Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 9781478002468

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Art for ­People’s Sake

Art for ­People’s Sake Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975

REBECCA ZORACH D U K E U N I V E RSIT Y PRESS   DU RHAM AND LONDON   2019

© 2019 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Typeset in Huronia by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Zorach, Rebecca, [date] author. Title: Art for ­people’s sake : artists and community in Black Chicago, 1965–75 / Rebecca Zorach. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018035542 (print) | lccn 2018042751 (ebook) isbn 9781478002468 (ebook) isbn 9781478001003 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478001409 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Black Arts movement—­Illinois—­Chicago. | African American arts—­Illinois—­Chicago—­History—20th ­century. | City planning—­Social aspects—­Illinois—­Chicago—­History—20th ­century. | Artists and community—­Illinois—­Chicago—­History—20th ­century. | africobra (Group of artists)—­History. | Organ­ization of Black American Culture—­History. | Chicago (Ill.)—­Race relations—­History—20th ­century. Classification: lcc nx512.3.a35 (ebook) | lcc nx512.3.a35 z67 2019 (print) | ddc 700.89/96073—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018035542

Cover art: Barbara Jones-Hogu, To Be Free (Know the Past and Prepare for the Future), 1972. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Terra Foundation for American Art, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Contents

Illustrations ​/ ​vii Acknowl­edgments ​/ ​xvii

Introduction: The Black Arts Movement in Chicago ​/ ​1

1 2 3 4 5 6

Claiming Space, Being in Public ​/ ​30

Cultural Nationalism and Community Culture ​/ ​85



An Experimental Friendship ​/ ​124

The Black ­Family ​/ ​179

­Until the Walls Come Down ​/ ​215

Starring the Black Community ​/ ​257

Notes ​/ ​299 Bibliography ​/ ​349 Index ​/ ​375

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Illustrations

Introduction I.1 Girl with hula hoop (Irene Sistrunk) near the Wall of Re­spect, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 2 I.2 obac Visual Arts Workshop, Wall of Re­spect (full view), 1967. Mural at 43rd Street and Langley Ave­nue. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 3 I.3 Census Tracts of Chicago, 1940: Races and Nationalities. Produced by Social Science Research Committee, University of Chicago. Map Collection, University of Chicago Library. 4 I.4 Wall of Re­spect, section with raised fist painted by Eugene “Eda” Wade, 1967. Photo by Bob Solari. Public Art Workshop Mural Archive. 6 I.5 Map of Chicago Showing Types of Cultural and Economic Areas, 1933. Produced by Social Science Research Committee, University of Chicago. Map Collection, University of Chicago Library. 24 I.6 Apache Rangers graffiti. Photo by John Tweedle for the Chicago Daily News, 1966. 28 Chapter 1 Map 1.1 Community areas of Chicago according to the number of demolished units (1965–68) relative to 1960 population. Map by Kelsey Rydland. 38 1.1 Margaret Burroughs, In School—­Together. Linocut, n.d. South Side Community Art Center. 41

1.2 1.3

1.4

1.5 1.6

1.7

1.8 1.9

1.10

1.11 1.12

1.13

1.14

1.15

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Margaret Burroughs, ­Mother and Child. Linocut, n.d. South Side Community Art Center. 42 The Museum of Negro History and Art at 3806 South Michigan Ave­nue, with bust of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable by Robert E. L. Jones, Chicago, 1966. Photo by Larry Nocerino for the Chicago Sun-­Times. 44 February 1970 calendar. Created by Fidepe Hammurabi. South Side Community Art Center Archive. Courtesy of South Side Community Art Center. 45 Jae Jarrell at Jae of Hyde Park. Photo by the Chicago Daily News, 1967. 47 Jeff Donaldson and visitors at exhibition at Lakeside Gallery, 1968. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 49 Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell with Wadsworth Jr. and Napoleon Jones-­ Henderson at wj Studios, 1968. Photo by Gerald Williams. Courtesy of Gerald Williams. 49 Edfu Kinginga crowning cele­bration (with artwork on the wall) at Oṣun Gallery in South Shore, 1981. Photo by Yaoundé Olu. 50 Meeting of obac Visual Arts Workshop at The Arts on Stony Island Ave­nue, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 51 Nii-­Oti and two colleagues in front of Zambezi Artist Guild, 1041 East 63rd Street, 1968. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 52 Poster for Barbara Jones and Napoleon Henderson exhibition Wanted: A Printer and a Weaver. Courtesy of sscac Archives. 55 Malcolm X Shabazz Park renaming event, Washington Park, May 1967. Photographer unknown. “White ­Women Set Off Two-­ Hour Melee in Chicago,” Jet, June 8, 1967, 38. 58 Artist William “Bill” Walker studies the sectional design created by designer Sylvia Abernathy for the Wall of Re­spect mural, during a meeting of obac, Chicago, IL, summer 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 60 Wall of Re­spect, “Theater” section by Barbara Jones-­Hogu in pro­ gress, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 62 Black student demonstration at Civic Center Plaza, 1968. Photo by Jack Dykinga for the Chicago Sun-­Times, October 29, 1968. 69 Il l u st rat i ons

1.16 1.17 1.18

1.19 1.20 1.21

1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25

1.26

Black Power graffiti in Chicago, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 71 Darryl Cowherd, Blackstone, Woodlawn, Chicago, 1968, 1968. Silver gelatin print. © Darryl Cowherd. Courtesy of Darryl Cowherd. 71 Jae Jarrell (American, b. 1935), Urban Wall Suit, ca. 1969. Sewn and painted cotton and silk, two-­piece suit. 37½ × 27½ × ½ in. (95.3 × 69.9 × 1.3 cm). © Jae Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emmy L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16. 72 Gerald Williams, Nation Time, 1969. Acrylic on canvas. 48 × 56 in. Collection of John and Susan Horseman. 73 Wall of Re­spect, detail of “Jazz” section, in pro­gress, 1967. Photographer unknown. 76 Wall of Re­spect, detail of Norman Parish’s “Statesmen” section with Roy Lewis photo of Malcolm Shabazz Park (Washington Park), 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 76 Neighborhood residents who protected the Wall of Re­spect, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 79 Child (Paul Higgins) giving a “tour” of the Wall of Re­spect, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 79 Darryl Cowherd, Full Support for Black Liberation, 1967. © Darryl Cowherd. Courtesy of Darryl Cowherd. 80 Wall of Truth, 1969. Mural at 43rd and Langley (across the street from the Wall of Re­spect). Detail of doorway with lettering. Photo by Mark Rogovin. 82 Wall of Truth, “Black Unity” section by William Walker, 1969. Photo by Mark Rogovin. 83

Chapter 2 2.1 Opportunity Please Knock, performed at On the Beach, 63rd Street Beach, Woodlawn, Chicago, 1967. Photo © Darryl Cowherd. 86 2.2 The Cry of Jazz, 1959. Still from film directed by Ed Bland. 89 2.3 Barbara Jones-­Hogu (American, 1938–2017), Rise and Take Control, 1971. Color screenprint on heavy purple-­colored wove paper. 23 × 35 in. (50.8 × 68.6 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for

Illus trati ons

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2.4

2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12

Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 94 Barbara Jones-­Hogu (American, 1938–2017), Nation Time, 1970. Color screenprint on gold-­colored Japanese-­style laid paper. Image 26¼ × 20¼ in. (66.7 × 51.4 cm); sheet: 31 × 24¾ in. (78.7 × 62.9 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 99 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Stop Genocide, 1969. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 100 “Blackstone Rangers shake fists and shout on way to meet Disciples.” Photo by John ­Settle for the Chicago Daily News, April 8, 1968. 101 Protesters (­woman and young child) with “Stop Genocide” sign in downtown Chicago, 1968. Photographer unknown. 102 Mitchell Caton, Nation Time, 1971. Mural, 4141 South Cottage Grove Ave­nue. Photo by Mark Rogovin. 103 On the Beach, shot of audience, 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 111 Phil Cohran playing the frankiphone at Affro-­Arts Theater, 1968. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 114 Manhood class at Affro-­Arts Theater. Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1968. 114 Marquee with “We Are Closed by Deceit,” Affro-­Arts Theater, 1968. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 117

Chapter 3 3.1 Art & Soul storefront, painted by Sachio Yamashita in rainbow stripes, 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle. 132 3.2 “Ex-­Gang in Cleanup Proj­ect” (cvl ­doing neighborhood beautification). Photo by Duane Hall for the Chicago Sun-­Times, July 12, 1968. 132 3.3 “The Conservative Vice Lords outside their westside teen center.” Photo by the Chicago Sun-­Times, April 4, 1968. 133 3.4 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Be Your ­Brother’s Keeper, 1968. Screenprint. 25 × 25 in. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 144

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Il l u strat i ons

3.5 ­Children 3.6

3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13

3.14

3.15 3.16

3.17 3.18 3.19



painting the outside of Art & Soul, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 149 Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage. Installation view, from Vio­lence! in Recent American Art, November 8, 1968–­January 12, 1969. Photo © mca Chicago. 150 Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage, 1968. Mixed media. First panel. South Side Community Art Center. Photo by Tony Smith. 151 Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage, 1968. Mixed media. Second panel. South Side Community Art Center. Photo by Tony Smith. 151 Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage, 1968. Mixed media. Third panel. South Side Community Art Center. Photo by Tony Smith. 151 Daniel Hetherington, Malcolm X, ca. 1968. Oil on masonite. Photo by Michael Tropea. Private collection. 154 Jackie Hetherington, Three on Three—­Chicago, 1986–87. Woodblock print. Photo by Ann Zelle. Private collection. 154 Danny Hetherington leading discussion of Ralph Arnold works with ­children, Art & Soul, 1968 or 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle. 155 Ralph Arnold (1928–2006), One ­Thing Leads to Another, 1968. Collage and acrylic on canvas. 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). © Ralph Arnold. Photography Purchase Fund, 2011.131. Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. 156 “­Music is provided at the Art and Soul opening at 3742 W. 16th by David Agustus and Bros., the ‘Sounds of Blackness.’ ” Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago Sun-­Times, November 14, 1968. 158 Ralph Arnold, Jan van der Marck, and Richard Hunt, with Jae Jarrell’s Ebony ­Family dress, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 161 Jae Jarrell, Ebony ­Family, ca. 1968. Velvet dress with velvet collage. 38½ × 38½ × ½ in. (97.8 × 96.5 × 1.3 cm). © Jae Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emmy L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16. 162 Wadsworth Jarrell, Black ­Family, 1968. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. 163 Peter Gilbert sculpture and Wadsworth Jarrell’s Black ­Family, Art & Soul, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 163 “Art Show at the Conservative Vice Lords’ Art gallery, Art & Soul.” Jackie Hetherington and Jeff Donaldson with Donaldson’s Two Illus trati ons

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T ­ oward Revolution. Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago Sun-­Times, 1969. 164 3.20 Jeff Donaldson cover illustration for Ebon, Revolution, 1969. 164 3.21 Reginald Madison, The Mill, 1966. Oil on canvas. 169 3.22 Reggie Madison touching up his contest entry, Art & Soul, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 170 3.23 Reggie Madison’s Black Madonna and Child with Jan van der Marck and Jackie Hetherington, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 170 3.24 Kenneth Hunter, portrait, ca. 1970. Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 177 Chapter 4 4.1 Jeff Donaldson, Two ­Toward Revolution, ca. 1968. Watercolor. Location unknown. 180 4.2 Wadsworth A. Jarrell (American, b. 1929), Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 64 × 51 in. (162.6 × 129.5 cm). © Wadsworth Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.18. 182 4.3 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, The Black F ­ amily, ca. 1968. Color screenprint on tan paper. Photo courtesy of Lusenhop Fine Art. Private collection. 183 4.4 Gerald Williams, Say It Loud, 1968. Oil on canvas. Private collection. 184 4.5 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Amer­i­ca III, 1969. 2/9. Color screenprint on brown paper. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 191 4.6 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Land Where My ­Father Died, 1968. Color screenprint on gold-­colored Japanese-­style laid paper. Image 27 × 20 in. (68.6 × 50.8 cm); sheet: 32½ × 24¾ in. (82.6 × 62.9 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 191 4.7 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, ­Mother of Man, 1968. Woodcut on paper. 24 × 15 in. Barbara Jones-­Hogu estate. Photo courtesy of Lusenhop Fine Art. 193 4.8 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Unite, 1969–71. Screenprint on wove paper, published by AfriCOBRA. Image 22½ × 30¼ in. (57.2 × 76.8 cm); xii  /

Il l u strat i ons

4.9 4.10

4.11

4.12 4.13

sheet: 28 × 38 in. (71.1 × 96.5 cm). David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of  The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 194 Carolyn Mims Lawrence, Black ­Children Keep Your Spirits ­Free, 1972. Oil on canvas. Collection of Carolyn Mims Lawrence. 198 Gerald Williams (American, b. 1941), Messages, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. 48 × 38¾ in. (121.9 × 98.4 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of  The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 207 Carolyn Mims Lawrence (American, b. 1940), Uphold Your Men, 1971. Screenprint on wove paper, published by AfriCOBRA. Image 30⅝ × 24¼ in. (77.8 × 61.6 cm); sheet: 38¼ × 29¾ in. (97.2 × 75.6 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; Gift of David Lusenhop in honor of the artist. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of  The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 209 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Black Men We Need You, 1971. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 210 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, To Be ­Free (Know the Past and Prepare for the F­ uture), 1972. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 211

Chapter 5 5.1 Robert Sengstacke, checkers players in Bronzeville, ca. 1968. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 218 5.2 Billy Abernathy, Live Flicks of the Hip World, exhibition at Shepherd’s Gallery, 347 East 31st Street, October 1967. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 220 5.3 Umoja Black Student Center, October 13, 1968 (Bob Crawford photo mural partially vis­i­ble). Photo by Val Mazzenga for the Chicago Tribune. 222 5.4 Robert A. Sengstacke, photo mural in Englewood, 1968. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 222 5.5 Photo of Eddie Harris’s “Blackmobile” at Englewood Concourse Art Fair. Jet, July 16, 1970, 7. Photo by Herbert Nipson. 224

Illus trations

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5.6

Wall of Truth, easels set up for youth participants, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 225 5.7 Wall of Truth, section by Eddie Harris, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 226 5.8 Wall of Truth, doorway section by William Walker, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 227 5.9 Wall of Truth, “Black Laws” section by William Walker, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 227 5.10 Vanita Green, Black ­Women / Racism, 1970. Mural at Chestnut and Orleans. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 228 5.11 Don McIlvaine, Into the Mainstream, 1969. Mural at West 16th Street and South Lawndale Ave­nue. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 230 5.12 Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall. Don McIlvaine paints and converses with a young boy. 231 5.13 Don McIlvaine, Black Man’s Dilemma in progress, 1970. Mural at 3742 West 16th Street. 233 5.14 Don McIlvaine, Black Man’s Dilemma, 1970. Photo by Larry Graff for the Chicago Sun-­Times. 233 5.15 José Chávez Morado, La Conquista de la Energía (The Conquest of Energy), 1952. Mosaic mural of Byzantine and Venetian glass, unam, Mexico City. Photo by Schalkwijk / Art Resource. 234 5.16 Mario Castillo, Peace (Metafísica), 1968. Mural at Halsted Street and Cullerton Street. 236 5.17 ­Free pass to the mca exhibition Murals for the ­People. Courtesy of sscac Archives. 240 5.18 Visitors at the Wall of Re­spect. Photo by Duane Hall for the Chicago Sun-­Times, March 2, 1971. 241 5.19 Mitchell Caton (in front) and Jimmy Ellis at The Alley with untitled ­music mural (left) and Rip-­Off / Universal Alley (right), 1970–74. Murals off 50th Street between Champlain and St. Lawrence Ave­nues. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 243 5.20 Mitchell Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley, detail, “Rip-­Off ” (with neighbors), 1970–74. Mural. Photo by Mark Rogovin. 245 5.21 Mitchell Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley, detail, C. Siddha Webber, “Universal Alley” (poem), 1970–74. Mural. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 247 5.22 Mitchell Caton, Philosophy of the Spiritual, 1972. Mural at 75th Street and Vernon Ave­nue. Photo by Robert A. Sengstacke. Courtesy of Sengstacke Estate. 248 xiv  /

Il l u st rat i ons

5.23 Mitchell

Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley (full view), 1970–74. Mural. Photo by Georg Stahl. 250 5.24 ­Children at The Alley, 1974. Photo by Kevin Harris. 252 5.25 Artist unknown, Psychedelic Shack murals, early 1970s. Photo by Georg Stahl. 253 5.26 Bertrand Phillips, Crossword, 1974. Silver gelatin print. 254 5.27 Bertrand Phillips, Black Ice, 1972. Silver gelatin print. 254 5.28 “Bird Lives” graffiti, Chicago, 1964. Photo by Sandor Demlinger. 256 Chapter 6 6.1 Ad for Salem Extra Long cigarettes from Ebony, September 1971. 265 6.2 The Image Makers poster, 1973. Courtesy of sscac Archives. 267 6.3 Doyle Wicks, “Miss Hollywood” (The Image Makers). Special Collections, Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Library. 267 6.4 Doyle Wicks, “Blacula” (The Image Makers). Special Collections, Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Library. 268 6.5 Teen painting Frederick Douglass, Art & Soul, 1968 or 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle. 270 6.6 José Williams, Ghetto, ca. 1969. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. South Side Community Art Center. 271 6.7 Gerald Williams, Wake Up, 1971. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. 273 6.8 Douglas Williams, A Tribute to My Black ­Sister, ca. 1970. Courtesy Douglas Williams. Installation shot from exhibition at South Side Community Art Center. Photographer and pres­ent location unknown. 274 6.9 Jeff Donaldson, J. D. McClain’s Day in Court, 1970. Mixed media. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. 275 6.10 Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall. 279 6.11 Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall. Graphic with end credits. 280 6.12 Back Alley Rip-­Off, 1970. Still from film directed by Don McIlvaine. 280 6.13 Spook Who Sat by the Door, 1973. Still from film directed by Ivan Dixon. 282 6.14 Don McIlvaine, Angela Davis, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 284 6.15 Ben Bey, Ghetto Child, 1970. Oil and acrylic on canvas. South Side Community Art Center. 289

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6.16

Ben Bey, Strug­gle Black/White, 1974. Acrylic on board. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of  The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. 290 6.17 Jeff Donaldson, Ala Shango. 1969. Gouache on cardboard. South Side Community Art Center. Purchase prize, Black Expressions ’69. 296 6.18 Young man writing “Black Power” in shaving cream. Photo by Kenneth Lovette for the Chicago Sun-­Times, April 7, 1968. 298

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Il l u strat i ons

Acknowl­edgments

More than ten years ago, Joanie Friedman and Theaster Gates convened a meeting with Patric McCoy, Sherry Williams, and Ollie Dantzler to help me research material for my 2008 class, “Chicago 1968.” This meeting launched me into work on Black Chicago in the 1960s and was the seed of many collaborations (individually and collectively) with Patric, Sherry, and Theaster in par­tic­u­lar. The students in the class and o­ thers that followed it nourished the research on this book; I hope they got as much out of my answers as I got out of their questions. Laura Gluckman’s work in the class, in par­tic­u­lar, introduced me to the Conservative Vice Lords and the question of how to find out more about their art gallery. I come to this proj­ect as a white art historian trained as a specialist in Eu­ ro­pean art but one who has studied and taught about activist art and Black art for the past twelve years. I happened to be at the right time to begin to do this research; the artwork itself urged my attention, the discipline had devoted hardly any to it, and, given that I had tenure, my ­career was not at risk. Within a discipline shot through with white supremacism, to devote attention to Black artists in general and the Black Arts Movement in par­ tic­u­lar has been, for young scholars and Black scholars in par­tic­u­lar, a real risk. I thus must acknowledge ­others who have worked on this material before me—­not only ­those who have published books and articles that I have been able to study but also t­hose who have been turned aside from it by well-­meaning advice or hostile rejection, or who have worked in the field of art education and other adjacent fields where publishing opportunities are not as profuse even as ­those in art history. In this vein, I wish to highlight the

doctoral dissertations of Murry DePillars, Carline Evone Williams Strong, and John Towns. As this proj­ect developed, conversations with Ann Zelle, James Houlihan, David Dawley, Bobby Gore, John Hagedorn, Heruanita McIlvaine, and ­others ­were crucial to my understanding of Art & Soul in par­tic­u­lar. Ann and Heruanita in par­tic­u­lar have been tremendously generous with their time and their personal collections of materials. I am humbled by the generosity of the countless artists and community members whose stories are chronicled in the pages that follow and who took time out of their own busy schedules to talk with me. Many other interviews that form a major part of the material of this book ­were conducted ­under the aegis of Never The Same, an archiving and oral history proj­ect I conducted with Daniel Tucker, which grew out of work on the publication area Chicago. I learned an enormous amount and assembled a g­ reat deal of research material from this pro­cess. Kate Aguirre and Carolina Fernandez-­Miranda provided masterful transcriptions of interviews. In addition to students in my classes at UChicago and Northwestern, I tested out some of my ideas on students in the Sojourner Scholars program (formerly Harlan Clemente), and learned a g­ reat deal from them. I am grateful to Amy Thomas Elder for the opportunity and to Audrey Petty for keeping the ship afloat—­and for providing a ­great deal of inspiration. In the realm of inspiration, I also want to thank members of Feel Tank Chicago—­ Lauren Berlant, Romi Crawford, Mary Patten, and Matthias Regan—­for periodic injections of intellectual energy, including a formative discussion of Blues ­People. Generous publication subventions ­were provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Terra Foundation, which initiated the Art Design Chicago program of exhibitions and events for 2018, has supported my work in many dif­fer­ent ways that manifest subtly in this book. I am also grateful to my institutions, including the University of Chicago, Williams College (where I was visiting faculty in 2013–14), and Northwestern University, for their generous support. I particularly want to thank Danielle Allen, who was Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago at the time I began this proj­ect. In many ways it was inspired by the princi­ples of the Civic Knowledge Proj­ect she initiated. Initial opportunities to publish and curate related material have come through Hannah Feldman, Stephanie Smith, Bill Michel, Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, Katherine Bussard, Alison Fisher and Greg Foster-­ xviii  /

Ackn o wl e ­ dgments

Rice, Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Christiano, and Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Daniel Schulman. Many portions of this book constituted revised versions of work initially published elsewhere. I wish to thank the editors and other collaborators for their many thoughtful contributions to them. ­These publications include “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum” published in Art Journal in autumn 2011; “Dig the Diversity in Unity: AfriCOBRA’s Black F­ amily,” published in Afterall, autumn 2011; “Fireplug, Flower, Baboon: The Demo­cratic ­Thing in Late 1960s Chicago,” kritische berichte, autumn 2011; “Seizing the Camera: Chicago’s Arts of Protest in and around 1968,” in The City Lost and Found, ed. Katherine Bussard, Alison Fisher, and Greg Foster-­Rice, exhibition catalogue (Prince­ton University Art Museum, 2014); “The Positive Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement,” The Freedom Princi­ple, exhibition catalogue (Museum of Con­temporary Art, Chicago, 2015); my contributions to The Wall of Re­spect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago, co-­edited by Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford (Northwestern University Press, 2017); and “Making Space, 1961–1976,” in Art in Chicago: From the Fire to Now, edited by Robert Cozzolino and Maggie Taft (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Opportunities to pres­ent material related to this proj­ect have come from Marissa Baker, Elina Gertsman, Ken Nagelberg and Egon Cohen, Henry Luittikhuizen and Craig Hanson, Lisa Junkin Lopez, Frank Valadez and Lisa Oppenheim, Nick Bastis, and Georgia Wall. Among the many archivists and librarians who have facilitated this proj­ect, I thank Ines Zalduendo at the Harvard Gradu­ate School of Design’s Frances Loeb Library, Jay Satterfield at the Rauner Library at Dartmouth, Beverly Cook at the Vivian Harsh Collection at Car­ter Woodson Library, Michael Featherstone, Lesley Martin, and other staff at the Chicago History Museum’s Research Center, as well as curator Joy Bivins for a last-­minute “find,” Alison Hinderliter at the Newberry Library, Heidi Marshall at Columbia College, Erin Matson at the library of the Museum of Con­temporary Art Chicago, and, at the Harold Washington Library’s Special Collections, Morag Walsh, Debra Orellana, and Glenn Humphries. For additional help obtaining reproduction permissions, I am grateful to many individuals, including Greg Foster-­Rice, Eric Johanson, Olivia Polk, and Leah Wicks. I have benefited greatly from generous colleagues at Northwestern, including Huey Copeland, Christina Normore, Krista Thompson, E.  Patrick Johnson, Kathleen Berzock, and Matthew Taylor. Kelsey Rydland produced an excellent map for the book. I also greatly appreciate the varied collegial contributions of Margo Natalie Crawford, Margaret Davis, ­Brother Mark Acknowl­e dgm ents

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Elder, Darby En­glish, Drea Howenstein, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Valerie Leonard, Solveig Nelson, Useni Eugene Perkins, Pemon Rami, Neil Roberts, Tony Smith, and Robert Stepto. David Lusenhop and Lavon Nicole Pettis have been especially impor­tant facilitators of my research for many years and in varied, but always impor­tant, ways. I am deeply grateful to them both. For their wonderful work with the photography collections of Georg Stahl, Mark Rogovin, Robert Sengstacke, and Ann Zelle, among o­ thers, I thank Bridget Madden, Whitney Gaylord, Amanda Rybin, and their staff. Research assistants who have contributed to this proj­ect have included Kate Aguirre, Chris Brancaccio, Chuck Lee, Young Joon Kwak, Rainbow Porthé, Anna-­Claire Stinebring, and Nancy Thebaut. Jenn Sichel provided essential last-­minute help. Gregory Vershbow provided expert technical assistance on images. I am grateful to Rainbow Porthé and to Mike Phillips for their work on the index. I am privileged and honored to have been able to work closely with the staff and board of the South Side Community Art Center. In connection with research and programs there that nourished this book, I wish to thank Marissa Baker, Natalie ­Battles, Sammie Dortch, Skyla Hearn, Faheem Majeed, Charles Miles, Maséqua Myers, Clinton Nichols, Eric Nix, Arcilla Stahl, Heather Ireland Robinson, Douglas Williams, and numerous interns who have helped with the collections and archives t­here: Naomi Etsehiywot, Lamar Gayles, Erin Glasco, Hanne Graversen, Jeanne Lieberman, Chloe Pelletier, Qiaira Riley, and KaSandra Skistad. I am grateful to many, many p ­ eople at Duke University Press, in par­tic­u­ lar to Ken Wissoker for his unwavering commitment to this proj­ect through thick and thin, and to Jade Brooks, Olivia Polk, Bonnie Perkel, and Susan Albury for shepherding the proj­ect expertly and ­handling my many odd questions and prob­lems with grace. Amy Ruth Buchanan created an absolutely stunning design. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions and critiques. My co-­conspirator Michael W. Phillips Jr. has given unflagging support of many kinds to my work, even when it gets in the way, and I owe him a g­ reat debt of gratitude. He and our son, Oliver, have brightened my life immeasurably in the years I have been working on Art for ­People’s Sake. Past, present, and future: I dedicate this book doubly, to the memory of those who helped me make it who have since joined the ancestors (in particular, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Robert Abbott Sengstacke, and C. Siddha Webber); and to Chicago’s students and teachers, their curiosity and imagination, and their struggles for equity and justice. xx  /

A ckn o wl e ­ dgments

Introduction

The Black Arts Movement in Chicago A l­ittle girl sways inside a strawberry hula hoop, keeping it magically afloat (figure i.1). Families and groups of young men stand on stoops. Short-­haired ­women lounge against a car; one gives the camera a skeptical side-­eye. A famous poet’s visit sends a thrill through the crowd. Another poet, smiling, swings his ­daughter up onto his shoulder. A speaker declaims from a scaffold. Ice cream bars get eaten. A boy gives a tour of the mural for a quarter. Other boys raise fists. The lady across the street thrusts her cat’s-­eye glasses out the win­dow with a frown at an artwork in pro­gress: “What is that ugly ­thing?” Fleeting fragments of scenes, ­these images emerge in photo­graphs taken around a mural known as the Wall of Re­spect created by an activist artist collective in August  1967 on a building on the South Side of Chicago (figure i.2). The monumental artwork presented portraits of Black heroes and heroines in painting and photography; the inclusion of photography mounted on the wall was a startling innovation. Neighbors who watched it take shape at 43rd Street and Langley Ave­nue, in a neighborhood traditionally known as Bronzeville or the Black ­Belt, did all the ­things they ­were ­doing already—­but they also created an ongoing, participatory set of per­ for­mances together with artists and activists and visitors from farther afield. Langley was and is a small residential street r­unning north to south; 43rd  Street was a major commercial corridor. (In 2018 this portion of 43rd Street is run-­down, with redevelopment more likely to appear as residential townhouses—­what now occupies the corner where the Wall of Re­ spect once stood—­than as commercial space.) This was the heart of Black

I.1. Girl with hula hoop (Irene Sistrunk) near the Wall of Re­spect, 1967.

Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

I.2. OBAC Visual Arts Workshop, Wall of Re­spect (full view),

1967. Mural at 43rd Street and Langley Ave­nue. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

Chicago, which appears already delineated in a map of majority ethnic populations in the 1940 census (figure i.3). Generations of African Americans traveling north from Mississippi and other southern states had settled in this neighborhood, which ran from Cermak (22nd Street) on the north to 51st Street on the south. Lake Michigan lay to the east; in August 1967, as in other Augusts, its beaches beckoned residents needing to cool down from the summer heat. Housing proj­ects belonging to the Chicago Housing Authority loomed to the west along State Street, rising up from the new Dan Ryan Expressway, which cut (and not by accident) a sharp dividing line between white ethnic neighborhoods and Bronzeville. To the south and east ­were Kenwood and Hyde Park, prosperous mixed-­race neighborhoods where many of the artists who created the Wall of Re­spect lived and worked. By 1967, Bronzeville was a neighborhood facing demographic losses and economic decline. When members of the Organ­ization of Black American Culture (obac, pronounced “Oba-­C,” to refer to the word oba, Yoruba for “leader”) made their decision to paint a mural ­here, it was not with an

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I.3. Census Tracts of Chicago, 1940: Races and Nationalities.

Produced by Social Science Research Committee, University of Chicago. Map Collection, University of Chicago Library.

agenda of economic development—as might be the case t­ oday—­but it was nonetheless a significant choice. As a po­liti­cal statement in the Civil Rights era, it was not a gesture t­oward integration with white society but t­oward symbolic reintegration into a historically Black neighborhood. ­These artists, many of them trained in majority-­white institutions of higher learning, might have chosen assimilation but did not. Responding to the Black Power moment of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as to local conditions, they allied themselves with “community,” making a commitment to working-­ class Black ­people. The Wall of Re­spect became a symbol of a moment in the po­liti­cal strug­ gle as well as a street museum of heroic figures. It also became a platform for multifarious per­for­mances, planned and improvised: rallies, concerts, poetry readings, community events. Opinions differ on w ­ hether it was dubbed the “Wall of Re­spect” from the very beginning; at any rate, by October 1967, two months ­after its initial unveiling, ­those three words beckoned from the second-­floor balcony, just ­under the portrait of a triumphant Muhammad Ali. The artists had boldly claimed space and re­imagined it, putting forward a pro-­Black visual statement that was monumental in size. To the artists, the effects on the neighborhood ­were palpable. The painter Jeff Donaldson observed that “­people feel better when they walk by ­there, and we made it so.”1 Muralist William Walker described a young man who stood before the Wall of Re­spect, contemplating it for a long time, before fi­nally saying, “I’m getting my strength.”2 It was a heady time. It was not without conflict. By October, the Wall had already changed. The obac Visual Arts Workshop had succumbed to internal and external pressures. William Walker had created controversy when he essentially took owner­ship of the Wall and authorized changes that ran contrary to the decisions the collective had made together—­changes that many in the group found unforgivable. Walker had found the building and made the contacts in the community, in par­tic­u­lar with the local community organ­ization run by former gang members. They w ­ ere the ones who had brokered a treaty between two bigger warring gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the Gangster Disciples, that allowed the art proj­ect to move forward. But the mural was the product of the collective, not the property of one individual. For reasons that are still not completely clear, Walker encouraged neighborhood residents to whitewash Norman Parish’s “Statesmen” section of the original Wall, and invited Eugene “Eda” Wade to repaint it with entirely dif­fer­ent imagery that bespoke a more militant mood: a raised fist (figure i.4). Ebony’s piece on

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the mural, published in December 1967, celebrated the revised Wall that appeared ­there in a photo­graph by Roy Lewis.3 For viewers who became aware of the Wall at that point, the rift among the artists was invisible. The Black Power fist became canonical in that first glimpse a national public had of the Wall. For the visual arts, the Wall of Re­spect can be considered both the founding moment and the founding trauma of the Black Arts Movement. The artists who created the Wall of Re­spect saw themselves as making art on behalf of the ­people. The poet Don  L. Lee (­later Haki Madhubuti) wrote about the Wall that it was “art for p ­ eople’s sake”—in stark contrast to the modernist notion of “art for art’s sake.”4 Jeff Donaldson ­later wrote about the collective AFRICOBRA, which had its roots in this moment, that they made “art for p ­ eople and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable.”5 From the point of view of visual arts, making art for ­people’s sake implied an emphasis on h ­ uman subjects and on depicting the humanity of African Americans. But even more, it said something about who ­these images ­were for. They ­were for “the community”—­specifically the Black community, the ­people seen in photographs taken around the Wall of Re­spect, the neighbors, artists and non-­artists alike, who watched the Wall as it unfurled. They commented on it, played around it, protected it from graffiti, painted portions of it, and explained it to visitors. ­Later reflections on the contentiousness of the mural’s history have tended to personalize the conflict as one between key members of obac. It is difficult to discern the contours of community participation. Many of the ­people depicted in photos of the Wall have died without leaving any trace of what they thought about it, and ­others are hard to track down. But it is clear that the trained artists of obac and their colleagues—­most of whom lived elsewhere on the South Side, not in the immediate neighborhood—­ developed, maintained, and extended relationships to non-­artist community members through their work. The Black Arts Movement, which this mural heralded, depended on a par­tic­u­lar relationship to “the ­people.” Artists claimed space in and for the community, established spaces for interaction (per­for­mance, exhibition, and gathering places throughout the city), depicted community members in their art, and gave voice, directly or indirectly, to community concerns. But “community” involved many dif­fer­ent groups, not all of whom agreed with one another, and artists took on complicated relationships with ­these groups. I.4. (opposite) Wall of Re­spect, section with raised fist painted by Eugene “Eda”

Wade, 1967. Photo by Bob Solari. Public Art Workshop Mural Archive.

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“Community art” had already appeared as a prominent term within the Federal Artist Proj­ect (fap) of President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt’s Works Pro­ gress Administration (wpa) of the 1930s and 1940s. It reemerged in the late 1960s and 1970s with the renewed community mural movement that the Wall of Re­spect helped spawn. More recently, since the 1990s, it has gained currency as a phrase in art criticism and art education. Perhaps it is actually art that is not community art that requires explanation: artists have always worked within communities. But in its par­tic­u­lar conceptual charge, in recent years it has tended to refer to situations in which professional artists enter communities of non-­artists and enjoin their participation, with the goal of channeling some truthful repre­sen­ta­tion of community feeling, and thereby promoting social cohesion. Pablo Helguera describes community art proj­ects as follows: “The typical community art proj­ect (for instance, a ­children’s mural proj­ect) is able to fulfill its purpose of strengthening a community’s sense of self by lessening or suspending criticality regarding the form and content of the product, and, often, promoting ‘feel-­good’ positive social values.”6 Within the art world, the category of “community art” has tended to be viewed as a minor subcategory of art, by both activist artists (who see it as too apo­liti­cal) and the prestigious institutions of fine art (who see it as low quality).7 Both views of “community” understand it as undifferentiated, benign, and culturally predetermined, a univocal entity that tends to quash dissent. As Raymond Williams puts it, “Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most impor­tant, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organ­ization (state, nation, society, ­etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.”8 Adolph Reed puts it even more sharply in his critique of the discourse of community: it is, he suggests, a “mystification . . . ​and an anti-­democratic one at that . . . ​a warrant to enforce a conformist, punitive moralism.”9 Failing to acknowledge differing interests among African Americans, the notion of “the black community” in par­tic­u­lar “presumes homogeneity of interest and perception. A politics stuck in its name is threatened by the heterogeneous tendencies put in motion by open debate.”10 To sum up, “community,” within recent writing on art and politics, has come to be seen as an overly broad and romanticized term, one that emphasizes harmony and reconciliation to the detriment of po­liti­cal contestation and conflict. Inigo Manglano-­Ovalle summarizes this position neatly in describing a shift in the 1990s from “sharp terms such as ‘difference,’ ‘the mar8  /

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gin,’ or ‘the other’ ” to “the more benign and all embracing ‘community.’ ”11 This belies the many debates and tensions pres­ent within communities. It also implies a certain ahistoricism—­a notion that communities maintain singular identities and do not change historically over time. In a more reduced sense, it might simply be a euphemism for “non-­artists.” Yet with the Wall of Re­spect, and in other activities of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, visual artists laid hold of a strong notion of “community,” one premised on negotiating rather than erasing difference. Rather than presuming an unquestioned homogeneity of interests, they sought solidarity across lines of class and education and profession. They emulated the “call and response” structure of Black musical forms and adjusted their artistic vision according to the responses they received. They renounced (white) art world frameworks and the aesthetic distortions that white patronage might produce, and sought extended relationships with non-­artists in their own and nearby neighborhoods.12 Perhaps it goes without saying, or perhaps it needs to be said, that they ­were not always successful in their efforts to integrate their artistic work with the concerns of the community. But this is, in a certain sense, beside the point. The gesture itself needs to be recognized as neither trivial nor inevitable. Black communities ­were and are not monolithic. When artists made t­ hese commitments, the resulting relationships involved negotiation, as they encountered rifts within the “community” that bespoke many differing interests. Gang members, c­ hildren, parents, businesspeople and professionals, social ser­vice workers, artists—­all had their own points of view as groups and as collections of individuals. Community was not ­simple and homogeneous and was not presumed to be so. To explore ­these relationships was to reveal that fact. In this book, I study how artists communicated with and collaborated with non-­artists in their communities or in other communities. In a spectrum of art about community, art for community, art with community, and art by community, I try to bring attention to forms of art that emphasize the agency of community members—­“by” and “with”—­while necessarily giving some attention to “for,” and less to “about.” I trace the development of a par­ tic­u­lar set of questions in and around the Black Arts Movement in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It could be called community, or it could be called “the street,” or it could be called “the p ­ eople.” The idea of  “community art” was still in formation, and would take a dif­fer­ent direction—­one more entangled with nonprofit organ­izations and government agencies—as the Black Arts Movement was winding down. Thus, while I freely use the term community, understanding it in the more complex way I have just outlined,

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I also emphasize the interchange between artists and the street—­with the street understood as a real and conceptual place and the ­people in it. Art History, Chicago, and the Black Arts Movement

The discipline of art history has neglected the richness and importance of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. Chicago was a hub, perhaps the hub, for the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement b­ ecause artists in the 1960s and 1970s took strength from an array of Black cultural and media institutions built by generations of Chicagoans. This cultural and po­liti­cal movement of Black artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s has been studied much more thoroughly in relation to lit­er­a­ture and performing arts than the strictly visual arts.13 Many of its most vis­i­ble prac­ti­tion­ers—­Amiri Baraka comes to mind—­worked in ­these realms. But a thriving visual arts scene gave visual form to the movement and confronted its own specific challenges. In Chicago, the movement built on the achievements of Chicago’s Black Re­nais­sance, which flourished from the early 1930s into the 1950s. Its reputation is dominated by major literary figures, but it also included many visual artists.14 Their most impor­tant meeting place was the South Side Community Art Center at 3831 South Michigan Ave­nue, a renovated former mansion originally built for grain merchant George A. Seaverns Jr. in 1892. ­After the wpa announced funding for public art and art workshops and centers in 1935, a co­ali­tion of African American artists and art lovers in Chicago took the opportunity to create a neighborhood art center. They raised funds to purchase the building and set up classes and workshops. The fap brought another group of artists into the picture, members of Chicago’s New Bauhaus, largely composed of Eu­ro­pean émigrés committed to the holistic fusion of art and life in education. With white and Black artisans working together ­under the Illinois Craft Proj­ect (part of the fap), designers reinvented the interior of the mansion following New Bauhaus princi­ples, transforming the building into an art center that opened in late 1940.15 Among the founding members of the center was the artist and educator Margaret Burroughs. ­Little of what happens in this book could have been accomplished without the groundwork she laid. Burroughs helped found the sscac, forged links with popu­lar po­liti­cal graphics in Mexico, taught generations of artists at DuSable High School, and held open an expansive notion of community and of what justice could mean by dedicating herself to teaching for de­cades in Illinois prisons. Perhaps most importantly, she cofounded the DuSable Museum of African American History, which grew 10  /

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out of her own personal collection of art and artifacts. It began simply when she first informally opened the collection, in her home at 3806 South Michigan Ave­nue, to viewing by friends and acquaintances. In 1960, she entered a listing for the “Ebony Museum of Negro History” into the phone book, which unexpectedly brought new visitors in.16 She began holding meetings with a group of interested supporters in the same year, and the museum officially opened in 1961. It was renamed the DuSable Museum in 1968, and would move into its current location in Washington Park in 1973.17 Margaret Burroughs looms large indeed among Black artists in Chicago, though she is almost entirely absent from canonical histories of art. ­There are several reasons for this. Regardless of race, visual artists in Chicago have been less studied than their counter­parts in New York and, to some extent, California. This is in part a ­matter of the Second City’s own secondary status. Since World War II, New York has dominated not only the production of art but also writing about it. And the New York art scene has always looked on Chicago as an essentially unimportant industrial city, a place to leave. In the absence of a high-­level art market and of major museum support for local artists (despite the presence of major museums), a relatively high proportion of Chicago artists have historically been educators or worked as commercial artists. Marginal, po­liti­cally radical, and grassroots communities have also supported the activities of artists in Chicago. Along with the communities around the Chicago Black Re­nais­sance and Black Arts Movements, ­these have included social crusaders like Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr and the social settlement movement they initiated at Chicago’s Hull-­House; rebellious bohemians and freethinkers who populated the 57th Street Artist Colony, Washington Park, and Bug­house Square (from the 1890s an outdoor radical soapboxing arena on the near north side); community organizers, surrealists, street theater performers, and l­abor activists.18 It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the modern l­abor movement was born in Chicago. As the iww (Industrial Workers of the World), it was born with a song on its lips. One of its members, Slim Brundage, founded the College of Complexes in 1951. (His former wife, Margaret Brundage, an illustrator of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, became the South Side Community Art Center’s only white female president in the early 1950s before being voted off the center’s board in 1953 along with ­others, like cofounder Margaret Burroughs, who ­were suspected of harboring Communist sympathies.19) This radical social center and experimental public forum was associated with Beat culture—­another component of midcentury Chicago culture and closely connected to the jazz scene on the South Side. In the 1960s, though

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the iww seemed more or less moribund, the Chicago surrealists looked to the ­union as the precursor of their own notion of radical imagination and anti-­miserabilist working-­class consciousness.20 With the industrial nature of the city came a lot of other ­things: it was a rail hub, crime syndicate city, city of architectural innovation, and a cosmopolitan worker city packed with mi­grants. Chicago is also a surrealist and cantankerous city, a palimpsest of a city that liberally layers the real and the imaginary.21 ­These characteristics are apparent in the work of the group of white artists known as the Chicago Imagists, particularly the subgroup known as the Hairy Who, who came to epitomize cutting-­edge Chicago art of the 1960s and 1970s for the mainstream art world; they are still the only ­thing most art world ­people outside Chicago know about the city in the 1960s and 1970s.22 At the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side, with artist and curator Don Baum as their impresario, the Imagists exhibited their scrappy aesthetic sensibility with its hybrid, often eroticized and machine-­like figurations inspired by comics. They also shared some characteristics with Black Arts Movement artists—­bright colors, a focus on the h ­ uman figure—­but their rebellion against art world norms came in the form of raunchy comedy rather than radical politics. In their account of the Imagists at the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1973, Chicago Tribune critics Jane Allen (Jane Addams Allen, the grandniece of Jane Addams) and Derek Guthrie described the work as nostalgic for an old Chicago made up of white working-­class kitsch: “If you have ever lived in an unrenewed section of a large city—­a neighborhood of homes sporting bay win­dows with ornamental shades partially obscuring enormous lamps; of old dime stores, cigar stores, lingerie shops, B movie ­houses, and girlie shows—­then you may have some concept of the urban nostalgia animating the Chicago artists g­ oing to Sao Paolo.” Somewhat more surprisingly, they go on to suggest that the racialized reor­ga­ni­za­tion of space was embedded in that nostalgia: “such neighborhoods in Chicago are fast falling victim to the squeeze between the expanding black ghetto on the one hand and high class urban renewal (to contain the ghetto) on the other.”23 As a ­matter of the Imagists’ subjective artistic choices it might not be fair to expect acknowledgment of ­these spatial politics, of the city’s racial divides. But while Allen and Guthrie pointed to the whiteness of their work, other critics simply took it for granted. Allen and Guthrie, like many other writers of the 1960s and 1970s, Black and white, use the word ghetto for par­tic­u­lar neighborhoods of the South and West sides. Even then it was not a ­simple, straightforward term for “Black and poor neighborhood” and hence deserves some discussion. 12  /

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Mitchell Duneier has chronicled how African American activists and scholars (in par­tic­u­lar Horace Cayton) ­adopted the term during and a­ fter World War II for its resonance with the antifascist strug­gle in Eu­rope, with the neighborhoods to which Jews in Eu­rope had historically been confined and which experienced intensifying repression u ­ nder fascism.24 By the 1960s and 1970s it was an ordinary way to describe poor Black neighborhoods in the United States, and as such it peppers period quotations in this book. As the connotations of the term have evolved, it can appear anachronistic or even racist to use it, so I use it sparingly outside of quotation marks, only when paraphrasing speakers of the time period ­under discussion—­precisely to indicate a location of racial and economic segregation in urban areas, enforced both formally and informally. The kinds of constraints that marked the “ghetto” w ­ ere experienced differently by middle-­class and aspiring middle-­class artists (and other professionals) but they still s­haped their lives. ­W hether ­because they chose to work in a po­liti­cally challenging and socially engaged way, or ­because the communities in which they lived and worked most closely ­were largely poor, or ­because of rampant white racism, most of the African American artists I write about in this book—­unlike white artists like the Imagists ­after a certain point in their ­careers—­did not have access to a robust market for their work. Some who are working ­today still do not. Some of them intentionally avoided white institutions. But for t­ hose who did not, they found that galleries would not represent them. Few of their works have been bought by or given to museums. Regardless of the reasons, few of them could command the prices that their talents would manifestly have drawn had they been white. Further neglect flowed from this: major exhibitions have been rare, and comparatively l­ittle writing has been done about them, a situation that has begun shifting only in the past few years. Critics still rely on the notion of an artistic vanguard—­there are leaders, and ­there are followers, and anyone “regional,” anyone of color, is a follower (at least u ­ ntil the 1980s). Despite having traveled through postmodernism, art history still unconsciously accepts many of the vanguardist presuppositions of midcentury modernism. If some artists in Chicago (or elsewhere) ­were working in a dif­fer­ent visual or po­liti­cal idiom than the New York avant-­garde, it had to be—by definition—­because they w ­ ere b­ ehind. And if ­those artists happened to be African American, this impression of belatedness chimes with dominant white supremacist narratives. According to Fred Moten, Rosalind Krauss “once said something to the effect that t­ here must not be any impor­tant black artists b­ ecause, if ­there ­were, they would have

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brought themselves to her attention.”25 ­Whether Krauss said precisely this, it was certainly a sentiment expressed openly by white museum professionals in the 1960s and 1970s, as Susan Cahan clearly documents in her recent book, Mounting Frustration.26 White critics and curators routinely failed to make any effort to know anything at all about Black artists, and they assumed, confoundingly, that their ignorance was a sign of the subject’s absence. ­W hether the field has unconsciously accepted ­those narratives, or has shown its discomfort with them by looking the other way, art history has failed to recognize that the artists concerned w ­ ere not just d­ oing identity politics by default. They fully understood themselves to be offering a direct challenge to white avant-­garde presuppositions. As bell hooks puts it, “Conscious articulation of a ‘black aesthetic’ as it was constructed by African-­ American artists and critics in the sixties and early seventies was an effort to forge an unbreakable link between artistic production and revolutionary politics.”27 The extraordinary richness of the Black Arts Movement should not have to form part of an identifiable “avant-­garde” in twentieth-­century art in order to be studied. And yet it is one of only a few art movements tightly tied to an a­ ctual po­liti­cal vanguard. But in art history, the tendency is to tell a story of a progressive march through time, as artists got better and smarter and left b­ ehind old styles or cleverly reappropriated them. The vanguard story reinforces the selectivity of cultural memory. Dif­fer­ent kinds of willed ignorance abet one another u ­ ntil they do not even require willing. Conversely, attentiveness to race also reveals absences that extend beyond race. ­There are many ways in which the lens of the Black Arts Movement can also allow us to see a dif­fer­ent and broader landscape of twentieth-­century art. Historians of African American art have given attention to the Black Arts Movement, beginning with Samella Lewis, who wrote arguably from within the perspective of the Black Arts Movement in her African American Art and Artists of 1978. The book opens with the declaration of a “cultural revolution” in pro­gress, and goes on to use language that resonates with Black Arts Movement princi­ples, such as the “functional” character of Black art, and “aesthetic princi­ples derived from Africa.”28 Lewis gives limited attention to Chicago artists, in part ­because her organ­ization by individual artist, medium, and theme does not permit a focus on the geographic situatedness and community involvements of artists and movements. Given her proj­ect of universalizing the relevance of the artists she discusses, rather than particularizing them by region, in many cases the places where artists live and work are not actually discernible in her narrative. For my purposes, the study is still 14  /

