Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. 376pp. $35
Reviewed by Annie Howard
When a group of interdisciplinary Black artists called The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) set forth their principles in 1967, they declared the intention that their community would find power in a burgeoning Black experientialism that the group sought to define and refine. In an “all-purpose handout” setting forth the organization’s principles, the group declared: “All of the people who might read this must find in it something which speaks to them.” It was an audacious vision—OBAC knew that aiming to inspire the entire Black community would mean reaching people in many different ways. But when they wrote, “we plead with the readers, whoever you may be, to search…find yourself in here,” they meant it.
Their quest would likely have gone unheeded without the Wall of Respect, a mural that sprung up the same year on Chicago’s South Side. Adorning a building on the corner of 43rd Street and Langley Avenue, the 20-by-60-foot composition was the product of intense collaboration among numerous artists involved in OBAC (pronounced oba-see, invoking a Yoruba word (oba) meaning “leader” or “chief”). With a gridded composition produced by Sylvia Abernathy, a tight-knit community of artists devoted themselves to enacting a vision of Black heroes and heroines, figures in jazz, R & B, sports, literature, theater, religion, and statesmanship that upheld the values of Black dignity and grace. Though the collective effort only stood for less than five years, and in its original form for only a few weeks before a series of controversial alterations began, the wall’s legacy has been remarkable, with over 1,500 wall murals estimated to have been painted in the US during the period in which the Wall of Respect still stood.
With its fiftieth anniversary on the books, the wall has finally begun to garner the official art-historical attention it merits. After an initial symposium gathered together important figures at the Art Institute in 2015, there were official exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art in 2017, bringing this history to a dramatically larger audience. While the publication of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is another important step in cementing a retrospective appreciation of the work, this memorialization raises thorny questions about the nature of historical memory and the influence of institutional support, issues worth contemplating when discussing a work whose orientation was always community-oriented and politically radical.
As a collection, The Wall of Respect offers interested parties a trove of original documents, photographs, poems, interviews, and articles, richly contextualized by essays by Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach. Though the essays are vital to this project, its true power lies in materials that sprung forth during the wall’s short lifespan. Through these materials, readers will intuitively grasp the bombshell impact the work had on those who encountered it in its physical form. Though the passage of a half century has shrouded much of the ’60s in a haze of uncritical nostalgia and an ideologically driven historical revisionism, a visceral spark still permeates the contemporaneous creative production that surrounded the wall, lending the entire book an energy that cuts across time and reminds us of a radical artistic legacy worth revitalizing.
On its own, the wall made its intentions quite clear: by depicting the types of figures that embodied Blackness honestly, the artists sought to offer the community a sense of power and cultural ownership so long denied to African Americans. From the outset, the artists used their own supplies, seeking no external support that could introduce subtle sponsor-imposed censorship. As the various muralists began their work, surrounding residents responded energetically to the project’s freewheeling spirit, frequently engaging with those painting at the wall when they felt a given depiction wasn’t up to par. With the community rallying around the artists and the mural, the OBAC artists, already working within a collective ethos, found the bounds of individual authorship stretched even further as the community ensured that the mural faithfully represented their needs and desires.
OBAC set the terms of neighborhood engagement purposefully, and the response to their work exceeded their wildest ambitions. An incredible selection of OBAC documents, cataloging the nascent energy that quickly birthed the organization and soon thereafter the wall, reveals a set of self-consciously radical artists. Their inspired efforts made real Frantz Fanon’s observation: “Revolutionary art is both a product of struggle and a reflection of it.”
In “What Is A Black Hero?” a text handed out by OBAC at the wall, the group offered its justification for those depicted in the mural, including figures as diverse as Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Nina Simone, Marcus Garvey, and Muhammad Ali. OBAC, in presenting the mural to the people, declared “that a Black hero is any Black person who:
1. honestly reflects the beauty of Black life and genius in his or her life style;
2. does not forget his Black brothers and sisters who are less fortunate;
3. does what he does in such an outstanding manner that he or she cannot be imitated or replaced.
