your population — people who wonderful things to offer. But we started to realize that it’s not going to be over in a few years. You reach a stage when you think it’s never going to over and you even considered bailing. Many people did. Many went to Africa, some to Cuba, some to South America, some to Mexico and some to Canada.” Mary went to graduate school.

She was the only African American in her class at Columbia. “I would go into this lily white environment and then at the end of the day I would walk down the hill to the middle of Harlem — pure black life,” she says. “I was living this contradiction.” She was also struggling to make her art relevant. Her friends wanted her to be political. They wanted art with a militant message. Mary found her answer in the aisle of a hardware store. Lampblack in a powered black pigment commonly used in construction. Mary bought a few bags, took it back to her studio, unrolled some canvas onto the floor and with a chalkboard eraser started to grind this lampblack stuff into the fabric. It was back breaking work, but she wouldn’t stop until the fabric was jet black. Then she added small, single zips of color.

“I thought this would answer the people who said my work was not black enough,” she says. “Then they got on me about it being too abstract. But I knew I had joined the argument in a strong position, on my terms. I knew I was probably never going to be able to make my art service the movement in the way that they wanted, but I was also clear that I could put my body on the line and I would continue to do that.”

Toward the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had splintered, with Martin Luther King and civil disobedience on one side, and militant organizations like Carmichael’s Black Panthers on the other. “Martin had a belief in people that was very special,” Mary says. “He believed that at the core there was goodness. I remember the day he was killed. I had to take the bus downtown. I was working at a community development agency. I thought my jaw would collapse, that my teeth would turn to dust because I was clenching them so much. I was so angry. White people would get on the bus and they would try to console me. They would say, ‘It was a terrible thing that they did to your leader.’ It didn’t matter that they were trying to be nice, I just wanted them out of my face.” The anger, simmering just below the surface, is still with her to this day.

Looking for a change after graduate school, Mary headed west to San Francisco, where she taught at a number of colleges and universities before landing a job a UC Berkeley. She taught there for more than 25 years, earning tenure and eventually chairing the art department. (She was the first African American woman to do both.) She loved teaching, but painting was still her first passion. It was at the beginning of this period that she “unzipped” her canvases and began her love affair with color and movement.

Many critics say her Whale Series, started in the late 1970s, is some of her best work. The large paintings are saturated with vibrant color. Her abstracted “whales” seem to dance across the canvas, giving the work a life force that is seemingly more joyful and less haunting than her previous black paintings. To her the whales represent freedom, intelligence and power. “I needed to get back to a more fluid thing and I needed to get back to color,” she says. “I learned what I needed to learn from the minimalist attitude. So I moved away from the black. I needed to mix it up, and perhaps it was true that I personally was opening up.”

The darker palette would return in her Bewitched Series (2000). But for the most part, her work has been consistently colorful, conveying emotion through energetic contrasts and abstracted shapes. Those shapes sometimes resemble something we might recognize. But to look for literal interpretations misses the point. O’Neal wants the viewer to feel her paintings. If you want a hint at meaning, the artist provides you with a title like Racism is Like Rain, Either it is Raining or it is Gathering Somewhere. But even then, the work is about conveying emotion.

Her latest work is fun, funky and somewhat figurative. But this is Mary Lovelace O’Neal, so it also comes with some social commentary — not about race as much as much as pretense and pomposity. O’Neal has not lost her touch for taking the essence of the times and transferring it to canvas. And perhaps that is one of her greatest gifts: throughout her artistic evolution, the work has always remained contemporary and relevant.

O’Neal has now retired from UC Berkeley. She and her husband, Chilean painter Patricio Toro, split their time between their homes in Chili and the United States. She met Toro at a party given for an artist friend. “I pulled up to the house and I saw my friend coming across the street with this guy,” she remembers. “I knew he was trouble — Latin trouble! I tried to stay away from him but he was persistent.” She’s been living with trouble for 20 years now. He is her third husband, the last in a series of great love affairs. “With passion” is the only way Mary knows how to live, whether it’s for her art, the struggle for civil rights, or the men she has loved.

You know the old saying, “I’m not a fighter; I’m a lover?” In Mary O’Neal’s case, she is both. She is still feisty and formidable. After spending a lifetime breaking down barriers, she is not about to give up the fight. But she also now relishes the quiet times. She likes to sip her Pisco (which is to Chili what tequila is to Mexico). She pampers her beloved dachshund, Tillie; spends time with the people she loves; talks about art and tells the stories from the frontlines of a movement that changed history.

It’s well past the holidays, but Mary’s Christmas tree still twinkles in the corner of her home in the Oakland hills. She’s in no hurry to take it down. The walls are filled with large canvases, and tabletops are cluttered with dozens of photographs chronicling a rich and varied life. Mary herself is wrapped in beautiful fabric and adorned with bangle bracelets and dangling earrings. Little tufts of silver peak out from under her cloth cap. She has just celebrated her 66th birthday, but age is irrelevant. She is an old soul with a young spirit. Her wrinkle-free face gives no clue to her chronology.

“My father used to say, ‘You have to really live life, otherwise you are not going have anything to say.’” No problem there. Mary Lovelace O’Neal always has plenty to say.

Written by: Erin Clark