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especially valuable in foregrounding numerous artists around the United States whose work shares po­liti­cal and formal concerns with t­hose active in Chicago. ­ entury (whose sec­ In his 1997 Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth C ond edition in 2002 was titled Black Art: A Cultural History), Richard Powell gave the Chicago group africobra, which grew out of the obac Visual Arts Workshop, a short but sensitive treatment.29 Similarly, in African American Art, published in 1998, Sharon Patton touches on obac, the Wall of Re­spect, and africobra in the broader context of Black artists groups, Black art, and Black Power. Other scholars have written on specific artists, and exhibitions such as The Freedom Princi­ple and Soul of a Nation have addressed africobra and some of their contemporaries.30 In par­tic­u­lar, exhibitions curated by Kellie Jones—­Witness and Now Dig This!—­have under­ lined the significance of art made in response to and support of the Civil Rights Movement, on the one hand, and Black art in Los Angeles, on the other.31 Books on the national mural movement have appeared at a slow but steady pace. Kymberly Pinder’s 2016 Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago has done pioneering work on Black religious murals, including William Walker’s murals on churches.32 Recent work on race and repre­sen­ta­tion in the 1970s such as Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-­Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­First-­Century Black Aesthetics (2017) and Darby En­glish’s 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016) focus on abstraction in the work of Black artists e­ ither inside or outside the Black Arts Movement, suggesting countercurrents to much of the work studied in this book.33 Indeed, the fact that ­until recently ­there was ­little scholarship on the period may also reflect the fact that ambitious Black artists of the subsequent generation experienced the Black Arts Movement and its quest for a Black aesthetic as compulsion—­a po­liti­cal orthodoxy that established, as En­glish describes it, “constraints on artistic freedom.”34 bell hooks puts it thus: “Rather than serving as a catalyst promoting diverse artistic expression, the Black Arts Movement began to dismiss all forms of cultural production by African-­Americans that did not conform to movement criteria. Often this led to aesthetic judgments that did not allow for recognition of multiple black experience or the complexity of black life.”35 The Black Arts Movement never represented all Black artists in its own time, and for t­ hose who initially identified with it, it was a chosen po­liti­cal commitment. Artists of ­later generations experienced it as a demand that they identify with an essentialist notion of blackness, constituting a rigorously

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imposed identity politics that, ironically, reduced the range of possibilities for Black subjectivity. This question might seem to parallel white critics’ rejection of po­liti­cal and repre­sen­ta­tional art as doctrinaire and ephemeral in ­favor of abstraction in the ­middle twentieth ­century. For critics invested in African American artists, to critique the Black Arts Movement is not a ­matter of rejecting po­liti­cal art outright but rather supporting a full range of sophisticated possibilities for po­liti­cal and aesthetic modes of engagement. Within this context, scholarly attention to the Black Arts Movement might seem to risk romanticizing an essentialist position, and this is not what I aim to do. Rather, I seek a clear view of what was at stake both po­liti­ cally and artistically in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Chicago, reclaiming the complex po­liti­cal and aesthetic ambitions of the work of that period— as a m ­ atter of faithful repre­sen­ta­tion of the past, insofar as I am able, and as a resource for the ­future. Putting the Black Arts Movement and related proj­ects of the late 1960s into dialogue with the field of art history poses challenges to the discipline. What events, works, ­people, and proj­ects become indispensable, and which ones seem less impor­tant? How does this rewrite the field’s key issues and values? What cherished aesthetic oppositions suddenly look more alike than dif­fer­ent? What kind of object lessons can it provide for po­liti­cally engaged art, or art as social intervention, for now fash­ion­able forms of “social practice”? Although art historians no longer identify with midcentury modernist prejudices against repre­sen­ta­tional art, the discipline still tends to view “community arts” that pres­ent “positive images” as simply naïve. ­These modes of artmaking are disparaged as “affirmative” by theoretical discourse that privileges the negative—­that is, art that is aesthetically antagonistic, preferring irony, ambiguity, and the production of discomfort to declarative po­liti­cal or social statements.36 From the point of view of American modernist criticism, such art errs in being reducible to language, failing to avail itself fully of the resources of its own medium. I argue in this book, however, that we cannot reduce even the most “affirmative” po­liti­cal art of the Black Arts Movement to linguistic statements. The movement did not seek merely to tell its viewers something. It sought to transform them. Black Experientialism

The Black Arts Movement prac­ti­tion­ers I study ­here could be understood as the inventors of “social practice” before t­ here was a fash­ion­able art world term for it. ­Today, artists who work in extended community collaborations 16  /

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(­whether ­under the label of “social practice” or not) have license to think broadly about art as not only product but also pro­cess. The work of strategizing, planning, designing, building, arranging, negotiating, and publicizing is legible nowadays—­when carried out by recognized prac­ti­tion­ers, at least—as art. Even in 1968, for an artist like Christo, working with Chicago’s Museum of Con­temporary Art (mca) in preparation for wrapping the building in 1969, the negotiations with the museum and the city ­were not distinct from the monumental physical “object” created by that pro­cess. And from the point of view of current discourse on “relational aesthetics” or “social practice,” the work of art (in the sense of l­abor and of accomplishment) can embrace the pain and plea­sure of negotiating and working through challenges and antagonisms, and inventing new forms of social relations and sensory experience.37 Mike Sell has argued that the “critical metaphysics” of the Black Arts Movement attacked the circulation and commodification of objects and focused on consciousness and the “per­for­mances, artists, and communities that surrounded the object and text.”38 He suggests affinities with other contemporary media and practices—­video, installation, conceptual art, and per­for­mance. Methods ­were “transient, situational, performative” and the rapid demise of experimental institutions was assumed as part of a revolutionary pro­cess.39 Paul Car­ter Harrison, in his Drama of Nommo, developed an account of ritual theater tapping into ancestral cultural forms. For him, participation was key. Audience members are participants and actors are activators: “Nommo force is best sustained through the collective-­energy commitments of participators and activators.” Participators and activators improvise together, though within structure provided by activators.40 In keeping with this idea, per­for­mance, participation, and experience (not to mention revolution) ­were watchwords for Black art. In the emphasis on per­for­mance, ­music played a key role. The visual arts might be characterized as improvisational or performance-­oriented on the model of jazz or other Black musical forms. Black artists in all genres frequently alluded to the centrality of ­music and theater as art forms. Black Americans’ contribution to m ­ usic in particular—in the nation and around the world—­was unquestionable.41 Taking a non-­European perspective also incited a revaluing of the musical and performing arts: as saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Marion Brown argued in Black World in 1973, an emphasis on vision characterized Western socie­ties, while non-­Western socie­ties emphasized the aural. Visibility implies a relationship to evidence (hence a reliance on notions of accuracy) and yet “visual relationships are too

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detached and do not communicate directly with what is being perceived.”42 From this point of view, the visual arts—­painting in particular—­implied a detached, Western aesthetic sensibility. Furthermore, the relationship of makers to “objects”—­already a vexing term—­was particularly fraught ­because of the legacy of slavery. Some Black Arts Movement theorists positioned a Black aesthetic against the object—­ whether ­because Western aesthetics had reached a dead end in its focus on the object for its own sake, or as the result of the trauma of the M ­ iddle Passage and slavery, which irretrievably cut Black Americans off from the heritage of African artifacts and abusively turned h ­ uman subjects into “objects” of property.43 Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) wrote in the 1963 Blues ­People that “the artifact was, like any other material manifestation of pure African culture, doomed. . . . ​­Music, dance, religion do not have artifacts as their end products, so they w ­ ere saved.” They w ­ ere “the most apparent legacies of the African past,” the art forms best positioned to tap into African heritage, hence the best models for artists reconstructing or excavating black identity.44 In his essay “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in ­Music,” published in Addison Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic, jazz guitarist and writer Jimmy Stewart took this position a step further, affirming per­for­mance as an internal and not merely accidental paradigm for Black art. He argues that culture in the white American context was based on “the accumulation of discernible artifacts of a p ­ eople”—­a position that enabled whites to believe that Black Americans had no culture.45 But, Stewart insisted, ­music forms “the ideal paradigm of our understanding of the creative pro­cess as a movement with existence,” meaning “to accompany real­ity, to ‘move with it’ . . . ​and not against it, which all, yes all, the white cultural art forms do.”46 ­Here, the “negative” emerges not only as characteristic of modernism but also as a characteristic of the deadness of Western art forms, embalmed in museums and cut off from participation in life. What might the value be in recuperating community for the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, precisely as a site of contestation and as an intentional intervention? The mood of the period helped inspire community engagement that often took the form of solidarity across class differences. When abundantly gifted Black artists who had trained at prestigious art schools and colleges, who might other­wise have chosen the path of assimilation into a white art world, embraced blackness instead, it was a deliberate po­ liti­cal and aesthetic act. The resulting works w ­ ere not products of amorphous community feeling or Zeitgeist but of complex negotiations. Collaborations 18  /

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with community meant dealing with gangs, with schoolchildren, with their el­derly neighbors—­largely also African American but in many cases quite dif­ fer­ent from the artists and from one another in aspirations and resources. For many, it was a defining act of racial solidarity to identify as Black rather than as aspiring middle-­class American, and one that was not a given. This has not been acknowledged as a conscious decision and new commitment. From the point of view of the white/mainstream art world, this solidarity, if it is considered at all, is simply assumed. In the realm of relational aesthetics and social practice, it is now considered noteworthy and in­ter­est­ing as an aesthetic practice, not only a community practice, when artists work with poor and disenfranchised communities. I suggest that the fact that Black artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged with communities is typically not considered a significant pre­ce­dent for socially engaged art ­today ­because racial solidarity and homogeneity are simply assumed. Indeed, the rhe­toric of the time—­the rhe­toric of nationalism and of white social ser­vice agencies alike—­encourages this view, as does the way white supremacy reserves complex subjectivity and group heterogeneity to whites. But it oversimplifies the complexity and the consequence of the work, both pro­cess and product. Examining work done by Chicago artists of all races making settings in communities, working on and with the street, I hope to make vis­i­ble this crucial set of practices—­largely work done by African American artists—on which ­later ideas about “social practice” ­were built. As John Runcie put it in 1976, the Black Arts Movement produced a “cele­bration of blackness, the provision of a more positive self-­image and the psychological liberation of black ­people through an art which would publicize black heroes and at the same time legitimize, without romanticizing, the lives of ordinary black p ­ eople.” Middle-­class artists “recognized the validity and potential importance of ghetto culture and . . . ​sought to interpret, reinforce, validate and direct this culture.”47 But this posed prob­lems: How much to “interpret, reinforce, validate and direct”? How much to listen, and how much to talk? Whom to teach, and from whom to learn? Vernon Dixon addressed the question of how African Americans who had embraced middle-­class white American values could relate to “the ­brother on the street” in a 1968 essay in Negro Digest.48 He argued that the danger of individualism made itself felt in a desire for self-­apotheosis—­ the personal desire to both receive the affirmation of poor Blacks and serve as their spokesman. Before attempting to assume positions of leadership, Black college students had to overcome their overreliance on an “American value matrix” that promoted individualism, literal over figurative meaning,

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and reason over emotion. Dixon suggested that Black intellectuals educated in mainstream contexts needed, too, to develop more fluency in figurative language and sensitivity to the value of emotion. It is easy to see how art might be understood as a key means to express ­these intangible values: the figurative and imaginative, emotion, and even communalism. In the formation of the Black Arts Movement, Black intellectuals expressed optimism that art held potential to change p ­ eople’s consciousness. And not only African Americans could benefit, but Amer­i­ca as a society—at least according to Lerone Bennett Jr. The editor of Ebony wrote in his brilliant (though not well-­known) 1964 book, The Negro Mood: ­ here is still another seed in the Negro community that promises a T bountiful harvest: the seed of a certain dark joy. With a tenacity that is somewhat frightening, with a resilience that is very beautiful, the Negro—­the ­middle class excepted—­has resisted the corrupting influence of money and machines at any price. In the direct circumstances, in fear and trembling, in blood and suffering, the Negro has retained a certain dark joy—­a zest for life, a creative capacity for meeting adversity and transcending it—­that is beautiful and meaningful. . . . ​Americans could use some of that life-­giving force.49 Hardly anyone would write like this ­today. It is uncomfortable even to quote it. It appears to reify and romanticize a situation of extreme oppression and social exclusion. But it is worth pausing to comprehend its radicalism, as part of an argument for why a Black revolution is necessary to reshape American society utterly—­not only on behalf of Blacks but also on behalf of Amer­i­ca. For Bennett, poor African Americans w ­ ere holders of authenticity, perhaps the nation’s sole hope for escaping what already, in 1964, seemed a technocratic nightmare of late modernity. They could play this role not only by default (­because, left out of mainstream American culture, they had no access to its false promises and thereby its “corrupting influence”) but ­because they had in fact resisted that influence, forging a distinctive culture, distinctive skills, even a distinctive mood, crystallizing a position as both aesthetic and po­liti­cal vanguard. The sense of poor Blacks in par­tic­u­lar as holding an alternative cultural vision suggested forms of class solidarity that sought common ground in a clearer-­sighted view from below, an understanding of Amer­i­ca’s corruption that came from the perspective of the bottom of the social hierarchy. Starting from this position, the sociologist Gerald McWorter, one of the found­ ers of obac, drafted an “all-­purpose handout” for the organ­ization in 1967 20  /

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on the topic of “Black Experientialism.” He emphasized a notion of shared experience that united all African Americans and suggested that artists and intellectuals not hold themselves to the standards of white society or of other Black intellectuals but instead “use as a barometer of his leadership . . . ​ the man farthest from him in the black community—­the man who is on the so-­called ‘top’ needs to judge his per­for­mance by how the man on the bottom views what he is d­ oing.”50 Pres­ent in his text are the outlines of a notion that art, by shaping consciousness and by addressing and resolving tensions between Black p ­ eople, can move po­liti­cal liberation forward. ­McWorter wrote, “­There is a cultural revolution ­going on which has meaning in terms of what kind of art is being produced, what kinds of experiments are ­going on, and what is happening in the consciousness of vast numbers of p ­ eople, as they think about their place in the black community and the nature of this community within which they belong.”51 He thus argued that the new thinking about the role of Black art should reserve a place of honor for “the community.” “Creative blackness” would be art not only to hang on the walls but to reshape p ­ eople, to permeate life. “We can use it to make ourselves more beautiful,” he wrote, “and we have to do that—­more beautiful to ourselves, more beautiful to each other, more beautiful to every­body, ­because somebody who knows they are beautiful Is beautiful, and that’s exactly what we have to do.”52 The relationship between individual artist and collective community was not a ­simple one in which the artist served as a funnel or vehicle for a unitary collective feeling. Rather, McWorter wrote, it was the product of tensions. Art, as produced by specific individuals, is the end product of tensions that come out of the community experience on the one hand versus the personal experience of the artist. . . . ​[The] communal aspirations, the communal experiences, the communal hopes, the communal gods, are the context in which art is produced, but on the other hand the artist himself has a par­tic­u­lar, personal, individual view of real­ity, that is obviously related to the communal view of real­ity, but they are not one and the same. It is out of this kind of tension and interaction between t­ hese two ­things, that art is produced which has integrity of being Black, b­ ecause it represents the fusion between the communal experience and a Black artist who has a par­tic­u­lar kind of insight.53 The artist does not simply funnel the expression of the “community” but engages in a dialectical relationship with it that shapes the production of

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art.54 Within pos­si­ble configurations for the relationship between artist and community, this position sits between two poles. The artist could be a vehicle for community feeling (which risked dissolving the par­tic­u­lar qualities of the artist into an undifferentiated u ­ nion with community), or could be an enlightened preacher to the masses or role model for them (both of which risked overstating the artist’s importance and condescending to the rest of the community). The “tension and interaction” kept both artist and community in play as partners in a dialogue, perhaps an idealistic view. [The artist’s] special gift is brought to bear with the personal sensibility of that person or group of p ­ eople, and the community out of which he comes, over which he stands against, t­oward which he is moving his art, for whom he wants to pres­ent his art. . . . ​If the artist who is producing the art is concerned about his Black experience, is concerned about the Black community, and coming to grips with himself as a person with this, and if he deals artistically, out of this context, bringing to bear the Black sensibility in producing a work of art, and if the social context for viewing or experiencing the art has to do with the same Black context, and if the ­people are the Black community, then the entire pro­cess is a Black pro­cess.55 Many ­things are “Black” in this statement: sensibility, context, community, pro­cess, and above all experience. McWorter continues: “Now, as with the example of the Blues, Black Experientialism must be lived and realized in the everyday experiences of the ­people who are involved, or it ­will remain a possibility and not a real­ity.”56 He suggests a form of aesthetic solidarity in blackness across class, forged in the crucible of art, that would “unify the vari­ous components of the Black community.”57 What this would look like was up to visual artists to define, but it would certainly involve the creation of a new “context”: “The fact is,” McWorter wrote, “that obac is an attempt to bring a new context in [sic] Chicago, a new situation, a new structure for cultural creativity and expression, a structure which is Black, is rooted in the Black community, and belongs to the Black community.”58 Jeff Donaldson, in notes for an early obac meeting, describes experientialism as follows: “We ­can’t go back. We ­can’t create African art forms. That would be phony and fraudulent. ­Because while we love our ancient home and our African ­brothers, we are Black Americans and we must create visual art which expresses the experience of being Black right ­here and right now!”59

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Art and the Street

Recognizing the differences that separated African Americans, McWorter sought cultural strategies to draw African Americans together into what he called a shared “context,” “situation,” and “structure” based in cultural expression—­what Seymour Sarason, writing contemporaneously, called a “setting.”60 Given the major role Hoyt W. Fuller, then editor of Negro Digest, played in the founding of obac, we might emphasize the role of periodical lit­er­a­ture in creating such contexts in a virtual way at the regional or national level. The Black Arts Movement, as it developed in Chicago, worked in tandem with the impor­tant publications that made Chicago the center of the African American publishing industry, in par­tic­u­lar the Chicago Defender (which became a daily in 1956) and Johnson Publishing Com­pany, which published Ebony and Jet alongside Negro Digest (which was to become Black World in 1970). It would not be a stretch to say that Negro Digest formed the intellectual core of the Black Arts Movement nationwide.61 To consider only the virtual and conceptual (“­imagined”) community forged by reading ­matter would be, however, to understate the importance of shared geography. In the 1960s and 1970s Black artists and community members in Chicago also made highly vis­i­ble claims on changing urban space, and it is worth stopping to gain a more concrete understanding of the histories and geographies of the par­tic­u­lar neighborhoods at stake in this book. A 1933 map produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago (figure I.5) adds detail to the census map, showing prosperous and well-­ established whites living at the edges of the city (with a few choice lakefront exceptions), with an “inner city” of mostly white immigrants, but a few areas of “over 50% Negro” population. ­These included a strip on the West Side (defined by Damen on the west, the railroads east of Halsted to the east, Roo­se­velt Road to the north and 16th Street to the south), and a thicker swath heading south from around 22nd Street near Lake Michigan to 71st Street, and (apart from a few outlying pockets) generally contained by Cottage Grove Ave­nue on the east and State Street on the west. Large parts of it are dotted to indicate “rooming h ­ ouse areas,” revealing more transient, eco­nom­ically precarious, and crowded populations. This area was the classic Black B ­ elt, where African Americans heading up the Mississippi from the South during waves of migration found a place to live. Workers and middle-­class strivers and wealthy residents lived cheek by jowl in the Black ­Belt. Intermingling, they built businesses, developed institutions, educated c­ hildren, and nurtured a distinctive culture. A similar but smaller,

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I.5. Map of Chicago Showing Types of Cultural and Economic Areas, 1933.

Produced by Social Science Research Committee, University of Chicago. Map Collection, University of Chicago Library.

and generally somewhat poorer, enclave of African Americans established itself on the West Side, where large numbers of mi­grants from the South settled following World War II.62 In this book, I concentrate on the proj­ects of artists and community members who lived and worked in Black and mixed (which might mean changing) neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago: First, Bronzeville, which held the Black cultural institutions of longest standing. Then, neighborhoods where Black artists w ­ ere creating spaces and building community—in dif­fer­ent ways, depending on ­whether it was a ­matter of the mixed university neighborhood of Hyde Park–­Kenwood to the south of Bronzeville, or the areas of Black expansion further south and west—­ Woodlawn south of the university, South Shore on the lakefront to the southeast, Washington Park to the west of Hyde Park, and Englewood further west and further south. On the West Side, I focus on North Lawndale, one of the poorest community areas of Chicago. ­There, a collaboration between the street organ­ization called the Conservative Vice Lords and the brand-­new Museum of Con­temporary Art and other cultural and social ser­ vice organ­izations created a community art space known as Art & Soul that drew in neighbors as well as artists from around the city. As Manuel Castells writes in The City and the Grassroots, “Cities and space are the unfinished products of historical debates and conflicts involving meaning, function, and form.”63 ­People who are very poor participate in ­these debates and conflicts using the means available to them. Without the power to make plans and policy, how would ­people make themselves vis­i­ble and audible in the city? In fact, ­there ­were many ways to speak in the streets. ­People engaged in protest marches, pickets, and occupations. For ­these events they produced signs, banners, ­music and noisemaking devices, and threatrical props. They marked surfaces with graffiti. All t­hese ­were ways of taking over urban space.64 In her poem “Prodigal Objects,” published in 1997, Carolyn Rod­gers wrote: “when i lose something, / i am all out in the streets / looking for it.”65 In the remainder of the poem, it becomes clear that what has been lost could be a valued physical object, or it could be a person, or it could be something more abstract: memory, freedom, or culture. This sense of what can be found “out in the streets” suggests the multiple pos­si­ble resonances of the “street,” as ­people, culture, object, or idea, as a place of sights, sounds, and smells. In the working-­class neighborhoods of Chicago, especially in good weather and regardless of race, the street beckoned as a place to look for something—­ whether it was something you had had and lost, or not. While it had its

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hazards, it was also a place for many forms of social life: a place where ­people could stretch out, show off, pair off, cool off in the summer, conduct business (licit and illicit), dance, hear m ­ usic, make art. For p ­ eople living in overstuffed apartment buildings, with few amenities and ­little privacy, the street could—at times—­hold freedom, relaxation, conviviality, and relative safety. The concentration of population and the particularly crowded domestic spaces of Bronzeville produced a particularly intense street culture. ­People spent time on the street getting from one place to another (in 1960, areas of Chicago with large majorities of African Americans typically had fewer than one car for ­every four ­people66), but they also saw the street as something more than just a place to pass through. This book considers the idea of the street as a place, a group of ­people and practices, and a point of view. It was the site of protests and parades, of illicit economies and alternative po­liti­cal structures—­that is, gangs—of gossip, murals, ice cream and vegetable vendors, and c­ hildren playing u ­ nder the watchful eyes of grand­ mothers who sat at the win­dow or on the stoop. Some communities for art could only find themselves in the street. I use the term street to talk about young ­people, about the street organ­izations and be­hav­iors some of them engaged in, and about adults viewed as marginal by society at large. It is a broad term, but I intend it as a respectful one. I examine dif­fer­ent kinds collaborations artists had with “the street”: their repre­sen­ta­tions of it, and their ways of speaking to it; and also the way the street itself found ways to speak. One of the ways the street spoke was through the young people’s street organ­izations often known as gangs. If discriminatory housing policy and urban renewal meant that working-­class African Americans had difficulty maintaining control over domestic space, their ­children found ways to lay claim to a mea­sure of power in the streets. It had long been the case that, for purposes of self-­defense when crossing neighborhood bound­aries, young ­people had or­ga­nized themselves into groups defined by place and ethnicity. Irish and Italian ­children of previous generations formed street associations, and many of ­those had acquired legitimacy over time. They even produced po­liti­cal figures—­including Mayor Richard  J. Daley, a leader of the infamous Hamburg Athletic Association, located in Bridgeport. As African Americans moved deeper into South and West Side neighborhoods, young ­people or­ga­nized themselves to defend themselves and claim territory, and they did so as part of a long tradition. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, smaller gangs that ran on par­tic­u­lar blocks built power and grew their numbers by joining with rivals they had once fought. Among the resulting organ­izations ­were the Blackstone Rangers and Gangster Disciples 26  /

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on the South Side, and the Vice Lords and Egyptian Cobras on the West Side. The Blackstone Rangers, as their name implies, got their start on South Blackstone—in Woodlawn, just south of Hyde Park—­after two leaders, Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston, met in the youth prison in St. Charles, Illinois. The organ­ization largely skirted around Hyde Park, but it also had strength in Bronzeville. To their west, still on the South Side, w ­ ere the Gangster Disciples, also formed through the merger of smaller gangs. On the West Side, the Vice Lords fought with the Cobras in the 1950s and, as they gained dominance, eventually pushed them south into an alliance with the Blackstone Rangers. Youth organ­izations routinely used visual media to make themselves vis­ i­ble. Gangs expressed group identity with uniforms and log­os.67 The Black Panthers, which emerged in the 1960s as a po­liti­cal organ­ization, also used stylish uniforms to impressive visual effect while selling their newspaper on street corners.68 Even the police ­were attuned to the meaning of dif­fer­ ent items of Black nationalist garb, as documents from the Red Squad files show. ­People improvised forms of expression that w ­ ere implicitly or explic­ itly po­liti­cal. As young p ­ eople made themselves collectively vis­i­ble in the streets, they also—­some of them—­made the streets theirs with copious graffiti. ­These markings made their way into public consciousness through the media, as in a photo John Tweedle took for the Daily News depicting graffiti on the building at the corner of 64th and Blackstone that proclaimed it “Apache Rangers” turf (figure I.6).69 Graffiti was becoming both more prominent and more politicized, as on the one hand, painted slogans claimed gang territory, and on the other hand, the words “Black Power” began appearing on Chicago walls. This was about more than just expression of group identity; it was also about shaping space. Marking walls was not the only way street organ­izations claimed turf and s­ haped space. They did that with vio­lence too—in the mid-1960s, killings and maimings and other violent crime abounded. But around that time, the Black street gangs of the South and West Sides ­were also beginning to imagine a dif­fer­ent way of operating. This included participating in community development proj­ects and creating cultural capital by partnering with mainstream institutions, new and established. A key argument of this book is that ­these organ­izations ­were impor­tant players in the making of art and cultural events in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not to excuse some of the other ­things they did. But it is to acknowledge this real aspect of the “Black Power” moment: the capacity for street organ­izations to get ­things done, the contributions they made to cultural activities, and the potential they held

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I.6. Apache Rangers graffiti. Photo by John Tweedle

for the Chicago Daily News, 1966.

to move even further in that direction, a potential squashed by the War on Gangs that the mayor, police, and federal authorities waged beginning in 1969. Chapter Outline

This is a story about an unusually rich landscape—or streetscape—of collaborations across race, class, and geography, and the philosophical, po­liti­cal, and aesthetic questions with which t­ hese collaborations attempted to come to terms. To imagine the streetscape of this proj­ect, I have used newspaper articles, archival materials, photos, interviews, and artworks. In places, I have had to fill gaps with conjecture or analogy. I begin, in chapter 1, with ways of thinking about and claiming public space that cluster around the Wall of Re­spect and the creation of in­de­pen­dent spaces for art, particularly on the South Side of Chicago. Chapter 2 discusses how Black cultural nationalism nourished community artistic collaborations, largely in the realm of ­music, that extended to gang members as well as the broader Black community (with proj­ects led by Oscar Brown  Jr. and Phil 28  /

In tro d u c t i on

Cohran). It also introduces white institutions’ attempts to insert themselves into the dialogue over community (in this case, Columbia College Chicago’s “The Arts and the Inner City” conference), and the ways Black artists responded. Chapter 3 follows in this vein with the major case study of the Conservative Vice Lords’ collaboration with the Museum of Con­temporary Art and other white institutions on an art center called Art & Soul. Chapter 4 studies the ways in which politicized Black artists, in par­tic­u­lar the artists of africobra, envisaged their potential impact on community audiences through the ideology of “positive images” and their techniques of production and distribution. In Chapter 5, I provide an overview of the multiracial community mural movement that followed the Wall of Re­spect, and study how community involvement could often produce results that ran c­ ounter to “positive images,” mounting a sharp critique of the status quo. In the last chapter, I look at the ways in which film and photography allowed community members to speak for themselves by “seizing the camera,” and how this practice rhymed with surreal effects in artworks that combined the real and the imaginary. ­These po­liti­cal and aesthetic developments unfolded in the context of efforts at reaching broad audiences through film in par­tic­u­lar. This closing chapter also addresses the economic and po­liti­cal challenges the Black Arts Movement faced as the 1970s progressed, and the continuing legacy of ­these proj­ects ­today. In writing this book, I am hoping to provide nourishment to contemporary artists and activists looking to the past for inspiration in imagining new forms of po­liti­cal action and autonomy, to art historians reinventing the history of twentieth-­century art, to anyone interested in knowing more about art, and especially Black art, in Chicago. Although I hope to create an analytically rich dialogue with the material at hand, I have consciously avoided importing theoretical frameworks from outside its time period in order to allow the rich artworks and sophisticated thinkers of the time to speak for themselves. But I have of course made choices about what to include, how to put the pieces together, and what conclusion to draw from them. I accept the risk of this and hope to open a dialogue—­I hope for my words to be critiqued, corrected, and expanded upon.



Introduct i on

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Claiming Space, Being in Public

1

Many African Americans of a certain age who grew up in Chicago or its south suburbs have a story to tell that goes something like this: “In the first-­grade class photo, ­there ­were only a few of us. But by the time we graduated from grade school, ­there ­were only a few white ­faces.” Neighborhoods in Chicago ­were changing that fast. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago was in the midst of a vast transformation that was happening neighborhood by neighborhood. The city’s near south, west, and north sides, in par­tic­u­lar, ­were undergoing dramatic physical changes. Between 1965 and 1968, the city of Chicago issued 21,140 de­mo­li­tion permits for dwelling units.1 Over the preceding de­ cades, land had been cleared for highways, high-­rise housing proj­ects, the University of Illinois, and the neighborhood redesign called “urban renewal.” To understand how artists addressed Black experience, how they addressed the street, and to see what was at stake as they responded to the city and its communities requires looking to the spatial politics of race in the city. If the beginning of the twentieth c­ entury is marked in Chicago by the “White City” of 1893’s Columbian Exposition (so named for the gleaming whiteness of the buildings constructed for the event), the 1920s to 1950s mark the moment of the “Black Metropolis” (the title of the classic study published by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton in 1945). African Americans had lived in Chicago from the city’s founding as a nonnative settlement. In par­tic­u­lar, in the 1780s, an Afro-­Haitian man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, set up his trading business in the region, which the Illinois, Miami, and Potawatomi, among other Native groups, had inhabited for generations. By the early twentieth ­century, a majority of African Americans in the city lived in

what was called the Black ­Belt, now Bronzeville, on the near South Side of the city. This was where African Americans had first begun settling in large numbers. It contained working-­class tenements, business and entertainment districts (including the celebrated “Stroll”), and the stylish neighborhoods of the Black ­middle and upper classes.2 As African Americans’ numbers grew, they also moved into the near West Side and pushed further south from Bronzeville. But they had difficulty settling elsewhere, b­ ecause whites or­ga­nized themselves early in the c­ entury to prevent African Americans from moving into other parts of the city. Municipalities could not enforce residential segregation in Illinois, but the Chicago Real Estate Board developed a new technique based on the primacy of contracts in Anglo-­Saxon law: the racially restrictive covenant.3 White homeowners effectively closed much of the city’s housing to African Americans through racially restrictive covenants. ­These covenants—­contracted by groups of property o­ wners who agreed not to sell or rent to Blacks and other minorities—­were held to bind not only pres­ent but also ­future ­owners. By 1928, as the Hyde Park Herald put it, t­ hese barriers stretched “like a marvelous, delicately woven chain of armor” from “the northern gates of Hyde Park at Thirty-­fifth and Drexel Boulevard to Woodlawn, Park Manor, South Shore, Windsor Park, and all the far-­flung white communities of the South Side.”4 As racially restrictive covenants w ­ ere put into place, the Black B ­ elt swelled with new waves of Black mi­grants from the South who arrived in what became known as the G ­ reat Migration.5 The city’s Black population, which already mushroomed from 40,000 to nearly 280,000 between 1910 and 1940, had grown to 813,000 by 1960, constituting a quarter of the city’s total population, as ­people arrived in search of jobs and opportunity. As the Black population grew, and could not move elsewhere, Bronzeville’s overcrowded ­houses and apartments ­were chopped up into smaller and smaller units, often without hot ­water or other amenities. African Americans who had the means to seek out living space in other parts of the city found many doors closed to them, although they might be able to find homes in enclaves where ethnic and religious minority whites (Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Bohemians) had preceded them—­often, ­these groups had not put restrictive covenants in place ­because they ­were also targeted by them. In a series of cases in the 1940s, the Supreme Court began recognizing that the actions of homeowners in creating racially restrictive covenants ­were “state actions” rather than private ­matters, and could thus be addressed legally as a m ­ atter of civil rights. The 1940 Supreme Court decision in Hansberry v. Lee (brought by the f­ather of playwright Lorraine Hansberry over the C laiming Spa ce, Being in Public

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f­amily’s ­house in the Woodlawn neighborhood) determined that a racially restrictive covenant could not be enforced on a white homeowner who sought to sell to an African American buyer merely ­because the covenant had previously been upheld in court, since the white homeowner had not been a party to the previous decision. A subsequent and more specific case, Shelley v. Kraemer, held that racially restrictive covenants could not be legally enforced on o­ wners through the machinery of the state, though they could still be put in place and voluntarily followed (they w ­ ere not actually outlawed ­until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and even t­oday many stay on the books). Throughout this period, however, segregation was also enforced by government rules about mortgage insurance. The Federal Housing Authority (fha) would not insure mortgages in predominantly Black—or “changing”—­neighborhoods. Realtors and the federal government together prevented Blacks from buying property outside of well-­defined, historically Black neighborhoods like the Black B ­ elt. ­After 1948 more and more Blacks tried to move out from the Black ­Belt and into neighborhoods to the south and west. The change was dramatic. The now mixed but majority-­Black block where I live, next to Washington Park, went from 5.5 ­percent Black to 89 ­percent Black in the space of just six years, from 1950 to 1956.6 In some neighborhoods, white residents reacted angrily: newcomers w ­ ere not just snubbed; they w ­ ere regularly met with mobs and physical vio­lence, as well as arson and bomb attacks on their homes.7 Other whites simply left. Neighborhoods changed quickly ­because of real estate speculation that on the one hand exploited the quintessentially American middle-­class hopes of Blacks (good schools, safe neighborhoods) and on the other hand explic­itly played on the racial fears of whites. Engaging in “block busting” (causing a racial turnover in an entire block) and “panic peddling” (playing on racial fears of economic decline—­based on the federal government’s refusal to guarantee mortgages in Black or “changing” neighborhoods), speculators drove whites to sell cheap. ­Every new African American ­family that moved into a neighborhood became a touchstone for further pressuring of more and more whites to sell. In a m ­ atter of a few years, neighborhoods w ­ ere shifting from white to Black. Some of t­ hese Black families bought their h ­ ouses, paying inflated prices for their ­houses, relative to the rock-­bottom prices whites had sold them for. But many of them ­were forced to enter into the more insidious hell of contract buying. As African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, and as the fha refused to insure loans in ­those neighborhoods, the only options for would-be homeowners who did not have the full selling price in cash ­were 32  /

C H APTER 1

“contract buying” plans, highly disadvantageous financial arrangements whereby the buyer paid on an installment plan. They typically paid more for less and w ­ ere left without any equity in the homes they thought they had purchased—­but ­were in fact essentially renting. They ­were subjected to hidden fees and rate changes and harassment by inspection, leading in many cases to the loss of the home.8 Without access to federally guaranteed mortgages, the Black m ­ iddle class could not develop financial security as their white counter­parts did. Urban neighborhoods in the post–­World War II period also dealt with the profound disruption of the war itself and of the returning population of soldiers, white and Black, who needed work. Populations whose employment level had increased during wartime—­the overlapping categories of ­women, young ­people, and African Americans—­lost jobs to returning veterans, and many young Black men thus found themselves without much hope of l­egal employment. Black veterans came home with reasonable expectations of gratitude for their ser­vice, which the government, mortgage lenders, educational institutions, and private employers ­were in no rush to provide, gi Bill or no gi Bill.9 As Black families and individuals moved into new neighborhoods, ­whether they ­were renters or buyers, they often had difficulty finding jobs. For example, Blacks moved into North Lawndale in large numbers in the postwar period. ­Because it had been a Jewish neighborhood, its properties had fewer racially restrictive covenants. But still, the abundant manufacturing jobs at places like Sears, Roebuck and Com­pany and International Harvester, which provided a middle-­class wage to high school gradu­ates, remained largely closed to them. New residents watched as p ­ eople who no longer lived in the neighborhood commuted in for the jobs African Americans could not get. Meanwhile, between 1950 and 1965, the inner third of Chicago (which encompassed North Lawndale) lost 400 companies and 70,000 jobs to the suburbs.10 Po­liti­cally, North Lawndale and other West Side districts ­were called “plantation wards”: their politics w ­ ere controlled by white aldermen who w ­ ere part of the formidable Daley po­liti­cal machine. Some of the West Side aldermen even lived outside their wards, by the lake.11 ­There ­were other spatial strategies whites used to slow the advance of racial integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, working with the federal government, the city of Chicago and local entities—in par­tic­u­lar the University of Chicago and the new University of Illinois Circle Campus—­were spearheading “urban renewal” efforts on the South Side that would be models for the rest of the country. The ostensible purpose of renewal efforts was to fight urban “blight” by redeveloping parts of the city whose housing stock was C laim ing Spa ce, Being in Publi c

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particularly degraded. Often this meant turning land over to speculators, or on a more basic level, pushing Blacks out or preventing them from moving in. In Hyde Park, the university’s motives ­were fairly transparent: to discourage the demographic shift that was bringing more African Americans into the neighborhood. (The program of urban renewal was popularly known among neighborhood critics as “Negro Removal.”) The program operated by demolishing rental properties and mixed-­use commercial space, building suburban-­ style shopping centers and town­houses, and rerouting traffic to make it harder to enter or leave the neighborhood. The city’s plentiful streetcar lines w ­ ere also removed, creating a city based on the automobile, as major highway proj­ects unfolded across the racialized landscape: the Eisenhower (I-290) cut right through the m ­ iddle of North Lawndale on the West Side; the Dan Ryan (90/94) cut between Black and ethnic white neighborhoods on the South Side, with a series of high-­rise housing proj­ects stationed alongside it like sentries. Critics at the time, such as Jane Jacobs—­who took par­tic­u­lar aim at the Hyde Park–­Kenwood case—­pointed out that the neighborhoods created by urban renewal ­were less rather than more hospitable to ­human life.12 Dependent on the automobile, moralistic in their campaigns against taverns, and emphasizing single-­family and soulless high-­rise housing to the detriment of smaller multifamily buildings and mixed residential and retail use, they discouraged the kind of foot traffic that helped residents collectively produce neighborhood safety, especially for ­children. Residents who opposed urban renewal w ­ ere able to beat back certain changes, or wring concessions from authorities, but the alteration of neighborhoods was still dramatic. Between 1953 and 1967, Hyde Park had 3,361 businesses operating, of which, a study concluded, “1838 liquidated and 668 relocated. 641 w ­ ere displacees, of whom 408 have now liquidated. Only 83 of the 637 businesses operating in the community t­ oday are displacees.”13 Many of the businesses that closed ­were in demolished buildings; ­others closed ­because their customer base was displaced. Similar conflicts occurred in the near North and near West Sides. The African American strug­gle in Chicago for civil rights in schools, housing, and employment was, in its own way, as challenging as the strug­gles of the South. Faced with rage as they moved to new neighborhoods, or displaced from their existing homes, many Black Chicagoans experienced the space of the city as confinement, frustration, and daily strug­gle, even as they aspired to shape their own ­futures. Neighborhood schools ­were a par­tic­u­lar flashpoint for discontent. Inspired by the pro­cess of school desegregation in the South, activists in Chicago built momentum through protests against inadequate schools. Starting in 1962, the Coordinating Council of Community 34  /

C H APTER 1

Organ­izations held protests and boycotts against the de facto segregation of Chicago public schools and the poor conditions of schools in Black neighborhoods. Schools ­were overcrowded, and system administrators refused to redraw neighborhood bound­aries to allow Black students to attend predominantly white schools with open spots. Instead, they imposed mobile classroom units that protesters termed “Willis Wagons” (­after the school superintendent, Benjamin Willis) and forced students to attend school in double shifts. Protests grew over the years that followed into an extensive movement that, in 1966, claimed the name “Chicago Freedom Movement” and turned its attention to one of the roots of the school prob­lem: housing issues. Activist tactics ­were inventive. Historian Arthur Waskow uses the evocative term “creative disorder” to describe the movement’s acts of nonviolent civil disobedience—­sit-­ins, blocking entrances to buildings, and lying down in the street.14 The movement’s activities in Chicago achieved national attention and produced national change, largely through the courts—as in the Hansberry case, already mentioned, and another Supreme Court case, Gregory v. Chicago. In August 1965, comedian Dick Gregory and other peaceful demonstrators protesting school inequities marched to Mayor Daley’s h ­ ouse ­under police protection (typical in situations where white vio­lence against protesters was a serious risk to public safety). When the march concluded outside Daley’s h ­ ouse, the police, citing concerns about the unruly be­hav­ior of white hecklers, demanded that the protesters leave—­and arrested them when they refused. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the subsequent disorderly conduct convictions, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned them, establishing the princi­ple that ­there is no “heckler’s veto” on protest.15 In the second half of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement entered a phase marked on the one hand by militancy and on the other by disillusionment.16 Cornel West describes the earlier phase as essentially a “critique of everyday life in the American South” that came about as a Black response to white racial vio­lence.17 It had success in transforming everyday life and in establishing federal protections for civil and voting rights. But by the mid1960s, the movement was changing, becoming increasingly radicalized. When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago, he was shifting gears, testing a strategy for northern cities that remained heavi­ly segregated and rife with discrimination. He arrived in the summer of 1966 to open Chicago’s housing market—­choosing the city as a test of the movement’s potential to make change in northern cities. To highlight the housing crisis, he chose to rent a rat-­infested tenement apartment at 16th and Hamlin—in the heart of Vice Lords territory. In August 1966, King and Chicago Freedom Movement ac C laim ing Spa ce, Being in Publi c

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tivists marched daily in such contested neighborhoods as Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, and Jefferson Park, with angry white mobs shouting and throwing projectiles at them. The spectacle was embarrassing for the city. A study done in 1967 reflects this experience, revealing severe racial animosity on the part of whites: 74.6 ­percent of Chicago whites said they mostly disliked Martin Luther King Jr. This statistic is not an outlier among white attitudes about civil rights in this period. In the 1960s, the white community in Chicago was a hotbed of virulent racism. Whites in Chicago w ­ ere largely unsympathetic to Black demands; most believed that Blacks had won the rights that they deserved, or had already gone too far. They wanted pro­ gress on racial equality to slow down. And as a group, they did not want Blacks living in their neighborhoods. A study conducted in the spring of 1967 showed that 65.2 ­percent of whites in Chicago strongly or moderately opposed any further action ­toward civil rights for African Americans.18 Further, 42.1 ­percent of whites stated an explicit preference for continued housing discrimination, and 15.9  ­percent believed that schools should be segregated by race; 10 ­percent believed racial discrimination in hiring should continue. Since ­these categories overlap, hence do not account for the full 65.2 ­percent, one must also assume that some whites who did not articulate a specific civil rights goal they disagreed with nonetheless felt uneasy about the extension of equal rights. Indeed, a very large number, 76.9 ­percent of whites, agreed that they “disapproved of the actions Negroes have taken on civil rights in the past few years.”19 While a generational shift t­ oward more white ac­cep­tance of racial equality is apparent in the survey data, even a majority of whites ­under thirty-­five—57 ­percent—­still fall into the category of moderate or strong opposition to further civil rights action.20 Meanwhile, African Americans saw that the ­legal rights they had gained over the previous de­cade had not translated into economic advancement. Building Institutions

This backdrop makes clear how impor­tant it was to claim space, both physically and symbolically. Cultural spaces of many kinds w ­ ere key to the development of the Black Arts Movement, as it nourished a vibrant culture of Black visual arts in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists turned their studios into galleries and came together to create spaces for exhibitions, meetings, and per­for­mances around the South and West Sides of the city. In the face of gentrification and so-­called urban renewal, many of ­these spaces ­were carved out in temporary sites and necessarily became nomadic, while o­ thers ­were 36  /

CH APTER 1

able to gain a toehold and survive for years. ­Either way, maintaining them involved creativity and strug­gle. Though Black artist-­run gallery spaces do not appear in the standard history of Chicago’s artist-­run spaces, Lynne ­Warren’s Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago, they w ­ ere actually abundant in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It might be said that artists have always made their own spaces. But experimental social groupings and uses of space w ­ ere especially prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from loose collectives sharing living quarters to utopian social experiments set apart from society to organ­izing headquarters where members of po­liti­cal movements could come together to regroup and strategize. Sites such as t­hese had always existed, but proliferated in the 1960s, and an index of this is the number of terms in­ven­ted to describe them by movement sociologists, urban planners, scholars, and journalists. Terms in­ven­ted in this period for the creative making of defined social and physical spaces, in which p ­ eople came together for specific goals, include “­free spaces,” “safe spaces,” “settings,” and “temporary communities.” In part this proliferation is an effect of the postwar baby boom, with an increased population of youth looking to come together in new ways outside the existing institutions they chafed against or found no place in for reasons of race, gender, youth, po­liti­cal radicalism, and many other reasons. In part it is, thus, an effect of po­liti­cal urgencies of the moment. In Chicago it was also, I argue, an effect of constantly and painfully shifting racial bound­aries and populations on the city’s South and West Sides. A map of Chicago’s community areas shows t­hose that had a high proportion of housing de­ mo­li­tions in 1965–68 relative to total population as recorded in the 1960 census (map 1.1). They are clustered around downtown and the South, West, and North Sides. Vast swaths of housing stock had already been demolished to make way for the interstate highway system in Chicago (the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways), housing proj­ects (most dramatically Robert Taylor Homes, the series of towers that ran down State Street), and the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus. Much of the new de­mo­li­tion clustered in t­ hese same neighborhoods; new de­mo­li­tion on the North Side particularly affected the area’s substantial Puerto Rican population, which was forced westward by gentrification. This situation created the need to come together and the desire to stake out space. It also produced some opportunities in the availability of marginal spaces such as vacated storefronts and theaters available for a short time in buildings that w ­ ere in the path of de­mo­li­tion. What in­de­pen­dent strategies might artists pursue? Claiming S pa ce, Bei ng in Publi c

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Demolished Units / 1960 Population 0.00% - 0.08% 0.09% - 0.18% 0.19% - 0.36% 0.37% - 0.83% 0.84% - 1.57% 1.58% - 2.90%

N

Map 1.1. Community areas of Chicago according to the number of demolished

units (1965–68) relative to 1960 population. Map by Kelsey Rydland.

