[2] He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery.

[7][3] After high school, Douglas moved to Detroit, Michigan, and held various jobs, including working as a plasterer and molding sand from automobile radiators for Cadillac.

[6] When World War I commenced, Douglas attempted to join the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) at the University of Nebraska, but was dismissed.

[8] After graduating, Douglas worked as a waiter for the Union Pacific Railroad until 1923, when he secured a job teaching visual arts at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, staying there until 1925.

During his time in Kansas City, he exchanged letters with Alta Sawyer, his future wife, about his plans beyond teaching in a high-school setting.

"[6] In the summer of 1930, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked on a series of murals for Fisk University's Cravath Hall library that he described as a "panorama of the development of Black people in this hemisphere, in the new world.

In addition, he was commissioned by Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, to create a mural with Harriet Tubman as its primary figure.

[6] In a series consisting of four murals, Douglas takes his audience from an African setting, to slavery and the Reconstruction era in the United States, then through the threats of lynching and segregation in a post-Civil War America to a final mural depicting the movement of African Americans north towards the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression.

In 1938, he again received a travel fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to go to the Dominican Republic and Haiti to develop a series of watercolors depicting the life of these Caribbean islands.

An exhaustive catalog of this exhibition was put together through collaboration between Spencer Museum of Art and The University of Kansas, with the title Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.

[17] In 2016, with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an archive of artworks created by or having to do with Aaron Douglas became available on their website.

[9] Through his murals and illustrations for various publications, he addressed social issues connected with race and segregation in the United States, and was one of the first African-American visual artists to utilize African-centered imagery.

[9] He adopted elements of West African masks and sculptures into his own art,[11] with a technique that utilized cubism to simplify his figures into lines and planes.

He created emotional impact with subtle gradations of color, often using concentric circles to influence the viewer to focus on a specific part of the painting.

[9] Douglas’ paintings include semitransparent silhouettes to portray the struggle of African Americans and their relative successes in various aspects of social life.