Sandra K. Friday
An intriguing medium that often represents those marginalized and disenfranchised in American culture is larger-than-life murals painted on the sides of buildings in urban settings across the country. Undeniably these
urban totems,
as they have come to be identified, are representations of American culture. Sometimes referred to as
art for the people
, they celebrate individuals, groups and historical events significant, in the first instance, to the urban neighborhoods in which they are painted. Some of these, such as the mural of Dr. J, basketball great Julius Erving, in Philadelphia, are several stories high, while others merely cover one-story buildings. In 1982 John Biggers produced a six-by-thirty foot freestanding mural
Christia V.
Adair
in Adair Park in Houston, to honor Adair, considered one of Houston’s most important civil rights leaders.
The Internet makes the exploration of urban totems more possible because many of them can be found there. While students search out these murals and the history behind them, they are also sharpening their Internet skills.
Students might find it interesting that murals, rock paintings, date back to around 10,000 B.C. according to a French researcher Henri Lhote who is quoted to have said when he looked on them in the Sahara Desert, “In a word, we were confronted with the greatest museum of prehistoric art in the whole world” 8
Perhaps the best description of urban murals comes from a website titled
Urban Totems:
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Urban murals were, and continue to be, vehicles of empowerment for African Americans. They signify a resistance to victimization and a refusal to act the part. They articulate hope, celebrate history and achievement, and show off the creativity of artists. They teach, inspire, affirm, critique, document, and sometimes just plain strut their colorful stuff. 9
John Biggers’ mural celebrates the strength of the Black matriarchy
John Biggers’s freestanding mural to Christia V. Adair in Houston, Texas is expansive and composed of large visual spaces, one of which my students will study. Biggers was one of the first African American muralists to visit West Africa, and his mural reflects rhythm and patterns that may well be the result of his visit to the Yoruba people. The section of the mural that my students will view and study is composed of a series of narrow little houses called
shotgun houses
in the south. Each house is topped by a triangular roof piece over the front door. Between each house is a tiny picket fence. The narrow houses, topped by the triangular roof pieces and picket fences create a geometric pattern, enhanced by a Black woman standing in each doorway. The tiny houses lined up row on row, with their triangle-shaped roofs, are called shotgun houses because they are designed with a front door lined up with a back door and two rooms on each side. The idea is that if anyone shoots a gun through the front door, the shot will go straight through the house and out the back. The Black women standing in each doorway, or on the front porches in front of the doorway, represent the strength of the matriarchal Black family in the South, a theme that Biggers favored. I am intrigued by the notion that these Black women serve as
caryatids
(sculptured women used as columns of support in Greek buildings), symbols of their support of Black households. 10
Running across the foreground in front of this patchwork quilt-like pattern of shotgun houses with Black women standing in the doorways, their bodies almost supporting the houses, both physically and metaphorically, is a railroad track, implying that the people who live in these houses live in the poor section of town, on the
wrong side of the tracks
. The railroad track may also be construed as a means by which Black people historically made their way out of the South and out of poverty. Biggers’s Adair mural is a powerful representation of marginalized American culture.
Bigger uses warm earth tones in this section of the mural, replicating tones and colors made by the Yoruba people, from natural sources in the environment. Looking at the mural is the best way to appreciate these warm tones and colors.
Black Panther Party memorialized in mural of black, and white on red
A famous mural painted in South Central L.A. in 1995 by Noni Olabisi that received much notoriety titled
To Protect and Serve
, was dedicated to the Black Panther Party, a militant civil rights group, founded in Oakland and while larger than life in the ‘60’s, is often overlooked today in the study of the history of Civil Rights movement in this country. While Biggers’s mural of shotgun houses is composed of warm earth tones, the images in Olabisi’s mural are in black and white on a background of red. If the medium is the message, Olabisi’s mural is intense and confrontational, demanding a response. Like the Party itself, this social historical mural is a lightning rod for injustices perpetrated on Blacks in the 60’s.
The title,
To Protect and Serve
, apparently was the credo of the Los Angeles police whom regularly abused and beat Blacks during the Civil Rights Movement. So, it is ironic that Olabisi should choose it as the title for her mural dedicated to the Black Panthers who were adversaries of the police. In fact, it was the Black Panthers who were dedicated to
protecting and serving
the same people that the police were disenfranchising. Next to the mural are excerpts from the Black Panther Party’s ten-point manifesto:
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We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER OF BLACK people! We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! 11
The mural that covers a one-story building, that houses a hair salon and a barbershop, is composed of prominent Black Panther Party figures, many symbols, and just folks. On the far left of the mural a Black man aims his rifle at a couple of hooded Klansmen, his blackness and their whiteness, against a backdrop of red. His stance could well be interpreted as one of protecting and defending his people. Opposite him, on the far right, a black panther crouches above the awning of the hair salon. Dead center is a prominent image of Huey P. Newton in his signature black beret, and Elaine Brown, Chairperson and Minister of Defense for the Party from 1974 -- 1977. A Panther holding a semi-automatic rifle stands guard in front of Newton.