Artists in the 1960s had models in older institutions, social forums, ­union halls, and settlement ­houses that had been a staple of community life since the turn of the ­century. Chicago had had its own Black Re­nais­sance, a younger con­temporary of the Harlem Re­nais­sance. In the ­middle twentieth ­century it possessed a solid tradition of writers and visual artists, not to mention musicians. Much of the credit for laying the institutional groundwork for the visual arts in Black Chicago must be given to Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs. “We h ­ ere in Chicago have a distinct identity as institution builders,” poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti explained to me, citing his own experience learning from Burroughs how to build and fund in­de­pen­dent institutions.21 Burroughs cut her own community organ­izing teeth with the South Side Community Art Center (sscac), which grew into a central cultural institu38  /

C H APTER 1

tion of the Black B ­ elt. The center was (and is) located at 3831 South Michigan Ave­nue, in the former Seaverns mansion. It was founded as a result of the hard work of community members who raised funds to open the center in late 1940. The Federal Art Proj­ect’s community art centers program funded the teaching staff for the first few years of operation, but it was the community subscription that enabled the organ­ization to buy the building, which turned out to be key to its survival when the federal funds for art stopped in 1943.22 The center is now the only continuously operating community art center in the country that was founded as part of the wpa. Artists and designers—­male and female—­whose salaries ­were paid by the Illinois Art Proj­ect developed plans for renovations to the interior of the building. Consulting on the proj­ect ­were two designers affiliated with Chicago’s New Bauhaus school, Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner: their job was to “co-­ordinate the vari­ous designs to form a unified w ­ hole.”23 The center was itself to be a work of art; an article in the Afro-­American noted that “novel usage of functional design and unusual treatments of textiles and wall surfaces promise to make the art center an object-­lesson of the use of art princi­ples in structural design and a show place of the South Side.”24 The New Bauhaus, which became the School of Design and then the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, included architects, designers, and educators trained in Germany’s Bauhaus who immigrated to the United States to work alongside László Moholy-­Nagy. The marriage of up-­to-­the-­minute modern design with a community center created to serve a largely low-­income neighborhood was a natu­ral one to Bauhauslers and their affiliates. For John Walley, who worked with or­ga­nized ­labor as part of the Chicago Artists Union and headed the Design Workshop of the Illinois Art and Craft Proj­ect, ­these new modern styles had a social value: “We must experiment in forms,” he declared in a 1940 speech, “and discover how they aid in bringing social change.”25 When the work was complete, the Victorian building’s new, open staircase design boasted uncluttered, curving modern lines that also graced the lobby’s front desk. Most of the original modern furniture and textiles are no more, but the wood paneling that lined the main art gallery remains; its rustic, unadorned warmth represents a dif­fer­ent vision of modernism than the white walls of the typical modern museum. Nail holes remain in the wood, accumulating over time as a vis­i­ble sign of the generations of public exhibitions that have occurred in the space.26 Perhaps it is a virtue of art that it can reveal the complexity in terms like public and community that might other­wise seem homogeneous. At its best, it may generate a conversation that allows conflicts to be revealed and C laiming Space, Being in P ubli c

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participation to be extended. The center was and is both an educational space and an exhibition space; it served ­children and adults, students, successful artists and struggling artists, and society ­women and men. But what the “community” was that the center was intended for—­its public—­was a fraught issue. A familiar kind of fault line emerged between the funders of the center, whose ideals about art coincided with their sense of bourgeois respectability, and the artists, many of them impoverished and struggling, who had spent years building community and working to scrape up exhibition spaces on the cheap. The center’s ambitions as a demo­cratic public space are apparent in an inaugural brochure sent out to solicit donations: “the Center ­shall be maintained and governed by the ­people who live in this community. . . . ​Participation in this active demo­cratic center ­will be ­free to all who wish to attend.”27 But when the center was opened to g­ reat fanfare with a visit from Eleanor Roo­se­velt (whose speech was broadcast on national radio), the artists ­were initially told that they would not be allowed to speak at the dedication. Margaret Burroughs (then Goss) quickly wrote up a statement and handed it to another artist, David Ross, who jumped up and read it to the crowd. In it Goss described the strug­gles of artists and declared that art’s purpose was “to rec­ord the times.”28 And the times—­Depression leading into war—­were certainly in need of recording. Margaret Burroughs was a teacher, painter, printmaker, historian, and above all institution builder. For de­cades, she taught high school art at DuSable High, and classes in art and writing to inmates in several Illinois prisons. Her work as a visual artist depends on a style of ­simple, blocky, slightly abstracted figures formed through the influence of social realism, in par­tic­u­lar the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros. She created works that emphasized the integration of Blacks and whites, such as her In School—­Together (figure 1.1), and also works that celebrated the specificity of Black history and culture as necessary to the flourishing of Black c­ hildren, as in her cover image of an African American m ­ other and child for her poem “What ­Shall I Tell My ­Children Who Are Black?” (figure  1.2). As a printmaker, she had ­little concern for the conventions of editioning (in which the value of each print is enhanced by the guarantee of limited quantity). She was more concerned with distribution to a broad audience than with maintaining the “fine art” status of her work. In her linocut prints, a favorite medium for her, she left her cuts into the surface very vis­i­ble, thus displaying the ­labor involved. The cuts also sometimes verge into ornamental striping or abstract geometries. But abstraction could go only so far; Burroughs strongly emphasized the ­human form as a direct and conscious 40  /

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1.1. Margaret Burroughs, In School—­Together. Linocut, n.d.

South Side Community Art Center.

counterpoint to white art world precepts of the mid-­twentieth ­century. Along with this, over the years, she also maintained a commitment to Black history as a means to provide positive examples for ­children. Burroughs’s approach to art was symbiotic with her leftist politics—­ politics hinted at in the intervention she made at the sscac’s inaugural event. Along with several of her contemporaries—­such as her second husband, Charles Burroughs; the sculptor Marion Perkins; her museum cofounder, Eugene Feldman; and the singer Oscar Brown Jr.—­she was sympathetic to ideas promulgated by the Communist Party, if not actually a member. Charles Burroughs was the son of the Communist Party activist Williana Burroughs, and had himself grown up partly in the USSR. Margaret owned copies of The Communist Manifesto and Capital; she traveled to Cuba and to the USSR. She held an insurance policy for her ­daughter, Gayle, with the International Workers Order, a Communist Party–­affiliated entity.29 Her activities ­were often u ­ nder surveillance by the authorities. In 1966 the fbi monitored her connections to the party as she planned a visit to the USSR for African American artists in collaboration with the Soviet American C lai mi ng S pa ce, Being in Pu bl ic

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1.2. Margaret Burroughs, ­Mother and Child. Linocut, n.d. South Side Community Art Center.

Friendship Society.30 (In a message retrieved by the fbi’s solo operation, a Soviet operative informed Gus Hall, Chairman of the Communist Party of Amer­i­ca, that the USSR Friendship Society would be contacting Burroughs about a pos­si­ble visit to the USSR by “Negro public and cultural workers.”31) Burroughs’s commitments ­were anti-­capitalist and anti-­imperialist as well as pro-­Black, and she was not one to hide her views. Thus, during the period of McCarthyism, as a public school teacher, she had to answer to the Chicago School Board for her links to the leftist African American singer and actor Paul Robeson.32 In 1952 she studied in Mexico City at the leftist Taller de 42  /

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Gráfica Popu­lar. It was the height of the Red Scare, and she worked ­there with a Communist American Mexican artist, Pablo O’Higgins.33 Her choices had consequences. When she returned to Chicago from Mexico in 1953 and proceeded to submit her membership fee to the South Side Community Art Center, she was told that it was “not the proper time” for the center to accept her membership.34 The center’s board elections that year—­the height of McCarthyism—­had resulted in a clean sweep of former members, and the new president of the board assured the police that no more subversives w ­ ere on the board.35 (By the late 1960s, Burroughs was back. The center experienced a new infusion of energy from the artists of the Black Arts Movement, who generated an energetic program of exhibitions, meetings, concerts, readings, and theatrical productions, and became once again a welcoming space for openly leftist artists.) As she described it l­ ater, Burroughs’s reaction to the snub was to move on to other proj­ects. In an interview, she explained: “I ­don’t go back trying to do anything against you. I keep moving, straight ahead. . . . ​We deci­ded well, maybe ­there’s room enough on the South Side for us to have two cultural institutions. One that’s devoted to history, and the arts center devoted to art. . . . ​And we deci­ded to start the Museum of Negro History.”36 Together with Charles Burroughs and Eugene Feldman, she had already assembled a collection of African and African American artifacts and documents. She formally opened the museum in the Burroughs home at 3806 South Michigan Ave­nue in 1961. A photo­graph from 1966 shows a bust of Du Sable outside a win­dow displaying a poster that describes the museum’s offerings and urges the public to “help make Negro history live” (figure 1.3). Her motivation came from work with other teachers and students that led to a desire to foster Black pride: “Negro ­children ­don’t have a sense of pride in their ­people’s contribution to society. This section of history has been ignored in the textbooks,” she said to a journalist in 1967.37 Burroughs obtained funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to hold a fellowship at the Field Museum, which gave her the opportunity to study African art at Northwestern University and to learn about fundraising and strategy from museum colleagues.38 ­Until 1973, the museum resided in Burroughs’s own home, serving not only as a collection of objects but also as a center for education in African American history and culture. By the fall of 1968 her Black History class was funded by the Sears Foundation and enrolled sixty-­five students ages eleven to sixteen. It placed emphasis on the idea of “positive image,” a commitment shared by many members of the Black Arts Movement (I w ­ ill discuss the idea of the “positive image” at greater 39 length in chapter 4). That same year the museum changed its name to the Cla iming Spa ce, Bei ng in Pu blic

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1.3. The Museum of Negro History and Art at 3806 South

Michigan Ave­nue, with bust of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable by Robert E. L. Jones, Chicago, 1966. Photo by Larry Nocerino for the Chicago Sun-­Times.

DuSable Museum in honor of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.40 Her canny strategizing eventually enabled her to move the DuSable Museum to a Chicago Park District building in Washington Park in 1973 and thereafter to receive a share in the state allocation to Park District museums. Throughout her life she also created art, taught c­ hildren, and continued her commitments to teaching art to prisoners incarcerated in Illinois correctional institutions.41 Along with the South Side Community Art Center and the Afro-­American History Museum/DuSable Museum, the Bronzeville neighborhood was home to a number of other cultural organ­izations. F. Hammurabi Robb, ­later F. H. Hammurabi, began producing books and calendars on African and African American achievement beginning in the 1920s, and traveled to Africa as early as the 1930s. He ran the House of Knowledge, which collected and disseminated information about Black history (figure 1.4). In the

1.4. February 1970 calendar. Created by Fidepe

­ ammurabi. South Side Community Art Center Archive. H Courtesy of South Side Community Art Center. C lai ming Space, Bei ng in Publ ic

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1950s, Hammurabi shared space with the Burroughses. He moved his operation to the third floor of the South Side Community Art Center in 1960, and ­later to 43rd Street and Martin Luther King Drive. Around the corner was the Abraham Lincoln Centre, a venerable social ser­vice center at 700 East Oakwood Boulevard (now the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University) that sponsored many cultural activities and militant meetings and became affiliated with the Hull-­House in 1966.42 In the late 1960s other organ­izations established themselves in the neighborhood. The Umoja Black Student Center opened in 1968 at 251 East 39th Street. The obac Center (a space run by the writers of obac and devoted to readings, meetings, and workshops) opened in June  1969 at 77 East 35th Street.43 Further south, Ellis’s Bookstore was another key site for po­liti­cally active Black intellectuals. In 1968 Eugene Perkins (­later Useni Eugene Perkins) wrote in the Chicago Daily News that “a Black Arts Colony was formed on 31st  St., near Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., to bring black artists together and to promote greater interest among black ­people in buying art.”44 Perkins wrote that the effort had found­ered ­because of urban renewal, but several galleries ­were still active on 31st Street in that year. Shepherd Studio and Gallery, run by Frank Shepherd, was located at 347 East 31st Street and exhibited pho­ to­graphy. In the same block was William Car­ter’s art and antiques shop. A few doors down was 353 East, a gallery run by Bill Daniel, Mary Reed Daniel, Howard Mallory, and José Williams. In between ­these storefronts, at number 349, a group of young artists (Louis Boyd, Sam Marshall, Robert Clay, Leon Savage, and Sidney James, all students at Crane City College—­soon to become Malcolm X College) opened another gallery, Studio 5.45 Many Black artists lived and had studios in and around Hyde Park, the neighborhood in which the University of Chicago was and is located. Urban renewal had pushed out many of the neighborhood’s Black residents and businesses, but it still retained some cultural diversity. Third World Gallery, at 5200 South Harper Ave­nue near the Harper Court complex, showed work by African American artists.46 Sticks and Stones, a Black international arts and crafts center, was located a few doors down at 5210 South Harper Ave­nue; Jeff Donaldson was a part own­er.47 Another Black artist, C. Rodger Wilson, had a studio gallery at 53rd and Harper, and hosted at least one obac meeting ­there.48 Harper Court, a split-­level complex or­ga­nized around open space that was devoted specifically to arts a­ nd ­crafts–­related businesses, had been created in 1962 at the instigation of residents concerned about changes in the neighborhood’s character. Following the loss of Hyde Park’s storied 46  /

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57th Street Artist Colony, a small bohemian enclave that occupied leftover cottages built for the Columbian Exposition, activists hoped to stem the loss to urban renewal of the often-­marginal operations focused on arts and crafts. (The pro­cess continues, as the original complex was demolished in 2009 by the University of Chicago and replaced by shiny towers housing a Hyatt H ­ otel, office space, chain restaurants, and upscale shops.) Nearby, Jae Jarrell, one of the found­ers of africobra, owned a dress shop, Jae of Hyde Park, which displayed paintings by her husband, Wadsworth, another cofounder (seen in figure 1.5 is Wadsworth’s painting Cockfight). Not far away, at 1703 East 55th Street, the Lakeside Gallery opened in 1968. It was run by Barry and Josephine Plotkin (a white Jewish former University of Chicago student from Baltimore married to a Black ­woman from the South Side). Barry had an interest in the arts, and met Murry DePillars at the 57th Street Art Fair. DePillars introduced him to Jeff Donaldson, who created the gallery’s logo and agreed to show his work as the gallery’s first exhibition (figure  1.6). Donaldson’s exhibition gave the gallery credibility with other Black artists, and for its few years of existence the Plotkins exhibited works by other Black artists including David Bradford, Sylvester Britton, DePillars,

1.5. Jae Jarrell at Jae of Hyde Park. Photo by the Chicago Daily News, 1967.

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Wadsworth Jarrell, Douglas Williams, and Barbara Jones.49 (Following her marriage, Jones was known as Barbara Jones-­Hogu, the name I ­will use for her from this point on.)50 Jarrell’s studio, wj Studios, was located just south of the Midway, the boulevard created by the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a traditional dividing line between Hyde Park and Woodlawn, the now predominantly Black neighborhood to the south. Now demolished, the building wj occupied had been designed for Charles Mulligan, a sculptor working with Lorado Taft on the Columbian Exposition, and was ­later occupied by the painter James McBurney. It was a remarkable building. “With Louis ­Sullivan as an architectural con­sul­tant,” University of Chicago professor Harold Haydon wrote in a memo about the building, “it was designed in emulation of Pa­ri­ sian studios and, with the exception of Taft’s Midway Studios, was regarded as the finest studio in Chicago.”51 wj Studios served as a meeting place and exhibition space as well as a work space (figure 1.7). Hyde Park also still retained several impor­tant ­music venues, and for visual artists it had the 57th Street Art Fair. Indeed, for African American artists shut out of white galleries, the outdoor neighborhood art fairs w ­ ere key venues. ­There artists not only sold work, but even more importantly they made contacts with likeminded souls and potential patrons. The 57th Street Fair was the oldest and one of the most popu­lar. It was (and continues to be) a meeting ground for many artists and art lovers.52 Margaret Burroughs was one of its first exhibitors, and she went on to found the long-­running art fair at Lake Meadows, a middle-­income housing development in Bronzeville, in the early 1950s. The Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity (ccuo) sponsored art fairs in Englewood, Woodlawn, and Lawndale beginning in 1967. The Englewood Concourse Art Fair continued for several years.53 The South Shore neighborhood, south and east of Hyde Park, also fermented in­de­pen­dent cultural activity. Educator, artist, and musician Yaoundé Olu started a space originally called East Shore Gallery, then Oṣun Gallery—­ later Oṣun Center for the Arts—at 2541 East 75th Street in 1968. Alongside art ­ usic and dance per­ exhibitions, Oṣun offered a range of activities including m for­mances, yoga and T’ai chi classes, a barter and trade event, and “Oṣuniversity” (figure 1.8). Near Oṣun was the studio of painter Haar-di, at 2543½ 75th Street.54 ­These studios joined Myrna Weaver and Lenore Franklin’s gallery, The Arts, in the South Shore neighborhood that hugged the lake south of Hyde Park and Woodlawn. Early meetings of the obac Visual Arts Workshop to plan the Wall of Re­spect ­were held at The Arts, at 7032 South Stony Island Ave­nue (figure 1.9).55 48  /

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1.6. Jeff Donaldson and visitors at exhibition at Lakeside Gallery, 1968. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke. 1.7. Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell with Wadsworth Jr. and

Napoleon Jones-­Henderson at WJ Studios, 1968. Photo by Gerald Williams. Courtesy of Gerald Williams.

1.8. Edfu Kinginga crowning cele­bration (with artwork on the wall) at

Oṣun Gallery in South Shore, 1981. Photo by Yaoundé Olu.

Further west on 75th  Street could be found the headquarters of Phil Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble, at 942 East 75th, and for a period of time Afam Studio and Gallery, which José Williams ran with Al Tyler and John Pinkney a­ fter leaving 353 East.56 Afam displayed works by Black artists in a homey coffee­house atmosphere. In its first year (1969), it moved several times around the South Side, from 6900 South Cottage Grove to 7703 South Mary­land and fi­nally to 1037 East 75th Street, its home from 1970 to 1972.57 ­There, it hosted per­for­mances of the New Concept Era Theatre, including a play based on the story of the Wall of Re­spect, as well as regular shows by José Williams’s band, the Gallery Ensemble.58 Williams was one of many other artist-­musicians on the South Side, including Calvin Jones, Lester Lashley, and Yaoundé Olu. He was a printmaking gradu­ate of the Illinois Institute of Technology, iit , and served briefly as the director of the South Side Community Art Center.59 Afam was also, along with the DuSable Museum and the South Side Community Art Center, a stop on the 50  /

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1.9. Meeting of OBAC Visual Arts Workshop at The

Arts on Stony Island Ave­nue, 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

tour of Black art centers provided to participants at the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art, confaba, a conference Jeff Donaldson or­ ga­nized at Northwestern in 1970.60 In 1973 Afam moved north to 126 West Kinzie, in the South Loop. Another gallery, Zambezi Art Guild, run by Timothy Williams (­later Nii-­Oti) and John Caldwell, opened its doors at 54th  and Harper; it also trained young jewelry makers. It moved around a g­ reat deal: in 1968 it was at 1041 East 63rd Street (figure 1.10). It then moved in 1969–70 to 6451 South Cottage Grove, and fi­nally in 1970  to  2038 East 71st  Street. Baraza Wa Afrika, which sold clothing, h ­ ouse­hold goods, and arts and crafts, was C laiming Spa ce, Being in Public

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1.10. Nii-­Oti and two colleagues in front of Zambezi Artist Guild,

1041 East 63rd Street, 1968. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Sengstacke.

nearby—2150–2052 East 71st.61 Just around the corner at 7130 South Exchange was Ankh Studio, a cooperative craft studio that provided studio space and classes in weaving, printmaking, and leatherwork. Partners in the venture included Lester Lashley, Napoleon Henderson, Murry DePillars, Seitu ­Nurullah (Robert Lewis), and ­others.62 At 1016 East 75th Street, The Catalyst, an activist organ­ization of Black cultural leaders, operated the African Information Center, where the Union of Black Artists also met. The Catalyst included Useni Eugene Perkins, Carol Adams (­later to direct the DuSable Museum), and Abena Joan Brown (who founded eta Creative Arts Foun52  /

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dation in 1971).63 Their 1969 Black Cultural Directory listed many more galleries, shops, and organ­izations on the South Side (and a few on the West Side): its contents include Afro-­Shops, Art Galleries, Book Stores, Cultural Organ­izations, Cultural Institutions, Places of Black Re­spect (in which the Wall of Re­spect held pride of place), Publishers, Student Organ­izations, and Theaters. With its creative design and images—­photo­graphs by Roy Lewis and drawings by Ramon Price—­the Directory was a work of art in itself. Artist-­run storefront galleries and similar organ­izations ­were typically cooperative ventures in which artists pooled their resources to pay rent and shared the tasks involved in keeping a venue open. José Williams said of Afam in 1974, In spite of what some p ­ eople may think, we do not see ourselves as bringing culture to this community. This community is seething with culture. What we do, and encourage younger artists to do, is to take ele­ments from what’s ­here and incorporate it in the work. In considering our philosophy, most Whites and some Blacks tell us that it’s a noble gesture. They r­eally missed it. It ­hasn’t got a goddamn ­thing to do with that . . . ​you know, ­those poor ­people keep this place open. I mean, both, in spirit and financially. They attend most of the functions and quiet as it’s kept, they purchase art.64 In addition to more or less established cultural centers, artists found perches in more temporary and tenuous locations. Many organ­izations and colleges held occasional exhibitions. Eateries displayed artists’ work. The Woodlawn office of the social ser­vice organ­ization Opportunity Centers, at 706 East 63rd Street, held an exhibition that included works by Gerald Williams, aacm member Lester Lashley, and textile artist (and friend of the africobra artists) Robert Paige.65 africobra’s first group exhibition was held at the Wadsworth Upper Grade Center, one of the three schools that formed the Woodlawn Experimental School, jointly run by The Woodlawn Organ­ization (two), a community development organ­ization.66 Illinois Federal Savings and Loan exhibited art in its “Black Art Gallery” beginning in 1971.67 But the South Side Community Art Center was the hub for Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, hosting concerts, poetry readings and writers’ groups, and theatrical productions (Kuumba Workshop, a Black theater com­pany, performed regularly on its third floor). Though it strug­gled through the 1950s and into the 1960s, it was kept afloat by board members (Wilhelmina Blanks, Fern Gayden, and Grace Leaming) and regained footing ­under the C laim ing Spa ce, Being in Publi c

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board presidency of Herbert Nipson, which began in 1965.68 The center cosponsored the Englewood Concourse Art Fair in the Englewood neighborhood and other events around the South Side. Director Douglas Williams brought to the center numerous exhibitions by artists who ­were central figures in the Black Arts Movement, such as africobra artists Barbara Jones-­Hogu and Napoleon Henderson, whose joint exhibition in 1970, Wanted: A Printer and a Weaver, used the conceit that they w ­ ere outlaws (figure 1.11).69 Along with work by Douglas Williams himself, and by José Williams (no relation), who succeeded him as director, between 1967 and 1973 the center also featured Marvin Young, C.  Rodger Wilson, Garrett Whyte, Frank Hayden, Sherman Beck, John Crenshaw, Elliott Hunter, Herbert Salone, Stan Williamson, Sylvester Britton, Paul Collins, Gary Jones, Norman Parish, Clifford Lee, Maurice Hodo, Lawrence Taylor, and Ralph Arnold, among o­ thers who exhibited in one-­or two-­person shows.70 The center also presented numerous group exhibitions. In 1968 it hosted Black Heritage, a traveling exhibition of African art including loans from the Art Institute of Chicago (aic), from Margaret Burroughs’s Museum of African American History before it became the DuSable, and William McBride’s collection. In the following year it presented Black Expressions ’69, an art competition sponsored by the McDonald’s Corporation.71 In 1972 or 1973 the center presented Seeds Within, an exhibition of the Black Arts Guild, a group of young artists.72 In 1973 the center mounted an exhibition of work by africobra artists.73 In the same year, apparently acknowledging the virtual absence of w ­ omen from one-­or two-­person shows in the preceding years (with Barbara Jones-­Hogu as perhaps the sole exception), the center began featuring more ­women artists. Yaoundé Olu exhibited with Douglas Williams in a two-­person exhibition that September.74 Geraldine McCullough was next.75 In 1974 Mary Reed Daniel showed with Sylvester Britton, and the center presented exhibitions of work by Margaret Burroughs and Marva Alvita Spaul­ding Fields, as well as a major group show of Black ­women artists titled Fem-­Images in Black.76 For artists, it was only natu­ral to seek out alternative spaces and in­de­ pen­dent institutions when most mainstream galleries remained stubbornly closed to emerging African American artists. Often, t­ hese spaces ­were inter­ disciplinary and oriented t­oward community involvement. Establishing and developing sites where artists could show their work was also a way of creating more visibility for African Americans in general. This was as much the case in the neighborhoods they ­were newly entering as in historically African American neighborhoods and in mixed neighborhoods like Hyde 54  /

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1.11. Poster for Barbara J. Jones and Napoleon

­Henderson exhibition, Wanted: A Printer and a Weaver. 1970. Courtesy of SSCAC Archives.

Park–­Kenwood. It was a way of claiming space for Black culture and asserting the right to self-­determination, and in this it was closely allied with the more intense and formative collective experience of the Wall of Re­spect, to which I turn next. The Wall of Re­spect

Along with establishing vis­i­ble spaces for art and cultural activity, another way of challenging the organ­ization of space was to claim public space bodily. The signal intervention into public space of the 1960s was the inspired creation of the Wall of Re­spect, which made a substantial intervention into its neighborhood and recalibrated notions of art, community, and public.77 The Wall of Re­spect radically changed the immediate space around it. It altered the landscape. ­Until that point, as Jeff Donaldson related, Black neighborhoods did not even have Black f­aces appearing on billboards to sell liquor or cigarettes to the community.78 It turned the street into a public forum for poetry, ­music, theater, and po­liti­cal rallies, serving as a platform for both informal encounters and formal events. Stokely Carmichael and other militant po­liti­cal figures spoke to rallies ­there. Poets read and musicians performed. The idea of the mural gained momentum and came together quickly. No one was thinking of creating a mural in late 1966 and early 1967 when the poet Conrad Kent Rivers, the sociologist Gerald McWorter (­later Abdul Alkalimat), and Negro Digest editor Hoyt  W. Fuller  Jr. originally came together to found the Organ­ization of Black American Culture (obac). Their intention was to or­ga­nize Black cultural workers as part of the larger Black strug­gle in Chicago. Their idea—­evident in the all-­purpose handout that McWorter l­ater wrote—­was that culture could serve to bind together diverse components of the community into a movement for liberation. By the spring of 1967 the cofound­ers had composed a statement of princi­ples. The goals of obac ­were as follows: To provide the Black Community with a positive image of itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibilities for creativity To reflect the richness and depth and variety of Black History and Culture To encourage and to bring to the public eye talent from the Black Community To encourage Black ­People in other communities to also channel into constructive endeavors the creative energies from their communities 56  /

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To spread an appreciation of the Arts among all Black ­People . . . To provide the mechanism for the honest pre­sen­ta­tion of the Black Experience as it profoundly proclaims the ­human condition.79 Beyond making theoretical statements to a self-­selecting audience of artists and cultural workers, obac sought to reach out to the Black community more broadly (note the insistence of the word “community” in the statement). The found­ers invited friends, colleagues, and acquaintances and, as a larger group, obac members or­ga­nized themselves into workshops according to dif­fer­ent disciplines in the arts—­visual arts, lit­er­a­ture, and “community.” Initial plans for drama and m ­ usic workshops faltered ­because they ­were essentially redundant with existing groups such as the Kuumba Workshop and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (aacm), both of whose members worked closely with obac. In March, the Visual Arts Workshop met to begin planning a “Festival of the Arts” for August 1967.80 A festival of the arts is not of necessity a major intervention into public space. But many of the artists involved w ­ ere also involved in direct action activism. In May, some obac affiliates participated in another event that helped lay the groundwork for the Wall as a po­liti­cal and aesthetic practice of occupying space: they symbolically claimed Washington Park and renamed it Malcolm X Shabazz Park (figure 1.12). Roy Lewis, one of the Wall photog­raphers, photographed the event; he ­later installed his photo­graph of it on the “Statesmen” section of the Wall—­next to the portrait of Malcolm X. Alicia Loy Johnson described the scene at the park in vivid sound and color in her poem “On May 21 for a Dedication”: crowds gathered gathered crowds Black crowds crowds of Blacks around in a circle listening intensely ­silent drums beating dancers heating to the rhythm of sounds of drums.  . . . Claiming S pa ce, Bei ng in Publi c

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1.12. Malcolm X Shabazz Park renaming event, Washington Park,

May 1967. Photographer unknown. “White ­Women Set Off Two-­Hour Melee in Chicago,” Jet, June 8, 1967, 38.

black ­brothers in striking colors black ­sisters in translucent colors hips swaying to the sound of round round bongo drums.81 Johnson’s emphasis on the crowd and its beauty and vibrancy (soon to be shattered by violent police response82) also anticipates the way ­people wrote about, experienced, and documented the Wall of Re­spect. With the Wall of Re­spect, the Visual Arts Workshop of obac was to work guerrilla-­style, appropriating and redirecting strategies for shaping space already found in Chicago neighborhoods. Jeff Donaldson wrote that it was “an adoption and an extension of the turf-­identifying graffiti scrawled on neighborhood buildings by Chicago street gangs.”83 A week ­after the park occupation, on May 28, obac held its first public program, at the Abraham Lincoln Centre at 700 East Oakwood. On June 14, a call went out to Black artists.84 The Visual Arts Workshop of obac met two weeks l­ater, on June 28, at Myrna Weaver and Lenore Franklin’s gallery, The Arts, on Stony Island Ave­nue. ­There, they first began formulating some of the same aesthetic precepts that would be refined and eventually formalized in africobra’s manifesto (see figure 1.9). Sometime that summer, the 58  /

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accomplished photographer Billy Abernathy brought William Walker to a meeting where artists ­were bringing work and ideas to share.85 ­Because of his previous experience with murals and his community contacts, Walker’s presence had a dramatic impact on the group’s plans.86 Walker was somewhat older than most of the other artists. He had painted murals in Columbus, Nashville, and Memphis in the 1950s.87 He lived near 43rd and Langley, knew of an available wall, and had contacts in the neighborhood, primarily with a militant community organ­ization—­a group sometimes known as the 43rd Street Community Relations Proj­ect, sometimes known as the Young Militants, run by a former gang member, Herbert Colbert. Colbert helped broker the truce between gangs that enabled work on the Wall to proceed: “they kept the P Stones and the Ds out of ­there,” Robert Sengstacke said, referring to the Blackstone Rangers (aka Black P Stone Nation) and the Gangster Disciples.88 Ziff Sistrunk, whose younger ­sister Irene was the l­ittle girl with the hula hoop in this book’s opening image, told me that, in fact, the Rangers and Disciples never r­ eally left. They maintained a truce for a time, with their leadership meeting regularly at Johnny Ray’s. But conflict flared up again even while the Wall remained and ­after it was gone. The block was divided down the ­middle, an active site of ­battles over turf.89 From the beginning, the organizers had wanted to do something that would celebrate Black heroes. Gerald McWorter wrote in his theoretical obac handout: “The w ­ hole pro­cess of finding and cultivating and making demands of and rewarding . . . ​beautiful Black ­people, necessarily means that we have to define t­ hese beautiful Black ­people as being our cultural heroes, our heroes. Now what this means is, in a sense, we have to think of other ways to find t­hese ­people than the ways that are projected in a normal society.” 90 The idea of a Festival of the Arts evolved into the Wall of Re­spect, which would pres­ent ­these heroes to a broader community audience, and would in turn serve as the site and platform for celebratory per­for­mances. The question for the artists, as a m ­ atter of visual design, was how to work together to pres­ent a collection of individual luminaries in dif­fer­ent disciplines without producing visual chaos. To solve this prob­lem, members made proposals for the overall layout of the wall (figure 1.13). The final design the group chose was Sylvia Abernathy’s. She laid out the sections of the wall using a system of light and dark tones to create a striking overall design; each section was then filled in by an individual or artists who contributed or collaborated on a section. It was an abstract design reminiscent of collage. C laiming Space, Being in P ubli c

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1.13. Artist William “Bill” Walker studies the sectional design created

by designer Sylvia Abernathy for the Wall of Re­spect mural, during a meeting of OBAC , Chicago, IL, summer 1967. Photo by Robert ­Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

Pre­ce­dents for the Wall of Re­spect could be found in the burst of artistic activity that occurred in the de­cade of the G ­ reat Depression, supported largely by the wpa, which sponsored several mural proj­ects by African American artists. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hale Woodruff and Charles White studied mural painting in Mexico with the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. White, Woodruff, and a third painter, Aaron Douglas, painted impor­tant indoor murals at historically Black colleges and universities (Fisk, Talladega, and Howard, in par­tic­u­lar). Mexico provided inspiration through its ambitious outdoor public murals, of which t­ here ­were few examples in the United States. In addition, if the Wall built on a mural tradition and if it extended the tactics of graffiti as a tool for claiming space, it also extended the work done by p ­ eople like Margaret Burroughs and F. H. Hammurabi, who used art and images, often portraits of impor­tant African Americans, to convey historical lessons. Indeed, the Wall’s overall collage style had an affinity to the collaged portraits and clippings of Hammurabi’s calendars (see figure 1.4). It also a­ dopted tactics like t­hose of the Malcolm X Park occupation and renaming. It renamed a site, and it reconfigured the sense of public space and who had access to it. 60  /

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The initial work on the mural—­producing its first state—­took place between August 11 and August 27, when the mural was first formally unveiled.91 The Wall combined painting and photography, and depicted major figures in African American politics, lit­er­a­ture, ­music, religion, entertainment, and athletics (see figure I.2). Unlike many murals, it was not a unified repre­sen­ ta­tional field, nor was it a narrative composed of historical vignettes. Within the sections, each painter took his or her own approach, adapted from the styles they worked in as easel paint­ers. None of their contributions hewed to the social realist narrative painting style that characterized most of the murals any of them might have seen. Along with portraits, Elliott Hunter had previously painted gorgeous large canvases, their bursts of abstract color suggestive of Abstract Expressionism. Wadsworth Jarrell painted landscapes and urban vignettes in broad parallel strokes of bright color. Jeff Donaldson painted figures in an impressionistic style that made brilliant use of negative space. Paint­ers adapted their style to the purpose of the Wall but remained individuals, without any imperative to achieve stylistic unity. Both a concrete image and the transformation of a site, the Wall also became a place for per­for­mances to be held. And the Wall was, itself, a per­for­ mance. Artists represented their figures not as static portraits but in action, in activities that represented their areas of achievement. Many of the figures come together in expressive per­for­mances that seem to rhyme with the production of the mural itself as a collective per­for­mance. On the left side of the lower register—­the building’s ground floor—­Jarrell, painting the “Rhythm and Blues” section, set his figures in motion. The animated space suggests a visual argument for the centrality of Black ­music to the Black aesthetic. Following Abernathy’s design, Jarrell painted on base wall colors that ­were split between red and white. He skillfully used dark and light values in his figures and their costumes to maintain a high contrast with the background. The decorative stripes of the Marvelettes’ outfits reverberated in the densely packed rhythmic stripes that Jarrell used to construct his other figures. Similar lyrical strokes suggested a dark cityscape ­behind them. To the right of the “r&b” section was “Religion.” ­There, William Walker stressed group identity and action along with the role of individual heroes. He placed his three leaders—­Nat Turner, Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam—at the head of the collectives they led and represented, giving t­ hese larger populations the parallel, pared-­down profiles that would become a hallmark of his l­ater murals. By contrast, Robert Sengstacke’s photo­graphs in the same section lent heroic character to nameless young w ­ omen. One Claiming Spa ce, Being in Publ ic

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depicted a Muslim girl (a grand­daughter of Elijah Muhammad) praying. The other displayed two girls at a nearby storefront church playing the tambourine.92 Edward Christmas’s brilliant “Lit­er­a­ture” section also enacted its subject m ­ atter by including poetry: lines from Amiri Baraka’s “sos—­Calling All Black P ­ eople.” (Baraka was also represented in a photo­graph, above the painted section, by Darryl Cowherd.) To the right of the “Lit­er­a­ture” figures, Barbara Jones-­Hogu carefully plotted the arrangement of the figures with preparatory drawings that are vis­i­ble in a photo­graph by Sengstacke (figure 1.14). Jones devoted to the figure of actress Claudia McNeil the much larger space of a boarded-up win­dow opening. She posed the rest of her solid “Theater” figures in two conversational triads—­Oscar Brown Jr., Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis above, and Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, and James Earl Jones below.93 The figures stood out dramatically against the red background of her section of wall. The triadic composition also anticipates other triads of figures in Jones-­Hogu’s work, such as her power­ful 1971 silkprint Rise and Take Control (see figure  2.3), which represents the africobra princi­ples of addressing past, pres­ent, and ­future. Above the “Theater” section, in “Jazz,” Donaldson and Hunter, along with the photographer Billy Abernathy, combined portrait heads with i­magined musical per­for­mance. In the action at its core, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Sonny Rollins engage visibly and dynamically with one another as if playing in an ensemble. Max Roach’s oversized hand reaches across the symbolic boundary of the win­dow frame he sits in, extending outward to the wall’s bricks and beyond as he plays his drums. The tilt of his head mirrors Sarah Vaughan’s in the photo­graph by Abernathy above, creating a dialogue between the figures. Around ­these engaging scenes, the artists arranged a collection of in­de­pen­dent, expressive portrait heads. The three by Hunter on the right edge of the mural—­John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and Ornette Coleman—­ were painted on panels applied to the wall, but they overlap the edges of ­these panels, extending onto the wall’s bricks and onto one another. On the smaller but visually prominent area of the second-­story oriel win­dow, Myrna Weaver placed a victorious Muhammad Ali in the central bay, a highly recognizable figure surrounded by admiring spectators. Florence Hawkins,

1.14. (opposite) Wall of Re­spect, “Theater” section by Barbara Jones-­Hogu in

pro­gress, 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke. C laiming S pace, Being in Public

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an art student living in the neighborhood who came by and asked to join in, contributed the figure of Lew Alcindor (who was to become Kareem Abdul-­ Jabbar).94 Weaver presented the other athletic figures—­Jim Brown, Bill Russell, and Wilt Chamberlain—in action, playing their respective sports. Norman Parish’s “Statesmen” section, on the upper left of the Wall, gathered together portrait heads, mostly depicted in three-­quarter view: H. Rap Brown, Marcus Garvey, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X.95 The section also included Roy Lewis’s photo­graph of the renamed Malcolm X Shabazz Park.96 Notably, Martin Luther King Jr. was not included ­either ­here or in Walker’s “Religion” section; the majority of obac artists and the Young Militants did not want King on the Wall. It was a po­ liti­cally tense moment, and this was a challenging section to take on. Parish painted the smaller portraits with deft, eco­nom­ical strokes and wove the floating heads together with abstract wedges of color. In treating his entire section as a single repre­sen­ta­tional field, Parish seems to have dispensed with the blocks of differing value that Sylvia Abernathy’s design had proposed as a strategy for using the Wall’s boarded-­over win­dow frames. For reasons that remain murky, it was this section that would be changed—­ without Parish’s consent—in a major intervention that took place soon ­after the Wall was created. The Wall, the Picasso, and the Public

Gwendolyn Brooks celebrated the initial version of the Wall of Re­spect in her poem inspired by its August 27 unveiling, called simply “The Wall.” Brooks emphasizes the po­liti­cal radicalism of the crowd that gathered around the mural (“Black / boy-­men on roofs fist out ‘Black Power!’ ”). She begins with a drumbeat—­“A drumdrumdrum”—­and continues with words that suggest the sonic as well as visual power the Wall embodied: “vibration,” “ringing, rouse . . . ​ferment-­festival.” The quasi-­sonic power of the Wall unites the community across differences of skin color represented as earring-­adorned, but also hearing, ears: “black ears, brown ears, reddish-­brown / and ivory ears.” 97 Brooks stresses how impor­tant per­for­mance around the Wall was, and how many dif­fer­ent artistic media ­were represented in events ­there. She alludes to two performing artists who plied their craft at the unveiling on August 27, 1967: Phil Cohran of the Artistic Heritage Ensemble and Val Gray Ward of Kuumba Theater. With her mention of them, she provides an initial hint of the mural’s existence not merely as static object but as ongoing event. Along ­these lines, Ebony referred to it as a Happening, alluding to the informal 64  /

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event-­based mode of artwork in­ven­ted by Allan Kaprow: “In this era of the happening, the Wall might be called a ‘black-­hap.’ ”98 Milling about the Wall was a panoply of artists, poets, actors, musicians, activists, journalists, community residents of all ages, local visitors and tourists from afar, undercover cops, and the ever-­present gang members-­turned-­community organizers.99 Gwendolyn Brooks published her poem about the Wall paired with her dedicatory poem on the monumental downtown sculpture dubbed “The Picasso,” the other major work of public art inaugurated in Chicago in August 1967.100 The installation of the massive Picasso sculpture in August 1967 was an event—to the (white) general public it was the single most impor­tant art event in Chicago in years. Sometimes posed in opposition to one another, the two artworks actually have some ­things in common. Though their origins could not have been more dif­fer­ent, both served as spaces for popu­lar po­liti­cal intervention. Together, they reflect fault lines in the range of meanings of “public” space, in par­tic­u­lar the sense in which it could be understood as the space of the public. The Picasso became a site for intervention well before it was actually unveiled. The absence of a serious commemoration of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable had irked Black Chicagoans for some time. John Kinzie, who bought Du Sable’s farm in 1800, was frequently given the honor of having been Chicago’s “first settler.” When the news came out that a monumental Picasso sculpture would be placed in Civic Center Plaza (now Daley Plaza), Margaret Burroughs, a tireless letter writer, was provoked to write to the Tribune to ask when the city would dedicate an appropriate public monument to Du Sable. It was 1966, and she suggested that “perhaps, with proper planning, the unveiling of a Du Sable monument could coincide with the state of Illinois sesquicentennial which ­will be observed in 1968.”101 Burroughs well knew that the Picasso sculpture reflected the ambitions of Chicago to be a major cultural city. And like other African American artists, she also understood that a major part of Picasso’s significance in modern art was owed to his incorporation of African imagery and styles into his work—­a fact she noted in an unpublished poem, “On Civic Center Plaza.”102 Breaking down assumptions of transparency and single-­point perspective, he had, early in the twentieth ­century, used “primitive” forms to critique and enrich modern Western styles of repre­sen­ta­tional art. The inspiration Picasso had found in African art, along with the fact that he was a known leftist, lent Picasso a certain interest for Burroughs and ­others. In the most charitable view of Picasso’s accomplishments, he had helped demonstrate the significance of African art to white cultural elites. Another, less rosy, view of this was as an C laiming S pace, Being in Public

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object lesson for just how successful a white artist might become by appropriating African art forms—­while Black artists strug­gled to have their work seen at all. Picasso’s monumental sculpture for the city of Chicago became quite controversial, as the first large-­scale modern sculpture sited in public in a place not known for its avant-­garde sensibilities. By the time it was unveiled, its design was familiar to Chicagoans. The large maquette, or model, had been unveiled at the Art Institute of Chicago and images circulated in the press for a year. Nonetheless, it caused a stir that the media gleefully perpetuated. The unusual shape of the statue coupled with its monumental size and central location made it the subject of widespread mockery and bemusement as well as appreciation. Already in September  1966, when the maquette was first shown to journalists almost a year before the unveiling of the final product, the Chicago Tribune published a photo­graph of the maquette together with a picture of a platypus.103 In the eyes of beholders, it was a ­thing that relentlessly metamorphosed into other ­things. ­People declared it a ­woman, a baboon, a bird, an orangutan, a dragon, a nun, a fox, or a ­horse; a monster, a bride, an abstract expression, the trademark of the city, an angel, a ­woman in an eve­ning gown, and a centerpiece.104 Though it had taken a g­ reat deal of effort to persuade Picasso to do the commission at all, in the end he donated the work to “the p ­ eople of Chicago.” (A group of Chicago-­based foundations raised the money to fabricate it in Cor-­Ten steel.) This sense of public domain—­which was ­later to be tested in a lawsuit that established a right to reproduce the monument—­was amplified by the object’s visual ambiguity. Presenting it to the city, Mayor Richard J. Daley said that he himself did not know what the sculpture ­really represented and that, since it was modern art, all could interpret it as they saw fit. “­You’re supposed to use your imagination in modern art,” he stated; “this is every­one’s Picasso.”105 In this statement the mayor equates imagination and the diversity of interpretations with a notion of a modern, liberal, pluralistic democracy. Every­one could have his or her own interpretation; the imagination is the location of demo­cratic freedom. This image of democracy served, perhaps ironically, as an opportunity to sell the city, to market a new image of Chicago as an enlightened, modern place worthy of its ­great architecture. Commenting on the dedicatory event, Mike Royko noted that the monument was designed to signal a change in the public image of Chicago: “When Keane and Cullerton [a power­ful alderman and the county assessor] sit ­behind a lady poet, ­things are changing.”106 What he did not note was that the lady poet,

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Gwendolyn Brooks, was also African American. The architect who commissioned the sculpture from Picasso, William Hartmann, however, made clear that it was on his mind in a letter to Roland Penrose, who had introduced him to the French artist; writing about plans for the ceremony, Hartmann called her “a Negro from Chicago.”107 The same liberal pluralism that could embrace a Black female poet could embrace the abstract artwork of a French Communist artist. Holding together re­spect for high art and the suspicions of the “person on the street,” Brooks’s dedicatory poem kept an irreverent but delicate distance from the work. “Does man love Art?” she asked, acknowledging the ambivalence of reactions to the work: “Man visits Art, but squirms. / Art hurts. Art urges voyages.” She concludes by alluding, again ambivalently, to the autonomous status of the modern Western artwork as a flower in a midwestern prairie: “as meaningful and as meaningless as any other flower in the western field.”108 If the Picasso was repeatedly associated with other referents, transformed into them or into embodiments of them, ­these metamorphoses, manifesting transformation and multiplicity, represent the optimism of modern self-­creation in a fragile, constructed moment of liberal pluralist consensus. One guest was absent: the governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner. Kerner sent his regrets: he was heading a presidential inquiry into racial vio­lence in American cities, which would come to be known as the Kerner Commis­ ere and also in protests that sion.109 The fragility of the moment appears h occurred at the unveiling alongside the speeches, the symphony, and a majorette contest. The Chicago Surrealists protested, circulating a flyer that excoriated the city government, the sculpture as sterile idol, and Picasso as (latter-­ day) reactionary. They cited both the “loathsome war against the Viet­nam­ese” and Black revolutionary militancy to come.110 Other protesters held puzzling signs proclaiming the sculpture as “the colossal booboo / creative evacuation of / emotional debris / fright.”111 A short film by Tom ­Palazzolo, The Bride Stripped Bare (1967), alluded to the inanity of the unveiling as media event by juxtaposing footage of it with striptease imagery. The public nature of the Picasso was also at issue in a lawsuit that followed. Trickster artist William Copley, interested in testing the copyright that the city was claiming on the sculpture, enlisted Claes Oldenburg to make a soft copy of the Picasso that Copley then published on a postcard as part of a limited edition, subscription-­based collection of artists’ multiples, S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop). Copley then sought an affirmative ­legal judgment to challenge the copyright, noting that Picasso had given the sculpture to the

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­ eople of Chicago and that in any event an artwork existing in public space p was de facto in the public domain where copyright was concerned. They won their case, though not on t­ hese grounds; perhaps loath to set a pre­ce­dent, the judge ruled on the narrower grounds that the city had waived copyright by exhibiting the maquette in the Art Institute in 1966 without affixing a copyright notice directly on it, as was then required. According to the judgment, the model was the ­actual “work.” Thus not only the city’s monumental sculpture but also all other replicas could be made f­ ree of any copyright. The judgment went the petitioners’ way, but what it did not do was allow for a broader discussion of the nature of public art of the sort they desired. In its very existence, the sculpture tested the definition of the “public” as “the ­people” versus the public as “the government.” Picasso declared in his deed of gift that he was giving the sculpture to the ­people of Chicago, but sited in Civic Center Plaza—­what was to become Daley Plaza—it could easily seem like an organ of official policy. On the other hand, the many scenes of protesters congregating near it suggest that citizens believed they could stake a claim of owner­ship of the space. The Picasso made scenes of protest picturesque. This was not lost on the African American student protesters who staged a mock funeral for the Board of Education in a direct line before the center of the sculpture in October 1968. They protested as part of the October 1968 school boycott that demanded Black studies classes and more influence on policy and curriculum in schools. As many as thirty-­five thousand students boycotted classes on a series of consecutive Mondays.112 Pémon Rami, a leader of the Umoja Black Student Center and one of the organizers of the 1968 boycotts, recalls meeting with twenty-­five or more students from Chicago high schools to plan a series of actions, including “a mock funeral for the board of education to demonstrate the need for the educational system to change or die!” Rami’s skills as a theater producer ­were put to good use in suggesting the intervention.113 Six pallbearers, wearing capes and hoods and accompanied by a crowd of supporters, marched through Chicago’s Loop with a cardboard coffin marked “Board of Education.” At Civic Center Plaza, the students joined hands, chanted together a mock pledge of allegiance, and delivered a eulogy to the board—­“a white racist system that needs to be buried.”114 Lining the coffin up in front of the Picasso, precisely centered before it, they then stomped on the coffin. Surely they sensed it would make for a good photo, and it did (figure 1.15). In a similar vein, other activist groups created spectacular scenes at the Picasso. The co­ali­tion of street gangs that pushed for construction jobs during work on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus in 1969 marched 68  /

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1.15. Black student demonstration at Civic Center Plaza, 1968.