While photographs capture the original composition of the wall, showing the many facets of Black strength that residents could gather inspiration from, the book captures the complex cultural forces that produced the wall and led to its transformation. In this way, the text honors the debates fostered by the mural, showing it in dialogue with its environment and a rapidly evolving political climate that was reflected in and prodded by the work itself.
For example, despite being completed only a year after Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Chicago to stay in a North Lawndale tenement, his figure did not grace the mural’s facade, the growing tide of Black Power creating a resistance to King’s perceived nonviolent approach. And soon after the wall’s initial completion, OBAC founding member William Walker invited Eugene “Eda” Wade to replace the statesman section. His addition, the first of many changes that would see the wall’s ethos of collective decision making threatened, used a darker palate to depict H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X, alongside a raised fist. Viewing the wall as a newspaper, rather than a finished product, Walker sought to keep the work engaged with the changing circumstances that birthed it, a move that would create schisms within OBAC and fundamentally alter the wall’s appearance only weeks after its initial completion.
Despite the split within OBAC, the wall made its mark. In creating a work so closely tied to the community, OBAC lived up to its own virtues, ensuring that their artistry would be embraced and made whole by the people it served. As Lerone Bennett Jr., included on the wall as a “Historian of Black everyman,” put it: “For a long time now it has been obvious that Black Art and Black Culture would have to go home. The Wall is Home and a way Home.”
For those already familiar with the import of the Wall of Respect, the most significant aspect of the book is its emphasis on photography and its purposeful use on and around the wall. Photographs of the mural have long been integral to its study, of course, given that it only stood for a few years and in varying iterations. Yet Romi Crawford, in a set of essays introducing pictures taken at the wall, makes a compelling case that “photography is just as vital as painting to the Wall of Respect.” The photographs document not only the rapid changes of the wall, but also the vibrant street life that emerged during its creation, including musical performances, poetry readings, and a social framework that drew in countless curious onlookers.
The wall allowed photographers and onlookers to enact a form of seeing that offered a space of freedom from what Fanon called the “crushing objecthood” of being Black by producing an environment that was resolutely their own. In documenting the wall’s surroundings, such as the building across the street that became a popular hangout, these photographs capture “a communal and collective context in which Black persons might look even as they are being looked at.” These words would mean little on their own, but in dialogue with the intimate portraits of Black life at the wall, they illustrate a profound beauty. “Black beyond words one might say,” as Crawford put it in the introduction.
There’s no changing the conditions in which the wall has reemerged into popular attention today, sucked into the institutional realm of the Art Institute, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Northwestern University. Yet the publication of The Wall of Respect offers both curious newcomers and those long familiar with its significance a chance to further reflect on the relationships of power and ownership that govern the ongoing effort to assess the wall’s legacy. Many of these debates will continue to play out in these austere settings, divorced from the on-the-corner liveliness in which OBAC’s vision first played out.
The wall’s influence has considerable bearing on our political moment, making it imperative not to stifle these debates inside the academy’s walls. In a 1971 article, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” reprinted in the book, OBAC founder Hoyt W. Fuller explored the tumult that Black artists faced in aiming to honestly represent Black life, in words that may as well have been written today:
Black people are being called “violent” these days, as if violence is a new invention out of the ghetto. But violence against the black minority is in-built in the established American society. There is no need for the white majority to take to the streets to clobber the blacks, although there certainly is enough of that; brutalization is inherent in all the customs and practices which bestow privileges on the whites and relegate the blacks to the status of pariahs.
While there’s a justifiable distrust in the long-overdue attention now directed at the Wall of Respect, its unalloyed significance to the present will hopefully remain at the center of these debates. “The revolutionary black writer, like the new breed of militant activist, has decided that white racism will no longer exercise its insidious control over his work,” Fuller wrote, recognizing in OBAC and so many other Black artists a vision for Black freedom that overcame the strictures imposed by the white gaze. The Wall of Respect was once capable of transcending the boundaries that whiteness had sought to impose upon Black creativity, sparking a mural movement of artistic consciousness-raising that empowered communities to rediscover and champion their suppressed histories. What should stop it from doing so once again today?
April 2018