The famous Chicago Eight are just to the right of Newton, except there are only seven. Bobby Seale is seated off to the left of Newton, bound and gagged during the Chicago trial. In fact, the left side of the mural represents acts of racism and violence perpetrated against Black people. Right of center, features the Panthers social projects: a father cradles his baby in his arms, a child savors a sandwich, a woman serves food to a child; the Panthers were active in initiating a free breakfast program.
This mural, which measures forty feet by twelve feet in black and white on red, adds to the riveting effect of the work. There is much more to the work than I have described and it would lend itself to considerable research by the students. The history behind these and other murals would be good topics for power point presentations. Students could collaborate or work on their own on this project. The rubric for art rendering in Lesson plans # 2 and # 3 would also work well with this mural.
Sharecroppers: always owing “the man”
Finally, on the “invisibility” chart, if invisibility can be
measured
by degrees, sharecroppers are the least visible of the individuals, groups, and events that I have chosen to feature in my unit. No one speaks more poignantly of the invisibility of a subculture of society than James Agee speaks of sharecroppers in his documentary
Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men:
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And some there be which have no memorial: who perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. 12
Agee and photographer Walker Evans lived with two sharecropping families, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, in Alabama in the summer of l936 and crafted a photographic and written record of sharecroppers’ daily lives. Their publication,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, including Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs and Agee’s riveting descriptions of the families with whom they lived, is a memorial to this aggregate of humanity that struggled and toiled from dawn to sunset, and sometimes past, to eek subsistence from the earth. Evans’s photos are witness enough to the grueling toil, the poverty, and the resignation in the eyes and body language of every subject he photographed. With Agee’s richly descriptive text piled on, it is almost more than a person can bear. Agee writes:
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If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs: the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it, and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly be able to bear to live. 13
If these marginalized, disenfranchised people are remembered anywhere, it is in the pages of this documentary that was such a condemnation of humanity, that allowed people to live this way, that
Esquire Magazine
, who commissioned the collaboration, declined to publish the results.
Each family, the Gudgers and the Ricketts, tended a vegetable garden, but their daily labor, while Agee and Evans lived with them, was picking cotton for the men who owned the land. One of the photographs that I will make into a slide is of Fred Ricketts poised, in his raggedy clothes, before a cotton field; slung over his shoulder is the long slender bag that he will drag up and down the rows behind him as he fills it with one hundred pounds of cotton. Another photo that I will make into a slide is of eight-year-old Pearl Gudger, dragging the long, slender bag and leaning into the row, bent to pluck the cotton from the open burrs whose gores are stiff with sharp points that will prick even the deftest fingertips.
Students can find, on the Internet, a wealth of photographs of sharecroppers laboring in the fields, leaning into the cotton plants, and dragging the bags along behind them. What cannot be conveyed in photographs is the sun beating down, intolerably on the heads and backs of the pickers. An excerpt that is an effective complement to these two photos is Agee’s description of the physical torture of it:
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Meanwhile, too, you are working in a land of sunlight and heat, which are special to just such country at just that time of year: sunlight that stands and stacks itself upon you with the serene weight of deep sea water, and heat that makes the jointed and muscled and fine-structured body glow like one indiscriminate oil; and this brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you more and more heavily in hour after hour so that it can seem you are a diving bell whose strained seams must at any moment burst, and the eyes are marked in stinging sweat, and the head, if your health is a little unstable, is gently roaring, like a private blow torch, . . . 14
Agee describes, in his chapter, “Money,” the rigidly structured economic arrangements that the sharecroppers have with their landlords, that leave no opening for escape.
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Gudger has no home, no land, no mule; none of the more important farming implements. He must get all these of his landlord. Boles, [his landlord], for his share of the corn and cotton, also advances him rations money during four months of the year, March through June, and his fertilizer.
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Gudger pays him back with his labor and with the labor of his family. At the end of the season he pays him back further: with half his corn; with half his cotton; with half his cottonseed. Out of his own half of these crops he also pays him back the rations money, plus interest, and his share of the fertilizer, plus interest, and such other debts, plus interest, as he may have incurred. What is left, once doctors’ bills and other debts have been deducted, is his year’s earnings. 15
Sharecroppers at the end of their rope in “A Summer Tragedy” by Arna Bontemps
Photographs and excerpts from Agee and Evans are preparation for a short story,
A Summer Tragedy
, about black sharecroppers by Arna Bontemps. A very old black couple, nervously, is putting on their Sunday best that has clearly seen much better days, as has the couple. He is partially paralyzed from a stroke, and she is nearly blind. We learn that their grown children who had helped them grow and harvest crops have all disappeared, possibly, although not directly stated, at the hands of the KKK. Even their chickens, one by one, are being stolen or poisoned. One can only wonder where they are off to in their old model-T Ford, dressed in their raggedy best. Wherever it is, they do not bother to shut the door of their little cabin; returning does not seem in their plan. What we learn as they drive anxiously down the rode and, first, one and, then, the other gets cold feet about what they are planning to do, but the other shores them up, is that they are so at the end of their rope, that they have made a pact to commit suicide by driving their old model-T Ford down a steep slope, into the river, and that is exactly what they do.
There is no one to witness, no one to care. These black sharecroppers are being driven to oblivion, and we come full circle to Agee’s description of sharecroppers:
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And some there be which have no memorial; who perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.16