Photo by Jack Dykinga for the Chicago Sun-­Times, October 29, 1968.

t­ here in the thousands.115 In 1970 members of the Contract Buyers’ League created a dif­fer­ent kind of spectacle when police evicted four families on the far South Side who ­were withholding payments pending a court ruling on the legality of their housing contracts.116 Realizing that the action took place in a location where few would see it, the league transported the belongings the police had dumped on the street downtown to Civic Center Plaza, meeting the watchful gaze of the Chicago Picasso and the cameras of news photog­raphers. ­These protests at the Picasso w ­ ere not on the horizon yet when Brooks conceived her two poems. In her poem on the Chicago Picasso, she articulated a set of modernist aspirations for a kind of art that challenges its viewers. But by the end of her dedicatory poem, the Picasso is tamed: the hurt has changed its character, and the sculpture is no longer aggressive but cool and standoffish. The respectful but ironic feeling contrasts sharply with her poem for the Wall of Re­spect. The Wall spoke to a dif­fer­ent kind of public, a community-­based Black audience not addressed by monumental Eu­ro­pean art situated in the Loop. By pairing the poems, Brooks implicitly contrasted the Wall with the Picasso. Where her take on the Picasso is cool and abstract, her poem about the Wall is all organic warmth. The comparison was evident in other poets’ Cla im ing S pace, Being in Pub lic

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writings as well. For Don L. Lee—­perhaps thinking of the mural as the visual analogue of LeRoi Jones’s “poems that kill”—­the Wall was “a weapon.” Lee wrote about the Picasso, “Picasso aint got shit on us / Send him back to art school.”117 Useni Eugene Perkins called the Wall “a citadel of black strength.” In the same poem he wrote, Let Picasso’s enigma of steel fester in the backyard of the city ­fathers’ cretaceous sanctuary It has no meaning for black ­people, only showmanism to entertain imbecilic critics who judge all art by Eu­ro­pean standards . . . The wall is for black ­people118 Perkins also pointed out in his poem that Black artists “have always painted in the ghettos.”119 This could mean many dif­fer­ent ­things. Of course, artists painted in their own cramped apartments all over the city, took their easels and portfolios out onto the street, studied and taught at the South Side Community Art Center, and showed (and sometimes sold) their work in street art fairs. But p ­ eople—­artists in a more general sense—­had also painted on the walls. C ­ hildren drew in chalk on the sidewalks. Gang members indicated territory with painted or chalked graffiti. John Fry, the Presbyterian pastor who became controversial for his work with the Blackstone Rangers, described his first glimpse of the Woodlawn neighborhood as a forest of territorial markings: “My eyes w ­ ere stunned by what was coming at me. . . . ​ Graffiti on the walls of buildings, on underpasses, on street signs attested to the presence of vari­ous Blackstone Ranger clubs: Apache Rangers, Maniac Rangers, Conservative Rangers, Rus­sian Rangers, F.B.I. Rangers, Imperial Pimps Rangers, and so on.”120 Po­liti­cal slogans in­de­pen­dent of territory also visually marked city surfaces, like “Black Power” on a wall photographed by Robert Sengstacke (figure 1.16) and “Be Black” (combined with other phrases) on a door photographed by Darryl Cowherd (figure  1.17). ­These markings ­were omnipresent, and they appear frequently in artwork of the period—­for example, Jae Jarrell’s Urban Wall Suit, a quilted silk suit painted with lines to indicate bricks and lettering suggesting vernacular slogans graffitied on the wall (figure 1.18). Appliqués suggest wheat-­pasted po­liti­cal signs and posters for jazz and soul m ­ usic shows. The suit is colorful and humorous, Jarrell’s generous translation into art of a typical ele­ment of urban landscape. More specifically it was the look of the walls of the viaduct u ­ nder the commuter 70  /

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1.16. Black Power graffiti in Chicago, 1967. Photo by

Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke. 1.17. Darryl Cowherd, Blackstone, Woodlawn, Chicago, 1968, 1968. Silver gelatin print. © Darryl Cowherd. Courtesy of Darryl Cowherd.

1.18. Jae Jarrell (American, b. 1935), Urban Wall Suit, ca. 1969. Sewn and

painted cotton and silk, two-­piece suit. 37½ × 27½ × ½ in. (95.3 × 69.9 ×  1.3 cm). © Jae Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emmy L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16.

1.19. Gerald Williams, Nation Time, 1969. Acrylic

on canvas. 48 × 56 in. Collection of John and Susan Horseman.

rail tracks at 61st Street, near wj Studios. “It was just a cool, neighborhood thing—­the tablet of the neighborhood,” Jarrell said.121 Other artworks that allude to markings on walls include Gerald Williams’s Nation Time (figure 1.19), in which words and steadfast ­faces emerge in bright colors from a brick wall, and Jeff Donaldson’s cover illustration for Ebon’s poetry chapbook Revolution, which I ­will examine in chapter 3. Like the Picasso, the Wall was unveiled in August 1967. Like Picasso its creators ­were for the most part professional, trained artists. But ­there ­were many key differences. It was avowedly made by Chicago artists, in Chicago, in collaboration with the neighborhood community. The community had to be b­ ehind the paint­ers, literally: working on a scaffold facing away from the street in a dangerous area, the artists had to be able to count on the eyes and ears of the neighbors, whose blessing on the proj­ect was thus crucial. The neighborhood also provided volunteer critics, paint­ers, interpreters, and Claiming S pa ce, Bei ng in Publi c

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helpers. It had a po­liti­cal goal—to create a form of public art that rep heroes and heroines. Most importantly, the wall was created without the consent of the owner of the building, hence more or less destined for destruction and entirely without monetary value. In this it declared an affinity with more “vernacular” practices of visual self-­expression. Changes to the Wall

The Festival of Creativity or­ga­nized by obac occurred on October 1, a ­little over a month ­after the mural’s creation. It served as the Wall’s formal dedication. But by this point, the mural had already changed.122 I have already briefly described the changes that w ­ ere made to the Wall early in its life. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, Walker found Norman Parish’s “Statesmen” section problematic, and took action to change it, resulting in serious trauma for the Visual Arts Workshop. Many years ­later, it is still unclear exactly why this happened, and it seems Walker did not expect his intervention to cause the drama that it did. Small changes that had already occurred as a result of dialogue between artists and community members may have given him the impression of a consensus around his own belief that murals need not remain static. The original plan received several adjustments and some of the changes ­were uncontroversial. Florence Hawkins joined as the mural was in pro­ gress, adding the figures of Duke Ellington and Dick Gregory vis­i­ble in some photos on the façade of Johnny Ray’s tv and Radio shop, as well as Lew Alcindor. Carolyn Lawrence (a f­uture member of africobra along with Donaldson, Jarrell, and Jones) joined the group ­after the Wall was planned. William Walker suggested she paint the corner newsstand, which she did, with abstracted figures representing “Dance”—­although in a sense dance was already represented by Roy Lewis’s photo­graph of Darlene Blackburn between the “Theater” and “Jazz” sections. ­Later, David Bradford, a California artist, would paint a second storefront, ­Will Hancock would paint neighborhood personalities (“local heroes”) on the building’s corner turret, and Kathryn Akin would add one or more figures in a doorway.123 Painting in public u ­ nder the critical eye of the community was a new experience for most of the artists. By its presence on the street, the mural called for community involvement: neighbors felt they had a stake in what their neighborhood looked like. This resulted in conversations with neighborhood residents that in several cases resulted in changes. According to Walker, militant community members “would not permit” Martin Luther King Jr. to be 74  /

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painted on the Wall. While the discussion in the obac meetings determined that Albert Cleage would be included instead, Walker seems to have deci­ded unilaterally to substitute the figure of King’s associate Wyatt Tee Walker.124 One ­woman summoned Jeff Donaldson over from across the street to ask him to change his portrait of Nina Simone, which she called “ugly.”125 A shot by an unknown photographer shows Donaldson’s first attempt (figure 1.20). The final version—­painted ­after Donaldson visited the w ­ oman and admired the cut paper artwork she herself had created in her home—is frontally oriented, better distinguished from the dark figure of Thelonious Monk above her, and, indeed, gives a sense of greater focus and vibrancy. This early photo also reveals a glimpse of the painted portrait of Ornette Coleman, originally above Max Roach, which was ­later replaced by Abernathy’s photo­ graph of Sarah Vaughan and cut out and moved to the far right u ­ nder Elvin Jones. Donaldson ­later told Murry DePillars that “the mural was conceived through the response and criticism of the community.”126 But more complex consequences arose when Eugene “Eda” Wade (“Eda” derived from “Edaw,” his last name spelled backward) began visiting the Wall. He was an art student who had shown work at Myrna Weaver’s gallery, The Arts. He asked Walker if he could work on a section—­but the sections had already been distributed. Walker happened to see Eda’s painting of Malcolm X exhibited at The Arts, and he was impressed with the young artist’s skills. But that was not enough: as Eda explains it, Walker waited ­until he was sure Eda was unafraid of the Young Militants, the politicized former gang members in the neighborhood led by Herbert Colbert. It was one ­thing to work together in a large group, as the obac artists had initially done in August. But once that initial campaign was over, ­things changed. Painting on a wall, alone, with one’s back to the street, one had to have a good relationship with the armed men who controlled the street. Walker believed Norman Parish had left his “Statesmen” section unfinished and that that situation needed to be remedied. Parish’s portrait of Malcolm X, substantially larger than the rest, was rather sketchily painted in, almost wispy—­perhaps it was indeed not entirely finished (figure 1.21). Moreover, according to Eda, the po­liti­cal mood in the neighborhood had changed and the community desired something more confrontational.127 So Walker gave Colbert and his community organ­ization the go-­ahead to whitewash ­Parish’s section (Roy Lewis’s photo­graph of Malcolm X Park stayed in place). Eda then repainted it with a central raised fist (see figure I.4). Surrounding the first w ­ ere smaller ­faces, representing Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Malcolm X—­the painting that had been on display at The Arts. While it Claiming S pace, Bei ng in Publi c

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1.20. Wall of Re­spect, detail of

“Jazz” section, in pro­gress, 1967. Photographer unknown. 1.21. Wall of Re­spect, detail of Nor-

man Parish’s “Statesmen” section with Roy Lewis photo of ­Malcolm X Shabazz Park (Washington Park), 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

is impossible to know Walker’s motivation, it does seem plausible that some community residents believed the portrait of Malcolm X was not a power­ ful enough image of the fallen leader. Residents had not been privy to the artists’ collective process—­but they, of course, had to live with the mural. The proj­ect had been collectively planned and executed by a group that relied on mutual re­spect and trust. When Walker made t­ hese changes unilaterally, for Parish, and other obac artists who ­were close to him, it was an enormous breach of trust, spelling the end of the Visual Arts Workshop of obac, and creating personal divisions that never truly healed.128 Some members shied away from joining organ­izations for many years.129 For Roy Lewis, the Wall was now a Wall of Disrespect.130 Meanwhile, obac members ­were receiving anonymous missives from provocateurs attempting to stir up even more internal conflict.131 The Chicago police conducted extensive surveillance of the many events that occurred at 43rd and Langley, filing reports ­under the broad heading “Coordinating Council for Black Power” used (more or less fictively) by the notorious Red Squad.132 Many participants in events around the Wall recall seeing gunmen on rooftops. Basing their account on interviews with Walker, Eva Sperling Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft wrote in ­Toward a ­People’s Art, “In August, local civil-­rights leaders called for a mass demonstration on Forty-­Third Street near the wall. A street permit was denied, but on a hot after­noon, angry ­people filled the streets from ­every direction. Police with shotguns waited on the rooftops. In the midst of this sea of protesters, Curly Ellison, with permission from the demonstration leaders, calmly lettered Wall of Re­spect ­under the figure of Muhammad Ali.”133 Many participants saw gunmen on the rooftops at the opening ceremony and concluded that they w ­ ere police or the fbi.134 While t­ here is l­ittle evidence that the police consciously targeted the art or artists for surveillance, ­there was obvious police presence in the crowds at events, and Red Squad files show the police w ­ ere interested in militant speakers at the many rallies 135 held at the Wall. To Lee, the government’s view was, in a sense, not incorrect: recall that for him the wall was “a weapon.”136 Lee writes that “whi-te ­people . . . ​run from the mighty black wall”; it “kill[s] their eyes.”137 The local effects, though, w ­ ere also affirming. Gang members helped acquire paint for the proj­ect, ­adopted the Wall as their own, protected it from defacement, and resisted anonymous efforts at turning them against it.138 Jeff Donaldson declared l­ater that the Wall was “where ­people feel better when they walk by ­there, and we made it so.”139

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­ hether or not the Wall could fit readily into the category of the W “Happening,” it was clear that it was not merely an object, a painting to be looked at.140 Creating it was a public event. When finished it elicited performance—­poetry, ­music, theater, oratory. According to observers, neighborhood residents, including gang members, protected the Wall from graffiti (figure 1.22). ­People gathered, ­children played. Some of ­those ­children—­Paul Higgins and Ziff Sistrunk—­would charge visitors a quarter for a complete “tour” of the Wall’s figures (figure 1.23).141 ­These c­ hildren and ­others ­were quick to take advantage of opportunities the Wall presented to them. The week ­after the initial unveiling of the Wall, the contentious National Conference for New Politics was unfolding at the downtown Conrad Hilton h ­ otel. The conference was an effort at bringing together Black Power organizers with the largely white New Left, and ended in failure.142 A group of Black activists, including pho­ to­g­raphers Darryl Cowherd and Roy Lewis, walked out of the conference to visit the Wall, bringing with them a banner reading “Full Support for Black Liberation.”143 What the photog­raphers immediately noticed was the changes Walker’s intervention had already wrought on the Wall. At the upper left of Cowherd’s photo­graph, Eugene “Eda” Wade can be seen repainting the “Statesmen” section. But the ­children at the Wall—­Ziff, Paul, and o­ thers—­were less interested in the details of the artistic pro­cess than in the opportunity to be photographed with the “Black Liberation” banner (figure 1.24). As they raised their fists in Black Power salutes, they reflected what Eda saw as the more militant mood of the neighborhood in the weeks following the Wall’s original creation. Perhaps they even inspired the fist he went on to paint. The language Gwendolyn Brooks used to describe the Wall of Re­spect is not as aggressive as Lee’s or Perkins’s. But contrast it with the meaningful/ meaningless “flower in the western field” of her Picasso dedication. For this dedication, she ends with ­these words: No child has defiled the Heroes of this Wall this serious Appointment this still Wing this Scald this flute this heavy Light this Hinge. An emphasis is paroled. The old decapitations are revised, the dispossessions beakless. And we sing.144 78  /

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1.22. Neighborhood residents who protected the

Wall of Re­spect, 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke. 1.23. Child (Paul Higgins) giving a “tour” of the Wall

of Re­spect, 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

1.24. Darryl Cowherd, Full Support for Black Liberation, 1967. © Darryl Cowherd. Courtesy of Darryl Cowherd.

Brooks points to the fact that the wall had not been “defiled” with graffiti—­a mark of its approval in the community. The Wall is not a s­ imple ­thing but a “still Wing” and a “heavy Light.” It is both “scald”—­a sudden, violent image—­ and “flute”—­a delicate flicker of sound. Its doubleness, strong and beautiful, and its presentness—­its position between past and ­future—­make it a “Hinge.” The wall is all ­these ­things—­the succession of nouns articulated by the repetition of “this” also suggests the visual composition of the wall as a series of portraits that made up a collectivity. Taken as a w ­ hole, the wall is a bulwark against historical trauma, and a new form of history. The intervention represented by the Wall of Re­spect was a conscious decision to make a commitment to a struggling neighborhood. This part of Bronzeville was in decline. The appeal of the neighborhood’s vibrant nightlife (and storied underworld) was greater at a distance. ­After World War II, African Americans who could afford to live elsewhere w ­ ere moving into city neighborhoods and suburbs that had formerly been closed to them, establishing what Charles Christian described as a “concentric” pattern of economic status: the higher the status, the farther from the center of the city 80  /

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and from the historic centers of the African American population in Chicago.145 This demographic shift intensified over the de­cades that followed. Bronzeville’s population declined and its segregated businesses lost money as whites developed a willingness to accept Black customers’ dollars. In addition, the meatpacking and manufacturing jobs that had originally drawn Blacks from the South ­were entering a precipitous decline, and by 1971 the last stockyard (once a backbone of Chicago industry) closed. As a built environment, the integrity of the neighborhood also suffered from the construction of high-­rise housing proj­ects and the Dan Ryan Expressway, and from absentee landlords who sat on properties that they allowed to deteriorate. The society African Americans had built in Bronzeville was profoundly disrupted by the pro­cesses that followed. Along with other center city areas along Lake Michigan, and the predominantly Black areas of the West Side, Bronzeville experienced a very high rate of housing stock de­mo­li­tion proportionate to population, and continued to do so ­after the height of “urban renewal” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is reflected in the map of proportions of housing de­mo­li­tions presented at the beginning of this chapter (map 1.1). The near North Side lakefront neighborhoods ­were also ­under heavy gentrification pressure that was pushing out poorer and nonwhite residents (Lincoln Park in par­tic­u­lar had been home to a sizeable Puerto Rican population). Already in 1938, a Chicago Tribune article on slum clearance by Howard Wood had noted the desirability for ­future development of the lakefront neighborhoods in par­tic­u­lar. The article presented a series of maps, each demonstrating vari­ous social ills connected to ­these same central neighborhoods, including juvenile delinquency, tuberculosis, infant mortality, and unsanitary plumbing. Many of t­hese concerns are racially coded. One item, “mortgage risk,” representing the unwillingness of the fha to insure mortgages in certain neighborhoods, was not just coded; it was explic­ itly the result of racist policies. The Tribune does not mention that fact. But Wood makes a statement that sharply illuminates nearly one hundred years of Chicago urban planning: “Strangely enough t­ hese very districts from the standpoint of location are intrinsically the most valuable residential areas in the city of Chicago.”146 The Wall of Re­spect thus came into being in an area where buildings, both residential and commercial, w ­ ere falling prey to urban renewal and redevelopment at a rapid rate. With the Wall of Re­spect and then, even more, with the Wall of Truth, artists found themselves working in concert with community members who sought to preserve their neighborhood. The walls w ­ ere more than just an efficient way of conveying a message; they C laiming S pace, Being i n Pu bli c

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1.25. Wall of Truth, 1969. Mural at 43rd and Langley

(across the street from the Wall of Re­spect). Detail of doorway with lettering. Photo by Mark Rogovin.

1.26. Wall of Truth, “Black Unity” section by William Walker, 1969. Photo by Mark Rogovin.

­ ere a way of establishing presence, shaping space. The claim to space w was even clearer in the sign posted above a doorway on the Wall of Truth (figure  1.25). That sign read, “we the ­people of this community claim this bldg. In Order to Preserve What Is ours.”147 In a section of the Wall of Truth Walker suggested what it might take to claim and preserve space: gang members, their berets representing the colors of dif­fer­ent groups, coming together in “Black Unity” (figure 1.26). The Wall was a major undertaking and enormously generative—­but the obac Visual Arts Workshop did not survive it as a stable group. The breach of trust between obac and Walker may have been exacerbated by the anonymous letters members received that seem to have come from police or other provocateurs. Members went their own ways, with some of them regrouping to form the collective that would become africobra. And the murals ­were demolished not long ­after they ­were created. The Wall of Truth was demolished in 1971. The Wall of Re­spect had been threatened at least as early as 1969, when community members began to rally to preserve it. On August 26, 1969—­almost to the day the second anniversary of the Wall’s creation—­the 43rd Street Unit of the Cosmopolitan Chamber of Commerce held a rally in support of the Wall. Chairperson Cora Carroll declared the

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intention to create a “community center containing a library, an art center, a referral center for young and old—in truth, a Black Cultural Center, unrivalled anywhere.”148 Her organ­ization won a delay in the Wall’s de­mo­li­ tion.149 Over the next two years, community members continued to rally at the site to keep the Wall intact.150 It was fi­nally torn down in March 1972.151

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Cultural Nationalism and Community Culture

2

On the same day that the Wall of Re­spect was unveiled, the tv station wbbm presented an unusual show: Opportunity Please Knock. It was a topical musical revue directed by the multitalented jazz vocalist, producer, and activist Oscar Brown Jr., and performed by members, former members, and associates of the Blackstone Rangers, the South Side street gang. The show, with mod, Crayola crayon–colored costumes designed by his partner Jean Pace and sewn by her ­mother, had already been presented to large audiences at the First Presbyterian Church in the Woodlawn neighborhood (figure  2.1).1 In May, the Defender praised the show and the Hyde Park Herald’s reviewer wrote of it as “a smooth rolling wave,” devoting special praise to Brown’s “Afro Blue,” which the reviewer described as a “melodic and richly pulsating . . . ​almost mystical” number.2 Like the stage version, the tv show presented a series of singing groups (the El duVels, Shantells, Paramounts, El Chicos, and Sixteens), with Fred Perry “speaking about ‘Chicago’ ” and a combined chorus performing a finale, “Out of My Head.”3 Ebony magazine presented a lavishly illustrated feature on the experiment, quoting Brown: “­These kids are angry b­ ecause ­they’re being shot through the same grease their parents ­were shot through, and they understand that it’s impossible for a bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstraps.”4 Brown did not mince words. His view reflected his longtime leftist politics: he was a protégé of Paul Robeson and former member of the Communist Party.5 In the musical, he introduced his own per­for­mance of Afro Blue with an extended poetic monologue.

2.1. Opportunity Please Knock, performed at On the Beach, 63rd Street Beach, Woodlawn, Chicago, 1967. Photo © Darryl Cowherd.

­ hese are our ­children who prayerfully come T Seeking some way to escape from the slum From pains of the past. From the poor paying job The scorn of the law; and the howl of the mob. ­ hese are our ­children still being denied T Freedom their ­fathers have fought for and died. ­They’re joining together in their common plight ­They’re ready to rise and if need be to fight. And what do you, sitting ­there, see as their fate? Why must they suffer? How long must they wait? How long must the captives of cast[e], class and race Be locked in the ghettoes and kept in their place? How long to recapture that freedom of yore Before they ­were dragged from the African shore? As hearing again the ­great African drum They sweetly recall from whence they have come.6 86  /

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With this musical revue, the Blackstone Rangers had some success. The ­ rothers ComOpportunity Please Knock Chorus appeared on the Smothers B edy Hour; they also cut a 45 on Ramsey Lewis’s label Ramsel Rec­ords, with the soul songs “All This Talk about Freedom” and, on the B side, “I’ll Be Back” (a song about ­going off to war, written by Brown). “All This Talk about Freedom” pres­ents a skeptical view of civil rights rhe­toric alongside apocalyptic fears for the ­future. The title is taken from the first line of the chorus (sung by the youthful ensemble), “All this talk about freedom—­seems to lead nowhere.” The soloists who sing the verses seem to address the chorus as a repre­sen­ ta­tion of society: “What’s this ter’ble hate y­ ou’ve got, tearing us apart? . . . ​ ­People, ­people, gonna end this world someday . . .” The gospel-­tinged song ends with a plea to look to heaven and, in a slightly odd formulation, “­don’t destroy the square.” This means, I would suggest, both the urban environment and the meta­phoric social compact of the “public square.” First Presbyterian Church was the regular venue for the musical b­ ecause the gang had developed a rapport with its pastor, Reverend John Fry, and its congregation. Fry was one of many religious and social ser­vice leaders who believed the appropriate response to the increase of vio­lence in the neighborhood was to engage with the Rangers to shape their conduct and direct them t­ oward peace. His church had a sizeable gymnasium, and when he was approached by the Woodlawn chapter of the Chicago Boys Club to allow its use for a program involving one Ranger club, he agreed. This working relationship expanded ­until gang members w ­ ere regularly using space at the church, and Fry and his colleagues had begun helping connect them to other resources.7 Opportunity Please Knock was a chance to showcase Ranger talent and to bring in legitimate revenue. The fact that Fry, a white Presbyterian minister, or Oscar Brown Jr., a well-­ known entertainment personality, would work with a street gang might seem surprising. For Fry, the youth gangs had to be taken as seriously as any community member, and the consequences of inaction—­the mounting body count of intergang warfare—­were even more dire. From Brown’s perspective, the Blackstone Rangers w ­ ere getting in the way of his work by frightening audiences away from South Side venues like the Harper Theater, where his Summer in the City was performed in 1966; he contacted the gang ­because it was “stepping on [his] hustle.”8 He was impressed by the Rangers’ abilities but, like many South Siders, skeptical of the uses to which they ­were putting the grant money they w ­ ere receiving. Brown offered to put on a show for them, and the Rangers responded, according to Ebony, by saying, “We have talent of our own. Why not use some of us in the show?”9 Cultural National is m

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In the public perception, gangs constituted a dangerous social prob­lem that needed to be addressed. But they also constituted a society in and of itself that had developed power and agendas with which both Black and white society had to reckon. Beyond this, a more utopian hope glimmered: that the orga­nizational strengths of the gangs might be put to constructive use building a Black nation. ­Until a rift developed over anx­i­eties about money, Brown held real aspirations “to transform the gang to a responsible youth movement.” As he put it, “I was always preaching to any of them who would listen, about changing their image from predators to protectors: ceasing their reported criminal activities, and becoming, instead, a power­ful po­liti­cal force.”10 Black Cultural Nationalism

In ­these years, Black intellectuals’ critiques cut to the core of white American culture. Harold Cruse put it bluntly in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: “The cultural mainstream of the nation is an empty street, full of bright lights that try to glamorize the cultural wreckage and flotsam of our times.”11 Lerone Bennett Jr. voices a similar critique in The Negro Mood: Americans in general are creatures who have “externalized almost every­thing, who live by machines and die by them, who mortgage their souls for pieces of tin and split-­level caves in middle-­class hells.”12 This position on mainstream culture was already clearly in view in the 1959 Chicago film The Cry of Jazz, made in Hyde Park and directed by Ed Bland (figure 2.2). Much of the film’s action is a passionate discussion of jazz and racial politics that unfolds following a meeting of the “Parkwood Jazz Club.” “Parkwood”—­Hyde Park–­Kenwood—­ reflects the neighborhood in which the film was made, with its apparently urbane interracial community living close to the South Side’s nightlife and its poverty. Scenes of crumbling back porches, kids playing basketball, young ­children in dilapidated, roach-­infested interiors, saloons, lively street life, and a fervid sanctified church ser­vice feature prominently in segments that alternate with the group’s discussion of the history and theory of jazz. The “social documentary” scenes are set to ­music by Sun Ra, with Alex, the film’s main character, delivering a didactic voice-­over; ­these alternate initially with a series of conversational “chapters.” L ­ ater, it is filmed per­for­mances by Sun Ra and his ensemble that punctuate discussion. Alex posits that jazz—­“the Negro cry of joy and suffering”—­could only have been created by Blacks. Beyond this, along with the film’s other Black characters, he radically, cuttingly inverts white supremacist commonplaces, arguing among other ­things 88  /

C H APTER 2

2.2. The Cry of Jazz, 1959. Still from film directed by Ed Bland.

that whites are not fully h ­ uman, have no souls, and are less intelligent than Blacks. Jazz, while a fully Black creation, is also universal—­“jazz is telling every­body’s story—­why ­can’t you accept that?” The best that whites can do is to “accept the Negro’s tragic experience with reverence and humbleness.” The ironic reversal is fully apparent in lines like “­after all, ­we’re not boasting, ­we’re merely laying down the facts”—­mimicking the typical demeanor of scientific racism—or “I shudder to think of the terrible burden the Negro has in trying to teach American whites how to become h ­ uman,” a clear reference, in reverse, to Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” Alex propounds a theory of the structure of jazz as a reflection of African American life, creativity that strains against the bonds placed on it and, to be fully realized, requires nothing less than the destruction of American society in its current form. He suggests that African Americans have a special, privileged view on the vacuity of American society, and therefore that Amer­i­ca ­will depend on African Americans to save it from ultimate destruction. But this would not be accomplished by art alone. In a medium close-up shot that positions his head next to that of an African figurine, Alex fi­nally argues dramatically that jazz is dead—­because its spirit cannot move forward in its aesthetic form.13 Jazz is too limited a canvas on which to paint the revolution implied in this position. “The Negro can only become alive,” Alex declares, over shots of burning buildings, “by the destruction of Amer­i­ca’s C ultural Nati onal i s m

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f­ uture.” Chaos erupts among the guests. The character Natalie asks if she is at a “Mau-­Mau meeting,” referring to the ­Kenyan revolutionaries. The theme of cultural and spiritual emptiness connected to American materialism was also an issue for white artists at midcentury, but the products of the white artists’ rebellions was assimilable into the very vacuousness they sought to critique. At any rate it seemed to sit comfortably within it, as members of the Black Arts Movement saw it. Some of the very gestures of critique of Western conventions made by modernism can be read from another point of view as a reinforcement of the very privilege that is ostensibly being critiqued. What Alex seems to be saying is that to create something truly new, turning away from the old was not enough—it actually had to be destroyed. A total reordering of art, consciousness, and spatiality was required. When you use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s h ­ ouse, from the outside it might just look like renovation.14 Chicago was becoming one of the country’s g­ reat Black cities, a fact most evident in the prominence of Chicago blues, as well as the major writers who emerged from Chicago’s Black Re­nais­sance. Chicago was the “Black Metropolis”: the title of the classic so­cio­log­i­cal text by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. But when Phil Cohran said in an interview with Clovis Semmes that the summer of 1967 was “when Chicago first became Black,” he referred to a shift in consciousness: a ­whole constellation of ideas embedded in the change from self-­identification as Negro to self-­identification as Black.15 Artists, writers, musicians, and other cultural workers ­were actively producing new forms of identity. In 1967 “Black” and “Negro” could still be used relatively interchangeably by an African American columnist writing in the Chicago Defender newspaper. For example, Doris Saunders referred in a January column in the paper to the formation of a “Negro theatre” but to “black artists” and “the black experience,” with no par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal stance evident in e­ ither, in February.16 But “Negro” was coming to have a derogatory sense, referring to African Americans who had internalized mainstream (white, racist) values. Statistics on the vocabulary chosen by writers for the Defender makes this shift very plain. From 1963 to 1973, the annual frequency of the word “Negro” by year dropped by close to 95 ­percent—­from 8,824 to 465 uses. The biggest single-­year drop is from 1968 to 1969. Meanwhile the word “black” shot up between 1967 and 1968, from 3,464 occurrences to 6,319, peaking at 8,857 in 1970 before leveling off at around 7,000 from 1972 on.17 Johnson Publishing changed the name of its cultural review Negro Digest to Black World in 1970. Culture workers ­were conscious of creating specifically Black identity. 90  /

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In July 1968 a perceptive white observer suggested that “before official Chicago acknowledges, or even comprehends, the new self-­definitions of its black society, that society may have moved past all ideals of racial mutuality.”18 This was certainly coming to be the case for Black nationalists, and in par­tic­u­lar cultural nationalists—­often associated with Ron (­later Maulana) Karenga—­who constituted one of the key strands of the Black Liberation Movement. O ­ thers included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc), and its approach to Black Power, which was more confrontational; the revolutionary nationalist (and eventually internationalist) Black Panther Party; and the religiously based Nation of Islam. The strands in the Black movement ­were many; I ­will refer to Black liberation to cover them all, with “liberation” to be understood as a broad continuum of activity including culture as well as politics. Malcolm X had said that culture was an “indispensable weapon” in the freedom strug­gle, and some have dated the beginning of the Black Arts Movement to his assassination, an event that prompted artists to dedicate themselves to militant action through their work as artists.19 Cultural nationalists asserted that po­liti­cal revolution needed to be nourished by vibrant and specifically Black cultural life. In the strongest terms espoused by cultural nationalists, they argued that culture must be used to shift mass consciousness before po­liti­cal revolution could succeed; Karenga called for Black art to serve an eventual armed revolution. For historian William Van Deburg, separatism and the development of shared group identity are the key components distinguishing nationalism from other militant Black libera­ tion positions.20 In July  1967  in Newark, the Conference on Black Power declared itself in f­avor of separatism, the a­ ctual territorial division of the United States into separate white and Black nations. The conference drew many participants from vari­ous branches of the Civil Rights Movement and militant activism. It should perhaps come as no surprise that when one of the Chicago attendees from the Newark conference, Dr. Nathan Wright Jr., stated on his return that he was planning to or­ga­nize a Black Power group, most of the ­people he named ­were also key members of obac.21 Culture was also, often, expressed in terms of self-­image. The Nigerian scholar Abiola Irele, describing the literary movement négritude as a form of cultural nationalism, wrote in 1965 that “nationalist movements are generally accompanied by parallel movements of ideas that make it pos­si­ble for its leaders to mould a new image of the dominated p ­ eople.”22 An article in Ramparts described Black nationalism as a way of raising c­ hildren with a “new self-­image,” one that embraced natu­ral hair and Black skin as well C ultural N at ional is m

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as cultural history.23 Van Deburg writes in New Day in Babylon that “for cultural nationalists, black culture was Black Power. By asserting their cultural distinctive[ness] via clothing, language, and hairstyle and by recounting their unique historical experiences through the literary and performing arts, cultural nationalists sought to encourage self-­actualization and psychological empowerment.”24 Nationalists also often sought to rediscover and emphasize suppressed African cultural forms in all the arts. In his editorial introduction in the summer 1963 issue of Freedomways, the Nigerian E. U. Essien-­Udom, surveying African American nationalists, suggests that “the liberation of Afro-­Americans . . . ​ultimately lies in an understanding, appreciation, and assertion of [their] Afro-­American cultural heritage.”25 The idea of a return to Africa could imply a form of racial essentialism. Van Deburg describes cultural nationalism in terms of a belief in a “special consciousness,” defined as “Afro-­Americans’ most impor­tant natu­ral resource—­the essence of their collective psyche.”26 The poet Carolyn Rod­ gers wrote, for example, “if the Black Spirit flows right through a piece of work it ­will excite me. It should excite any Black who reads it. Excite meaning, some level of yes, indeed, interest or feeling.”27 Revolutionary nationalists like the Black Panthers argued on the contrary that cultural nationalism was counterrevolutionary romanticism, inasmuch as it promoted “returning to the old African culture.”28 And Harold Cruse, commenting on this issue in his 1967 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, noted the “profundity” of the “cultural ­factor” while emphasizing that the assertion of cultural heritage “cannot be based solely on an African cultural fundamentalism of the traditional kind.”29 He argues for a synthesis of politics, economics, and culture, in what he calls a “new institutionalism”: “only when this new synthesis is able to proj­ect ­actual cultural revolution in Amer­i­ca ­will the Afro-­American’s assertion of cultural and spiritual heritage have any real social meaning.”30 A significant alternative also existed within cultural nationalism that saw African American cultural identity as something to be fostered and constructed rather than something innate to be tapped. In a 1969 article on nationalism in Black Scholar, James Turner argues for nationalism as a psychological and so­cio­log­i­cal proj­ect of redressing the overwhelming impact of negative messages that barrage the psyches of Black Americans. For Turner, “such a movement of ideas represents an effort to transcend the immediate conditions of an undesirable relationship by a pro­cess of reflection which creates a dif­fer­ent (and opposing) constellation of symbols and assumptions.”31 Tracing a genealogy of Black nationalism, he argues, for instance, that Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement was not atavistic but a first step ­toward 92  /

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constructing a positive valuation of blackness in­de­pen­dent of the values of white society. In this view identity was precisely not a timeless resource but rather needed to be situated, possibly imaginatively created, in relation to time: to past, pres­ent, and f­uture. In The Cry of Jazz, Alex describes “Amer­i­ca’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate the Negro,” and not only physically, not only culturally, but also temporally. “You wiped out our past,” he states; “with slavery, you wiped out our ­today, and the present-­day savagery is intended to deprive us of our tomorrow.” This produces a situation of a “futureless ­future” documented in the film’s quasi-­documentary shots of Black life and reflected in the movement-­within-­stasis that, Alex argues, characterizes jazz: improvisation against the constant return of the chorus and the structured changes that restrict movement. This parallels the film’s understanding of “Negro life” lived in the moment, “electric—­full of meaning and seething with life.” The visual material of the film provides a sense of vibrant intensity in its scenes of a Black church, a pool hall, p ­ eople walking down the street, and musical per­for­mances. (The contrast with the frivolity of “white” jazz—­paired with the assertion of white American life’s consumerist emptiness—is devastating.) Cry suggests that being confined to the pres­ent moment has artistic benefits, but takes a ­human toll. As a remedy for this sense of confinement to a timeless pres­ent, Jeff Donaldson called for three temporal strands in Black art: “Definition—­images that deal with the past. Identification—­images that relate to the pres­ent. Direction—­images that look into the ­future.”32 The group Donaldson cofounded, africobra, emphasized this temporality in programmatic statements and in the themes and imagery of their work. Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s Rise and Take Control (figure  2.3), for example, displays ­faces turned left, right, and center, suggestive of ­these three temporal dimensions. Cultural nationalism asserted that all three ­were necessary to create lives that are livable, and that culture had a key role to play in that creation. In an essay titled “Black Theater, Go Home!” published in April  1968, Ronald Milner issued a call: “We, black p ­ eople, desperately need a healthy natu­ral art form: art coming from an intercourse with life! Our lives! . . . ​It must become an organic, functioning part of our communities. As black artists we must go home in ­every way.”33 What this meant for Black intellectuals was not (or not only) the reconstruction of a sometimes mythicized view of an African past but also, importantly, crossing class bound­aries within African American society to seek inspiration in the “ghetto,” among “the ­people.” Karenga argued that artists should transmute the ­people’s Cultural National is m

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2.3. Barbara Jones-­Hogu (American, 1938–2017), Rise and Take Control,

1971. Color screenprint on heavy purple-­colored wove paper. 23 × 35 in. (50.8 × 68.6 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of ­Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

everyday experience into art forms more vivid and larger than life. Art, he suggested, “must be from the ­people and must be returned to the ­people in a form more beautiful and colorful than it was in real life. For that is what art is: everyday life given more form and color. And in relationship to that, the Black artist can find no better subject than Black ­People themselves.”34 Cultural nationalism is often posed against (and indeed posed itself against) the class analy­sis central to the Marxist ideas that had informed the values of an earlier generation of artists. In California, the cultural nationalists and the Black Panther Party ­were openly hostile to one another. But in Chicago the situation was somewhat dif­fer­ent. Useni Eugene Perkins identified as a cultural nationalist but invited the Panthers to hold an ongoing ­Free Breakfast program at the Better Boys Foundation, which he directed. Phil Cohran, a key figure in Chicago’s cultural nationalist movement as well as in Chicago’s experimental Black cultural scene, took his students at Malcolm X College to tour the apartment in which the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered in December 1969. The Black Arts Movement

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was nourished by cultural nationalist ideas, but this was in no way inconsistent with a focus on building relationships with poor Black ­people. In this artists of the 1960s ­were supported and enabled by an earlier generation of radical leftist artists and writers: Margaret Burroughs, Marion Perkins, Paul Robeson, Theodore Ward, and Richard Wright, for whom communism provided language to understand in­equality in Amer­i­ca and globally.35 Oscar Brown Jr., younger than this group but older than most of the artists connected with the Black Arts Movement, can be taken as a transitional figure, expelled from the Communist Party for being too much of a “Negro Nationalist.”36 ­Running into a young artist in a ­hotel in Dakar, Senegal, in 1967, Margaret Burroughs described the beret she habitually wore: “It’s not just a fashion statement. It’s revolution.”37 To turn to poor Black life as a source of strength and aesthetic inspiration was not an obvious gesture for a generation raised on hopes of assimilation and unfiltered access to the American Dream; for young p ­ eople in the 1960s it was a conscious choice and a rejection of hopes held both by liberal white society and by many African Americans of their parents’ generation. Black students ­were expected to feel grateful for increased access to mainstream educational institutions, but what they saw ­there persuaded them that the institutions themselves only perpetuated discrimination and oppression in subtle or not so subtle ways. Thus, some Black artists made a deliberate choice to look to poor Blacks for a form of unassimilated “blackness” that could serve as a source of authenticity, a model on which to refashion oneself. In The Cry of Jazz, Alex—­shifting between participant in the discussion and authoritative voice-­over, with neutral accent and devastating calm, and even more importantly ranging between temporal registers—­necessarily places himself at a certain scholarly remove from the experience of vibrant presentness that he describes as essential to “Negro life.” An intellectual comfortable educating white intellectuals (or pseudo-­intellectuals), he (and the film) also draws on neighborhood street scenes for a vision of “Negro” authenticity and as evidence for the central place of the spirit of jazz in Amer­i­ca’s ­future. This position had a long history. Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” celebrated the authenticity of “the low-­down folks, the so-­called common ele­ment” and chastised any Black writer who would say “I want to be a poet—­not a Negro poet.”38 Hughes and ­others responded to a set of questions arising in the “New Negro” movement of the 1920s, about the extent to which Black artists should look

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to African or folk forms for inspiration. A debate on this topic played out in the ’20s over the pages of the naacp’s magazine The Crisis, with some writers arguing that Black artists and writers should seek to become universal, to “encompass all experience, not attempting to suppress non-­Negro influence, for such suppression meant intellectual and aesthetic negativism,” as James Porter put it, describing the debate from the vantage point of the 1940s.39 For Hughes, the common p ­ eople ­were the best source of material for artists of their community, ­because to look elsewhere would mean an excess of artifice, turning away from the truth. Following in a similar line of thinking four de­cades ­later, Black cultural nationalists relied conceptually on poor Blacks for authenticity, believing that rural or urban poor Black culture harbored a kind of purity or autonomy that the Black bourgeoisie had lost. Scholars have persuasively critiqued this position, questioning essentialist views that suggest ­there is a “true” blackness to be found in any par­tic­u­lar group.40 And yet the critique has not recognized the extent to which artists in the Black Arts Movement w ­ ere attempting to thoroughly reformulate the relationship of intellectuals and “common folk.” For Hughes, the fact that common folk are an aesthetic resource does not necessarily mean they are models to emulate or leaders to follow in other aspects of cultural or po­liti­cal life; but the 1960s brought a notable shift in that direction. Writing on jazz in his book Blues ­People, Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones) argued ­there ­were perversely beneficial effects of the barbarous social isolation from the mainstream of American life inflicted on poor African Americans in par­tic­u­lar. While many (though not all) middle-­class Blacks attempted assimilation, and while poor whites identified with the culture of the oppressor, poor Blacks did not have t­hese options. With no expectation to assimilate, they preserved their connection—­not pure but less diluted—to musical forms inherited from African ancestors. According to Jones, as middle-­class Black artists began to recognize that assimilation would not save them from the basic ge­ne­tic inequities of American life, they saw advantages in assertively embracing this position of social isolation and the ­music that went along with it. This, he argues, is the situation that produced the jazz style bebop in the 1940s and 1950s. Though a high culture form, it relies heavi­ly on the cultural legacy that had been transmitted by poor rural and urban African Americans. Karenga emphasizes subject m ­ atter, and Baraka emphasizes style. Artists and writers creating a theoretical program for Black art, a “Black aesthetic,” also asserted a need for art that is relevant and legible to “the p ­ eople.” On 96  /

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a very basic level, this might simply imply engagement: identifying and feeling unity with the (Black) community as a ­whole, directing one’s resources and leadership ability ­toward that community. The House of Umoja (“unity”), founded in April 1968 on the West Side of Chicago, at 3309 West Monroe, pres­ents a version of this position in its statement of princi­ples. Along with promoting a sense of community and harmony among Blacks, the organizers argued that “blacks [who] have assumed certain qualifiable rights and positions in areas that are relative to the lives of other blacks . . . ​ should be allowed an opportunity to examine, experiment on, and devise new methods in which to cope with the prob­lems of other blacks.”41 This might seem paternalistic, and perhaps it was. But it also reflects a complex mixture of desire for cultural reintegration, frustration with the slow pace of social change, suspicion with the agendas of white institutions, and anger at the continuing exclusion of African American professionals (including artists) from the mainstream institutions making policy decisions. Emphasizing Black solidarity over the authority vested in higher education, Jeff Donaldson wrote in 1969, “We ­will no longer permit so-­called higher learning to separate us from our ­people. We ­will no longer permit academic degrees to function as wedges between us and our ­peoples’ needs and desires. We w ­ ill no longer permit scholarly language, useless theoretical doubletalk, and esoteric dilettantism to make our academic and artistic exercises unintelligible to our ­people. In other words art or knowledge that does not serve the cause of the black strug­gle is a waste of valuable time and creative energy.”42 Beyond this back-­and-­forth communication—­artists inspired by the ­people and giving back to them—­artists might also be led by the ­people. Revolutionary consciousness would suggest this imperative: Baraka argued in an address to the Congress of African ­Peoples that “­there is no revolution without the p ­ eople. . . . ​It is the p ­ eople that must make revolution, not the vanguard.” 43 As Van Deburg writes, “If black expression truly was to be organic, the folk collective had to do more than provide the raw materials of anthropological inquiry. It was given the additional duty of helping shape the contours of black creative vision. The Black Arts movement held that ‘the p ­ eople’ could ‘sustain, assist, and inspire’ art. Often they dictated its form and content. Ultimately, they would pass judgement upon its worth. In this view, the community was both the essential source and the chief critic of the artists’ work.”44 According to this way of thinking, many middle-­class Blacks had lost themselves to Eu­ro­pean value systems, and African Americans as a p ­ eople needed to recover true Black roots wherever they might be found. Cultural National is m

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The Positive Potential of Youth Gangs

If the ordinary patterns of daily life pres­ent on the street could provide models, in the rhythms of speech and social interactions, their chromatic richness, what about the orga­nizational structures of the street? Could young peoples’ street organizations (also known as gangs) correspond to this notion of organic Black culture? Or should they be seen, rather, as corrupt products of the divisions foisted on Blacks by white society? Barbara Jones-­Hogu, who painted the “Theater” section of the Wall of Re­spect, wrote in her master’s thesis, “The gang ele­ment is a negative and positive force in the Black community. Although the gang has created many disturbing acts upon the community they also represent an or­ga­nized force. The gang is a product of the ills of our existence. Gang activities many times act as an extension of the power structure by committing acts of vio­lence. It is the responsibility of the mature male to redirect the gang t­ oward positive activities which would benefit every­one in the group.”45 When she writes that gangs act as extensions of the power structure, she means the white power structure; gangs are instruments of genocide for Black p ­ eople, serving the interests of the power­ful. As organ­izations, however, they hold and channel energies that could be directed to beneficial ends. In Jones-­Hogu’s prints Nation Time and Stop Genocide, she depicts gang members wearing differently colored tams intermingling, suggesting a co­ali­tion of dif­fer­ent gangs (figures  2.4 and 2.5). As a South Sider, Jones-­ Hogu was fully aware of the gangs operating t­ here. Like many other South Side residents of the period, Jones was impressed by the moment “when the Blackstone Rangers crossed the Midway. . . . ​They ­were crossing the Midway for a summit with rival gangs. I think when the public saw how many boys ­were in that gang it was astounded. When I saw that, I could see and understand that t­ here was g­ reat power in their numbers.”46 It was a startling show of visibility, and photog­raphers—­among them Robert Sengstacke and Gary ­Settle—­were likewise impressed (figure 2.6). In hindsight, and in the context of discussions of street gangs, Jones-­Hogu’s use of the phrase “Stop Genocide” might be assumed to represent a statement against Black-­on-­Black vio­lence, which has been a much-­publicized outcome of gang activities in the years since the 1960s. And although she acknowledged this as one result of the gangs, in the first instance she understood the command “Stop Genocide” to be addressed to gangs in their potential to fight back against white-­on-­Black vio­lence. “I felt,” she said, “that they had the potential to stop genocide . . . ​[meaning] white on black crime.”47 98  /

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2.4. Barbara Jones-­Hogu (American, 1938–2017), Nation Time, 1970.

Color screenprint on gold-­colored Japanese-­style laid paper. Image: 26¼ × 20¼ in. (66.7 × 51.4 cm); sheet: 31 × 24¾ in. (78.7 × 62.9 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

2.5. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Stop Genocide, 1969. Screenprint.

South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist.

2.6. “Blackstone Rangers shake fists and shout on way to meet Disciples.”

Photo by John ­Settle for the Chicago Daily News, April 8, 1968.

