[6] She persevered, and the principal of her new high school in West Palm Beach, where her family relocated in 1915,[7] encouraged her talent and allowed her to teach a clay modeling class.

[12] Poston died of pneumonia aboard a ship while returning from Liberia as part of a Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League delegation in 1924.

Savage continued to model clay, and in 1919 was granted a booth at the Palm Beach County Fair where she was awarded a $25 prize and ribbon for most original exhibit.

[13] Her talent and ability impressed the Cooper Union Advisory Council and she was awarded additional funds for room and board after losing the financial support of her job as an apartment caretaker.

[9] Her bust of William Pickens Sr., a key figure in the NAACP, earned praise for depicting an African American in a more humane, neutral way as opposed to stereotypes of the time, as did many of her works.

[9][15] Savage was deeply upset and questioned the committee, beginning the first of many public fights for equal rights in her life by writing a letter to the New York World.

[2] The incident got press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually, the sole supportive committee member sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil – who at one time had shared a studio with African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner – invited her to study with him.

[12] Poston died of pneumonia aboard a ship while returning from Liberia as part of a Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League delegation in 1924.

[19][16] With assistance from the Rosenwald Fund, Savage enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a leading Paris art school.

[22] She launched the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, located in a basement on West 143rd Street in Harlem, with the help of a grant from the Carnegie Foundation.

Another student was the sociologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose later research contributed to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled school segregation unconstitutional.

In 1937, Savage became the director of the Harlem Community Art Center;[9] 1,500 people of all ages and abilities participated in her workshops, learning from her multi-cultural staff, and showing work around New York City.

Funds from the Works Progress Administration helped, but old struggles of discrimination were revived between Savage and WPA officials who objected to her having a leadership role.

[23] Savage was one of four women and only two African Americans to receive a professional commission from the Board of Design to be included in the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The 16-foot-tall plaster sculpture stood in front of the Contemporary Arts Building[24] and was one of the most popular and most photographed work at the fair; small metal souvenir copies were sold, and many postcards of the piece were purchased.

[24] The work reinterpreted the musical instrument by featuring 12 singing African-American youth in graduated heights as its strings, with the harp's sounding board transformed into an arm and a hand.

[25] Savage did not have funds to have the piece cast in bronze or to move and store it, and so like other temporary installations, the sculpture was destroyed at the close of the fair.

The K-B Products Corporation, the world's largest growers of mushrooms at that time, employed Savage as a laboratory assistant in the company's cancer research facility.

[9] While she died in relative obscurity, Savage is remembered today as a great artist, activist, and arts educator; serving as an inspiration to the many that she taught, helped, and encouraged.

Mitchell never reported any of this, but New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, drawing from evidence in the Millen Brand Papers at Columbia and the Joseph Mitchell papers, then newly deposited at the New York Public Library, told the story in a 2016 book called Joe Gould's Teeth in which she speculated that Savage left New York in 1945 to escape Gould.