Jones-­Hogu likely ­adopted the phrase “Stop Genocide” from 1960s activist contexts. It appears in a photo, whose creator I have not been able to identify, that depicts a ­woman and a young girl, presumably the ­woman’s ­daughter, protesting at the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago.48 The ­woman’s sign reads “­people . . . ​welfare . . . ​jobs . . . ​meat explosion” (figure 2.7), the latter referring in all likelihood to the February 1968 explosion at the Mickleberry meatpacking plant that claimed eight lives, including four firefighters, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The ­woman also wears buttons in support of Jeff Fort (“­Free Jeff Fort”) and the Almighty Black P Stone Nation. The child’s handwritten sign reads simply “Stop Genocide.” In other contexts, the slogan might refer to the Vietnam War and brutal police tactics as well as white promotion of birth control among African American ­women. Jones-­Hogu’s title Nation Time relates to the language of Black nationalism, and particularly Amiri Baraka’s “It’s Nation Time,” which inspired many artistic statements—­including Jones-­Hogu’s print, the painting by Gerald Williams (see figure 1.19), and a mural by Mitchell Caton (figure 2.8). It also inspired the gangs themselves to constitute themselves as “nations”—­the Black P Stone Nation, the Almighty Vice Lord Nation. Like many artists active in C ultural N ati onalis m

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2.7. Protesters (­woman and young child) with “Stop Genocide”

sign in downtown Chicago, 1968. Photographer unknown.

the Black Arts Movement, Jones must have encountered young ­people who ­were members of gangs through her work as a teacher. Strikingly, she suggests that gang members could be a driving force producing the Black nation, stopping racist genocide against Blacks, moving po­liti­cal change forward. ­Others felt this way too. In the late 1960s, the organ­ization called two (originally the Temporary Woodlawn Organ­ization, then The Woodlawn Organ­ization) was fending off the university’s push into the Woodlawn neighborhood, south of the main quad in Hyde Park. two had formed in 1960 to ­battle corrupt landlords and grocers, and had begun taking on bigger targets. Initially part of an organ­izing effort by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, two was established with support from churches (in102  /

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2.8. Mitchell Caton, Nation Time, 1971. Mural, 4141 South

Cottage Grove Ave­nue. Photo by Mark Rogovin.

cluding the Catholic Church); its leaders ­were local ministers. They became ­adept at getting grants, including one from Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo, the driving force of the War on Poverty) to support a youth training program that employed members of the Blackstone Rangers. This was part of the oeo’s approach of innovation and risk-­ taking—­“seeking new and unusual ways to motivate alienated youths to become productive members of society.”49 This was the context in which Opportunity Please Knock took shape. Activists w ­ ere also talking about the potential to politicize gang members and even to model their own tactics on gang practices. An fbi in­for­ mant reported in November 1966 that, in a meeting of what the fbi termed the “Coordinating Council for Black Power,” activist Lawrence Landry had suggested learning from gang tactics. At the meeting, in this account, speakers “urged that the Negro should obtain control of and run his own neighborhoods as well as establish and operate his own po­liti­cal machine. Landry urged what he described as ‘street action’ to accomplish this, feeling that ­those individuals in Negro neighborhoods who would not want to go along C ultural National is m

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with this program should be terrorized into cooperating. He noted that this was the way both the Vice Lords and Blackstone Rangers operate.”50 One must take with a grain of salt—­understanding the ideological agenda driving the fbi—­the idea that activists planned to “terrorize” neighborhoods. Perhaps this report sensationalizes a speech something like one Landry gave on the Blackstone Rangers in December, in which he suggested allowing the Rangers “to develop in their own way” and argued that “Black folks must control the black community,” given that “we are all in a sense part of the Ranger Nation. For what we are about is taking power—­political power and economic power.”51 It seems plausible that activists like Landry admired the gangs’ orga­nizational abilities and the fact that they w ­ ere able to maintain control effectively over territory. At the same time, organizers also felt that the gangs ­were lacking in ideology. Another fbi report pre­ s­ents remarks ostensibly made by Stokely Carmichael at a dance held on the West Side in May 1967: “We got to begin to give a po­liti­cal ideology to the ­brothers in the Vice Lords and the Blackstone Rangers, ’cause if we can get t­ hose ­brothers to stop fighting each other and fighting the right ­people, ­we’re ­going to be moving t­ owards black power. But now the only way w ­ e’re ­going to be able to do that is when we stop talking from platforms and get down and work with the ­brothers ’cause ­they’re looking to somebody to tell them what to do.”52 The Community Action Program

While Carmichael suggests that gang members w ­ ere seeking outside leadership, this was not necessarily every­one’s view. What would it look like for activist artists to collaborate with p ­ eople who w ­ ere among the most marginalized members of society? Even in mainstream circles, the idea of self-­ determination was gaining ground, the sense that rather than paternalistic programs, poor ­people needed opportunities to make decisions for themselves. Proposing dramatic new antipoverty programs to quell riots, Lerone Bennett Jr., se­nior editor of Ebony, argued that such programs “must coincide with the black man’s desire to control his own destiny . . . ​[and] must give black p ­ eople power over themselves and over the institutions of their community.”53 The idea that poverty programs should have community control received bureaucratic expression in the philosophy of “maximum feasible participation” prevalent within the Community Action Program (cap) of the oeo. cap was founded with the intention of giving incentives to local communities to fight poverty with local solutions. The doctrine of maxi104  /

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mum feasible participation meant that the poor should themselves take action, that they should be the ones making decisions in the fight against poverty. It could go beyond this, at least conceptually. In a discussion of the doctrine during a 1968 University of Chicago workshop on community ser­ vice, maximum feasible participation was even more utopian: not just input on the direction of the social programs that already affected them but “poor ­people participating in our total society.”54 In his book From Opportunity to Entitlement, Gareth Davies addresses a late 1960s shift in emphasis in the War on Poverty from the idea of proffering structured opportunities to the poor to a new notion that money should simply be transferred to them—to do with what they themselves chose. The latter view recognized and promoted the autonomy of poor ­people but would prove in the end more po­liti­cally fragile.55 Discussing maximum feasible participation, Davies writes that “insofar as this doctrine emphasized changing the individual and finding alternatives to anaesthetized de­pen­dency, its focus was traditional and congenial to t­hose who boasted the virtues of American values.” But, he goes on to say, it was also about conflict and confrontation: “empowerment resulted from a once voiceless and passive poor confronting unsympathetic po­liti­cal and social welfare institutions.”56 “Anaesthetized de­pen­dency” might have been the condition of some poor and disenfranchised African Americans. But in the view of many observers the emotional diagnosis of the poor was not insensibility but rage. In his article on how to stop riots, Lerone Bennett Jr. described this rage as a force of nature. Quoting Herman von Holst’s meta­phor of national crisis as a mountain avalanche, he affirmed: That’s the way it happened in the summer of 1967 in the United States of Amer­i­ca where ­great chunks of discontent had been accumulating for 348 winters, high in the steep mountains of black despair. So massive ­were ­these accumulations, and so obvious was the neglect of the years that a series of small incidents in this summer pushed critical masses in the black colonies of Amer­i­ca over the ­human ridge of endurance and the resulting avalanche of rebellion inundated city ­after city. A black fury, as elemental as a natu­ral disaster, whiplashed the land.57 Bennett associates youth uprisings to natu­ral disasters to suggest that their actions w ­ ere to be expected, ­were only natu­ral, could not have happened other­wise, given the pressure ­under which they had been put. As a C ultural N ati onali s m

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remedy to the fury felt by youth excluded from the abundance of American society, opportunities for aesthetic expression for poor youth w ­ ere often posed in terms of necessary emotional catharsis. In this model, the aesthetic created a framing situation, a safe space to channel discontent. As increased attention to youth art programs was both casually and more pointedly tied to inner-­city prob­lems, the implicit theory of art’s practical effects was that by allowing emotional release within a safe space—­safe to society perhaps more than to the young p ­ eople involved—it would ease the pro­cess of social adjustment. A similar view was expressed in a statement circulated at the time of the formation of the South Side Community Art Center: “art is a social vehicle which may be used as a guide by the individual into a way of life whereby he can enjoy a certain sense of security within himself and his environment.”58 It is difficult to know to what extent the unnamed author merely a­ dopted social scientific rhe­toric as a way of making the center’s case to government and other funding agencies, and to what extent it is fully sincere. But it certainly implies that social prob­lems can be solved by fixing individuals psychologically rather than by changing society. For many in the field of social ser­vices, the adjustment that needed to be made was a ­matter of individual psy­chol­ogy of affected young p ­ eople, and not the ­wholesale social and po­liti­cal transformation that the Black Liberation Movement sought.59 Discussions of a controversial episode in the early days of the oeo explic­itly articulated this view. In 1965 the agency was harshly criticized for funding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, directed by LeRoi Jones, ­because of the highly militant content of its per­for­mances. Though the events occurred in New York, the Chicago Tribune jumped into the fray with an article titled “U.S. Cash Aids Negro Spiel of White Hatred”60—­ “white hatred” meaning, from the Tribune’s right-wing point of view, hatred of whites, and not the statistically more significant hatred by whites. (The Tribune and other Chicago media ­were also, a few years ­later, to wage a vigorous b­ attle against oeo funding of the Blackstone Rangers.61) The oeo responded both internally and in public statements with the position that, as Jim Elleher, Deputy Director of Public Relations, put it, “We’d rather see ­these kids fussing on the stage than on the streets.”62 That is, they suggested an implicit theory of the arts as a safe channel for energies that could other­ wise erupt into vio­lence. The official history of the oeo during Lyndon Johnson’s administration declares that “the Black Arts Theatre was credited with serving as an emotional catharsis, easing the threat of civil disorder in Harlem.”63 Jack Williams, oeo inspector, wrote in a memo: 106  /

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It’s clear that the civil rights movement has focused the attention of this generation upon the indignities and injustices done to Negroes in Amer­i­ca, currently and in the past. Their knowledge was never lacking for an individual Negro, of course, but in earlier days it was suppressed. Now it’s out in the open and for many Negroes it seems to be it is only expectable that the reaction ­will be—­and is—­rage, for both the pres­ent and the past. B ­ ecause it has been long suppressed, this rage is particularly virulent, but it must come out if the Negro is to reach an accommodation with his own personality and his everyday world.64 Williams took the position that rage was inside young ­people of color, that it had to come out, and that art could channel it into forms that would allow expression without social danger. Conservative critics of the program’s funding may have had a dif­fer­ent view : that such “art” was not art at all; or that, rather than offering a safe channel for other­wise dangerous emotions, it actually incited them and urged action. Ironically or not, this latter view certainly was how Black Arts Movement prac­ti­tion­ers often saw their work. Youth programs funded at the national, state, and local levels in urban Amer­i­ca in the late 1960s thus walked a delicate line, constantly flirting with (what they saw as) danger in order to salvage an integrated sense of American identity, working with practitioners who often had much more radical desired outcomes. One such program was “Youth Action,” a Chicago citywide initiative undertaken in the summer of 1967 by the ymca, together with Chicago Boys Clubs, Chicago Youth Centers, and the Hull House Association.65 This was part of an evolution in youth social work. Since the late 1950s social ser­vice organ­izations had begun to put “detached workers” on the streets in recognition of the fact that the ­children in the greatest jeopardy (­those most directly affected by poverty and vio­lence—­and this often meant gang members) w ­ ere literally not coming into their buildings, where the bulk of programming had traditionally been situated.66 Youth Action was an attempt at coordinating street-­based youth work so that the many dif­fer­ent agencies took consistent approaches; one of ­those approaches was to support the arts.67 ­There was e­ very expectation that Chicago in 1967 would have a “hot summer”—­that is, a very violent one. Acknowledging frustrations, the Daily Defender created a campaign to “Keep a Cool Summer” that year. Defender editors solicited volunteers to make calls to get citizens’ agreement to support the cool summer, as well as seeking ideas from readers. Readers suggested religion, sports, jobs, and art programs for ­children and teens, as well C ultural Nati onali s m

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as po­liti­cal solutions such as mandating open housing. The Conservative Vice Lords and other gangs got involved.68 In summarizing readers’ ideas, the Defender’s editors declared that “community involvement, in one form or another, is basic to the quest for a remedy to . . . ​painful social wounds.”69 The concern to “keep cool” also reflected a growing national sentiment that major racial conflagration was imminent.70 On the Beach

One of the programs the Defender highlighted was Youth Action’s South Side program On the Beach, a summer festival of the arts held at the 63rd Street beach h ­ ouse on the shores of Lake Michigan that was supported by a large donation from a private donor.71 Phil Cohran served as musical director. At the beach ­house, among other events, he engineered the per­for­ mance of the enormously popu­lar Opportunity Please Knock. It made sense; he had worked with Oscar Brown Jr. on another proj­ect, Lyr­ics of Sunshine and Shadows, a proj­ect Brown had spearheaded, based on the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.72 Lyr­ics had run for the month of May 1967 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park.73 Born in 1927 in Oxford, Mississippi, Cohran had grown up in St. Louis and joined Sun Ra’s Arkestra in 1959 as a trumpet player. He in­ven­ted an electrified mbira called the frankiphone, named for his m ­ other, Frankie. (It is also sometimes known as the “space harp”—­Cohran can be heard playing it on Arkestra recordings.) When Sun Ra and the Arkestra left Chicago in 1961, Cohran stayed, and in 1965 he helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (aacm), an organ­ization closely linked to obac. For the first aacm concert, Cohran brought together a group he called the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. Though he was central to its founding in 1965, Cohran and the ensemble left the aacm by 1966 over differences in emphasis. He felt the musicians ­were undisciplined, and he was less interested in experimentation for its own sake than in incorporating African heritage and developing a sound that would appeal to a broad audience. He wanted his art to thrive on community support.74 A rift was clearly on view in a meeting the aacm held on October 2, 1965, which George Lewis chronicles in his book A Power Stronger Than Itself. The group divided over the question of original m ­ usic: some felt that the group should devote itself only to original compositions, while ­others, like Cohran, advocated for incorporating existing Black American and global ­music. They made this

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argument out of re­spect for past musicians but also on behalf of the audience. In one notable exchange, founder Muhal Richard Abrams stated, “Our purpose is to awaken the psyche.” Poet David Moore—­aka Amus Mor—­ asked the question, in Lewis’s account: “Are you interested in awakening the psyche of the performing musicians . . . ​or are you interested in awakening the psyche of the audience?” “The musicians,” responded Abrams without hesitation. Moore was incredulous. “­You’re not interested in awakening the psyche of the audience?”75 The question of audience is reflected in Cohran’s collaboration with Brown. In the 1960s, jazz had come to occupy a more specialized, “high culture” niche; r&b had taken over as the popu­lar ­music that most working-­ class and middle-­class African Americans identified with. Socially minded artists like Oscar Brown and Phil Cohran who emerged from a jazz background ­were experimenting with ways of reaching a mass audience that the more esoteric improvisations of ­free jazz might not touch. Cohran describes how On the Beach came about, beginning with his work on Lyr­ics. I had a five-­piece segment out of my band, the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. We had Spencer Jackson and his wife, Ella Pearl Jackson and we had Donald Griffith and Patricia Ann Smith. . . . ​The show was quite a big success, and it brought on a lot of other response. And one lady by the name of Betty Montgomery and her s­ ister Bebe Conda came to see our show when it was produced at Doolittle Elementary and she said she had secured a grant of a nice size package of money and she ­didn’t know exactly how to do it but she wanted to put on an artistic pa­norama on the lakefront. And they had the beach ­house which ­wasn’t being used at 63rd St.—­because primarily it was in the Black community and so no one was interested in a beach ­house over ­there. We went in and cleaned that up and lo and behold started On the Beach.76 Simon Conda, Bebe’s husband, was a carpenter; according to the sculptor Douglas Williams, who taught visual arts classes, he built a stage and augmented the walls “so that guys ­couldn’t peek over and see the ­little girls in the bathroom and showers. And then that could be used to hang paintings.”

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Williams was a tireless sculptor who taught art at the Martin Luther King Jr. Urban Pro­gress Center and directed the South Side Community Art Center for several key years (1967–70) before serving as the curator for Black Esthetics. ­There was a lot of work to do; the interior, Williams recalls, “was full of big columns of pigeon doo.”77 But the results w ­ ere spectacular. C ­ hildren’s and community workshops in writing, m ­ usic, and visual arts took place during the week, and major programs, per­for­mances, and exhibitions of student work unfolded on the weekend. Cohran performed with his own ensemble and invited other performers to participate—­the Spencer Jackson ­family of gospel singers and the dancer Darlene Blackburn and her youthful troupe, the Lively Ones. The beach h ­ ouse overflowed with crowds; photos show rapt listeners, many of them perched on walls for a better view, or just to find space to sit (figure 2.9). According to Cohran, the festival changed the way p ­ eople ate, dressed, and interpreted their history. And the crowds who came for concerts ­were not only receiving culture and teachings; they w ­ ere experiencing one another as much as the m ­ usic itself, recognizing themselves collectively as a culturally vibrant body, producing Black identity consciously in a po­liti­ cal way. In the second year of the program, Useni Eugene Perkins taught a writers’ workshop; out of the work produced by c­ hildren and adults, he published a collection of poetry called Black Expressions. In the book’s introduction, he writes, “In addition to the Writer’s Workshop the program included workshops in drama, art, crafts and ­music. . . . ​The program brought to the black community a summer of black culture that ­will be remembered for some time.”78 Perkins implicitly supports Cohran’s view that this event galvanized Black consciousness in Chicago. It was a particularly intense moment, concurrent with the creation and unveiling of the Wall of Re­spect. The Artistic Heritage Ensemble played at the Wall, too; Gwendolyn Brooks included Cohran in her poem about the Wall. In her description, Cohran’s work is a synthesis of nature and culture. Time stands still—­a “day-­long Hour”—as a marker of unity: Phil Cohran gives us messages and ­music made of developed bone and polished and honed cult. It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration, the day-­long Hour. It is the Hour of ringing, rouse, of ferment-­festival.79 The melding of “messages and ­music” was key to Cohran’s method. He liberally interspersed doctrine about Black history and culture and healthy 110  /

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2.9. On the Beach, shot of audience, 1967. Photo

by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of ­ obert Abbott Sengstacke. R

lifestyles with his ­music. The combination of ­music per­for­mance and educational lecture has pre­ce­dents in the per­for­mances of the sncc Freedom Singers;80 it also finds an echo in the africobra artists’ insertion of directive text into their semi-­abstract visual styles. Cohran took time to explain to his audience the roots of the m ­ usic he played. But he did more than this. A vegetarian, he promulgated natu­ral living based on African traditions. He urged his listeners to examine African history, the historical contributions of Africans to other cultures, and the politics of their dress, diet, and hair. Cohran was at the center of Chicago’s nationalist movement. Dress, diet, hair, consciousness of history: ­these are among the ele­ments of cultural change that he identified with the moment of blackness in Chicago. Wearing a “natu­ral” (not straightening Black hair) was gaining popularity. It was not uncontroversial; when Claudine Myers deci­ded not to pro­cess her hair C ultural N ational i s m

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anymore, she wrote to the principal of the school where she worked letting him know she was aware she might be fired for it.81 In 1967, too, Barbara Jones-­Hogu made a print that portrayed a young w ­ oman with a natu­ral, and when describing the image in her thesis, she wrote: “It is to mark the return of the Black w ­ oman’s ac­cep­tance of her kinky hair and the proud sublime character of her new identity of Blackness.”82 Blackness may be understood h ­ ere as a more au­then­tic identity for African Americans to assume, but it is not automatic: it is a constructive gesture. African-­inspired dress was also part of it. As Cohran describes it, it got so ­people “felt bad when ­they’d come over in their regular dress” so they would change into dashikis and other African garb before coming to the show.83 The ­music took inspiration from African sounds; Darlene Blackburn and her troupe also took inspiration from Africa for their dance routines and their minimal, bikini-­style costumes. Cohran’s musical style is sometimes classified as jazz, but as George Lewis has maintained, a better term for it is “creative ­music” (the term Cohran had himself offhandedly coined for the aacm—­which then stuck).84 When he first auditioned his ensemble for Oscar Brown Jr., Brown said, “I know you write your own ­music ­because no one ­else is ­doing anything like this.”85 Cohran’s pieces from this period are symphonic, gospel-­inspired, hypnotically danceable, and eerily apocalyptic by turns. They combined African drumming; dreamy cymbals; Eastern-­inspired melodic stylings; spoken, sung, and chanted words; and the occasional contribution of violins or the spacey-­ sounding, twangy frankiphone. Part of Cohran’s motivation in leaving the aacm was a hope for his ­music to appeal to a broader audience. On the Beach was part of that ambition, and appeal it did. The ­music attracted such a following, he recalled, that at the end of the summer it became obvious t­here was interest in having a year-­round venue for avowedly Black m ­ usic. The last weekend of On the Beach was devoted to a festival in honor of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.86 At his last per­for­mance, Cohran asked the crowd if they would like to continue year-­round. When the response was enthusiastic, he asked if they would come to a meeting at the St. John’s ­Grand Lodge, where the aacm also performed.87 Eighty ­people showed up, and he gave them a signed statement authorizing them to collect funds for a theater, which they did. As with the “mile of dimes” that helped found the sscac, this was a community-­supported endeavor.

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Affro-­Arts Theater

Cohran had identified a location for his new theater: the former Oakland Square Theater at 3947 South Drexel Boulevard. A few short months a­ fter the unveiling of the Wall of Re­spect, in November 1967, he began renovations in earnest.88 At 39th and Drexel, the theater was just a few blocks away from the Wall’s location at 43rd and Langley, but Drexel is one of Chicago’s boulevards, lined with stately homes, a parkway ­running down its center. The theater stood in the heart of Bronzeville. With community donations of cash, materials, and sweat equity, and Cohran’s personal commitment, a run-­ down old movie palace would become the Affro-­Arts Theater. (“Af ” was for Africa and “fro” stood for “from.”) The ornamented façade displayed a hand-­ painted sign that almost, but not quite, covered up the old Oakland Square sign.89 Pémon Rami remembers watching Prince No-­Rah placing the marquee on the front of the theater. Rami was himself a young theater director and actor whose printing skills ­were commandeered to produce the tickets for opening night using the letterpress in the basement of Wendell Phillips High School.90 As he reshaped the space, Cohran hoped to create something more than just an entertainment venue. On the model of the programming that had occurred at On the Beach, he and his collaborators planned workshops and classes, including gender-­specific classes on “womanhood” and “manhood,” as well as per­for­mances (figure 2.10). In Howard Simmons’s October  1968 photo of the “manhood” class taught by the drummer Bob Crowder (figure 2.11), participants wear a mix of formal and informal dress, both conventional and African-­inspired. They sit in a variety of poses, but the elongated central figure—­a man in a suit with his legs stretched out in front of him—­pres­ents the Black male body in command of space, as well as neat, tailored, and professional. B ­ ehind them, a wall of photo­graphs of performers provides a backdrop like that of the Wall of Re­spect, adapted to the specific setting. For most of the month of November, Cohran and helpers worked intensively to renovate the decrepit theater building. The theater held its ­grand opening in December. In January, the theater required a new entertainment license with the city—­a Class 1 public amusement license. So Cohran applied to the city for the license. On February 29, he paid the fee of $287.50.91 He also took the po­liti­cally canny step of approaching the local division of the Blackstone Rangers, explaining his plans to them, and offering f­ree admission to any of his programs and events. Although their collaboration with Oscar Brown Jr. was hitting the skids b­ ecause of mutual distrust, the Cultural N ational is m

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2.10. Phil Cohran playing

the frankiphone at Affro-­Arts Theater, 1968. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke. 2.11. Manhood class at

Affro-­Arts Theater. Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1968.

group was willing to work with Cohran. They contributed volunteer l­abor and obtained donations of paint and other materials from local businesses—­ with what methods, Cohran was prob­ably glad not to ask. But he told them to consider the theater their theater, and in l­ater years the building would actually become the Rangers’ headquarters, a­ fter they became known as the El Rukns. Like Brown, Cohran had some difficult politics to negotiate working with the Rangers. He had support from Jeff Fort and a few other members of the Main 21, the gang’s governing body. But the other primary leader, Eugene Hairston, was, at least at one point, dangerously unfriendly. Cohran almost became the victim of a gang hit before he was able to smooth ­things over.92 With all this to work through, Cohran did not bother to approach the local alderman, who, like all aldermen, wielded a g­ reat deal of influence over permits and, in general, the city’s dealings with business ventures in his district. To Cohran, it was the Blackstone Rangers’ support that was key to the theater’s continued existence. The initial program of the theater’s Black Studies College included musical concerts and classes in ­music, dance, and languages (Swahili, Hebrew, and Arabic). It also included po­liti­cal and religious forums. The theater’s classes in “womanhood” and “manhood” meant health and hygiene on the one hand, and self-­control over alcohol and drugs on the other; Cohran’s position on gender was unapologetically patriarchal, in keeping with prevailing rhe­toric of Black cultural nationalism. But it was the theater’s po­liti­cal events that attracted the scrutiny of the police.93 On February 21, the theater held an event to commemorate the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. The theater attracted negative notice from the Chicago Tribune by distributing leaflets about it to schools.94 The next day, February 22, the theater held a benefit event with the obac Writers’ Group to support LeRoi Jones, who was fighting the charge of illegal weapons possession and resisting arrest in the Newark riots of the previous summer.95 On March 25, Stokely Carmichael of sncc gave a fiery speech at the theater. Before he spoke, Carmichael asked Cohran to remove the press from the event, and ­because most of the members of the press w ­ ere white, the local police commander accused Cohran of racial discrimination. Cohran pointed out that Black journalists had been removed too. Alone and not in the mood for a confrontation with Cohran’s intimidating associates, the commander left. But the next day, police officers returned and declared that the theater had been operating without a license and would have to close. Cohran had the receipt from the license fee, but that was no good. Something was holding Cultural N ati onali s m

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up the license, and without it he could not operate. A loophole opened but only temporarily. I talked to [the police commissioner] and he said, well, you can operate but you c­ an’t charge anything. They thought they would break us by us not making any money. They thought we ­were hustling. See, all of our ­people ­were donating their work anyway. So, we opened up, ­free. The weekend. Every­body came in ­free. We took up a collection, I told them, I said, “Nothing operates in Chicago without some coins.” So we took up a collection and made more than we ever did on the tickets! So we operated that Friday night, and then Saturday morning . . . ​[a] policeman came in with his hand on his gun. And he said, “­You’re ­going to have to close, now.” So that was the theater closed.96 According to the Defender, the police did not just close the theater but swept the premises, forcing thirty girls in a dance class to dress quickly and get out.97 Cohran put up on the marquee the words “We Are Closed by Deceit” (figure 2.12). The situation aroused substantial community concern. Interviewed by the Defender on April 1, Cohran described the goals of the establishment as follows: “We started the theater in order to make a better contribution to our ­people. To elevate them, to lift them up, to instill pride—­not just for pride’s sake alone, but for the knowledge of the truth.”98 In public statements Cohran thus made the case for his organ­ization on the grounds of heritage and uplift. On April 4 he announced a “musical rally” at the Capitol Theater for the coming weekend to raise funds to do the necessary electrical work to bring Affro-­Arts up to code. It would feature the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, the Spencer Jackson ­Family, and Darlene Blackburn and the Lively Ones. But this was April 4, 1968—­a day that changed every­thing. Two years ­later Jeff Donaldson would review the growth of a militant Black consciousness among Chicago artists in an article in Black World (formerly Negro Digest). The Civil Rights Movement had floated optimistic balloons of equality and racial harmony. But this moment, Donaldson observed, was the end of all that: “And then the dreamer’s dreamer had his balloon busted on a Memphis ­hotel balcony. And that was the last balloon.”99 In Memphis, Martin Luther King  Jr. was murdered, and in Chicago, West Side neighborhoods exploded into a fiery uprising. On the eve­ning of April 5 some West Side residents burned and looted an area that closely hugged the Eisenhower Expressway, from Madison on the north to 16th Street on the south, from Damen on the east to Kildare on the west. (The Expressway itself had sliced 116  /

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2.12. Marquee with “We Are Closed by Deceit,” Affro-­Arts

Theater, 1968. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

through the neighborhood in 1955, forcing de­mo­li­tions and contributing to neighborhood decline as it split neighbors from neighbors and lowered real estate values in its immediate vicinity.100) Fires raged; amid the chaos, rocks, ­bottles, and bullets rained down on fire engines and National Guard troops. Mayor Daley imposed a curfew and issued an infamous shoot-­to-­kill order to be applied to anyone holding a Molotov cocktail. Nine West Side residents ­were shot dead by police, and over two thousand ­people ­were arrested. Many who w ­ ere caught in their sweeps w ­ ere not the original rioters but the “mopes and gawkers” who came out of the woodwork a­ fter ­things got g­ oing; the jails filled up with men accused of breaking curfew.101 Courts imposed unusually high bail in a rushed pro­cess that allowed few mitigating circumstances to be taken into account. On the South Side, the Blackstone Rangers are credited with having kept the peace and prevented large-­scale looting and burning of Black neighborhoods. A gang summit with the Gangster Disciples occurred on April 8 on the Midway Plaisance, the park-­lined boulevard at the south end of the University of Chicago, close to Woodlawn (see figure 2.6). This is the summit that Barbara Jones-­Hogu referred to in her Stop Genocide print. Leaders agreed to a truce, and it was largely respected.102 In the midst of the West Side rebellion, one organ­ization that tried to stem the tide of vio­lence was the Conservative C ultural N ational is m

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Vice Lords, Inc. The Daily Defender reported that the Vice Lords ­were among four Chicago gangs that “­were instrumental in averting much vio­lence during the weekend’s rioting.” Bobby Gore, a Vice Lords spokesman, stated, “The Vice Lords, Inc., did not participate in the action. . . . ​If ­there ­were any members engaged in vio­lence, it was on their own.”103 Though this was certainly only part of the story, he described Vice Lords distributing lit­er­a­ture on nonviolence, and encouraging young ­people to go home. On the question of the theater, the authorities pivoted briefly, caught in the same set of issues that caused controversy around oeo funds in Harlem. It must have looked more attractive, now, to at least some of the powers-­ that-be, to have the Affro-­Arts Theater open and occupying ­people peacefully, rather than having its closure stoke further frustrations. And so, with the intervention of several police officers, the African American aldermen Ralph Metcalfe (Sixty-­Third Ward) and A. A. “Sammy” Rayner (Sixth Ward), and Erwin France of the mayor’s office, preparations began for the theater to reopen. It opened, at least, for a meeting of the Black United Front to discuss relief for areas affected by the uprising.104 But this break in the clouds was short-­lived. A summons was issued on May 1 citing Cohran once again for operating without a license. This time it seemed that he was being punished for giving support to men jailed following the riots.105 Cohran padlocked the theater and announced on the marquee, “Chicago Regrets No More Affro Arts Theater.” The Arts and the Inner City

During this period, the unfolding drama around the Affro-­Arts Theater intersected with white cultural institutions and their ambitions to use art to “make a difference.” In May, Cohran crossed paths with a very dif­fer­ent kind of cultural organ­ization: Columbia College Chicago, an art school with a vocational emphasis. Mirron Alexandroff had become president in 1962 at a low point for the school, and he was assertively building programs and enrollments and encouraging experimental teaching methods. He led the planning for a conference called “The Arts and the Inner City” that Columbia held May 12–15 in the auditorium of the American Dental Association Building in Chicago.106 The conference became the scene of a confrontation between militant members of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and the well-­intentioned ambitions of members of Chicago’s socially conscious white art community. The conference’s passionate mission statement critiqued the ­handling of “ghetto” arts programs in terms that anticipate the debate it 118  /

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would itself provoke. The statement identified a “­wholesale plunging into arts activities for the disadvantaged without any research or planning to discover what types of programs would evoke response and constructive involvement of large groups of ­people or w ­ hole communities.” Art forms designed for and popu­lar with middle-­and upper-­class audiences ­were not necessarily relevant to the poor, and the idea that they should produce automatic “uplift” was naïve. The statement’s critique was scathing: “The poor, ­after all, already have arts. In fact, a g­ reat richness of ­these. But, it is comfortable to ignore all this, as not being ‘ours’ it must be inferior. Moreover, in too many instances arts programs have no real purpose or benefit except to show activity. In some part, sponsored arts programs are ­little more than employment opportunity for outside artists and the private designs of arts organ­izations.” It was most ironic, given what followed, that the statement noted that in the design of art programs for the poor, “­there has been ­little involving of Negro artists or of helping the Negro communities to develop their own arts programs.”107 “Arts and the Inner City” was funded by the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity and the New World Foundation, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council, the Fund for Enlightenment, and Columbia College Chicago.108 The invitation list included leaders of numerous local and national foundations and government agencies, as well as some key figures in urban arts programs from the East and West Coasts. Initial invitations went out early in the year; a few weeks before the conference a new invitation was sent out to more recipients, citing the riots obliquely: “Though the Conference plan was begun some months past, the disturbing events of the last weeks give sharpened importance to the deliberations of our conference proj­ect.”109 Alexandroff was sincere, but he was also engaged in program-­building, trying to find funding for proj­ects that would do well by ­doing good: do good in the world and, at the same time, raise the profile of the college he was leading. Among the long lists of invitees, mostly ­people with money to dole out—­most of whom did not attend—­were a precious few local African American prac­ti­tion­ers of arts and education. As envisioned, it was a far cry from “maximum feasible participation.” Alexandroff had given Gwendolyn Brooks her first teaching job. In the dedication of her collection of poems In the Mecca, she placed him alongside Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones. She was an invited speaker at the conference. The choice of invitees from among the Black community was not entirely unresearched. By inviting Phil Cohran to speak at the conference, Alexandroff was attempting to make overtures to Chicago’s Cultural N ational is m

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Black cultural world. He also invited Hoyt Fuller and Oscar Brown Jr., perhaps acknowledging the specific role that Cohran and Brown had played in youth programs like On the Beach and Opportunity Please Knock. But he had not given them any role in shaping the direction of the conference; the conference had not been or­ga­nized in a collaborative way with the local community that it purported to be serving. An attendee paraphrased by a newspaper reporter pointed out during discussions that the college was seeking to “function on a national level before opening significant ave­nues of communication within its own community.”110 Hoyt Fuller, who attended the conference, tartly noted in his reply to the invitation that the wording of Alexandroff ’s mission for the conference seemed very close to the mission statement of obac itself. He enclosed a copy of that mission statement in his note.111 Fuller could not have been more cordial in his written response, but privately he expressed frustration. Passing on the press release to Jeff Donaldson, he wrote at the top of it in red, “What pisses me off is that—­ having moved in on obac’s ­thing—­they keep calling me on the phone almost daily for advice, information, and help.”112 The tenor of words at the conference itself was angrier. According to textile artist Robert Paige, a group of Black artists planning their response met “all night” at Gwendolyn Brooks’s apartment prior to the conference.113 The next morning they picketed at the beginning of the conference, protesting the failure of the conference to invite substantial numbers of Black Chicago artists. Paige brought a sign depicting a pair of hands accompanied by the words “Hands Off Black Art.”114 The group announced itself as cobra, the Co­ali­tion of Black Revolutionary Artists. Jeff Donaldson served as spokesman. Richard Muhal Abrams of the aacm was another prominent participant.115 Invited inside, they refused to partake of food and drink in the receptions, symbolically continuing their protest.116 cobra had sprung into being as a response to the conference, in air that crackled with the po­liti­cal events of recent weeks and months. In Donaldson’s lyrical narrative in his 1970 Black World article about the origins of africobra, the April riots had led directly to cobra’s formation: “And it was Chicago again and Harlem again, and San Francisco and D.C. and Cleveland and everywhere. And cobra was born.”117 The events ­were so dramatic that a reporter wrote of the conference itself as a Happening: a­ fter an extensive general description of Happenings as an art medium, he defined the “academic happening” as an unstructured conference event: “As in the intermedia world, the symbol networks do the relating. Lacking control or structure, participants find their own ways to state 120  /

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and solve prob­lems. Out of this anarchic combination of attitudes and ideas, new and meaningful patterns of control can result.”118 The conference must indeed have seemed anarchic, as cobra picketed the conference, and organizers reacted by inviting cobra to join in. In their prepared statement, cobra members wrote that it was “immoral and usurping at this time in history for white Americans to be setting and interpreting standards of black art for black p ­ eople.”119 Heated discussions ensued, and the group split into white and Black caucuses, with Latinos joining the Black group. Separate statements w ­ ere prepared by the two caucuses. In discussions, Black caucus members criticized Columbia College for setting itself up as an arbiter for Black art, indeed (as Donaldson put it) the “­Great White F­ ather” of Black art.120 Donaldson stated it bluntly: “We do not need any more overseers. We do not need anybody to dispense money to us. We have a program. We need the money. Send us the money. ­Don’t give it to somebody to give to us. Give it to us.”121 The issues the conference sought to address w ­ ere valid ones, and money from white sources would not be turned away, but any such efforts should have Black leadership. Beyond maximum feasible participation, this view was ­simple—­give us money and get out. At the final dinner on Tuesday, May 14, the novelist John O. Killens read the statement of the Black caucus, a statement against “racism, colonialism, and exploitation” and strongly in f­avor of the position cobra had taken on cultural self-­determination: “Only through this kind of definition and control can we achieve ­human dignity, self-­realization, and the liberation of our ­peoples throughout the world.” Thus the conference “had to fail, and all other conferences of that nature must fail.” The statement concluded with the demand that the Affro-­Arts Theater be reopened. Following the reading of the statement, Killens proposed that the final session of the conference the next morning be abandoned, and that the conference instead reconvene at the Affro-­Arts Theater to protest its closure. The motion was ­adopted. The white caucus came out with its own position paper against racism and in ­favor of Black self-­determination. The next day, the conferees ­were bussed to the theater, which Cohran temporarily opened. Further discussions ­were held and the conference concluded with a per­for­mance by the Artistic Heritage Ensemble.122 The conference had been pulled together hastily, and numerous invitees expressed regrets that their time was already committed by the time they heard about it. Attendance from Chicago’s mainstream arts and nonprofit communities was not as abundant as it might have been with more planning. But perhaps this made the “fireworks” all the more vis­i­ble, and ­those Cultural National is m

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fireworks had real effects. In pushing visibly for the reopening of the Affro-­ Arts Theater at the time of the conference, and with letters they wrote ­after the fact, conference participants brought visibility to the theater’s strug­gles with the city and helped make its reopening pos­si­ble. Cohran, accompanied by Abrams and Donaldson, announced on July 2 that the theater would be able to reopen pending review of its compliance with city building regulations.123 Cohran gave credit to the conference group—­commandeered and re­oriented by the local Black artists—­for pressuring the city to reopen the theater—­which it did, by special arrangement, for a July 4 cele­bration.124 For a period of time, the theater was able to operate as a “­free black voice for expression and culture.” The theater announced plans that included screenings of Black and Third World films, such as The Road to Mecca, Malcolm X Speaks of Freedom, and The ­Battle of Algiers, as well as visual arts exhibitions.125 The theater’s Black Studies College was enhanced in late August by the arrival of Anastasia Onyewa Megwa, a native of Biafra and experienced teacher who also taught African dance that fall at the Museum of African American History.126 At Affro-­Arts, Megwa headed the African history course offerings.127 Months a­ fter the Columbia College Chicago conference, Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell renewed a conversation they had started in the early sixties. The two artists, who worked together on the Wall of Re­spect, had known each other for years. As Donaldson put it in his 1970 Black World essay, “AfriCOBRA 1: 10 in Search of a Nation,” they had talked as early as 1962 about “the idea of “a ‘negro’ art movement based on a common aesthetic creed.”128 Jarrell and Donaldson also worked together with Barbara Jones-­Hogu on the Wall of Re­spect as part of the obac Visual Arts Workshop, and they both met Gerald Williams, in­de­pen­dently, around the same time in 1968 (Williams rented studio space in the same building as Jarrell, and assisted with classes at iit, where Donaldson taught). Wadsworth’s spouse, Jae, was a talented fiber artist trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (saic). ­These five artists came together to start the new group following the dissolution of the Visual Arts Workshop. In 1970 Donaldson described the earlier conversations as just a “daydream balloon . . . ​we let it float . . . ​the ‘negro’ sky was pregnant with optimistic fantasy b­ ubbles in ­those days.” In 1968, as many po­liti­cal ­bubbles ­were bursting, the five artists who would found africobra came together with the intention of honing their skills collectively and distilling from their vari­ous practices something they might call a “Black aesthetic.” The name Co­ali­tion of Black Revolutionary Artists—­c obra —­seemed to fit their 122  /

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purpose, and it was available: following the Columbia College intervention, the multidisciplinary group was not planning to use it. The artists met regularly for two years, and in 1970 they ­were invited to exhibit at New York’s Studio Museum. As the artists prepared for that exhibition, the group deci­ded to change its name to africobra, at the same time changing the words denoted by the acronym: African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. Donaldson’s “AfriCOBRA 1: 10 in Search of a Nation” essay accompanied the africobra I exhibition that traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem and the National Center of Afro-­American Artists in Boston. The ten mentioned in the title included Sherman Beck, Napoleon Jones-­Henderson, Omar Lama, Carolyn Lawrence, and Nelson Stevens, in addition to the five founding members: Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-­Hogu, and Gerald Williams. africobra went on to be an impor­tant presence in the Black visual arts in Chicago and nationally, and its members ­will repeatedly intersect the remainder of my narrative. Among other visual strategies, they put forward power­ful images of Black collectivity, both embodied in their own practices and represented in their artworks, which gather together a Black militant mass public, a chosen community of Black ­people based on the idea of ­family. I ­will return to africobra’s ideas about ­family in chapter 4.

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An Experimental Friendship

3

In 2017 a corner store popped up in North Lawndale, on the West Side of Chicago, to all appearances a typical “inner-­city” con­ve­nience store. Still, in that neighborhood, with few options available for buying food nearby, it looked like it might be something to look forward to. Distressed neighbors quickly found out that it was a fake, a set for a tv show about the South Side. Perhaps only the West Side neighborhood was deserted enough to be used this way. This incident is symbolic of the differences between the South and West Sides of Chicago. The South Side is recognized as struggling, but it is recognized. City government acknowledges African American stakeholders ­there—­typically representatives of large, well-­established organ­izations. But the West Side becomes a blank slate for other ­people’s imaginings. In 1970 the Chicago soul artist Curtis Mayfield opened his song “Other Side of Town” with dramatic harp glissandos, smashing cymbals, and swelling horns, conjuring an otherworldly dream—or a gathering storm. With his sweet-­sad, reedy voice, understated and gentle, he states absences—of basic fellowship and fairness, of shoes and bread and comfort: “Depression is part of my mind / The sun never shines / On the other side of town / The need h ­ ere is always for more / ­There’s nothing good in store / On the other side of town.” Mayfield likely had in mind the West Side, where he had lived u ­ ntil the age of fourteen, when his ­family moved into the near north housing proj­ect Cabrini-­Green. Mayfield refers to something more corrosive than the blues, a bottomless pit of bad feeling feeding on itself. The West Side poet Sigemonde Wimberli, in his poem “Pro­cessional for the URBAN MAU MAU” (its title a hint of hoped-­for revolution) speaks similarly of

abject hopelessness. Wimberli gives us a fusillade of grim “hours,” times of the day: “hopeless hours, last-­hired-­first-­fired hours, faithless hours, fear of police hours, helpless hours, high-­rate credit hours, city summer hours, fear of lynching hours, crowded hours, rats-­and-­roaches hours, heatless winter hours, white-­polluted hours, racist-­ridden hours . . .”1 North Lawndale was the neighborhood where Martin Luther King  Jr. chose to set up shop in 1966 as the test case for racial justice work in northern cities—­and with good reason. The neighborhood was desperately poor. Its community fabric had been devastated by the construction of the I-290 Expressway and lost massive numbers of jobs with the disappearance of industry. North Lawndale, explained the artist Don McIlvaine in 1970, was “the heart of the ‘classical ghetto.’ It is an area where decay is vis­i­ble in abundance. It is a ‘depressed’ area. The inhabitants are working p ­ eople, welfare recipients, gang members, hustlers, gamblers, prostitutes, regular type regimented teen­agers, and an abundance of young black ­children.”2 Much of what McIlvaine observed in the late 1960s was true already in the 1950s. In ­those years, ­there ­were few recreational facilities and even fewer jobs. Schools ­were not equipped to deal with the student population, and their curricula w ­ ere Eurocentric and out of date. Looking around at their neighborhood, kids could see that they did not have much to look forward to. In this context—as was also the case for white ethnic working-­ class youth in the city—­small gangs formed as neighborhood boys allied themselves for self-­defense and a sense of identity within the ever-­changing geography of postwar Chicago neighborhoods. Some of them pursued small-­ time criminal activity like purse-­snatching and vandalism, but physical vio­lence mostly meant street fighting with fists or knives with turf or reputation at stake. The groups ­were small and local. Then, in 1958, the leaders of several of t­ hese small street gangs, all incarcerated together at the St. Charles Youth Prison in a west suburb of Chicago, met and deci­ded to create a new, bigger organ­ization called the Vice Lords. This was a general trend in Chicago’s Black street gangs. The new organ­ ization formed at St. Charles brought with it the structure of an umbrella organ­ization. While it would be naïve to say that it kept the peace, it did give a certain order to the vio­lence. The Vice Lords came to control crime in Lawndale. They developed a reputation as “Westside terrorists,” as the Chicago Tribune put it.3 The Vice Lords—by their own description—­“ruled the streets” on the West Side of the city. “Cars w ­ ere stocked with shotguns,” they wrote of their past exploits. “Young men w ­ ere mauled in street ­battles, 4 and many ­were arrested and sent to jail.” A n Experimental Fri ends hi p

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A turning point came one night in July 1964 when the older gang members ­were approached by a younger member. As Bobby Gore said in a speech at the inauguration of Operation Bootstrap, the program operated through the Y and funded by a co­ali­tion of businesses, this younger Vice Lord “told us he wanted to take about fifty fellows l­ ater that night to make a fall. . . . ​We asked him why and who he wanted to fall on; had anyone misused him. His reply was we the older Lords including the fellows who are in jail had made a name and they wanted to keep it alive.”5 According to the accounts of Gore and o­ thers, they w ­ ere alarmed at the part they had played in creating an image of vio­lence that had become self-­perpetuating. The older members deci­ded to “go conservative.” This would mean working constructively with the community to create jobs and improve life on the West Side. ­After discussing it among themselves, the leaders called a meeting with the younger members: “We told them we knew how they felt b­ ecause this same feeling was how we got into trou­ble. . . . ​Most of them wanted jobs. Some wished they could get back in school; ­others ­didn’t care just what he got; he was just tired of the same old e­ very day routine. Our task began the very next day of trying to put ­these kids’ minds at ease.”6 Then they ran into new roadblocks. The newly constituted Conservative Vice Lords (cvl) had expectations that their new resolve would be immediately welcomed by members of the local community and mainstream society. But for three years, Gore recounted, no one would listen. No one r­ eally believed that they w ­ ere serious about the change they wanted to make. They realized that they needed to make a complete change in their image.7 In 1967 they obtained a meeting with Alderman George Collins, who, with evident relief, listened to the Vice Lords describe their feelings. Notably, the language of feeling is ever-pres­ent in the Vice Lords’ description of the prob­lems and the solutions they found. The Vice Lords “poured their hearts out.”8 It was a “shift in mood.”9 ­After the meeting, it seemed that opportunities might be opening up. Collins helped them incorporate as a not-­for-­profit in Illinois, and made contacts for them with ­others who could help them, including Sears (once a major employer in Lawndale) and sympathetic members of the local police.10 They began working together with institutions and organ­ izations on clean-up proj­ects, workforce development, restaurant franchises, and educational proj­ects. The gang did not stop being a gang—­though vio­ lence decreased, it did not entirely stop in Vice Lord territory, and the group still often functioned through intimidation. But it started to look as if the energies and orga­nizational strengths of a legitimized cvl, Inc. might eventually become a positive force in the neighborhood. 126  /

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New pro­gress came with the arrival of David Dawley. This former Peace Corps worker was employed by the Transcentury Corporation to work in Chicago as part of research for a report on eleven cities for the President’s Council on Youth Opportunity. It was a prelude to work Transcentury would do for the Kerner Commission—­the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, which would famously return the verdict that Amer­i­ca was “moving ­toward two socie­ties, one black, one white—­separate and unequal.”11 Dawley’s charge was to conduct a study of attitudes of West Siders ­toward government social agencies, and he boldly sought out the Vice Lords to help him conduct the study in the summer of 1967. The responses to the survey revealed to Dawley the neighborhood’s feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and although he returned to Washington in the fall, he continued to help the Vice Lords prepare and submit grant proposals. In December  1967 Alfonso Alford, the president of cvl, Inc., submitted a grant proposal written in collaboration with Dawley to the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation. The organ­ization hoped to open businesses, day care centers, and places for youth to gather, as well as taking on proj­ects to beautify the neighborhood.12 In early 1968, the director of Humanities and Social Science for the Rocke­fel­ler, Joseph Black, replied that the foundation could give grants only to nonprofit organ­izations but that he was interested in seeing if ­there ­were other ways that help could be offered. Alford replied, rather poignantly, “We are most happy, excited, and overjoyed ­because we are a not for profit corporation.” Along with his letter he sent a copy of cvl’s nonprofit charter.13 But in an internal memo, Black was told [by someone with the initials P.H.], “Sorry, but this ­won’t do!”14 The Illinois nonprofit charter could not substitute for a federal irs determination. But since Black had a visit to Chicago in the works for ­later that month, he set up a meeting with the Vice Lords along with John Root and Bruce Cole of the ymca. The Vice Lords came together with the ymca and a number of businesses (manufacturers, retailers, and utilities that included Sears, Roebuck; Ryerson Steel; Illinois Bell; Western Electric; Hotpoint; and Carson, Pirie, Scott) to form Operation Bootstrap. Initially, the proj­ect, administered by the Y’s Root and Cole, was aimed at helping find jobs for Lawndale youth. While the Vice Lords clearly preferred to receive funds directly, in the end they came to an agreement that Rocke­fel­ler would make a grant to Operation Bootstrap in the hope of getting matching funds from the businesses already involved in the proj­ect.15 In the end, $15,000 came from Rocke­fel­ler and $15,000 from the businesses. A n Experimental Fri ends hi p

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The sense of depression, in the emotional as well as economic sense, echoes through the Conservative Vice Lords’ description of West Side conditions. In the proposal the cvl sent to the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, they wrote, “The most common feeling on the West Side of Chicago is one deep felt by most black ­people: the feeling of hopelessness. . . . ​W hile the politicians and the man do all the talking, the feeling of hopelessness grows: ­we’re just a bunch of kids who have nowhere to go, no special skills, not enough education, and most of all not enough ­people who care about us.”16 The Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, writing to inform the Chicago ymca of a grant to work with the cvl, echoes the sentiment, summarizing meetings with both groups: “The Conservative Vice Lords strongly believe that most young Negroes would far rather have a steady job than live on haphazard gains questionably obtained but find it difficult not to be dominated by a feeling of the utter hopelessness of their situation.”17 The West Side was in crisis; foundations and business o­ wners and upstanding community members ­were taking a risk. As the specter of riots loomed in cities around the United States, and then took concrete form in the West Side uprising in April 1968, the alternative seemed worse. Community members, businesses, and foundations ­were willing to try new ­things. They w ­ ere working with the Black Panthers, too. As work proceeded on cvl’s business ventures, Wanda Ross, a disaffected college student and dancer, joined the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-­Defense. Her job starting in 1969 was to run the Panthers’ ­free breakfast programs, one of which was ­housed at the Better Boys Foundation, right around the corner from the Conservative Vice Lords businesses. (The foundation sat smack dab on the boundary line between Vice Lord and Cobras territories and had its hands full negotiating that boundary while providing youth arts and recreation programs.) She crisscrossed the city soliciting donations; she did not drive, so a friend with a car helped out. Supermarkets and distributors had hired new community outreach coordinators in the wake of the April riots, and Ross met with them to negotiate regular in-­kind donations. Another place she went looking for help was the W. Clement Stone Foundation, a donor to many ­causes in Chicago. Stone was already supporting cvl, Inc. He was the founder of the Combined Insurance Com­ pany of Amer­i­ca, and the proponent of a system for success he called pma or “Positive M ­ ental Attitude”; he had become persuaded that the Vice Lords had taken up his notion of positive thinking ­after reading his book, Success through a Positive ­Mental Attitude, in prison.

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Ross described a meeting in which she outlined the Panthers’ proj­ect with staffers while an unidentified man sat silently in the corner. Fi­nally he announced himself: he was Clement Stone. He was sorry that he could not help them, he said, ­because they ­were a po­liti­cal group. If they ­were killing and robbing in the streets, he could provide them with support. Wanda Ross was stunned. The Panthers w ­ ere an activist organ­ization, not a gang. She walked out of the meeting and asked her driver comrade, “Did he just offer to pay us to commit crimes?”18 Stone was po­liti­cally conservative—he contributed $10 million to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns. Most likely, he believed sincerely that his contributions and his philosophy would turn gangsters around. That was the work he wanted to have his name on. If he was paying for anything it was not for vio­lence but for peace. But Ross was not the only one who wondered why it was street gangs that w ­ ere receiving so much money—in the case of the Blackstone Rangers, nearly a million federal dollars. Was the real government or foundation agenda in fact to increase crime, rather than decrease it? This concern was only solidified in the 1990s as allegations emerged about the cia’s role in funneling drugs into inner-­city communities. The cvl situation differed from the Black P Stones’ funding in that the money came in smaller amounts from many dif­fer­ent sources. And for a time, the new approach seemed to work to reduce crime. Crime in the Marquette district, which covered most cvl turf, dropped in 1969, while the rest of the city’s crime rate r­ose.19 In the fall of 1968, anthropologist Lincoln Keiser returned to the West Side to reconnect with gang members he had worked with in conducting research in the summers of 1966 and 1967. “Every­one I talked with,” he wrote, “including friends who no longer took part in any of the club’s activities, said that gang fighting had completely stopped.”20 In his book A Nation of Lords, David Dawley, speaking as a generalized voice of the Vice Lords, attributed the very formation of the early Black street gangs to the inadequacy of leisure facilities. Playgrounds, swimming pools, baseball diamonds, and movie theaters ­were few and far between. ­Because ­there simply was not enough space to go around in overcrowded Lawndale, gangs of boys had to develop in order to structure access—to control turf: “We needed land to establish our identity and we r­ eally ­didn’t own land. But we thought this was ours and we paraded the streets and controlled certain corners.”21 A 1969 article by po­liti­cal scientist Richard Kraus titled “Providing for Recreation and Aesthetic Enjoyment” noted that

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the Kerner Commission had reported “that in city a­ fter city where serious riots had occurred over the past several summers, ghetto residents had b­ itter complaints about the lack of adequate park and recreation facilities and programs in their neighborhoods.”22 It was in response to the deficit of leisure facilities that the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity’s Model Cities program brought architect Raymond Broady back to the neighborhood he had grown up in. As a young, recently licensed architect, having grown bored with his job with the General Ser­vices Administration, he moved to the job in North Lawndale as the third architect-­in-­residence brought in within the space of a year to build vest-­pocket parks along 16th Street. The first man hired had been white; the second had been Black; but neither was able to connect with the Vice Lords to get their support. Whenever they built a playground, kids—­ who did not want outside intervention into the neighborhood—­would trash it the next day. When I talked with Bobby Gore, he had a dif­fer­ent interpretation. ­Children in North Lawndale w ­ ere simply starved for places to play. Sure, t­ here was the ymca, the Better Boys Foundation. But the capacity was nothing compared with the need; the shortage of leisure space had much to do with the establishment of gangs in the first place. In a given day, a few hundred kids could play basketball at the Y. But how many ­children ­were ­there in North Lawndale? And kids ­were naturally impatient; if the playgrounds ­were left in an unfinished state at night, if the builders left before the cement set, the enthusiasm of active ­children might easily wrench poles out of the ground.23 Perhaps the truth was somewhere in between. Small acts of vandalism could be a way of exerting power. Broady knew he had to work with this context somehow. He figured out a strategy to divert the kids’ abundant energies into production. He had grown up on the West Side too, and was lucky enough to have gone to high school with Gore, and he had had Gore’s re­spect as a younger, studious kid with a shot at professional success. Broady contacted Gore, and Gore helped smooth communication with the younger Lords.24 With this “umbrella,” Broady asked if he could collaborate with the kids in the neighborhood to figure out what they could do to avoid having the playgrounds trashed. “­You’re just ­going to build what­ever you want to build.” “No, you tell us what you want, and that’s what ­we’ll build.” “You’ll bring white guys in to build it.” 130  /

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“No, the kids ­will get to build it themselves.” “But ­they’ll have white foremen.” “No, ­we’ll teach older Vice Lords all they need to know to be able to supervise the work themselves.”25 With this more collaborative approach and the support of the organ­ ization, Broady was able to proceed in his work. In its own small way, this example illustrates both how young ­people exerted grassroots power on the street and how a productive arrangement for cooperation could be envisaged. Art & Soul

Not every­one would have expected an art gallery to emerge from the Conservative Vice Lords’ efforts. Most of the cvl’s proj­ects ­were businesses, designed to increase the stake of gang members in the community, to provide them with jobs, and to provide a model of keeping Black dollars in Black neighborhoods. But on November 14, 1968, the cvl opened an experimental neighborhood art gallery and workshop called Art & Soul, at 3742 West Sixteenth Street (figure 3.1). As a community art center, over the next few years, it would offer youth classes, open studio time, residencies, readings, and exhibitions. The Columbia College Chicago president, Mirron Alexandroff, had said in a press release for his controversial conference that the “imaginative use of the arts in our seething inner cities can provide a meaningful expression for the anger and frustration of the man in the ghetto.”26 Inner-­city arts programs ­were often justified on similar grounds. In the long, hot summer of 1968, such community arts programs had an obvious function, for their official funders, of calming troubled neighborhoods. They might even be viewed cynically as a discount riot prevention plan. Artists cost even less than social workers, and certainly less than rebuilding ravaged neighborhoods. And yet, if you think of the arts as a real need to be fulfilled, if you think of art as a response to riot, the equation might turn around: riots as an erratically directed demand for art (among other ­things). The cvl had received grants for neighborhood beautification and training programs, which the Sun-­Times featured in July 1968 with a photo by Duane Hall of young men sweeping sidewalks and preparing neighborhood parkways to replant them with grass (figure  3.2). They also started businesses: two Tastee Freez franchises; an African heritage clothing store called An E xperim ental Fri ends hi p

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3.1. Art & Soul storefront, painted by Sachio Yamashita in rainbow stripes, 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle.

3.2. “Ex-­Gang in Cleanup Proj­ect” (CVL ­doing neighborhood

beautification). Photo by Duane Hall for the Chicago Sun-­Times, July 12, 1968.

3.3. “The Conservative Vice Lords outside their westside teen

center.” Photo by the Chicago Sun-­Times, April 4, 1968.

the African Lion; a cosmetics line and store, called Simone.27 On the fateful day of April 4, 1968, their teen “hang-in,” Teen Town, hosted an open ­house for police, inviting them for ­free coffee. A newspaper article presented an image of joyful teens gesturing ­toward the sign above (figure 3.3). cvl, Inc., was also interested in providing neighborhood opportunities in the arts; along with the art center they hoped eventually to open a recording studio. Like the Black P Stones, the Vice Lords also had singing groups, including one called the Clevertones, of which Bobby Gore was a member.28 He and ­others in the group ­were acutely aware of the talents within the community that ­were ­going unacknowledged and undeveloped. They w ­ ere certainly aware of what was g­ oing on with the Blackstone Rangers and An Experim ental Friends hi p

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Opportunity Please Knock. In May 1967, Oscar Brown Jr. spoke to youth on the West Side as part of a po­liti­cal meeting with Stokely Carmichael, inviting the audience to come down to Woodlawn to see the musical. His account of it as “the most dynamic show I believe Chicago has ever seen” was interrupted repeatedly by shouts from Vice Lords angry that Brown was working with the South Side gang. But what he said of the Rangers rang true for the Lords: “I asked them to show me their talent. They overwhelmed me with talent.”29 Perhaps as a result of this West Side encounter—or another in which Brown was confronted by Peppilow and ­others about his involvement with the Stones30—­a few weeks ­later, on June 16, at the bbr Youth Center deep in Vice Lords territory, Brown performed with Phil Cohran in Black Soul. Though in comparison to Opportunity it was barely publicized, it seems to have been an analogous per­for­mance: a series of loosely connected musical per­for­mances by singing groups made up of Vice Lords and Vice Ladies.31 (The appeal of such per­for­mances was not lost on another West Side street organ­ization, the Roman Saints, which also staged a variety show in the following year.32) Along with the performing arts, the cvl, Inc. participated in a number of dif­fer­ent programs in the visual arts, ­whether fine art, film, or design and architecture. In July 1968, through a partnership with architects from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the cvl newsletter offered opportunities to “Lords who want to learn anything about architecture”: with the uic group they would be able to learn how to make architectural drawings or bring in drawings that they had already made for an evaluation by pro­ ere also forming a friendship with Bernard Rogers, an fessionals.33 They w insurance executive and friend of David Dawley who had taken an interest in the Vice Lords’ activities. (Among other t­ hings, he took them out waterskiing on his boat.34) A member of the board of trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rogers was also the person who began making introductions to the white art world. Among the Vice Lords’ talented members ­were the two Hetherington ­brothers, Jackie and Danny, who w ­ ere skilled visual artists (Jackie’s name on his birth certificate was Alfred, but he never used that name). The two ­brothers had gone to Crane Tech High School, on West Jackson Boulevard;35 ­after graduation Jackie stayed on to attend Crane Ju­nior College, which occupied the same building. (In 1969 it was renamed Malcolm X College, one of the two-­year City Colleges of Chicago, and soon moved to new quarters on the near West Side. The institution’s copious murals attest to its close connection to movement artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Eugene “Eda” Wade 134  /

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painted all the building’s stairwell doors with African motifs relating to education and culture, and students of Barbara Jones-­Hogu painted murals on the walls on the third floor. Several pieces from the Wall of Truth w ­ ere preserved at the college ­after the mural’s destruction. Some are missing but ­others, including Eda’s panel representing Malcolm X, have recently been rediscovered.36) Jackie and Danny ­were two of five Hetherington boys. They had grown up on the West Side (the 2800 block of Lake Street, then Douglas Park—­the 1200 block of Sawyer). The b­ rothers attended Tennyson Grammar School, then Hayes School. Jackie was the second oldest, then Daniel, then Jerry, who was the one ­brother still alive when I began my research (he died in 2012). Their parents, like most Black Chicagoans of their generation, came from the South. James Hetherington, their f­ather, was from Alabama. He worked in Chicago cutting paper on a machine at W.  A. Johns Paper Co. Their ­mother, Katie, had come from Tennessee. She worked off and on; for some time she worked at an ice cream cone com­pany, and she had also held a job as a domestic worker. The parents’ marriage broke up, and James took the oldest two b­ rothers, while Katie took the three younger b­ rothers. She became connected with a sanctified (Pentecostal) church. The pastor was a ­woman, which did not sit well with their ­father. As ­children they all studied art, then a standard subject in Chicago public schools. Kids also had opportunities to take art classes on weekends at the Art Institute, and Jackie and Danny rode their bikes downtown regularly to study drawing and painting. The other boys did not go any further with the subject, but Jackie and Daniel kept at it. For Daniel especially, it was a passion. As Jerry put it, he was “singular about drawing.” Jackie had a head for business; ­after his studies he had worked in the exhibits department of Compton’s Encyclopedia, and had also operated a barber shop with two other men, so he had skills that would enable him to run Art & Soul effectively. Danny was, Jerry said, “strictly art.” It was dif­fer­ent with Daniel. He kept d­ oing [art]. He went to art school, bought materials, put it in a big envelope—­a portfolio—­and traveled around with that. He’d sit on the El and would say “do you mind” to the person sitting next to him and sketch them and he would oftentimes give it to them. . . . ​He’d come in and sit down and in 15 minutes he’d be sketching. If someone like you was h ­ ere—­he’d pull it out and he’d be sketching. He did that to a c­ ouple of girlfriends of mine.37 An Experim ental Friends hi p

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Daniel and Jackie ­were logical choices as the key neighborhood ­people brought in by the Vice Lords to work on the new art center. They became the director and assistant director. Along with the two Hetherington ­brothers, expertise came from the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission and the city’s nascent Museum of Con­temporary Art. It seems surprising now that a museum would have taken the risk of partnering with a street gang; and indeed, it is equally surprising that a gang would have partnered with a museum. But the cultural moment not only encouraged experimentation but also seemed to require it. Artists in the late 1960s, including the artists of the Black Arts Movement, ­were making objects, but they ­were also, and often in the pro­cess, making and remaking collectives, scenes, spaces, environments, and settings. The term setting, in the con­temporary sense in which it was used by educational psychologist Seymour Sarason, is especially useful. Sarason wrote about the “creation of settings” in the 1972 book The Creation of Settings and the F­ uture Socie­ties. A setting, in Sarason’s broad definition, is “any instance in which two or more p ­ eople come together in new and sustained relationships to achieve certain goals.”38 Sarason’s par­tic­u­lar interest was in small organ­izations and institutions whose purpose is in social change and experimental therapy. And, indeed, this seems to be the scale at which his final chapter—­“The New Setting as a Work of Art”—­has the most purchase.39 In a similar vein, in 1968, urban planners Kevin Lynch and Stephen Carr wrote an article titled “Where Learning Happens” in which they speculated about f­ uture city planning that might view the city as a vast archive of knowledge and playground of education. The shaping of the city might facilitate “temporary communities . . . ​where it was permissible to break the habitual mold of action and to try out new roles. . . . ​­These groups would be like participatory theater or continuous happenings, the tentative gesture would for a time be the substitute for the competent committed act.” 40 But while white culture workers had the luxury to see something like Art & Soul as a “temporary community,” a “new setting” that might be superseded by another, its presence in North Lawndale created expectations for something more durable and institutional. It was not the fake “corner store”; it was more than that. But it was not the South Side Community Art Center, ­either. Within this context, what was the function of art? Liberal whites believed art would provide emotional release and uplift; Black radicals thought art could remake its audiences, promoting revolutionary consciousness; and gang members saw unrecognized talent in their midst and believed sincerely 136  /

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that every­one should have a chance at self-­fulfillment. The collaboration was not without its challenges—­the participants had to work through the complexities of institutional relationships and neighborhood politics while also confronting issues of race and class on a very personal level. Enter the Museum

Ann Zelle was a young sculptor on a short stint at the Newark Museum when she attended a meeting of the American Association of Museums (aam) in New Orleans in May 1968. At the conference, she sat in the audience at a panel about museum attempts to make themselves more relevant to “underprivileged” communities. Lip ser­vice to this notion—at the very least—­was starting to become imperative in the museum world, as riots erupted in Amer­i­ca’s cities. White institutions ­were looking for ways to be relevant, and smaller, in­de­pen­dent institutions ­were sprouting up. By 1970, ­there w ­ ere enough of them that the magazine Art Gallery profiled them in a feature; the nine profiled in the article did not include several o­ thers described in the pages of Arts in Society. At the panel, in New Orleans, staff from the Anacostia Museum in DC and the Studio Museum in Harlem presented on the work that they w ­ ere ­doing. The proj­ects ­were new, and the staff members w ­ ere sincere and engaged. But Zelle was frustrated with what she saw as paternalism, and stood up a­ fter the speakers had finished to voice a sharp critique: the panel had not done enough to include the voices of any of the community members supposedly being served. ­After the discussion was over, a man wearing big round spectacles approached her: he had been in the audience too, liked what she had to say, and wanted to offer her a job. The man with the impossibly stylish glasses was Jan van der Marck, the director of the Museum of Con­temporary Art (mca) in Chicago. Van der Marck had first come to the United States from his home country of the Netherlands on a Rocke­fel­ler fellowship to study ways of breaking down the museum walls. Van der Marck wanted to shake ­things up in Chicago. More importantly for Ann, he wanted to find ways to bridge the gap between the world of museums and con­temporary art and the lives of all Chicagoans, not just the privileged ones. Ann went back to Newark, finished out her internship ­there, and packed up her vw Beetle and came to Chicago to work as the mca’s advisor to its new partnership with the Conservative Vice Lords. Zelle would attempt to put into practice lessons learned from the Columbia College Chicago conference along with the inspiration of Oscar Brown Jr.’s efforts with the Blackstone Rangers. A n Experim ental Friends hi p

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The Museum of Con­temporary Art opened in 1967 at 237 East Ontario Street with two exhibitions, Pictures to Be Read/Poetry to Be Seen and Claes Oldenburg: Proj­ects for Monuments. Van der Marck came from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to be the museum’s inaugural director, taking the helm of a brand-­new museum founded by Jewish collectors who had been frozen out of the board of the more established Art Institute of Chicago.41 ­After his art history training in the Netherlands, he had first come to the United States in 1957 to study and conduct research on the relationship of museums to their communities. Trained as an art historian at Nijmegen University and interested in the sociology of art being practiced by American scholars, he studied at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro in the Department of Fine Arts and Paul Lazarsfeld in sociology. Van der Marck’s original plan of study began with the assumption that Eu­ro­pean museums ­were committed to the preservation of national cultural trea­sures, while American museums ­were less bound by tradition, more focused on education, more oriented ­toward their communities. The American museum, he stated in his proposal, is an “instrument of cultural intention.”42 He studied academic and professional publications, but more importantly made a series of visits to American museums and conducted interviews with museum directors and staff all over the country. As his work evolved, he listed his preliminary conclusions on the role of museums: The art museum’s pres­ent course and direction a. as a repository of past art and taste b. as an instrument of cultural intention c. as a sponsor of the living arts d. as a ser­vice agency to the community e. as an integrating ­factor in society.43 While he alludes to the role of museums as repositories, his emphasis lies clearly in the con­temporary relevance of museums and art to communities and society. “The museum has to preserve society’s cultural heritage,” he wrote, “but it also has to fulfill the mandate, imposed onto it by a democracy, of serving the public.”44 In keeping with ­these views, van der Marck’s initial vision for the mca emphasized not collections development but rotating exhibitions and temporary proj­ects such as—in its first year—­Christo’s wrapping of the museum building, inside and out. It was the artist’s first major American building.

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“Con­temporary” had not yet become a period designation covering the past fifty years or so within art history, but referred quite specifically to the art of the moment. In van der Marck’s understanding, this meant pursuing proj­ects that w ­ ere always cutting edge, of their time and place, and often avowedly ephemeral.45 The new museum faced big questions about what its aims ­ought to be: To serve the public and improve lives? To evoke new aspirations? To make engaged and informed citizens? Was art inherently a social good, a form of cultural capital, or simply good for the spirit? American museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been conceived with the explicit goal of reshaping the body politic: a civilizing mission of making citizens out of immigrant and working-­class populations.46 And yet what­ ever social consensus might have been embodied in this notion was being more and more overtly challenged by current events. At the mca, van der Marck took seriously a commitment to reach a broad public, with a sense of a mission for art, and, in par­tic­u­lar, con­temporary art—­and for him truly con­temporary art, of the moment. He acknowledged a prob­lem in the specificity of the demographic he could attract in the usual ways, but he did not at first fundamentally question the liberal idea of the public as racially unmarked—­meaning essentially white. For a museum like the mca, a community-­based art center in a poor Black neighborhood was not an outlandish idea in 1968. Art & Soul was preceded by Studio Watts in Los Angeles, the Harlem School of Arts in New York, and, closer by, the Paint Box in Milwaukee. Such proj­ects shared something of the ethos driving the formation of ­free and experimental colleges alongside or in opposition to traditional university education, but the clientele was dif­fer­ent: not the mostly white university students who populated ­free universities but inner-­city kids of color.47 The gang connection was more unusual; van der Marck suggested ­later in an interview that “working with a street gang seemed questionable in the beginning,” but that once the museum came to understand how to interact effectively with the community, it was a productive partnership.48 As with the Blackstone Rangers at the Affro-­Arts Theater, the gang’s cooperation would be necessary for programs in the neighborhood to succeed, and beyond this, gang members ­were clearly motivated to participate actively. In June 1967 as van der Marck was just arriving in the city, he had made a proposal for the Illinois Sesquicentennial, the statewide cele­bration of the 150th anniversary of Illinois statehood that would take place over the year

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1968. At that time, his idea of a suitable experimental art proj­ect was innovative in form—­Hydroscape, a floating sculpture garden on Lake Michigan—­ but dependent on a group of established art world names for its cachet.49 Ralph Newman, the head of the Sesquicentennial, had been interested in this proj­ect, but it had not panned out, apparently for lack of funds on the mca’s side. Van der Marck would ­later say that “it turned out to be a sad case of my eyes being bigger than my stomach and trustees escorted me back from Delaware Riviera to Ontario Street.”50 By the following year his sense of experiment had taken a dif­fer­ent turn. The Sesquicentennial also sponsored two sculptures that ­were placed on view in the mca in October. One, by Richard Hunt (who would ­later serve as a contest judge at Art & Soul), honored John Jones, the first African American elected official in Chicago. The other, by Frank Gallo, depicted Dan Cook, the namesake of Cook County.51 But van der Marck also had his eye on ways the museum could expand its sense of community. The panel at the aam, the conference at Columbia—­from the point of view of white institutions, it was clear ­there was work to be done. In early July 1968, he made a dif­fer­ent proposal to Newman, one that suggested creating ­either an art studio and gallery, or a ­free bookstore modeled on the ­free stores of the Diggers (a radical artist group in San Francisco).52 ­Either or both would be comanaged by a member of the cvl and a museum staffer or librarian. When he heard of what was originally called the West Side Art Proj­ect, Newman expressed immediate interest. He had funds available and was ­eager to enhance the repre­sen­ta­tion of Black Illinoisans in the Sesquicentennial festivities. This was not a merely momentary concern for him. ­Whether or not it was his own inclination (and it may have been), he had been pushed to think about ­these questions by Margaret Burroughs, among ­others, and it had been raised frequently as an issue in his correspondence with the governor, Otto Kerner. (Kerner, recall, had spent considerable time pondering the consequences of Amer­i­ca’s racial divisions.) Kerner, Newman, Burroughs, and van der Marck all believed that culture was a field in which real, substantive change could be created. In early October 1966, Burroughs first heard about the Picasso monument and wrote to the Tribune proposing that a Du Sable monument be considered for the state Sesquicentennial. The Sesquicentennial Commission, Burroughs must have known, would be pouring money into cultural activities in the state of Illinois in 1968. She may well have sent a copy to Newman, or he may have read her letter in the paper, but ­either way, her views must have come to his attention, ­because he was soon in contact with Burroughs and acting on some of her thoughts. On October 31, he 140  /

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wrote a letter of recommendation to the Wieboldt Foundation in support of a grant application from the Museum of Negro History; he also initiated a conversation on two ambitious proj­ects that would involve African Americans in the Sesquicentennial events. The first was to secure a monument to Du Sable in Grant Park; the second, to create “an Afro-­American Cultural Center & Institute, incorporating a library, museum, ­etc.”53 Like Burroughs, Newman was a lover of history; he was an Abraham Lincoln scholar and the owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop. As part of the planning pro­cess, he constituted a Negro Heritage Committee that included prominent African Americans: Dempsey Travis (founder of the first Black-­owned mortgage com­pany in Chicago), Oscar Brown Jr., Alfreda Wells Duster (­daughter of Ida B. Wells), and Lerone Bennett Jr., the Ebony editor.54 The following year, Newman attempted to help Burroughs secure the loan of fifty paintings of “Negro History in Illinois” from the Illinois State Historical Library. Staff ­there had agreed to the loan but it was ­later denied by “Property Control,” without explanation. Burroughs complained about this treatment in a letter of July 21 to Ralph Newman.55 When the Illinois state legislature passed a bill requiring the teaching of “Negro history” in public schools, Newman wrote to the Illinois State Library and State Historical Society to urge them to ask historical socie­ties to follow the passage of the bill with appropriate exhibits in their public facilities.56 As part of the Sesquicentennial’s festivities, Newman also helped engineer a commemoration at Du Sable’s gravesite. An official party flew to St. Charles, Missouri, ­ ere to place a marker on the site.57 Black dignitaries included in the visit w Burroughs, Illinois State Rep. Corneal Davis (who l­ater helped the DuSable Museum get state funding), and Erwin France of Mayor Daley’s office. Conscious of the significance of 1968 as the Sesquicentennial year, Burroughs kept African Americans and their history on Newman’s agenda for the Illinois Sesquicentennial’s cultural events. Thus, Newman had plenty of preparation to be interested in a Sesquicentennial art proj­ect on the West Side that would engage with the African American community t­here. But he was unwilling to use state funds to finance an operation run exclusively by a street gang, and emphasized that the proj­ect must involve other community partners and serve the community as a ­whole. Therefore, many dif­fer­ent community groups ­were invited to initial meetings from which the advisory council developed. Community organ­izations that sent representatives or offered moral support of one kind or another included the Lawndale Youth Commission, West Side Federation, Lawndale Urban Pro­gress Center, Better Boys Foundation, Boys Brotherhood A n Exper imental Fri ends hi p

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Republic, the Lawndale ­People’s Planning Conference, the A.B.C. Youth Center, the Chicago Public Library, and the Catholic Church—­a very dif­fer­ent list from the first Sesquicentennial proposal van der Marck had drawn up. The Illinois Arts Council also supported Art & Soul, following a shift in its priorities that came out of the experience of the Arts and the Inner City conference. Gwendolyn Brooks was a member of the council, and made a special request to have Val Gray Ward speak to council members at the scheduled May 24 meeting. Ward asked the council to bring arts opportunities to the inner city. “One major point that came out of the conference held at Columbia College,” she said, according to the meeting minutes, “was that standards cannot be set on Black art by White ­people.” She and her husband, journalist Francis Ward, argued for broadly disseminated knowledge of Black culture, saying that whites should come to see the Wall of Re­spect, that they should know about the South Side Community Art Center and the Afro-­American Museum (soon to be the DuSable), and that they should “know who the Black photog­raphers are.” The change in priorities is palpable in council rec­ords—in that and subsequent meetings. This shift produced the funds that supported per­for­mances by Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble around the South Side that summer. The council soon formed a Black theater panel to evaluate proposals and an architecture and environment panel that focused largely on murals, a response to the substantial mural movement that was emerging following the inspiration of the Wall of Re­spect. The year 1968 was a contentious and emotional time in national politics, which came to be focused on Chicago in the weeks surrounding the meeting of the Demo­cratic National Convention (dnc) ­there. The sitting president was not r­unning for reelection. Rage and sadness followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy Jr., and tense expectations of a difficult convention built up over the months. Numerous groups and individuals had long planned to converge on Chicago, in par­tic­u­lar ­because of the Vietnam War. Groups organ­izing protests included the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (mobe); the Poor P ­ eople’s Campaign; ­Women Strike for Peace; the American Friends Ser­vice Committee; the Black Panther Party; and, famously, the Youth International Party, the Yippies, with tricksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin at the helm. Protesters, bystanders, and journalists alike w ­ ere roughed up by Chicago police officers in what a l­ ater investigation called a “police riot.” Several protest organizers ­were singled out for conspiracy prosecution in

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the famous trial of the Chicago Eight (then Seven). ­These events appeared on national tv; when protesters chanted “the w ­ hole world is watching,” they w ­ ere right. While (famously) “no one was killed” in the dnc disturbances, ­people w ­ ere killed in the uprising on the West Side of the city that followed the assassination of King. As Daniel Walker’s report on the events, Rights in Conflict, pointed out, the police response to the dnc was conditioned by reactions to the April uprising. Daley had openly rebuked the police for showing restraint, declaring that police should shoot to maim looters and shoot to kill arsonists.58 While the police leadership still sent out a directive that tread a careful l­egal line, the rank and file must have been well aware of the mayor’s words. Yet to many in poor Black neighborhoods, the dnc protests did not seem directly connected to their lives. The film American Revolution 2 makes this point clearly (before g­ oing on to chronicle the coalition-­building work of the Black Panthers and Young Patriots that followed). Despite the prominence of Black comedian Dick Gregory among the dnc ­protesters, at least some African Americans in Chicago had difficulty identifying with an event one described as a “bunch of hunkies [getting] their heads beat.”59 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, describing her silkprint Be Your B ­ rother’s Keeper (figure 3.4), a brilliantly colored, abstracted depiction of convention events, wrote that “logic . . . ​kept most Black ­people away from the scenes since they knew that the police ­were preparing for confrontation.”60 Po­liti­cal alliances with hippie protesters seen as privileged, self-­involved youth w ­ ere not necessarily the most obvious priority for p ­ eople struggling to get through their day with body and soul intact. On the other hand, the events around the dnc might serve as an opportunity for whites to learn what Blacks risked in walking down the street e­ very day. But Jones-­Hogu and ­others had another thought on their minds: if this was what the police would do to white college kids and journalists, what w ­ ouldn’t they do to Blacks? Her message in the print was similar to that of o­ thers she made around the same time: Blacks needed to come together and support one another. In the summer of 1968, the Affro-­Arts Theater seemed to be establishing itself on an even keel—­though it would soon face internal conflict and eventual closure. That summer Cohran—­with the Illinois Arts Council’s funding—­worked on a Chicago proj­ect that included another Arts and the Inner City attendee, James Shiflett. Shiflett had signed the white caucus’s statement of support for the Black caucus but also tangled overtly with Donaldson

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3.4. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Be Your ­Brother’s

Keeper, 1968. Screenprint. 25 × 25 in. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist.

and the other militants by asking them to examine their own racism—­not a position that was likely to endear him to them. Shiflett ran the Community Arts Foundation, a church-­based organ­ization ­doing youth art programs, particularly theater, and l­ater murals, on the near North Side. As the Tribune reported, “Each summer night on a street corner somewhere in the city ­people are watching and even joining in a program of m ­ usic, theater, and dance produced by the Illinois Arts Council as part of the city’s Reach 144  /

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Out proj­ect. The performers, who double as instructors for aspiring actors, musicians, and dancers in the communities, are from two organ­izations. One is the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, headed by Philip T. Cohran. . . . ​The other is the Community Arts Foundation, headed by James A. Shiflett.”61 The two groups performed on alternate nights, roving throughout the city and also offering a program of educational workshops—­a heavy schedule of public events. Cohran and his group performed at a public library in Woodlawn and at the Cabrini-­Green housing proj­ect, among other locations. In her research notes, Zelle described a visit she and van der Marck made on August 4 to a per­for­mance by Shiflett’s group: “A rock/hillbilly/ integrated western performed on the stage of a moving van parked in an empty lot. Very informal with kids coming & g­ oing, talking & eating.” Amid the informal entertainment was something a l­ittle more sobering: “Also on lot,” she typed in her notes, “was a fun fair with 5 cent tickets to bet on rat races (named ­after the local slum landlords).”62 The cvl had launched a “rat campaign” to take on “the landlords who prey on tenants and threaten them with eviction when the tenants become hip to the bad conditions of buildings.”63 In the vacant lot where Shiflett’s group performed, as in the tenements, the rats ­were also rodents. In August the museum convened several meetings with community members about the “West Side Art Proj­ect”—­which quickly changed to the “Lawndale Art Proj­ect.” (It was not ­until October that the name Art & Soul was chosen in a contest.64) Opinions of the proj­ect ­were mixed, but Monsignor Egan, director of the Chicago Archdiocesan Office of Urban Affairs and pastor of Pre­sen­ta­tion Church in Lawndale, voiced strong support for the Vice Lords as man­ag­ers of the proj­ect, and Warner Saunders, then head of the Better Boys Foundation, agreed that he was satisfied cvl had sufficient community support to go forward.65 Some community members had doubts about gang involvement, and ­these ­were shared by Lew Kreinberg of the Westside Federation, who proposed a location, a vacant bank building, outside the cvl’s territory. Van der Marck was excited by the scale of the building, as well as that of a vacant Oldsmobile dealership proposed by a development com­pany, Greenleigh Associates. The Oldsmobile dealership remained u ­ nder consideration for a f­uture recording studio, but the idea of the bank building faded away, ­because it would have been difficult to get the proj­ect off the ground without the cvl. Van der Marck’s introduction to the concept had come through Rogers, who was the linchpin between Lawndale and the white cultural institutions downtown, and who had formed a specific connection with A n Exper imental Fr iends hi p

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the cvl. Perhaps more importantly, the vari­ous social ser­vices and funding organ­izations had to reckon with the Vice Lords; they had the capacity to make ­things happen in a way that other organ­izations could not. The plan provided for Vice Lords to mobilize volunteers and students and provide security; in the persons of Jackie and Danny Hetherington, they would staff the center. But Ralph Newman made it clear: the gang could not be the official recipient of Sesquicentennial funds. His enthusiasm about African American repre­sen­ta­tion in the Sesquicentennial events did not mitigate his wariness of Vice Lord involvement. Questions arose over how the cvl’s participation would be credited, and whose letterhead would be used for what purposes. In a meeting at which the proj­ect seemed to be at an impasse, Newman proposed that, rather than disbursing funds to the proj­ect directly, the Sesquicentennial would hire an administrator who would have control over payments.66 This is how James Houlihan came into the picture. L ­ ater to become the Cook County Assessor, he was the Sesquicentennial Commission’s representative to Art & Soul. Houlihan was ­there to ensure broader community participation and to keep control over the Sesquicentennial’s funds. As it was described in the August 12 meeting in which Newman proposed the administrator position, in addition to managing the bud­get, his role was to act “as a go-­between among the Commission, the proj­ect, and the vari­ous ele­ments of the community hopefully broadening community interest and support of the proj­ect.”67 This occasionally put him in a position of conflict with the “local” leadership: whose letterhead would be used to put out press releases, the Sesquicentennial’s or the cvl’s? Finances could become symbolic of other issues: in one example, according to Houlihan, Jackie Hetherington asked to bill the Sesquicentennial for expenses that included ­Ripple, a mildly fortified wine produced by the Gallo winery. As Houlihan put it, “He would say ‘­Those executives downtown have their three martini lunches and put it on their expense accounts. Why c­ an’t I have R ­ ipple [and put it down as an expense]?’ I said, ‘Your logic is impeccable, but I’m still not ­going to do it.’ ” The interaction was jocular but suggests how philanthropy with strings attached might grate. But the daily stresses of life in North Lawndale also became evident to Houlihan. Though he sparred with Jackie, they also became friends. Relaxing with a few beers in a car together one night ­after a day’s work, they w ­ ere approached by an aggressive cop and Houlihan saw racial (and neighborhood) profiling in action. “[Jackie] turned to me and said, ‘See, now you know what it feels like.’ ”68

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Newman saw Houlihan’s position as a way to maintain limits on how much the proj­ect would belong to the Vice Lords. By contrast, Zelle felt it was impor­tant to support their role. Both believed in community leadership of the proj­ect, but dif­fer­ent definitions of community ­were at work. To Newman, the Vice Lords ­were a potentially nettlesome segment of the community; to Zelle, the Vice Lords—­with their par­tic­u­lar representatives, the Hetherington ­brothers—­w ­ ere the community with whom the mca was partnering. In notes in a “time sheet” that Zelle kept, she describes telling Jackie that she would defend his role as director of Art & Soul.69 Yet the requirement of a board drawn from dif­fer­ent sectors of the community was, she also says, a positive t­ hing. If members of the community still had doubts about the gang’s shift in focus, most of them could nonetheless get ­behind an art center for c­ hildren; the pro­cess of pulling the board together and negotiating with them “helped integrate the cvl into their community.”70 Ann’s employer was the museum, but most days, rather than traveling the short distance from her apartment past the fancy shops on Michigan Ave­nue to the new museum’s building on East Ontario Street, Ann instead drove her vw to work in Vice Lord territory in North Lawndale. The hard work of prepping the space for Art & Soul would often have her working late into the night. (The cvl organ­ization must have put out the word that no one was to hassle her, b­ ecause no one ever did.) Once the art center opened, its hours ­were 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. When she returned to her apartment in Old Town at 9 or 10 or 11, she could circle for hours on end in search of a spot to stow her l­ittle car. One night she parked illegally right in front of a cop. “I live ­here,” she said, “and I’m just so tired.” “If you park ­here I ­will have to ticket you,” he replied. She parked all the same. An old checkbook displays the evidence of her largest category of expenditures that year: parking tickets. Ann’s car said something about her; vw’s early ad campaigns for the Beetle famously described it as ugly—­a lemon. It was the anti-­car. In 1972 Ken Dunn, a University of Chicago–­trained phi­los­o­pher and South Side prophet of ecol­ogy, taught a “­free university” class on Volks­wagen mechanics. He wrote in the course description that “the automobile is . . . ​a sometimes necessary machine in a poorly or­ga­nized society like our own. . . . ​Since the automobile and the skill of maintaining it are not desirable in themselves, but only as an interim means to achieve community, the course w ­ ill treat exclusively the minimum machine that is readily available.”71 That minimum machine was the one Ann Zelle chose to drive.

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She was not the only one. Old Town had a lot of Beetles. It was a commodity that represented the rejection of the commodity, rejection of the American dream of ever bigger and grander t­hings and comforts. With its head shops, folk ­music, coffee shops, and alternative journalism, Old Town—­Wells Street in particular—­was Chicago’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight-­Ashbury. A New York Times writer called it a “hippie-­campie, touristical haven of white adolescents.”72 It was not entirely white; the nearby housing proj­ect Cabrini-­Green supplied its share of Black teens to the countercultural mix. Hotbed of the hippie counterculture, it was a place where kids came to escape parents, school, conventionality of any kind. “Some would have us believe,” wrote the authors of the Port Huron statement (named ­after the Michigan town in which it was drafted in 1962), “that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity—­but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anx­i­eties about their role in the new world? And if ­these anx­i­eties produce a developed indifference to ­human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe t­ here is an alternative?”73 In the summer of 1967, Karl Meyer, a veteran peace activist, created a “Vietnam Forum”—­a participatory soapbox speaking event—on Friday nights on Wells Street, precisely b­ ecause that was where young p ­ eople congre74 gated. To many midwestern white kids, Old Town represented the seeds of an alternative. So proclaimed the banner of the counterculture: a scrappy psychedelic paper called the Chicago Seed. Old Town might resound with ardent social critique, but the neighborhood also knew how to have fun. With its bars and coffeeshops and m ­ usic scene—­the Blind Pig, Somebody Else’s Trou­bles, the Fickle Pickle, the Earl of Old Town, ­Mother Blues, the Quiet Knight—­Wells Street grooved late into the night. That was why Ann had such trou­ble finding parking when she came home at night. Parking was not a prob­lem, on the other hand, in crumbling Lawndale, a neighborhood dotted with vacant lots and empty storefronts. The journey from Old Town to Lawndale was only a few miles, but their economic differences bespoke a greater distance. In 2000 Lawndale still had a median income only a l­ittle over $18,000. Its population had dwindled to one-­third of its 1960 peak of nearly 125,000.75 Artist in Chicago (Black)

In the late summer of 1968, Art & Soul was beginning to take shape. Between late August and early September, a storefront location was identified near the center of cvl territory at 3742 West 16th Street. Initially the 148  /

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3.5. ­Children painting

the outside of Art & Soul, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle.

team planned an opening in late September. But this was overambitious in terms of both the building and the organ­ization. Over the months that followed the August meetings, Zelle negotiated with the landlord and gathered donations of art supplies and building materials. She and Houlihan and the Hetherington b­ rothers collected letters of support from advisory council members. Together they worked with neighborhood kids to clean and paint the buildings inside and out (figure 3.5). It was also Zelle’s job to travel the city making connections with African American artists and ­others who might contribute to the proj­ect. David Dawley had suggested meeting with Margaret Burroughs, but Zelle did not succeed in eliciting much interest from her in the proj­ect. She did, however, receive some support from Useni Eugene Perkins, who worked at the Better Boys Foundation and would become its director ­after Warner Saunders moved to a new ­career in tele­vi­sion. In her notes, Zelle indicated his connections with the South Side An Experi mental Fri ends hi p

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3.6. Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage. Installation view,

from Vio­lence! in Recent American Art, November 8, 1968–­January 12, 1969. Photo © MCA Chicago.

Community Art Center and the DuSable Museum and her hope that he would advise Jackie on making connections in the community. In October, Zelle went to see an exhibition of Ralph Arnold’s collages at the Benjamin Gallery. Among African American artists in Chicago at the time, he was one of the few who had some prominence in the white art world. He was the only Black artist from Chicago who was included in the mca’s Vio­lence! in Recent American Art show (figure 3.6). It was a show that van der Marck had begun preparing before Chicago’s 1968 Demo­cratic Convention, but it fit well with the mood following ­those events. Arnold’s piece was a large triptych titled Unfinished Collage, which was recently rediscovered in storage at the South Side Community Art Center (figures 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9).76 The triptych addressed the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy  Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr.—it also, disturbingly, left a blank space, “which the viewer,” wrote the Tribune reviewer Robb Baker, “realizes has been left for victim #4.”77 ­After ­going to see Arnold in person, Zelle invited him to be Art & Soul’s first artist in residence. In his studio they talked at length about—as she put it in her notes—­“his position as an artist in Chicago (Black).”78 150  /

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3.7–3.9. Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage, 1968. Mixed media. Triptych. South Side Community Art Center. Photos by Tony Smith.

The question of being a Black artist or an “artist who happens to be Black” was not a new one but was becoming charged in new ways as the Black Arts Movement gained momentum. In August  1967, Negro Digest reported on obac’s launch of its “community-­directed” program at the Abraham Lincoln Centre. With Hoyt Fuller looking on, the poet David Moore (aka Amus Mor) provided the “catchwords”: “Who are we? Why are we h ­ ere? Where are we ­going?” The article closed with a question posed “in all the oba-­c workshops to its participating artists”: “Do you consider yourself a Black Artist, or an American Artist who happens to be black, or a writer, period?”79 When, in the following year, the journal Arts in Society devoted two issues in 1968 to “The Arts and the Black Revolution,” its editors posed the question in a way that already sounds b­ ehind the times. They surveyed Black artists, prac­ti­tion­ers of vari­ous art forms, asking each if he or she identified as a “Negro artist” or as an “Artist who happens to be a Negro.” Beyond the fact that such a question would never have been asked of white artists, the issue’s own title spoke of a “Black” revolution, not a Negro one. Perhaps a shift had occurred in the journal’s outlook even in the course of putting the issue together. In the responses, the only artists who accepted the terms of the question ­were ­those who felt they ­were “an artist who happened to be a Negro.” Some artists identified as Black, not Negro, or they resisted the coupling of the terms altogether. The simplistic duality of the journal’s question was complicated both by the range of possibilities p ­ eople saw for the relationship between their work and their racial identity but also by An Experimental Fri ends hi p

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the newly politicized differentiation between Negro (presumed to be assimilationist) and Black (presumed to be militant).80 The designation “Negro artist” (or “Negro art”) seemed to imply not only specificity but also restriction, limitation, even inferiority.81 When the Tribune covered the mca’s Sesquicentennial installation of the sculpture of John Jones by the very accomplished and nationally (indeed internationally) known sculptor Richard Hunt, the author of the piece referred to Hunt as “Chicago Negro Sculptor Richard Hunt.”82 Hunt—­who was invited to judge the art contest held at Art & Soul—­was a highly successful Black artist who worked in an abstract idiom and did not rely on specifically African American experience as subject m ­ atter. In 1969 he said in a symposium at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, “The prob­lem of the Negro in terms of the con­temporary situation in art seems to be more or less tied up with the prevailing currents in art itself. For instance, an artist who’s working with kinetic, light or minimal ­things might have a better chance of breaking into the scene than someone who’s painting figuratively.”83 Hunt himself said, “I am an artist who is black—­not a black artist.”84 References to him as “Negro artist” must have chafed—­his work was abstract, he did not make an issue of his race, and he had received acclaim for the quality of his work in absolute, not culturally or racially relative terms. For an artist, this willy-­nilly identification with a racialized identity was (as Alex in The Cry of Jazz put it) part of “the hazard of being Negro.” Did Black themes limit what artists could do even more? Did they restrict how broadly they could appeal to viewers of dif­fer­ent backgrounds? Hunt resisted the limitation (at least this is how it appeared to him) of specifically African American subject m ­ atter. And he attributed any par­tic­u­lar lack of commercial success of figurative painters—­including Black artists painting Black ­people—to trends in the art world rather than racism. It would be a reasonable position for Hunt to see himself within an art-­world economy, to see no reason why he, as an artist, should not have ­every right and freedom that a white artist would have. Other artists saw the work of art within an economy of public images—­a visual culture—in which the impor­tant ­thing was the repre­sen­ta­tion of African Americans that art could afford. In speaking of the “Black esthetic,” Hunt said that its proponents “are talking about more specific ­things than the subjects I deal with.”85 He does not say that abstraction is universal but seems to imply it, suggesting that he aims for something more general, or universal, or monumental—­like the Chicago Picasso, many of Hunt’s works w ­ ere made of Cor-­Ten steel. Subject ­matter that addressed white experience was generally not criticized for 152  /

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being too specific or limited; part of white supremacist culture is the claim of consonance between whiteness and universality, a message repeated so often and so subtly as to be taken for granted. To some, abstraction itself read as socially delimited—­white, elitist—or as the exhausted endgame of a de­cadent Western culture. In this vein, Barbara Jones-­Hogu presented a critique of the “universality” of Western culture in her thesis: far from being the only form of art that is universal, Western art is “the only form of art which originally dealt with illusions which created a three dimensional form in a two dimensional space.”86 The art of other ­peoples, times, and places, she writes, addresses itself to beautify functional objects and to explore the ­human being in relation to society.87 The artist’s duty is to “address himself to his ­people’s experiences”; and this approach is universal even if its consequences are specific. The Hetherington ­brothers, for examples, produced portraits of ­people and “types” they knew, as well as Black heroes like Daniel’s Malcolm X (figure 3.10). Jackie worked in printmaking as well as painting and drawing, and he created log­os and other visual materials for the cvl. ­Later, ­after moving to Washington, DC, he would study at the Corcoran School and produce work inspired by his experiences growing up in Chicago, like a delicate woodcut scene of young men playing basketball, Three on Three—­Chicago (figure 3.11). Ralph Arnold had established what might be seen as a ­middle ground between the abstraction of Hunt and the more militant imagery of po­liti­ cally engaged artists. He addressed po­liti­cal themes in a pop art idiom, using text, news photos, and bright stripes in his collages. While he belonged to a Lincoln Park artist cooperative, Gallery Mid-­North, that was mostly white, his work also appeared in group shows of “Negro Art.” His work addressed po­liti­cal themes, including Black liberation imagery and messages, but left it to the viewer to sort out a position on the depicted events and the sometimes ironic text that accompanied them. He certainly was fully aware of debates around Black art and the “Black aesthetic”; for example, he owned a copy of Black Art Notes, a collection of sharply critical essays responding to the 1971 show Con­temporary Black American Art at the Whitney Museum in New York.88 But his work cannot be pinned down to a par­tic­u­lar ideological position. At Art & Soul he showed several collages (figure 3.12). One that is partially vis­i­ble in photos is Columbia (displaying, fragmented, the patriotic song title “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” with colors that might be interpreted as the colors of the African liberation flag). Another, One ­Thing Leads to Another, packed with phrases like “Left Out,” “Put Down,” and “Poverty Amidst Plenty,” directly refers to urban strug­gles, the Vietnam An Exper imental Fr iendshi p

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3.10. Daniel Hetherington, Malcolm X, ca. 1968. Oil on masonite. Photo by Michael Tropea. Private collection. 3.11. Jackie Hetherington,

Three on Three—­Chicago, 1986–87. Woodblock print. Photo by Ann Zelle. Private collection.

3.12. Danny Hetherington leading discussion of Ralph Arnold works

with ­children, Art & Soul, 1968 or 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle.

War, and the vio­lence at the Demo­cratic National Convention, with arrows suggesting how “one ­thing leads to another” (figure 3.13). Arnold was also dedicated to working with youth. He had received a grant earlier that year to work with the Midwest Boys Club, and he obtained grants to work with a dif­fer­ent group of ­children the following summer, also on the West Side.89 As artist in residence at Art & Soul, he taught a class composed of handpicked students who already had some art training.90 One ­Thing Leads to Another was clearly the subject of discussion in a class led by Danny Hetherington: in Zelle’s photos of the class, ­children eagerly raise their hands, clamoring to answer a question. To all appearances, Arnold’s provocative works generated lively discussion on site. By the time Zelle had her first meeting with Arnold in October, the proj­ ect was moving along, but questions remained. The pro­cess of establishing community trust was not a ­simple one. ­There was an almost inevitable conflict between spending on building renovation and spending on programs. As the head of the Sesquicentennial, a program of events commemorating Illinois’s 150th year of statehood, Newman obviously wanted the proj­ect to bear fruit—­specifically through programming that could be reported to state government—in the year 1968. The proj­ect got off the ground only in the summer; spending too much time on renovations would slow the pro­gress An Experimental Friends hi p

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3.13. Ralph Arnold (1928–2006), One ­Thing Leads to Another, 1968.

Collage and acrylic on canvas. 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). © Ralph Arnold. Photography Purchase Fund, 2011.131. Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

of the opening, and spending too much money on them would reduce program possibilities. Yet community members wanted to establish some permanence. Jackie Hetherington pushed for more extensive renovations. Once the architect, Ray Broady, saw the condition of the building, his cost estimates went up. Van der Marck’s initial bud­get of $25,000 had almost entirely neglected the cost of remodeling, to which he allocated only $1,000. The crumbling interior walls could not be redone without spending more money than Newman would allow. ­These questions of cost ­were emotionally and po­liti­cally charged. If white money was coming into the neighborhood to build something, why ­couldn’t it be something magnificent? Van der Marck, too, wanted the 156  /

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building to look good enough that it would create an impression. In a meeting on September 30, van der Marck, Zelle, and Rogers came to “agree with Jackie that enough money had to be spent to get the job done well and quickly.”91 The next day van der Marck expressed frustration: “Where are we? No payrolls yet. Every­thing is done piecemeal and nothing is done properly. . . . ​Forget preliminary budget—do remodeling right with black architect and contractor.”92 The exigencies of the schedule led to some creative solutions. As Houlihan remembered it, Zelle had the idea to tack burlap over some of the interior walls and nail down a ­simple wood border rather than completely replacing the decayed plaster.93 The burlap provided a minimally acceptable surface for hanging artwork. By October 31 the space was nearly ready to open. The two vacant storefronts had been painstakingly converted into a single space for youth programming, artist residencies, and exhibitions. A preopening Halloween party was held, with movies, bobbing for apples, and a painting contest for kids. Zelle noted with relief that the cvl had come through with support for the event, that it was a “good introduction to Art & Soul as an active, swinging ­ usic from a percussion place.”94 Two weeks ­later, it formally opened, with m ensemble called the Sound of Blackness and a psychedelic light show modeled on one that had been done at the mca. Bobby Gore had a camera and took copious pictures, as did Ann Zelle. Newspaper articles gushed about the success of the endeavor. Members of the Sound of Blackness are seen from a striking ­angle in a photo by Howard Simmons for one such article, in the Sun-­Times (figure 3.14). Ralph Arnold’s art was on the walls along with works by local and South Side artists. The idea of a f­ ree bookstore modeled on the Diggers’ ­free stores had been nixed in an early meeting with area pastors, but the Chicago Public Library’s involvement insured that the center was stocked with books; the opening program described Art & Soul as “A Community Art/Book Center for All Ages.”95 Robert Nolte wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “Two months ago, it was a dilapidated building, housing a hat cleaner on 16th Street. ­Today, it is the brightest spot on the block—­Art and Soul, a library, gallery, light and ­music theater, and workshop for West Side artists.”96 If anything, the tensions pres­ent in the way the partnership was structured seem to have injected energy into the proj­ect. Eventually the collaborators became, as Houlihan put it, “trusted partners.” Although he recalls the proj­ect as misguided in certain ways, he still describes it as “a wonderful event.”97 Over the months, the center hosted a flurry of activity. In addition to the collages of Ralph Arnold, Art & Soul exhibited works by Ramon Price, An Exper imental Fri endshi p

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3.14. “­Music is provided at the Art and Soul opening at

3742 W. 16th by David Agustus and Bros., the ‘Sounds of Blackness.’ ” Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago ­Sun-­Times, November 14, 1968.

a protégé of Margaret Burroughs who would become the second director of the DuSable Museum, and Ben Bey, the or­ga­nizer of a group of formerly incarcerated artists. ­Later it also hosted a small traveling exhibition of African sculpture, African Sculpture 1969–1970, from the Art Institute’s collections (also sponsored by the Illinois Arts Council).98 Staff offered classes in papier-­ mâché, puppets, sculpture, murals, “Afro-­art appreciation,” and screen printing, and held a regular writers’ workshop. The center also held informal studio hours, and sponsored visits to the mca and a poetry reading ­there by Black poets (Useni Eugene Perkins, Sigemonde Wimberli, and Ebon).99 It also sponsored a poetry reading by Gwendolyn Brooks and Don L. Lee at the nearby Penn School and a per­for­mance by the ­Free Street Theatre. Art & Soul staff held paste-­ins (collage-­making events), sidewalk chalk-­ins, a “Black Christmas” cele­bration, and a writers’ workshop. The pace of activities was impressive but would have been difficult to sustain over a longer-­ term proj­ect, and eventually, although Art & Soul continued for several more years, the frenetic activity slowed. As 1968 turned into 1969, indeed, 158  /

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t­ here ­were questions about how long it could keep g­ oing: the Sesquicentennial funds w ­ ere drying up, and it was uncertain what ­future ­there was. But at the time, for Zelle, it was “very positive and fun. P ­ eople ­were excited and interested. Lots of neighborhood ­people would come by. It was exhilarating and full of hope. Such a rich, productive, creative time.”100 Art & Soul was not an explic­itly oppositional or critical proj­ect, though its very existence certainly derived from a critique of the status quo. On the other hand, it might be understood as the radicalization of a genre of 1960s art proj­ects whose medium was the “setting”: to take two prominent New York examples, Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 Store (a fake store) and Gordon Matta-­Clark’s 1971 Food (an a­ ctual restaurant). A funding proposal for Art & Soul written in February 1969 drew on the rhe­toric of con­temporary art: “ ‘Art & Soul’ began as a six-­month art happening in Lawndale, an experimental friendship between a street group and a museum.” Along with being described as a “Happening,” the proj­ect was also modeled on the ­free stores of the San Francisco radical street theater group, the Diggers. In parallel with its commitment to ­children’s programming, Art & Soul was attempting to initiate dialogue between the con­temporary white art world and the styles and concerns of Black artists. The proposal also suggested that part of the proj­ect’s innovation was its responsiveness to African American cultural forms: “By providing the opportunity for the application of con­temporary art techniques to black moods, the concept of ‘Art & Soul’ becomes a medium for new forms and styles in art.”101 “Black moods” was an in­ter­est­ing word choice. Other cvl grant proposals refer to overwhelming hopelessness as the “mood” of Lawndale, but ­here “black moods” seems instead to represent a more expansive and creative feeling. Interviewed in late 1968 by Steven Pratt of the Chicago Tribune, Houlihan said that the work done by “artists h ­ ere is a dif­fer­ent type of art than that you see hanging in the north side galleries. That’s why the museum is so interested.”102 He implied thereby that the museum was not just engaged in charity work but also had something to gain in the partnership. The “black moods” fostered at Art & Soul also suggested the idea of creating, or maintaining, a distinctively African American style of art. This was also a priority for Jackie Hetherington. The Art Institute offered an exhibition of African art, but Jackie hesitated to stress African art at the expense of developing con­temporary African American artists; in the end he accepted.103 He rejected, however, the mca’s offer of Red Grooms’s Chicago billboard, which contained a caricatured African American boy. At the same time, he also resisted the claims of members of obac who visited the space and must An Exper imental Fri ends hi p

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have reacted negatively to Ann Zelle’s presence: “­Doesn’t like the idea of So. Side militant Obasi [sic] artists coming in and trying to tell him what he should do,” she wrote; “—­will stand up for me more from that standpoint than ­because he would have chosen to have a white girl ­there.”104 ­Every Day All Day Thang

Art emerged out into the street from Art & Soul, with chalk-­ins and street per­ for­mance and murals that made the building a changing canvas. It opened itself to professional artists through a residency program; in March  1969, Art & Soul held a contest with notable judges: Jan van der Marck, the established artists Ralph Arnold and Richard Hunt, and Herbert Baker, a white collector of African art. Jeff Donaldson won first prize, and Peter Gilbert, a sculptor who worked at Art & Soul, was second; Reginald Madison (who went by Reggie) was third. Between Donaldson and Gilbert was as much of a contrast as ­there could possibly be. Donaldson was a trained artist pursuing a PhD in art history at Northwestern. He was a key figure in obac and the Wall of Re­spect, and a guiding force in africobra. Gilbert, on the other hand, was a gang member with ­little if any formal art education; his medium of animal bones represented a material he could get his hands on easily. Madison, like Donaldson, lived on the South Side, and like Gilbert he was self-­taught, not art school–trained, but he had had the benefit and inspiration of the vibrant cultural and po­liti­cal scenes of Hyde Park. In contrast to Donaldson in par­tic­u­lar, he saw his painting and his politics as equally impor­tant but quite separate. Jeff Donaldson was an acknowledged leader in the visual arts and helped spearhead the founding of africobra. In addition to Jeff Donaldson’s prizewinning entry in the March contest, other members of africobra had work t­ here. On view in a photo by Ann Zelle of Ralph Arnold, Jan van de Marck, and Richard Hunt standing in the space is Jae Jarrell’s Ebony ­Family dress, made of black velvet with colorful velvet appliqués (figures 3.15 and 3.16). One of Wadsworth Jarrell’s paintings—­The Black Family (figure 3.17)—­appears leaning against the wall in another of Zelle’s photos (figure 3.18).105 Donaldson’s prizewinning painting (see figure  4.1) appears in dif­fer­ent situations with two slightly dif­fer­ent titles. In a photo taken by Sun-­Times photographer Howard Simmons, where Donaldson looks at it together with Jackie Hetherington, it is captioned as Two ­Toward (figure  3.19). It had the same title at Black Expressions, a show sponsored by the McDonald’s 160  /

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3.15. Ralph Arnold, Jan van der Marck, and Richard Hunt, with Jae Jarrell’s Ebony ­Family dress, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle.

Corporation at the South Side Community Art Center in the fall of 1969.106 In it, a man and a ­woman appear posed frontally. Frontality was a central precept for africobra artists, expressing strength and likely derived from the straightforward, solid poses of Benin sculpture. The man’s expression is resolute, his right fist loosely curled, the thumb hooked in his jeans pocket. The ­woman’s determined gaze is focused beyond the spectator in the ­middle distance; she is much shorter than the man, and her body sways so dramatically in an S-­curve that it is hard to know, on close inspection, how she is holding herself upright. When it was exhibited in the Museum of Science and Industry’s Black Esthetics exhibition in 1970, it bore the title Two ­toward Revolution.107 Also connecting ­these figures to the idea of revolution is Donaldson’s closely related illustration for the cover of the poetry chapbook Revolution: A Poem, by Ebon, published in 1968 by Third World Press (figure  3.20). In this image, the difference between the two figures’ sizes is exaggerated, and they are joined notably by John Coltrane, a guiding spirit for the poem. The man’s fists are outstretched, and he towers over the A n Exper imental Fr iends hi p

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3.16. Jae Jarrell, Ebony ­Family, ca. 1968. Velvet dress with velvet collage. 38½ × 38 × ½ in. (97.8 × 96.5 × 1.3 cm). © Jae Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emmy L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16.

3.17. Wadsworth Jarrell,

Black ­Family, 1968. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist. 3.18. Peter Gilbert sculpture and Wadsworth Jarrell’s Black ­Family, Art & Soul, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle.

3.19. “Art Show at the Conservative Vice Lords’ Art gallery, Art & Soul.” Jackie Hetherington and Jeff Donaldson with Donaldson’s Two ­toward Revolution. Photo by Howard Simmons for the Chicago Sun-­Times, 1969. 3.20. Jeff Donaldson

cover illustration for Ebon, Revolution, 1969.

­ oman, much smaller now in comparison. The uneven block pattern on w her dress ­causes her to blend in to the wall beneath, which bears assorted gang graffiti, partially covered by the large letters spelling revolution. Beneath are caricatures of corrupt whites. Peter Gilbert was the second-­prize winner in the March contest. He made small delicate sculptures out of chicken and pork bones, materials to which he had ready access. ­Later, Bobby Gore said, he sold necklaces made from similar materials at the African Lion: “He took pork bones, dried them out, drilled holes in them, put cut glass and chains on, and it was something you wore around your neck like a necklace.”108 None of them, to my knowledge, has survived, and only a few photos exist. On the top shelf of the bookcase in figure 3.18 can be seen an example of his small sculptures. It is about eigh­ teen inches tall: abstract, with human-­like proportions, and a knobby, irregular, ventilated construction. One of the sculptures was called Slave Ship—­ the Sun-­Times reporter Richard Foster eloquently described the bones in the piece as “jammed tightly against one another, huddled closely.”109 Art Institute–­trained painter Wadsworth Jarrell remembered the sculptures but was less complimentary, seeing the use of chicken bones by an untrained Black artist as unfortunately playing into racial ste­reo­types.110 But the South Side artist who won third prize in the contest, Reginald Madison, was enthusiastic. Recalling his reaction at the time, he said, “Wow, this is g­ reat stuff, now t­ here’s a po­liti­cal statement. Pork chops, oxtail bones, chicken bones—­ what you eat, as a cultural ­thing, turned into art. That was pretty ­great.”111 Gilbert’s work married medium with po­liti­cal content, and his sculptures—­ apart from their medium—­also bore a resemblance to some of the tubular, biomorphic forms found in the work of Richard Hunt. Surely, the judges must have thought it was impor­tant to award a prize to one of the local Lawndale artists. Perhaps they did not r­ eally take his work seriously. But what if they did? With ­little to go on beyond a few black-­ and-­white photos, an offhand memory or two, it is hard to piece together an understanding of Gilbert’s sensibility as an artist. Peter Gilbert is also the name of a filmmaker in Chicago, a l­ittle younger than the sculptor. I asked him if he had ever met the other Peter Gilbert. Yes, he said; his parents knew ­people who did community work in Lawndale, they had visited Art & Soul, and “it’s not so often you run across someone with the same name.”112 Many ­people remembered the sculptor Peter Gilbert, but none could give me any leads. In context, the absence was not just regrettable from a research point of view; it is expressive. This was one of many times in which, in the course of researching this book, I ran up against demographics. African American A n Experimental Fr iends hi p

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men in Amer­i­ca have a life expectancy six years shorter than white men. Short lifespans in North Lawndale w ­ ere symptomatic of poor housing, health care, and nutrition, before you even begin to specify other demographic characteristics, like gang membership or drug addiction. Jerry Hetherington, the last surviving b­ rother of Jackie and Danny, told me that some of the Vice Lords smashed Gilbert’s hand with a hammer b­ ecause he owed them money for drugs.113 He might still be alive. But I could not locate him. In the fall of 1969, Edward Perry, aka Pep or Peppilow, who had helped found the Vice Lords in 1958, went off to Dartmouth College. He was on his way to spend a year at Dartmouth College as part of a program called Foundation Years that had been initiated by DeWitt Beall, a friend of David Dawley’s from Dartmouth.114 While shooting the film Making It—­a chronicle of the obstacles and hopes for young Black men seeing a successful life in Amer­i­ca—­for the American Can com­pany, DeWitt Beall became interested in the young Vice Lords he interviewed for the film. He made the connection with his alma mater, Dartmouth, to establish a program that would enable them to attend the elite East Coast college. The film served as a fundraising tool for the program—­Kenneth Montgomery, a wealthy liberal benefactor in Northbrook, hosted a fundraiser with a screening and opportunity for conversation with Vice Lords Henry Jordan, Allen “Tiny” Evans, and Theo­philus Moore.115 Interviewed in the film, Oscar Brown Jr. provided the “militant” point of view, emphasizing the obstacles that faced young Black men; ­others, successful in vari­ous fields of business and industry, claimed that the responsibility for success lay squarely on the individual’s shoulders. (­Later, I ­will revisit Beall’s work as a filmmaker: he also directed Lord ­Thing, a film that chronicled the development of the Vice Lords into cvl, Inc., and examined its ­future prospects.) Peppilow spoke to a journalist as he was preparing to leave: “Working with the Lords alone poses a limitation,” he said. “I want to be limitless.”116 What did it mean for a young man, from North Lawndale to be “limitless”—to embrace Amer­i­ca’s midcentury phantasms of boundless possibility? Contact with resources and the possibilities they opened up could be exhilarating. It could also be frustrating. One structurally inevitable component of contact between white institutions and community development proj­ects in Black neighborhoods was a sense of paternalism. The limitations that w ­ ere routinely placed on the assistance t­hose institutions would or could provide created a feeling that that very assistance was designed to keep recipients in a slightly improved but dependent and still subservient position. At best, this involved a failure to communicate expectations about constraints of 166  /

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fiscal responsibility; at worst, it reflected the limitations of forms of charity that, in fact, rely structurally on continued inequity. ­There was desperate need in North Lawndale. In early meetings, during the months in which Art & Soul was in formation, community members challenged the idea of the proj­ect in ways that might seem contradictory but reflect the community’s manifold needs and desires. Two ­women from Concerned Parents objected to the use of funds for art at all—­citing more basic needs that ­were not being served in the community. When I spoke with Wanda Ross, who ran the Panthers’ breakfast programs, she said almost the same ­thing: personally, she loved art, but ­there ­were such enormous deficits in the provision of ­people’s basic needs that she would not have even thought to take time for it.117 ­There was an additional f­ actor in the ­women’s suspicions: van der Marck reported in the time sheet that they asked, “Why do you white p ­ eople all want to make your mark in the Lawndale area? Is that the way you want to get into the news?”118 At the same time, however, the same two w ­ omen criticized the potential shabbiness of the art center’s circumstances. Van der Marck noted, “The point was driven home rather sharply that black ­people associate storefronts with churches, neighborhood clubs and in general poorly financed, faltering operations.” He went on to remark that “neither of the 2 ladies ­were thinking of the museum in terms other than the traditional concept.” While he saw the promise of sustainability in a frugal experiment, perhaps the ­women ­imagined something like the Art Institute: Beaux-­Arts architecture, soaring ceilings, lions out front. What if they could have that in their neighborhood? Storefronts would in their eyes consign the operation to being a poor substitute for a real museum. The ­women thus seemed to be asking for the two conflicting t­ hings: the fulfillment of basic needs instead of art—­and at the same time a magnificent museum. But why should they not have wanted both? Why c­ ouldn’t the neighborhood have enough food, clothes, good schools, and decent jobs—­and a ­great museum? Elsewhere, the Conservative Vice Lords themselves put it this way: “In a country that spends millions of dollars to reach the moon, a young Vice Lord cannot afford a decent haircut before ­going out for a job interview. In a state that receives a million-­dollar atom smasher, young Negro men cannot afford to take their girlfriends to a ninety cent movie. In a city so rich that it can rebuild McCormick Place, West Side ­mothers cannot find a place to leave their ­children while they look for a job.”119 The ­women’s concerns do not surface again in the documents of the proj­ect—­not in that form. But it is clear that the limits that white institutions A n Exper imental Fri endshi p

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placed on the proj­ect could rankle in many small ways. It is already clear that Houlihan and Jackie Hetherington sometimes found themselves at odds over expenditures. The sentiment echoes in a grant proposal written by David Dawley: “Skeleton anti-­poverty efforts ­will quickly be revealed as cooling-­out shams. ‘If ­you’re gonna give us something,’ one Vice Lord chief maintains, ‘we w ­ on’t accept it if we ­can’t be proud of it.’ Though hopeful of opening an ice cream parlor which is now u ­ nder construction, the Vice Lords would rather lock the doors than accept used equipment.”120 ­People in Lawndale w ­ ere tired of decrepit housing and the substandard goods that circulated in their community. “Vintage” was not yet a value. And all it took ­ ere was turning on the tv or taking a trip downtown to see that they w living in the land of plenty. At least, plenty for some. Money became an issue between Jim Houlihan and Peter Gilbert in a dif­ fer­ent way. As Houlihan remembered it, the day of the opening t­ here was a prob­lem with the electrical wiring of the luminous ceiling panels. Rather than spend money on an electrician, he made the thrifty choice of working on the wiring himself. In the pro­cess, he accidentally caused a panel to fall and shatter one of Gilbert’s creations. Gilbert insisted that Houlihan owed him $5,000 for the piece. A figure like that was wildly disproportionate to what his sculptures might have actually sold for on the market. But Gilbert believed that ­people like Jim Houlihan had access to a lot of money, and he also knew that art (some art, anyway) fetched prices beyond his wildest dreams. Perhaps he also reasoned that the museum’s involvement should raise the value of the work. Perhaps he just allowed himself some grandiosity. That’s My Ancestor

The third-­prize winner in Art & Soul’s contest, Reggie Madison, does not fit neatly into the category of trained professional or self-­taught, vernacular artist. He could almost be the “artist who’s working with kinetic, light or minimal ­things” to whom Richard Hunt was referring. As a teenager Madison discovered a discarded box of paints in the 57th Street viaduct ­under Lake Shore Drive, and from that point on he was teaching himself to paint by painting any chance he got. He even painted on the graveyard shift as he sat atop a crane high above U.S. Steel’s Southworks plant, where he went to work when he was nineteen (figure 3.21). Madison appears in several of Zelle’s photos touching up one of his entries at the last minute (figure  3.22). He won third place with an abstract 168  /

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3.21. Reginald Madison, The Mill, 1966. Oil on canvas. Collection of the artist.

geometric sculpture he titled Black Madonna and Child (figure 3.23). He had given the titles Black Madonna and Child and Choco­late Machine to two of his brightly colored sculptural pieces as a kind of private joke, believing that an expression of Black identity was what the organizers of Art & Soul’s contest ­were ­after. In fact, the judges prob­ably enjoyed the irony of such a title attached to a multicolored abstract sculpture. Madison did not think of himself as a po­liti­cal artist; he did not see the need to put politics into his artwork, in part b­ ecause he was plenty po­liti­cal outside of his art. Growing up in Woodlawn, the neighborhood just to the south of the University of Chicago, he had attended anarchist meetings on the north side, participated in protests and actions, hung out with leftists in Hyde Park, and enjoyed the vibrant Beat culture that existed t­here. As an artist, though, he was a modernist. As he put it, he was just interested in learning how to paint. Madison’s job as a steelworker informed his painting practice—he painted machinery, and figures with machinelike bodies, in a colorful idiom inspired by Fernand Léger. It was r­eally at Southworks that he found himself as an artist, he said, ­because the machinery gave him subject ­matter. Madison was part of a new generation of African American workers who went to work at the plant. It was not easy for them: the ­unions ­were corrupt, and the older men—­Irish, Germans, Poles—­felt threatened. Just north of the plant is Rainbow Beach, where racial tensions emerged in the 1950s and 1960s over public access to lakefront space. In 1961, the naacp held A n Exper im ental Fri ends hi p

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3.22. Reggie Madison touching up his contest entry, Art & Soul,

1968. Photo by Ann Zelle. 3.23. Reggie Madison’s Black Madonna and Child with Jan van

der Marck and Jackie Hetherington, 1968. Photo by Ann Zelle.

a “wade-in” over the course of the weekend, and on the second day of the action, white gangs threw rocks at the interracial group. The plant is shuttered now; by the time the fifty-­year anniversary of the wade-in was commemorated, in the summer of 2011, the steel plant had been closed for nearly twenty years. It is a brownfield, and since 1992, it has been guarded by barbed wire, with signs proclaiming penalties for trespassing. You can walk around the outskirts, but you cannot get in—­unless you are very resourceful. But as developers began noticing opportunities on Chicago’s southern lakefront, t­hings began to change. In the summer of 2011, the Dave Matthews Band played a concert t­here. The last time the Dave Matthews Band played in Chicago, one of its tour buses literally dumped on the city—­letting loose its bathroom waste while on a bridge over the Chicago River. This illegal act of pollution might have gone unnoticed except for the fact that a boatload of tourists was passing u ­ nder the bridge and received the noxious gift. Now, the same band was being enlisted to help the city clean up the image of the Southworks site—in preparation for 170  /

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a luxury condo development. The choice of this par­tic­u­lar band also tells us who the developers want to entice: presumably, white p ­ eople of a certain age. Along with his interest in the machine aesthetics of Eu­ro­pean artists like Léger, Madison also appreciated the work of the Hairy Who, and of a slightly older generation of hip Black artists he wanted to emulate. They hung out at the Cellar Boheme, an after-­hours club in a basement at 5231 South Kimbark in Hyde Park. The atmosphere, a Defender article explained, was “dim lights, fish nets, paintings by Cellar members and cushioned seats on the floor in the midst of haunting strains of jazz.” While it might be described as “Beatnik” and “Bohemian,” the author notes, aficionados preferred to call it “a living, loving, spontaneous center of the popu­lar arts.”121 The hip scene that Reggie admired included the painter Mitchell Caton (Theodore Burns Mitchell), along with Dino Campbell and Albert Zeno. Caton worked together with the muralist William Walker and Siddha Webber at the post office, where Gerald McWorter and Conrad Kent Rivers had also worked. As with Pullman porters in the previous generation, the postal ser­vice provided a steady day job for members of the working-­class, African American intelligent­sia. Another postal worker, Henry Casey, was not an artist but was a key figure in the Hyde Park scene, hosting parties that attracted all kinds of artists. Madison could have taken the route of working at the post office, but he was not ready to s­ ettle down or push paper. He chose a dif­fer­ent, riskier, and prob­ably more lucrative path at Southworks. He needed to make a living, but he was also saving money to get himself to Eu­rope. From the time he started working at the plant, he was taking extra shifts. He would work sixteen hours a day, six days a week. A ­ fter five years, with the money he had saved, he took his young f­ amily to Eu­rope for a year. In t­ hose days, you could take Icelandic Air via Reykjavik for $100. Munich was drab, Paris was vibrant, and he got an art historical education visiting museums in Eu­rope. Eu­rope also offered a respite from the racial politics of the United States. But it was clear that New York, not Paris, was where the action was. In Paris, it was New York artists who ­were everywhere—­Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol. Reggie came back to Chicago. He was interested in working with dif­fer­ent art forms; he secured some funding from the leftist philanthropist Lucy Montgomery to put on a play with a musician friend. It was April 1968—­and suddenly, the West Side went up in flames. The money that would have gone to his play went elsewhere. Madison had had enough of Amer­i­ca, he deci­ded; he flew away to Eu­rope again. But washing dishes off the books in a restaurant in Copenhagen, his lack of a visa caught up with him, and he had to head home. Back in Chicago A n Experi mental Fr iends hi p

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in early 1969, he entered his work in Art & Soul’s contest. He was already on his way out—on his way to the East Coast, on an itinerary that would take him to western Mas­sa­chu­setts and Connecticut, where he worked for years as a scientific glassblower at the University of Connecticut, and then to New York City and fi­nally to Athens, New York. Part of the reason Madison believed art should be kept distinct from politics was that his model was ­music—­free jazz. In this he was not so dif­fer­ent from many white modernist artists. Black ­music not only was both African and American but also had a solid claim to being both specifically Black and soaringly universal. If you could not fly to Eu­rope, ­music also opened up vistas of possibility. What enabled Reggie to become an artist? As much as that box of paints, it was the organ­izing abilities of Margaret Burroughs that made space for younger artists like him—­and it was the jazz avant-­garde, Charlie “Bird” Parker and other musicians. Black identity mattered but it was not the subject of his work; painting was about painting. “I’m still learning to paint,” he told me in 2011, ever the modernist. But modernism also meant blackness. “If you say, ‘what’s your ancestry?’ ” he said, “I say—­Charlie Parker. That’s my ancestor, yeah.”122 The End of Art & Soul

Art & Soul was a multiracial, collaborative, community art proj­ect from before such proj­ects ­were an art world trend. It was a bargain struck between groups—­each individually comprising complex interests—­that knew, at the outset, very ­little about one another. For their own separate reasons, each agreed to construct this space both to foster creativity in Lawndale from the ground up and to celebrate African American art and artists in Chicago. Art & Soul borrowed, and was sometimes a vehicle for, the Black Arts Movement’s aspirations, and in making do with limited resources and challenging presuppositions—­just like the in­de­pen­dent galleries that dotted the South Side—it made an art of the ­labor required to create such a space. One cannot claim any pre­ce­dence for Art & Soul in relation to the South Side collective Black proj­ects. What is most impor­tant about Art & Soul is the remarkable fact of the engagement of the mca and other white institutions, in an aesthetic proj­ect, with a street gang, whose members engaged in the proj­ ect as essential partners and not merely recipients of charity. The multiple kinds of ­labor that went into allowing this risky, fragile experiment to happen even for a short time express the content of the proj­ect as need, crisis, poverty, danger, and power—as well as optimism and creativity. 172  /

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When I asked Danny and Jackie Hetherington’s ­brother, Jerry, if the Vice Lords had been successful at changing their methods, he said they w ­ ere, at least partly, at least temporarily. “If you go by what they did,” he said, “you ­didn’t hear about beatings and shootings anymore. You d­ idn’t have that kind of vio­lence. They wanted to change their public image. And to some extent they w ­ ere successful.”123 In spite of this, or perhaps b­ ecause of it, in May  1969, the Cook County State’s Attorney, Edward Hanrahan, along with Mayor Richard  J. Daley, declared a “War on Gangs.” Together, they argued, “Gang claims that they are traditional boys’ clubs or community organ­izations ignore the vio­lence and destruction of social values in the neighborhoods they terrorize.”124 As part of the War on Gangs, leaders of the cvl ­were harassed, arrested, and imprisoned, often with obviously flawed or manipulated judicial pro­cesses. And at the indictment of Bobby Gore on murder charges that many argued at the time and since w ­ ere trumped up, Hanrahan pointedly excoriated the various granting organ­izations for giving money to gangs: “We think t­ hese brutal acts should cause foundations and ­others to intensify their scrutiny of persons seeking money from them to make certain their funds are not used to arm street gangsters or for other idleness.”125 Why was this war declared? Did Daley and Hanrahan not see the potential the “reformed” gangs offered? Several observers at the time, and historians more recently, have suggested that Daley saw their potential all too well. When Edward Perry went off to Dartmouth, in addition to expressing his desire to be “limitless,” he also said something ­else: “One day, the D’s and the Stones and the Lords ­will all be together, and when that day comes, baby—­some ­people better watch out.”126 In 1969 the cvl and other youth organ­izations ­were upping the ante, joining together with Civil Rights Movement leaders in mass protests for jobs. Gang members rallied in front of the Picasso at Civic Center Plaza; the major gangs came together with the Co­ali­tion for United Community Action to participate in a series of protests against discrimination in construction industry jobs.127 Daley knew from personal experience how far a “youth organ­ization” could take its agenda if it developed po­liti­cal legitimacy. As a young leader of the Hamburg Athletic Association, he was a probable participant in the major race riot of 1919 in Chicago; throughout his life he refused to answer questions about his involvement.128 He knew exactly what could happen when gangs began to legitimize themselves and claim po­liti­cal power, ­because he had lived through this very experience. By this reading, the Conservative Vice Lords ­were not the exception to the rule, a force for good unfortunately An Experimental Fr iends hi p

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swept up in an overly indiscriminate but ultimately necessary police operation provoked by the vio­lence of other gangs. They w ­ ere the provocation. It may have been for this reason that Art & Soul became harder to fund ­after the first influx of money from the Illinois Sesquicentennial. That funding was never intended to go much beyond the end of 1968, but staffers eked it out for another few months nonetheless. The proj­ect was not uncontroversial with the museum’s board.129 Efforts at cultivating individual donors—­“Friends of Art & Soul”—­included the promise of copies of the book Picasso’s ­Women (donated by Time, Inc., and an obvious thematic tie-in with the monumental Picasso sculpture downtown) for the first five hundred donors of twenty-­five dollars or more. The February 1969 grant proposal pres­ents an ambitious program for the continued work of the center, and makes clear that an association with the Museum of Con­temporary Art is still presumed. But even as the proposal was being produced, it was clear the museum would not remain formally associated with the center for much longer. In a letter dated February 10, Alfonso Alford asked van der Marck ­whether he would be willing to remain on the board past the end of the formal relationship with the center. In another letter of the same date he also indicated that the cvl hoped Zelle would continue to assist the proj­ect.130 Zelle stayed on u ­ ntil the summer, when she left to take a job in Washington with the nascent International Council of Museums (icom). Around the same time, Jackie Hetherington left for Washington too, to work for another new organ­ization, Youth Organ­izations United (you). In the fall of 1967, leaders of eight gangs from across the United States, including cvl, had come together to develop “a national communications network to be called Youth Organ­izations United, which would pool the experiences of youth groups across the nation, and seek financing to enroll as many such groups as pos­si­ble.” A meeting in May 1968 produced a national proposal that, in 1969, resulted in a grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.131 This grant enabled Jackie and o­ thers to move to Washington to work in the national organ­ization’s headquarters. He tried to convince Danny to come along, but he would not leave.132 Danny kept drawing, but his life took a downward turn. Ann and Jackie met up again in Washington and their working relationship developed into a romance; they lived together ­there for ten years. For part of that time their third h ­ ouse­mate was a bird named Bird (­after Charlie Parker). In the summer of 1969 t­ hings ­were still moving along with the cvl’s other proj­ects. The African Lion was opened with the help of a Field Foundation grant that enabled cvl to convert an old bar into what Jet called “a smart 174  /

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store that sells dashikis, Afro-­American suits, unisex garments, costume and handcrafted bone jewelry, designed by the Zambesi [sic] Art Guild, mod clothing, mini-­dashiki dresses, African beads, statuary, artifacts.”133 A professor of architecture at Harvard’s Gradu­ate School of Design, Jerrold Voss, was making plans to bring classes to work with the Conservative Vice Lords as an urban planning laboratory that would mutually train students and gang members, provide orga­nizational development strategies for the cvl, and create a development plan for the neighborhood.134 The cvl had opened the Teen Town restaurant and the House of Lords and two Tastee Freez franchises; they had done neighborhood beautification work, and had begun work on a paper recycling proj­ect in concert with other West Side organ­ izations.135 They created a “Management Training Institute” and ­were working with Malcolm X College to run a “Street Acad­emy.” Older cvl members ­were effective as recruiters of younger kids ­because they had, as a uic Center for Urban Studies proposal for a similar Model Cities program put it, “all of the desirable characteristics. . . . ​They ­were available in the neighborhood day and night. They ­were totally familiar with the haunts of the neighborhood youth. The recruiters ­were trusted by them and they ­were respected. Furthermore, their style of recruiting was naturally effective, i.e. their demeanor and language ­were totally appropriate for the neighborhood.”136 The fact that the University of Illinois at Chicago (known then as the Chicago Circle campus) took over administration of the program is not too surprising, given uic’s West Side location and activity in the area of youth program development. The details of how this happened are not entirely clear. Among other appeals for help, someone at Art & Soul wrote to the Department of Art at uic.137 Sometime ­later, the Department of Art and uic’s Center for Urban Studies jointly submitted a grant proposal on behalf of the proj­ect to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity u ­ nder the Educational Assistance Program. A proposal dated June 1969, authored by the Center for Urban Studies, lays out a plan for the continued operation of Art & Soul. It must have been funded, since rec­ords show that a second year’s operation, costing $25,100, was funded in August 1970.138 I have not been able to ascertain exactly who made what connections, but it is certain that John Walley, whose interest in art and community dated back de­cades, was involved. Walley was a member of the faculty of the Department of Art and may have actually been the driving force b­ ehind this venture. In the late 1960s he generated several programs and more proposals for neighborhood educational programs in cooperation with the Center for Urban Studies. Thirty years earlier, Walley had headed the design An Experimental Fr iends hi p

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workshop that developed vocational and arts curricula for Chicago Public Schools and worked on the South Side Community Art Center’s interior. He must have maintained some connection to the center’s artists; in 1961 he was invited by Margaret Burroughs to judge the art contest at the Lake Meadows art fair that she had founded in 1957.139 The other cojudges ­were all affiliates of the center, including Fern Gayden, Marion Perkins, and LeRoy Winbush. Walley still felt a strong mandate to marry art with social engagement. This meant helping establish and maintain educational programs in the distressed neighborhoods that bordered on uic’s, including in par­tic­ u­lar North Lawndale. One collaboration with the Better Boys Foundation brought twenty-­four boys to uic’s campus to learn about physics and art.140 Walley derived from his Bauhaus training an interest in multisensory modes of education. From the Bauhaus and also from his involvement in the ­labor movement, he may have derived a sense of the nobility of manual craft; his framing of ­these proj­ects in terms of vocational training (as opposed to fine arts training or appreciation) suggests an interest in developing a skilled ­labor pool that may have been paternalistic, or utopian, or both. The language he contributed to uic’s Art & Soul proposal reflected his Bauhaus background: “Many of the participants at Art & Soul have had discouraging experiences with learning at the symbolic-­verbal levels. Experiences at Art & Soul, many of which involve manual skills, begin at a kinetic level and involve a dif­fer­ent kind of learning; one in which ­there is ­little individual, personal history of failure.”141 One of his more eccentric ideas involved creating a technologically cutting-­edge “Sensory Gymnasium” to stimulate ­children’s senses and stimulate the creative pro­cess and learning in general: “We propose,” he wrote, “to hasten and enrich the student’s conceptual growth by direct experiences with perception devices and machines.”142 He also proposed a traveling “Negro History Exhibit” with slides, films, and tapes to be produced on behalf of the DuSable Museum, a citizens’ information center, a program of “Humanities and Art in the Community” for Lawndale, and a “Photography and Typography” workshop.143 It obviously was not clear to every­one that the Department of Art had a role to play in youth work and community development in North Lawndale, for Walley was at pains to justify it in a text that appears in several of ­these proposals. The form of education was based, he made clear, on Bauhaus’s design workshop. The Department of Art, he argued, can offer its experience in addressing the “transposition from the cognitive (formula-­data retention) to the sensory experience (kinetic-­tactile action).” It can also address “role-­ taking” and the “acting out” of work roles. Fi­nally, it can help with the design 176  /

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3.24. Kenneth Hunter,

portrait, ca. 1970. Heruanita McIlvaine Collection.

and production of devices and the technology of communication through media (“film, video tape, audio tape, models and displays”).144 The shift to uic’s administration of the proj­ect also meant staffing changes: uic hired a new director, Don McIlvaine. It seems that at first the plan may have been simply to let Jackie Hetherington go. He sent out an urgent call to advisory committee members to attend a meeting on July 22.145 The change to the new director did not sit well with every­one. Burt Lazar of Metalcraft, who had been supportive of the proj­ect from the start (seeing it at least in part as a training program that could enhance the skills of the ­labor pool), attended an advisory meeting on July 22, responding to an urgent call to come help decide the ­future of the center.146 Two days l­ater he wrote to Goat (Kenneth Parks) to express concern about the possibility that Jackie might not stay on as director.147 According to Lazar, at the advisory committee meeting, Jackie had also mentioned some communication difficulties with the gang leadership. Perhaps Lazar’s intervention spurred a compromise that kept Jackie on, but with a demotion; just one day ­later A n E xperimental Friends hi p

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Goat issued a letter declaring that as of August 5, Don McIlvaine would be the director of the center and that Jackie would stay on as assistant director.148 It wasn’t too long before Hetherington was in Washington, working for you. From the university’s point of view, it may have seemed prudent to hire a director who was familiar with government bureaucracy (McIlvaine had worked for the city for years) and, perhaps more importantly, not a gang member. By November 1969 operations w ­ ere definitively ­under the auspices of uic.149 Members of the architecture faculty ­were already working with the Vice Lords on other proj­ects.150 Don McIlvaine told the Tribune that he planned to continue the proj­ect with a range of classes—­filmmaking, photography, painting, mechanical drawing. During his directorship students produced some remarkable artworks (figure 3.24). The funds from uic ­were apparently not sufficient for all operations of the program; McIlvaine also initiated a silkprint proj­ect, working with the ­children to make prints and selling them to department stores to raise funds, and he made several funding proposals for related proj­ects.151 He also sold art: in October, the Defender ran a photo of him at Art & Soul with a caption that called it “the ‘in’ place to purchase con­temporary black art.”152

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The Black ­Family

4

Jeff Donaldson’s Two ­toward Revolution (figure  4.1) makes a statement about the ­couple—­the Black ­couple—as the unit of revolution. Alongside Donaldson’s work, the pieces by Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell that appeared at Art & Soul emphasize the ­couple, and more than that, the ­family unit. They created their work as part of africobra’s theme of “the Black ­family,” one of two collective themes the group chose to work with. In its development of a shared aesthetic, africobra provides an especially good example of collective pro­cess. Jeff Donaldson was a dominant figure, a force to be reckoned with, but he also sensed the power to be found in a collective. His study of art history convinced him that, for artists to be remembered, they had to be part of a movement.1 Already in June 1967, as the obac Visual Arts Workshop embarked on planning the Wall of Re­spect, the group engaged in group critique and identified some shared princi­ples. ­These included a use of space that was “ambiguous . . . ​and somewhere between 3-­d and 2-­d in concept”; color that was “bold, clean and intense”; high contrast; and line that “explored the full spectrum of expression, from subjective (emotional) to objective (analytical),” always with a “direct and unlabored” application.2 As the group that came to be known as africobra came together, following the collapse of the obac Visual Arts Workshop, the members pursued a similar pro­cess. They showed work to one another and identified par­tic­u­lar aspects that each would contribute to a collective set of aesthetic princi­ples—­the distillation of a Black aesthetic. They also looked at the imagery that surrounded them. They endorsed a frontal, humanistic pre­sen­ta­tion of the (Black) figure and the use of text as a visual ele­ment that also helped

4.1. Jeff Donaldson, Two ­toward Revolution, ca. 1968. Watercolor. Location unknown.

establish meaning. Artworks, they asserted, should identify prob­lems and offer solutions, speaking to past, pres­ent, and ­future.3 The aesthetic princi­ples came not only from an internal examination of the artists’ work but also from observing what was happening outside, on the street. Robert Paige, a friend though not a member, contributed the idea of “coolade colors,” the bright colors ­people ­were wearing (recall the vivid colors worn by performers in Opportunity Please Knock). As their imagery evolved, the artists often broke up and abstracted their repre­sen­ta­tional forms with a kaleidoscopic use of color. Often, multiple discrete small blocks of color alternately define and cut across repre­sen­ta­tional forms, deploying what the africobra manifesto (penned by Barbara Jones-­Hogu) calls “lost and found line.”4 Many of ­these strategies are on display in Wadsworth Jarrell’s Revolutionary (Angela Davis) (figure 4.2). In the use of nearly pointillist patches of color and lettering, discrete but combining to an overall effect, the painting also speaks to the production of the collective, expressing chromatically the new form of collectivity that members ­were fashioning. The first impression is one of a bright uniformity, with the figure (Angela Davis) readily accessible to the viewer as a recognizable face, but the text that makes her up much more difficult to make out. The viewer is drawn in by the image, and then has to puzzle out the meaning—an effect that might be analogous to speaking in a kind of code. While not presented frontally—­the three-­quarter view was based on an iconic photo­graph of Davis—­the figure represents a Black hero much like ­those on the Wall of Re­spect. Describing the character of their collective work, Donaldson wrote: “We are a ­family. Check the unity. All the rest must be sensed directly. Check out the image. . . . ​We are a ­family of image-­makers and each member of the ­family is ­free to relate to and to express our laws in her/his individual way. Dig the diversity in unity. We can be ourselves and be together, too.”5 He thus emphasizes the fact that each artist remained an individual. This constitutes a small but significant contrast with the obac writers’ group. In an interview in the Defender about the Writers’ Workshop, Don L. Lee (­later Haki Madhubuti) says, “We give to each other. My vacuum might be filled by Carolyn, Kathy, or any one of the o­ thers,” and another (unnamed) member adds, “We are no longer individuals.”6 In contrast to the writers’ circle, africobra members’ statements about their collaborative pro­cess do not suggest a total merging of the individual into the collective. While their styles and methods converged, they remained cognizant of the qualities each had brought, like an improvisational jazz piece in which each player in the ensemble plays a solo. The Black Fam ily

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4.2. Wadsworth A. Jarrell (American, b. 1929), Revolutionary

(Angela Davis), 1971. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 64 × 51 in. (162.6 × 129.5 cm). © Wadsworth Jarrell. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.18.

­ fter the group had met and talked together for several months, the A time came to work together on a shared theme, and the theme they deci­ ded on was “Black ­family.” Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald Williams all completed works that directly match this theme. Donaldson produced a watercolor painting of a f­ather, ­mother, and child, which I have not been able to locate; Jones-­Hogu produced a silkprint, likely the one represented by a recently rediscovered unfinished proof state (figure 4.3). She also made other prints on the theme of ­family, which I ­will discuss ­later in this chapter. The importance of collective critique within africobra is made clear by Gerald Williams’s experience with the “Black f­amily” theme.7 He first presented for discussion a painting of a f­amily sitting at a dinner t­ able, but it used Eu­ro­pean perspective, and the group heavi­ly critiqued it. His revised piece, Say It Loud (figure 4.4), presented the f­ aces of two parents and a child amid lettering that spelled out the words of the title, making more direct use of africobra princi­ples: the bright “coolade colors”; the frontal positioning of the figures within the repeating pattern of the large and small geometric letters. ­These letters spelled out part of the title of James Brown’s

4.3. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, The Black ­Family, ca. 1968. Color

screenprint on tan paper. Photo courtesy of Lusenhop Fine Art. Private collection. Th e Black Fam ily

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4.4. Gerald Williams, Say It Loud, 1968. Oil

on canvas. Private collection.

anthem “Say It Loud—­I’m Black and I’m Proud,” released in 1968. Using the first three words of the title, the canvas inevitably calls up the ­others. The outline created by the shape of the face and natu­ral hair of each figure also suggests the outline of a map of the African continent. Rather than being positioned in perspective, the figures float in the colorful picture plane. Jae Jarrell’s Ebony ­Family dress (see figure 3.16) puts the ­family members in a tighter relationship with one another. Jarrell built up the dress’s imagery through abstract blocks of color, such that from a distance one might not realize it contains any figuration. On closer inspection it becomes evident that the color blocks construct a ­family with ­mother, ­father, and two 184  /

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c­ hildren, as well as the repeated letters “E F” (the initials of the title words). A ­mother—­wearing a pink shirt and holding the hand of a boy in green—is the largest figure in terms of the space she takes up on the front of the dress. The f­ather, at the upper right corner, affectionately holds a swaddled baby to his cheek, constituting a gentle and fully engaged vision of Black fatherhood. Wadsworth Jarrell’s canvas (figure 3.17), his first acrylic painting, also pres­ents a ­father and ­mother with two ­children, a younger boy and an older girl. (Jarrell chose faster-­drying acrylic so the painting would be ready for a hastily arranged taping opportunity for Black Pride—­a documentary written by Hoyt Fuller that aired on wgn-­t v on November 30, 1968.8) Within the pose of a more staid, traditional, middle-­class ­family portrait, Jarrell strongly emphasizes both parents’ large, protective hands.9 Jarrell’s dramatic use of text breaks up the painting’s illusionism: much of the surface of the canvas—­largely excepting the figures’ ­faces and other exposed skin—is covered with Bs and Ps, alluding to the phrase “Black Prince” written in cursive at the upper right. This subject m ­ atter may seem s­ imple and self-­evident. In context, however, it was highly po­liti­cally charged. Much of the discourse around the “Black ­family” had been conditioned by the report popularly known as the Moynihan Report, which identified in it a “tangle of pathology” deriving ultimately from slavery but perpetuated (so the report charged) by emasculating matriarchy, which “imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male.”10 The report both emerged from and entered into a public discourse strongly influenced by Freudian ideas. Though Moynihan did not use the word “castration,” ­others soon did. On the other hand, some observers noted that Black masculinity was crushed not by Black ­women but rather by white supremacist patriarchy, the successor to the long history of enslavement, which had obliterated f­ amily, language, body, gender, and culture.11 But the prescription for many African Americans, w ­ hether conventional or more militant in their views, was to emphasize and lift up the heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear ­family. Jae Jarrell’s depiction of a Black ­family and the parallel imagery of her husband’s painting could be seen as a rejoinder to the Moynihan Report on its own terms, depicting Black f­ athers, ­mothers, and c­ hildren taking part in the ideal American ­family unit. Following a similar line of thinking, Barbara Jones-­Hogu produced a print called “Man’s Return,” which she described in her master’s thesis as follows: “A five-­color woodcut print which depicts the Black man’s return as head of the f­amily with strength, courage, and dignity in a world of turmoil and confusion. The Black ­woman has returned to her role of homemaker instead of breadwinner. The two The Black Fami ly

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figures are linked together by their hands which marks their united des­ oman tiny.”12 ­Today, in its cele­bration of the man as breadwinner and the w as homemaker, this may sound retrograde. It reflects thinking that was current, if not universal, in the Black Liberation Movement, in which ­there was felt to be an imperative to support Black masculinity (­under constant attack from white patriarchy) and the reproduction of the race. But in choosing the theme, the group also pointed to the diversity of f­ amily structures pres­ent in Black communities. The words Black ­family, in other words, also reflect the broader ­family of Black ­people, the Black “community,” or a specific Black collectivity, understood as ­family. (This is, indeed, how members often refer to africobra. In the 2011 TV Land documentary, AfriCOBRA: Art for the P ­ eople, Jae Jarrell said, “Once y­ ou’re in africobra ­you’re always in africobra. It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood—­it’s a bond.”13) But if the point of reference is the normative f­amily, to make that ­family Black is already an intervention. Positive Images

The idea of “positive images,” whose cultivation, to combat an overtly racist visual culture, was a strongly shared and clearly articulated goal for the Black Arts Movement, provides a useful starting point for thinking about the Black ­family theme.14 Barbara Jones-­Hogu said of africobra’s work that “we wanted to make positive images . . . ​directing and motivating [viewers] with par­tic­u­lar thoughts, attitudes, and postures that we wanted to portray.”15 “The main t­ hing we w ­ ere dealing with was positive images,” said photographer Bob Crawford in dialogue with his d­ aughter Margo Crawford in 2008.16 In his account of africobra’s founding and early years, Jeff Donaldson also uses the language of the “positive”: africobra creates “images which deal with concepts that offer positive and feasible solutions to our . . . ​prob­lems.”17 In the textual portion of Jones-­Hogu’s master’s thesis, she quoted Ralph Ellison’s description of Romare Bearden’s mission as an artist: “Bearden’s mission is to bring a new visual order into the world, and through his art he seeks to reset society’s clock by imposing upon it his own method of defining the times.”18 Society’s clock, Ellison argues, is anachronistic, mired in old (that is, racist) ways of thinking and seeing; Bearden’s work is designed to disassemble and reassemble, in a new form, society’s visual sensibilities. africobra’s mission followed in this path, seeking to create a new sense

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of time, not simply reflecting on the past or documenting the pres­ent but presenting a new, ambitious program for the f­ uture—­and for art. The psychological goals of the Black Power Movement cut across class and politics. “Black is beautiful” discourse aimed to reveal the attractiveness of men and ­women both to themselves and to one another—­promoting both self-­confidence and healthy intraracial relationships (understood to be heterosexual ones). Both vernacular psy­chol­ogy and more specialized studies informed popu­lar theories of art and its efficacy. The psychological theory that underpinned positive images drew on Frantz Fanon’s work on the internalization of negative self-­image. In the late 1960s, Fanon was a staple of Black bookstores such as Ellis’s Bookstore in Chicago; his chapter “Black Man, White ­Woman” was published in Negro Digest in June  1967, concurrently with the publication of the En­glish translation of the book in which it appears, Black Skin, White Masks.19 Fanon suggests an alternative to using sexuality as a proxy for the desire to climb an existing racial hierarchy: instead of climbing it, to destroy it.20 “We s­ hall see,” Fanon writes, “that another solution is pos­si­ble. It involves the restructuring of the world.”21 On a basic level the idea of positive images was designed to c­ ounter, in an assertive manner, the negative images—­stereotypes and caricatures—­that ­were a basic staple of mass culture in midcentury Amer­i­ca. It is in this guise that the position of positive images was understood, by writers such as Stuart Hall in the 1990s, “to substitute a range of ‘positive’ images of black ­people, black life and culture for the ‘negative’ imagery which continues to dominate popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tion.”22 If the realm of images was full of pain, it was also a field of action to attack the situation. This gave visual repre­sen­ta­tion a par­tic­u­lar role to play in forging new types of self-­image.23 Images could recount experience, document injustice, and press for change. Across all media, in the work of visual artists, poets, dramatists, and musicians, the doctrine of “positive images” played a key, if not uncontested, role in shaping the idea of the “Black aesthetic.” obac’s “Statement of Purposes” of its Committee for the Arts, written in early 1966, had declared the goal of “bringing together the Black Artist with the Black Masses into a solid u ­ nion which ­will establish the bedrock for the flowering of art and the regeneration of the spirit and vigor of the Black Community.” Other goals ­were to encourage talent and spread appreciation of the arts; to channel “creative energies” into “constructive endeavors”; to create indigenous expressions, “unhampered and uninhibited by the prejudices and dictates of the ‘mainstream,’ ” that “reflect the richness and depth and variety of Black History and Culture”; to provide honest portrayals

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of the Black experience “as it profoundly proclaims the ­human condition”; and “to provide the Black Community with a positive image of itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibilities for creativity.”24 The ­simple numerical proliferation of positive role models in visual media was, then, part of the proj­ect.25 But negative images w ­ ere not only the product of active racism; they w ­ ere also the product of the tv news. As Curtis Mayfield sang in “The Other Side of Town,” the “ghetto blues” could be “showed on the news” but, as he concluded, “all is aware, but what the hell do they care?” Tele­vi­sion could inform ­people about the plight of the “ghetto,” but information did not necessarily lead to changes in attitude. When tele­vi­sion news reported on the real­ity of the situation in poor Black neighborhoods—­poverty and crime and despair—­this too was a negative image that could be disabling. Even artists working in social documentary and protest modes might contribute to the prob­lem. As Martin Berger has suggested in Seeing through Race, the national news media’s widely circulated photographic images of the Civil Rights Movement, even if sympathetic to the movement, tended to show Black Americans as passive victims rather than active participants in shaping their own f­uture.26 Images of passive suffering in the face of oppression might document objective truths, might even form part of a deliberate po­liti­cal strategy, but their effects could still be negative; the prob­lem was in how the information was used. The idea of positive images was not only to provide alternative images to ­counter ste­reo­types but assertively to use images to shape new ­human beings. Paul Car­ter Harrison writes in a similar way of functionalism in a Black ritual theater designed to “communicate and affirm the ethos of the community. . . . ​Functionalism, however, does not imply the kind of static imagery that comes with photographic duplication of natu­ral life, the theatrical hot­house that nurtures the emotions of Social Realism. The traditional artist embarks upon the activation of forms that fulfill the demands of a constantly shifting social mode. . . . ​Thus, while functionalism cements socie­ties, art forms are constantly changing.”27 In declaring their allegiance to the idea of positive images, Black Arts Movement artists ­were also turning away from documenting prob­lems—­a strategy they saw as ineffectual, or worse, a way of enforcing their inevitability—­and ­toward a sense of art as dynamic, responding to events with directions for the ­future. At its most reductive, creating positive images could just be a m ­ atter of presenting ideas about role models to young ­people. Hugh Osborne, deputy director of city youth programs in Chicago, argued in a University of Chicago–­ sponsored workshop on community ser­vice that “we need successful images 188  /

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to proj­ect before the young Negro child in a low-­income ­family.”28 ­There is an ele­ment of conservatism to it, and indeed it carries uncomfortable resonances with W. Clement Stone’s “positive m ­ ental attitude”; he too suggested that readers “identify [themselves] with a positive image.”29 With reference points such as ­these, it would seem that “positive images” ­were closely connected to the “politics of respectability,” a term coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her 1994 book Righ­teous Discontent: The ­Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920.30 Respectability politics describes an imperative placed on individuals and groups to reform their be­hav­ior to line up with dominant norms as a means of gaining recognition in the po­liti­cal realm. From one perspective, the idea of “positive images” could be understood as a form of respectability politics in the field of visual repre­sen­ta­tion.31 Some writers have argued that the “positive images” of this period are “gradualist,” emerging from an earlier period of the Civil Rights Movement.32 Since the 1970s, indeed, this framework has been sharply critiqued on the grounds that it oversimplified politics and set limits on aesthetic and po­liti­cal practice. Stuart Hall pointed out that the mere additive function of positive images could not displace the dominance of the negative.33 It might pile new weight onto one side of the scale, but it did not fundamentally alter the terms ­under which the scale operated. Michele Wallace, in her book Invisibility Blues, resists the concept of positive images even more forcefully ­because, she argues, it does not allow (self-)criticism to occur within the Black community. She argues, for example, that it shuts down Black feminist cultural producers who pres­ent Black men engaged in negative be­ hav­iors.34 The positive may indeed have evolved into a form of forced consensus, especially in the po­liti­cally correct atmosphere of the 1980s. In the introduction to her book, Wallace suggests that the goal of positive images was “to salvage the denigrated image of blacks in the white American imagination.”35 The imperative of positive images (in this view) was an imperative not to air dirty laundry for a mainstream, white audience. But positive images may be more fruitfully understood within the context to which this formulation responded. This is not to invalidate Wallace’s critique, particularly on grounds of gender justice, but to give a fuller sense of the significance of the concept, of why artists found it persuasive, and in par­tic­u­lar why many Black w ­ omen artists accepted and supported the movement’s gender ideology while providing some of its most power­ful images. For theorists of positive images in the context of 1960s and 1970s cultural nationalism, the possibility of white audiences for Black art was negligible: certainly The Black Fami ly

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unlikely, and in any case not particularly desirable. For ­these thinkers, images ­were power­ful not ­because of what they said to whites but b­ ecause of what they said to Blacks. The audience was the Black community, and the goal was not advocacy for change, but transformation on the level of subjectivity. Positive images would (their proponents believed) pres­ent positive models to shape Black viewers’ consciousness and actively bring about the new and better real­ity they depicted. Actionary Images and Prints for the ­People

Apart from the positive view of the Black ­family, what did positive images mean? B ­ ecause Barbara Jones-­Hogu identified a specific change in her work during the late 1960s, from critique to positive images, she provides a good case study for how to define what made images “positive.” Following studies at Howard University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jones was pursuing her master’s degree in visual design, with a printmaking focus, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her skills as a printmaker ­were to be key to africobra’s dissemination of its imagery through multiples that ­were sold at art fairs and galleries and traveled all over the country. As her work took a clear turn ­toward the “positive,” she documented the shift in the written portion of her master’s thesis. As she explained, “The content and messages I displayed changed from reactionary themes of the ‘Amer­i­ca’ series to an ‘actionary’ programmatic communication of the ‘Unity’ series which I am presently working on.”36 By reactionary she meant reactive: that the Amer­i­ca series reacted strongly against the negative events she observed in Chicago and the world, critiquing the current state of affairs. The Unity series, rather than simply diagnosing a prob­lem, directed viewers to act on it; it was oriented more t­ oward the ­future than the pres­ent. The printmaking work that comprised the bulk of Jones’s thesis, the Amer­i­ca series, attacked the “­human atrocities of Amer­i­ca’s racism.”37 ­These prints, made early in her time in gradu­ate school, ­were intended, she wrote, “to communicate the extreme racial feelings based on community disturbances, demonstrations, and emotional feelings.”38 She chronicled protest, upheaval, and riot. One print, a photographic ­etching titled Westside—­ Summer ’66, presented burning buildings on the West Side and depicted “the destruction of property but it also stresses the dilapidated conditions of ­these rat and roach infested buildings.”39 In many of ­these works Jones-­ Hogu incorporated ele­ments of the American flag. Its overall striping at first glance seems to have been applied simply as an innocuous technique to 190  /

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4.5. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Amer­i­ca III, 1969. 2 of an edition of 9. Color

screenprint on brown paper. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist. 4.6. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Land Where My ­Father Died, 1968. Color

screenprint on gold-­colored Japanese-­style laid paper. Image 27 × 20 in. (68.6 × 50.8 cm); sheet: 32½ × 24¾ in. (82.6 × 62.9 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

punctuate the composition, but, she indicated, the stripes “are used for suppression of the ­faces.” And the flag’s fields of stars ­were composed of armies of white-­hooded kkk-­like forms, simplified to resemble five-­pointed figures. Juxtaposed with ­these more geometric ele­ments are angry male ­faces and skeletons that evoke vio­lence. In Amer­i­ca III, the flag flies above a field of skeletons; the stars and stripes part to reveal a swastika (figure 4.5); in Land Where My F­ ather Died, it is the white and red stripes of the flag themselves that make up a row of swastikas, while angry protesters march below (figure 4.6). Jones-­Hogu’s work in this period addressed riots and their consequences, “the ­human sacrifices and wastelands of Black potential,” the Black Revolution, dnc protests, and police response. The Black Family

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One of the most power­ful images to come from this period of Jones-­ Hogu’s work is the astonishing ­Mother of Man (figure 4.7), a woodcut made from a block mea­sur­ing 24 × 15½ in. It pres­ents, from a low vantage point, a skeletal figure—­skull, ribcage, and arm bones—­with a very large Afro, standing before an American flag. The figure’s spine and pelvis are printed a very dark black and at the center of its pelvic area is a circular knot of white lines, suggestive of an abstracted uterus, a kind of icon of female reproductive power. The figure stands before the Stars and Stripes, presented backward, symbolically reversing it to represent, as she put it, “the racism in American democracy.”40 (The printmaking pro­cess, of course, reverses images—­but as a practiced printmaker, Jones-­Hogu knew what she was ­doing.) This is a strong, complex, suggestive image. The title ­Mother of Man calls up the possibility that the figure represents a disrespected ­Mother Africa—­the place of origin of all of humankind. But Jones-­Hogu’s thesis text shows she also had the deaths of Black men in the Vietnam War on her mind, as well as their ­mothers: “A black and white woodcut depicting the creator of man. The figure is to symbolize the Black m ­ other’s refusal to give up her off springs [sic] to die for Amer­i­ca’s racist government. The skeleton is the symbol of the death of many young men who have lost their lives.”41 The culminating point of her early thesis work, and a turning point ­toward the new, “positive” approach, was her silkprint Unite, which is prob­ ably her best-­known work (figure  4.8). Unite was inspired by the Black Power salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, as well as by Elizabeth Catlett’s Homage to My Young Black ­Sisters (1968), a female figure with fist raised (Jones-­Hogu visited Catlett in Mexico in 1968).42 The print shows a V-­shaped group of Black men and w ­ omen standing each with one fist raised, their uniform f­ aces—­unified in the spirit of the print’s command—­lit from the left. They appear against a backdrop formed by repetitions of the word Unite. This single word is s­haped into wedges of color and repeats (in dif­fer­ent color combinations) fully and partially about ten times. Unite articulates a demand on the viewer. The legibility of the single command Unite in Jones-­Hogu’s print, its affirmative, militant message, and its content—­the idea of the formation of a collective—­are characteristic components of the “positive image.” Alone among Jones-­Hogu’s prints, it exists both in pre-­africobra impressions signed by her and in a l­ater printing signed with an africobra stamp. The ­handling of bodies, too, establishes a midpoint between the pictorial detail and drawn lines of her earlier work and the geometric blocks of color and more simplified and 192  /

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4.7. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, ­Mother of Man, 1968.

Woodcut on paper. 24 × 15 in. Barbara Jones-­Hogu estate. Photo courtesy of Lusenhop Fine Art.

4.8. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Unite, 1969–1971. Screenprint on wove paper,

published by AFRICOBRA . Image 22½ × 30¼ in. (57.2 × 76.8 cm); sheet: 28 × 38 in. (71.1 × 96.5 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

abstracted (though still quite legible) bodies and f­aces of her africobra prints. Color is also in transition, from the flag colors (plus muted blacks and browns), t­ oward what africobra would call “coolade colors.” Eventually Jones-­Hogu’s palette would be expressed in fruit colors: raspberry, grape, orange, lime. This brightness, with “coolade colors” and “shine,” would be emphasized in the aesthetic precepts of the group. Unite also inaugurated a series of prints whose purpose is not to critique the state of affairs but more directly to motivate action. Another in this category is Rise and Take Control (see figure 2.3). Rise and Take Control derives ultimately from Margaret Walker’s poem “For My P ­ eople.” The line displayed in the image—­“may a race of men now rise and take control”—is 194  /

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also featured as the last line of Marion Perkins’s Prob­lems of the Black Artist and appears in Gerald McWorter’s obac text on Black experientialism.43 Jones-­Hogu might thus have seen the line repeated multiple times in texts that circulated in her immediate context. The overlapping, repetitive text was made with repeated printings of a single screen (a version with the text screen printed only once also exists, to my knowledge in only one impression). The f­aces suggest the t­riple temporality of past, pres­ent, and f­uture, emphasized in many africobra writings and Jones-­Hogu’s own To Be ­Free (Know the Past and Prepare for the ­Future) (see figure 4.13 l­ater in this chapter). One major component of the shift from reactive to active derives from a change of addressee. The early thesis prints w ­ ere produced in a largely white institution, for the explicit purpose of becoming credentialed by it. In a sense, I think, the implicit addressee t­ here was the white mainstream or Amer­i­ca at large, and Jones was not shy in her artwork about telling this world what she thought. But africobra was developing an autonomous sense of Black community, holding shows in its own spaces and other Black-­ owned spaces and institutions, avoiding the white art world, seeking to expand Black audiences for art. For Jones-­Hogu, the move to positive images from critique also coincides with a change of audience: from white or mixed to Black. In repeating to Black audiences what they already knew, critique risked simply producing more emotional trauma. In an article in the November 1973 Black ­Music issue of the key publication Black World, Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson wrote that “it is the con­ eople have tention of the aacm that it is not the potential which black p which ­will determine what they do but, rather, how they feel about themselves.”44 Jones-­Hogu and her colleagues believed direction and support for action ­were what was needed, rather than a repetitious and demoralizing rehearsal of prob­lems. Marion Perkins, in his 1959 speech Prob­lems of the Black Artist (published in 1971), anticipates much of the thinking of the Black Arts Movement: “­Today the subject races and nations of Africa and Asia are beginning to awaken to the fact that their own culture, a knowledge of its origin, and its contribution to ­human development is one of the essential ingredients to give a race or nation a cohesiveness and a definite feeling of self-­respect.”45 Outside of Eu­ro­pean art’s fetishization of aesthetic purity, art was functional as well as beautiful. One of Perkins’s sons, the poet Useni Eugene Perkins, wrote, in “The Black Arts Movement: Its Challenge and Responsibility,” that “art for p ­ eople’s sake has taken on a functional meaning . . . ​becomes part of Th e Black Fam ily

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the natu­ral environment . . . ​a tangible feeling; functional in the sense that art becomes a true reflection of the community.”46 This idea of “function” was also foregrounded in the confaba conference that Jeff Donaldson or­ga­nized at Northwestern University in 1971. And Donaldson took the critique of the white art world a step further, suggesting that humanity was not only an essential quality of African Americans but a specific property distinguishing them from (white) critics. “Our p ­ eople are our standard of excellence,” he wrote in Black World, echoing language from McWorter’s manifesto of Black experientialism. “We strive for images inspired by African people/experience and images which African ­people can relate to directly without formal art training and/or experience.” He went on: africobra made “art for ­people and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable.”47 This meant representing and speaking to a broader community and asserting a shared humanity with other African Americans. In its interest in repre­sen­ta­tion, humanism, and po­liti­cal content, the work of africobra artists ran directly ­counter to the orthodoxy in place in American art criticism. Black subject m ­ atter implied a commitment to the very idea of subject ­matter as opposed to abstraction. Clement Greenberg, who ruled American art criticism at midcentury, had argued that the visual arts should not try to compete with verbal arts on their own terms. Thus not only politics but also any form of illusionistic, identifiable content should be eschewed. Identifiable content also meant that with which a viewer might identify—­which, Greenberg suggested, confused the bound­aries between viewer and work. In his view, to contemplate art required an almost ascetic position—­renouncing the fullness of plea­sure in the familiarity or intimacy a viewer might have with a depicted world, placing limits on oneself, encountering a tangible, or rather sensory, form of otherness. A further historical condition for the question of specifically po­liti­cal messages in art was the reaction against the art of totalitarianism. Many artists and critics in the mid-­twentieth ­century, including many African American artists and critics, believed that when art explic­itly presented po­liti­cal ideas it became propaganda ruled by a simplistic agenda and hence no longer aesthetically ­viable. Associated with this, perhaps, was anxiety that by being relevant to one moment, to a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal situation, art would render itself irrelevant to the f­ uture. This position is thus the product of a par­tic­u­lar form of historical consciousness: the experience of seeing works of art lose their relevance alongside the sense of an expansive ambition to universalism in the postwar period.

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The Black Arts Movement presented a contrary position. Marion Perkins had argued in the 1950s that the American art world’s taste for abstraction “has small attraction to the Negro artists confronted with harsh ­human realities and impelled with the desire to uplift his p ­ eople, to portray them in dignity in the manner of the old masters, and to seek to demolish the ste­ reo­type which persists in being cherished in the minds of white Amer­i­ca.”48 Clyde Taylor even suggests in “The Re-­Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema” that the very notion of the aesthetic, of form distinct from content, is based on racism—­the possibility of the separation of form and content (in the case of Birth of a Nation, beautiful form and evil content) carry­ing with it the notion of disinterestedness and transcendental whiteness.49 The insistence on repre­sen­ta­tion and on expressing ideas in art reflects what Carolyn Lawrence, a member of the obac Visual Arts Workshop and a member of africobra, wrote about art education: “At a time when art is becoming more material or technique-­oriented”—­I take this as her way of alluding to abstraction—­“it seems ironical that what the black student needs is to produce an art that is idea-­oriented. He needs to deal with ideas in this art that helps him come into the full realization of his own identity. . . . ​This is crucial ­because this country c­ an’t begin to solve its prob­lems ­until black ­children begin to affirm themselves as ­human beings of worth.”50 Her thinking is also reflected in her effervescent canvas Black ­Children Keep Your Spirits F­ ree (figure 4.9). Abstraction was not the only tendency pres­ent in the late 1960s. Chicago’s art world held up the Imagists, with their colorful, humorous, and often raunchy vernacular style, as a ­counter to the preoccupations of New York. And in New York, Abstract Expressionism had given way to Minimalism, which was opening up into the beginnings of conceptual art. Certainly, conceptual art had strands with more overt po­liti­cal commitments and drew, as Black Arts Movement artists did, on the intertwined histories of art and society throughout the twentieth ­century. But ­those who supported abstraction in art of the period had power­ful platforms from which to speak. Some of them saw it as freedom from the constraints of artistic tradition, or what Robert Motherwell called “a kind of dumb, obstinate rebellion at how the world is presently or­ga­nized.”51 Abstract Expressionism, for him, involved a “rejection of the lies and falsifications of modern Christian, feudal aristocratic, and bourgeois society, of the property-­loving world that the Re­nais­sance tradition expressed.”52 But this freedom was typically a freedom from something one had not only the compulsion to reproduce but the choice to be

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4.9. Carolyn Mims Lawrence, Black ­Children Keep Your Spirits

­Free, 1972. Oil on canvas. Collection of Carolyn Mims Lawrence.

part of. The visual language of 1960s minimalism produced abstraction as frugality and renunciation, retrospectively revising the “freedom” of earlier forms of abstraction as a renunciation of the tools of illusionism in ­favor of resources proper to the medium.53 Renunciation requires having something to renounce. It is predicated not only on existing social prestige but also on racial privilege—­what the phi­los­o­pher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.”54 Modernist critics’ covert appeals to tradition insisted that art must work within an established (that is, Eu­ro­pean) medium. An abstract painting in the 1960s was not meaningful without the sense of dialogue with tradition embedded within it: it assumed what it critiqued, and thus could not divest itself from Eu­ro­pean art. Renunciation of the figure is part of what constitutes it as a work. Many Black artists in Chicago worked as teachers or commercial artists, and t­hese occupations ­shaped their working methods and visual sensibilities. 198  /

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In a more intentional way, many felt a commitment to document their daily experiences and ­those of their communities ­because they had ­little worthwhile repre­sen­ta­tion in public visual culture at large. This certainly was not the choice of all African American artists (or even all artists who identified as Black).55 But many po­liti­cally engaged Black artists in Chicago rejected abstraction precisely b­ ecause they felt it could not represent blackness. Margaret Burroughs, who as an art teacher and mentor trained numerous artists, had her formation in the social realist period of the 1930s, and her po­liti­cal convictions continued throughout her life to inform her aesthetic sensibility. In one statement Burroughs interprets abstraction in painting as, precisely, the absence of blackness, both in terms of color and in terms of culture. She cites a communication from Ernest Crichlow: “The black intellectual or artist in his training period goes off into that realm of white-­oriented western esthetic . . . ​but he has to come home sooner or l­ater, if only to sleep or to get his battery recharged. When he comes back home, he is forced to deal with his own personal esthetics, even if he is determinedly non-­black in all aspects and paints abstract expressionism in white-­on-­white!”56 Once the decision to create repre­sen­ta­tional work was made, artists had many choices. They might choose to represent something about Black experience b­ ecause it was what they observed readily in their daily lives, or ­because they made a conscious commitment to depict African Americans in their full humanity. They might claim an aesthetic sensibility they traced back to Africa. They might make a more militant, didactic po­liti­cal commitment. No single mandate emerged from the extended debates in which artists and intellectuals vigorously discussed the notion of a “Black aesthetic.” Many of ­those debates took place in the pages of Negro Digest/Black World, published in Chicago and edited by Hoyt Fuller.57 Black artists and writers voiced multiple and conflicting views on the importance of art and the specific aesthetic qualities it should possess. One of the primary points was the insistence that art be connected to life: that art play a social and po­liti­cal role, that it be in the streets and among “the p ­ eople.”58 This entailed a revolt against prevailing (white) institutional standards for art in which abstraction was still dominant. As James C. Hall has written, not only did “African-­ American art in the 1960s [claim] for itself an expansive social capacity” but the challenges it posed to modernist criticism “have been too often ignored as rhetorical or ceremonial.”59 Hall is speaking largely about lit­er­a­ture, but his critique holds true for art history and criticism as well. The point was not a turn from art to a purely po­liti­cal form of Black strug­gle but a redefinition of the relationship between art and politics. The Black Fami ly

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As in the case of Barbara Jones-­Hogu, the other members of africobra had also made work within degree programs in majority-­white institutions and had sold work to white buyers. As the end of the 1960s approached, they committed themselves more explic­itly to Black audiences. The printmaking pro­cess offers another demonstration of this. As a Chicago collective, africobra would go on to make some of its most striking visual statements in silkprints. ­These “poster prints” ­were designed to be fine art that was inexpensive, available for ten dollars apiece at art fairs, exhibitions, expositions like Chicago’s Black Expo, and Black bookstores. Creating prints would enable them to field multiple exhibitions at once, seeking “untraditional exhibit areas and locations so that a larger majority of our ­people are exposed. Several Poster Print exhibits can be set up at the same time.”60 They charged white venues for their exhibitions but provided them to Black-­identified venues gratis. In 1971 five of the members—­Jones-­ Hogu, Williams, and newer members Napoleon Jones-­Henderson, Carolyn Lawrence, and Nelson Stevens—­worked together, each artist creating his or her own design for a print, and the group printing them collectively. Jones-­ Hogu, the only expert printmaker, oversaw the creation of the screens and the printing of the sheets. Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell, who by that time had moved to the East Coast, in­de­pen­dently produced prints in 1971 and 1972 as well. For her own prints, Jones-­Hogu combined two methods of blocking her screens to create imagery to print. For large blocks of color, Jones-­Hogu adhered hand-­cut stencils made from Rubylith film on the screens, one screen for each color. She used the tusche and glue technique for more paint­erly sections, creating finer detail and tonal variation. Other members’ screens ­were made from their paintings by photo transfer.61 Following the preparation of the screens, members worked in groups, printing one another’s work without regard to individual authorship, and producing about fifty sheets (the capacity of their drying rack) per session. They printed one member’s work at a time, so that the screens could be cleaned by hand and reshot with other members’ work when each edition was complete.62 With their multiple colors, each print required several screens, meaning multiple printings per sheet, and careful attention to registration (lining up each color to fit perfectly with the o­ thers). The multipart pro­cess of printing, pulling, and hanging each sheet reflected the complexity of a collaboration in which members retained individuality while working together on a shared proj­ ect. With minimal financial resources, the group pooled their l­abor out of necessity—­they ­were not in a position to hire a printer or studio assistants 200  /

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to do the work. The imperative to produce works of very high aesthetic quality also played a role; if the group had simply wanted to get a message across, they could have produced prints that ­were much less labor-­intensive. This also means that not very many ­were made, and though they sold well they did not turn out to be very profitable. More than producing income, the pro­cess of creating multiples itself generated the collective. Collectivity as form was not separate from the work of art—­indeed, I would argue, it was itself a work of art. Making Images, Making Men

The idea of “actionary” positive images was not only a m ­ atter of what was in the images but how images themselves ­were ­imagined to function. The Black Arts Movement understood positive images as performative: not passively affirming repre­sen­ta­tions but efficacious images with positive effects on consciousness that actively brought about the state of affairs they depicted. ­W hether or not they ­were successful is, of course, another question. In fact, many such images coincided with assertive forms of po­liti­cal militancy but also operated with a precise theory of the impact of art on its viewers that was psychological or even spiritual: it was to shape consciousness for the strug­gle. In this light, they are not “mere” repre­sen­ta­tion but rather join in the performance-­based, participatory, and ritualistic modes of artmaking that w ­ ere coming to the fore in both the cutting-­edge white art world and the Black Arts Movement. In some of its moments this line of thinking was surreal to the point of mysticism. The multimedia, performative, ephemeral, and even surreal aspects of hip Black Chicago arts could be seen in the work of a figure like KeRa Upra (born James Pettus), who embodied some of the more eclectic spiritual features of Black cultural movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Chicago. In his room at 6336 South Drexel and at his Cottage Grove shoeshine stand, KeRa dispensed wisdom gathered up from ancient philosophy and world religions. C. Siddha Webber described it this way: “When you get a shoe shine from him, it’s a two-­hour experience. Time means nothing. He talks in discourse and his discourse opens up and opens up.”63 In a conversation Robert Sengstacke recorded with him in January 1971, recorder and drums drift in and out as the “cosmic speaker” addresses a gathering in the swelling tones of a preacher. He moves rapidly among topics drawn from a range of ancient and modern sources: from “psy­chol­ogy and mathe­matics” to Cleopatra, from marijuana to the Book of Revelation, from sexual organs Th e Black Fam ily

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to King Solomon to gravity and the splitting of the atom, a syncretic medley layered with positive thinking: “­After a while you ­don’t need nothing to get high on anyway. Just high thoughts can keep you high. High thoughts can do that. Supreme thoughts can do anything for you.”64 KeRa also painted u ­ nder the name Shteha Upra. He had performed with Sun Ra while he and the Arkestra ­were still in Chicago; together they participated in mock “­battles” (debates) at Forum Hall at 43rd and South Calumet.65 Upra played the recorder and a double-­kazoo-­trumpet contraption he in­ven­ted himself. “Life is twofold,” explains a photo caption in Amus Mor’s obituary of KeRa in the Chicago Defender, taking on KeRa’s voice: “Why should a trumpet have only one bell? I have made mine with two bells. It’s gotta represent both forces in existence.” (The caption goes on to explain that the trumpet is a modified kazoo made with a trumpet mute and part of a coffeemaker.)66 Mor, a poet who published ­little but influenced many, claimed that John Coltrane’s spiritual conversion was an outgrowth of a visit with KeRa: “­After leaving a session with the Speaker . . . ​his life had been renewed. He had walked in an addict, but left healed.”67 According to Robert Sengstacke, when Coltrane told KeRa, “I have sounds in me that I ­can’t get out,” KeRa told him it was b­ ecause he was “not a pure person”; Coltrane “stopped using drugs, became a vegetarian, and out came A Love Supreme.”68 In Mor’s poem “The Coming of John,” a tribute to Coltrane, he wrote: we ate our last piece of pork bacon heard ke ra give us the rundown on the evil it definitely projected in the western world it was autumn 1961. . . . ​. . and john coltrane went to sleep in the butterfly chair at the front of the room ­under the color eruption caton had crucified himself on with a trumpets bell stuck thru his head with shango puts on african bass the poet takes his cue and john coltrane awakes showing us the way to listen to his ­music . . . ​­really69 ­ hether or not it was strictly true, the lore about Coltrane’s awakening W through the words of a Chicago street prophet gives additional texture to the reverence in which the saxophonist was held by the visual artists and poets (not to mention musicians) of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. 202  /

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It also corresponded to the idea that positive images would shape the consciousness of Black p ­ eople.70 Artworks, as “images,” ­were implicitly understood in a performative way. New technologies, in par­tic­u­lar tele­vi­sion, had brought attention to the realm of “image” in the 1960s; Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-­ events in Amer­i­ca, which critiqued the media construction of events and corresponding values u ­ nder the category “image,” was published in Britain in 1961 (­under a slightly dif­fer­ent title) and in the United States in 1964. This book and other writings created debate about the role of “image” in American culture, in both commercial culture and the arts.71 In the context of African American repre­sen­ta­tion, the issue of negative stereotyping was part and parcel of the “prob­lem of the image”—­the sense that “we are becoming more and more a visual world,” as Chicago artist Don McIlvaine put it in an unpublished text.72 In remarks made during a reading at Wayne State University and recorded on his a­ lbum Rappin’ & Readin’, Don L. Lee emphasized the image and Black control over it: “Understand that images control our lives . . . ​ our lives in most cases are being controlled by alien images.” ­After inventorying tele­vi­sion images of African Americans produced by whites, he exhorts his audience: “It’s very impor­tant that we as black ­people take it upon ourselves to . . . ​proj­ect as positive an image of ourselves as pos­si­ble. . . . ​We have to proj­ ect images of ourselves. . . . ​We’ve got to control our own images.”73 To control one’s own images was also to reclaim history. This is what had inspired the founding of the DuSable Museum, from the beginnings when Margaret Burroughs, recognizing the significance of her personal collection of historical materials, began opening her home to visitors. The Wall of Re­spect and other proj­ects—­including many murals—­continued this attention to the importance of Black history. Eugene Eda also painted a Mural of Black History in the basement of the DuSable Museum, in its original home at 3806 South Michigan.74 The Negro History Action Committee in Chicago, supporting the Illinois Legislature’s bill to mandate teaching of Black history in schools, wrote of the place of history in shaping consciousness: “We feel that the omission and distortion of the Negro as a contributor to the pro­gress of this country is directly related to the anger and riotous dissension pres­ent in this country ­today.”75 A young gang member interviewed by Ebony explained his disaffection with an education system that emphasized white history: “I ask the teacher ‘But what did we do?’ and she looks at me like I’m crazy.”76 A group of African American doctors wrote in the Defender of the need for a Black history museum, referring to the lack of knowledge of history as a pathology: ­there was a “nationwide malady” of The Black Family

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“Negro history anemia,” they warned.77 At the same time, many Black artists and educators believed that knowledge of history would have therapeutic effects. In Lerone Bennett Jr.’s The Challenge of Blackness, he emphasizes the importance of history in its relationship to image. History is, he argues, “the basis of the image which is the ground of a man’s acts. This is a point of enormous importance, for men act out of their image. . . . ​They respond to the image-­situation, to the ideas they have of themselves in the situation.”78 For African Americans, particularly African American paint­ers, the visual arts ­were in a rather paradoxical position. Easel painting was an art form that was thoroughly Western. The poet Carolyn Rod­gers makes this point in her essay “Feelings Are Sense: The Lit­er­a­ture of Black.”79 Switching back and forth between prose and poetry, she writes of painting: Colors are to be used freely. ­going against all techniques that are eu­ ro­pean. all colors go on canvas together or rather create new families of colors define what color is the body of a Black man must be viewed beneath or beyond oppression.80 Rod­gers’s words do what she asks colors to do, “­going together” and creating “new families”—­sentences that form backward and forward, meanings that work more than one way in her unpunctuated lines. The line “define what color is the body of a Black man” does not merely ask what color a Black man’s body is but defines color as the body of a Black man. She continues, the canvas must be viewed as something other than what eu­ro­pean art dictates. Perhaps the canvas itself is eu­ro­pean and needs to be thrown away.81 Rod­gers brings out the conceptual rhyme between color painted on canvas and the color of skin. She does not ask Black artists to stop painting but to paint differently. Perhaps she has in mind the Wall of Re­spect or other murals; perhaps she imagines painting as an even more expanded practice. Shifting from painting to sculpture, she also moves seamlessly between maker and object. paint on anything every­thing. The hands the fin­gers of the sculptor are the many tongues the fin­gers and what they make must become the man. Black.82 204  /

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With the word become, she suggests the sense “to be becoming” in the sense of flattering, appropriate, beautiful: the sculpture made by the hands-­ fingers-­tongues must be suitable Black art for Black ­people. But it also suggests transformation, an act of making an artwork that is also the act of making a man.83 Could one argue that the “positive” Black aesthetic ran c­ ounter to the negative, or negation, so prized in other modernist discourses? In painting, according to the American sensibility dominated by Clement Greenberg, “advanced” art moved t­oward negation: a refusal of narrative, repre­sen­ta­ tion, figuration, and illusionistic space, a reduction that aimed to reach the essential properties of the medium. The positive, by contrast, was all about figuration, about fleshing out the ideologically obscured history of African Americans. Yet it might also be worth returning h ­ ere to Jimmy Stewart’s suggestion, which I cited in the introduction, that the creative pro­cess is a “movement with existence . . . ​to accompany real­ity, to ‘move with it’ . . . ​and not against it, which all, yes all, the white cultural art forms do.”84 What is elsewhere described as positive is ­here the sense that art is additive and cumulative, traveling along with life rather than opposing itself to life. In 1971 Addison Gayle wrote in his introduction to The Black Aesthetic that, in contrast to white academic literary criticism and its vari­ous schools, Black critics should evaluate works “in terms of the transformation . . . ​that the work of art demands from its audience.” He asks, “How far has the work gone in transforming an American Negro into an African-­American or black man?”85 While intellectuals in Paris—­Michel Foucault and o­ thers—­were dismantling the very notion of the ­human, the Black Arts Movement sought a new humanism, viewing the ­human being as the central product of artistic practice.86 In an interview in Black Scholar, the activist Queen ­Mother Moore elaborates on this notion of transformation in reverse, addressing the subjective transformations in oppressed ­people that accompany and naturalize oppression.87 She suggests that the submissive psychological type of “the Negro” was manufactured by the mass media in the early twentieth ­century. Asked to explain her argument that in the time of Marcus Garvey the “Negro” had not yet been created, she replies: “How they made a Negro? This was a technique. . . . ​All the books, the moving pictures, all the derogatory movies about us, came on the scene to help prepare us psychologically for our own overthrow. He succeeded in creating a Negro, a denatured t­ hing which no longer knows himself—­and acts that way. . . . ​It was a high art, a high science, to manufacture the Negro.”88 Th e Black Fami ly

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If, as Moore argued, the “Negro” had been manufactured, so too could a Black person be. Within the par­tic­u­lar historical inflection of the legacies of slavery, a context in which h ­ uman beings had literally been turned into ­things, to return ­people to their humanness was an urgent proj­ect. And in this context, the proj­ect of the visual arts is the proj­ect of making subjects and not, or not only, objects. This position helps account for the humanistic component of africobra imagery, its frontal portrait images, which insist on the humanity and subjectivity of their subjects, and the images of collectives in which the relationship among ­human subjects is crucial: take, for example, Jones-­Hogu’s Unite or Gerald Williams’s striking painting Messages, which urges Black solidarity and shows three young men whose ­faces are lined up, side by side (figure 4.10). Black ­Woman Speaks

Queen ­Mother Moore also articulated the feelings of many when she stated in the Black Scholar interview that Black w ­ omen had no part in the white ­women’s feminist movement and that a key part of their job was to support and understand Black men. This ideology was a distinct component of the cultural nationalist movement. In a more casual way, it finds expression in one of a list of “items to consider” in notes from an early obac meeting: in obac’s opening program, along with “programs to hand out,” t­here should be “many beautiful girls.”89 It echoes Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s statement about the Black c­ ouple that I cited earlier in this chapter. At the very same time, one of the key features of africobra as a collaborative in Chicago was its relative gender balance. In the founding group of five ­there ­were two ­women (Barbara Jones-­Hogu and Jae Jarrell), and as the group expanded it added another (Carolyn Lawrence). Along with the “Black ­family” theme explored by all the artists in the group, gender roles and sexual politics w ­ ere key themes for the artists. This was also consistent with the centrality of t­hese issues in the internal politics and rhe­toric of the Black Liberation Movement. The movement’s imperative to recalibrate gender roles to emphasize Black masculinity had its critics; Toni Cade, editor of the anthology The Black ­Woman, argued that w ­ omen in some segments of the movement w ­ ere being asked to “cultivate ‘virtues’ that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.”90 In a similar vein, Linda La Rue identified hierarchical gender relations as the product of white society: “­Unless we realize how thoroughly the American value of male superiority and female inferiority has permeated our relationships with one another, we can never appreciate 206  /

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4.10. Gerald Williams (American, b. 1941), Messages, 1970. Acrylic

on canvas. 48 × 38¾ in. (121.9 × 98.4 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions and James M. Wells Curatorial Discretion Acquisition Fund. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

the role it plays in perpetuating racism and keeping black ­people divided.”91 Cade writes that rather than sacrificing the personal ele­ment of politics to the urgency of the moment, assuming it can be taken care of l­ater, “We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships.”92 And yet the way to do this had to be a specifically Black way. For most ­women in the Black Liberation Movement, co­ali­tion with white feminists was not v­ iable. A majority of white feminists in the period had difficulty recognizing their own racial privilege and could not see gender as a key vector for the oppression of Black men.93 This awareness that Black men ­were oppressed not only through the construct of race but also in the way white society gendered them is reflected in Carolyn Lawrence’s painting Uphold Your Men, which became her contribution to africobra’s print proj­ect (figure 4.11). Some of the most vocal calls for co­ali­tion with the ­Women’s Liberation Movement came from Black men, not ­women, as when Black Panther Party (bpp) chairman Huey P. Newton unequivocally charged the party to establish alliances with the (mostly white) w ­ omen’s and gay rights movements.94 In official statements (if not uniformly in practice), the socialist-­ internationalist Panthers ­were supportive of gender equality. For a group like the Panthers, the question of natalism—­the need to promote Black fertility—­might be a ­matter of practicalities more than of essentialist gender roles. The question was, if t­ here was to be a revolution, and an armed revolution, was it more impor­tant to make babies now for f­uture fighters, or to have more female fighters now? Given that f­amily bonds ­were destroyed and prohibited by slavery, and that sexual abuse was a central weapon in the oppressors’ arsenal, to create a “Black f­ amily” appeared as a constructive act of revolutionary importance. The question was what ­family this would be. Jones-­Hogu expressed themes of individual, community, and ­family in an iconographic way in Jones-­Hogu’s Black Men We Need You (figure 4.12). “Black Men, preserve your race, leave white bitches alone,” reads the sharper and more specific text at the bottom, which is a ­little harder to decipher than the larger title phrase. While it represents one m ­ other with her c­ hildren as the speaker of the imperative phrase of the title, the recipients of the utterance—­Black men—­are also represented in the profiles on the upper right and lower left that suggest a more generic larger group, reflecting the double impetus to individualize and collectivize. In other work, color blocks create a geometric dappling effect over embedded text and depicted figures that both separate and unify them. 208  /

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4.11. Carolyn Mims Lawrence (American, b. 1940), Uphold Your Men, 1971.

Screenprint on wove paper, published by AFRICOBRA . Image 30⅝ × 24¼ in. (77.8 × 61.6 cm); sheet: 38¼ × 29¾ in. (97.2 × 75.6 cm). The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; Gift of David Lusenhop in honor of the artist. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

4.12. Barbara Jones-­Hogu,

Black Men We Need You, 1971. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist.

In To Be ­Free (Know the Past and Prepare for the F­ uture), created in 1972, Jones-­Hogu connects past, pres­ent, and ­future, with a main ­family group of ­mother and child in the left foreground surrounded by figures representing past and ­future (figure 4.13). Color attaches in very specific ways to the figures. Male figures standing in the background are rendered entirely or almost entirely in black as if they “represent the race,” and are unaffected by the bands of color of the foreground. Their upright, black forms punctuate the print’s overall color. At the same time, they thus appear more generic. The other figures, and the text, made up of bright “coolade colors,” are striped wherever the concentric circles of sunlight meet them. Unlike ­ ere printed over black outlines of Unite, where red and purple ink colors w 210  /

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4.13. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, To Be ­Free (Know the Past and

Prepare for the ­Future), 1972. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center. Gift of the artist.

the raised arms, the printing of this multiscreen print does not involve any blending of colors but rather the careful registration of each color in its defined area. The imperviousness of this black might be understood as the chromatic be­hav­ior of black as the darkest pigment, or it might be read in symbolic racial terms, as power and steadfastness. One figure stands out distinctly: the ­woman in the foreground, leaning over her child, clad in black pants and black vest. ­Because she is dressed primarily in black, she seems to sit in front of the color bands. A line does “cut” across her neck and wrist, but it barely creates appreciable stripes. She seems to be the addressee, and like the m ­ other in Black Men We Need You, she possesses individuality while the male figures represent a less specified community presence. The background ­woman and her ­children, emerging out of (or receding into?) the sun’s bands of light, are much more affected by their color—­the outline of the bands cuts through their forms and alters The Black Fam ily

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the color of their bodies and clothing. The difference between them is a ­matter of past and pres­ent, as well. The print’s text reads “To be ­free know the past and prepare for the f­uture.” The foreground w ­ oman, with her one child and modern dress, suggests the w ­ oman of the pres­ent, to whom the statement is directed. The background ­woman, with her African dress and three ­children, seems to represent the past, emerging from the African sun. The ­woman who stands between them seems to be a mediating figure, connecting the two o­ thers, holding a piece of patterned cloth that attaches the three. (Its patterning also echoes the alternating color pattern created by the sunlight bands.) What is less obvious about this mediating figure is that she carries a r­ ifle. The barrel points directly upward, not following the ­angle of her body, but the strap she wears strongly implies that it is hers. As with the Panthers, ­women have a revolutionary role in bearing and teaching c­ hildren, but their role is double; they have to prepare to fight. With the foreground figure—­who partakes of the steadfast black of the male figures (with her male-­inspired dress) and the bright colors of the w ­ omen and c­ hildren—­Jones-­Hogu suggests, perhaps, that it is on the body of this female figure, addressee of the image’s message, that past and pres­ent, male and female norms, and individual and collective, come together. The question remains w ­ hether this position constitutes too heavy a burden (conceptual, or ­actual) to bear. The second theme africobra members chose was a contentious one, “I Am Better Than ­These ­Mother Fuckers” (or simply, without the profanity, “I Am Better Than You”). In the end few of the members carried out works based on it; perhaps it took the “positive” so far that it became “negative” again. Jones did two versions, each incorporating the same screen, printed in red in both cases, with the words i am better than ­these ­mother fuckers and they know it. One version, a very complex multicolor print, displays a Black ­woman with a large Afro, seated on a beach surrounded by whites, who, it is implied, are trying to obtain a tan in direct imitation of her brown skin. The number of ink colors used is difficult to determine b­ ecause many of them overlap, but t­ here must have been at least six colors of ink and thus six screens that needed to be printed with precise registration—­hence, an extremely labor-­intensive pro­cess. The edition (that is, the number of prints made) is not known, but several impressions (copies) exist, and presumably Jones-­Hogu would have printed more to make the best use of her painstakingly created screens. The other version, which may exist in only one impression, is simpler, perhaps an incomplete proof state, but pres­ents the Black ­woman standing, in a strong, 212  /

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dynamic pose, one leg bent at the knee and the other extended, with a fist raised in the Black Power salute. Both—­perhaps the apparently abandoned version even more than the final version—­pres­ent a power­ful image of Black womanhood. In 1973 Michele Wallace wrote about Barbara Jones in an article in Ms., “Within her own commune, Jones reports, she is not taken seriously by her black male artist peers.”95 Jones-­Hogu stayed in Chicago when members began to move to the East Coast: first Jeff Donaldson to take up a position as Chair of the Department of Art at Howard University; then Nelson Stevens to the University of Mas­sa­chu­setts at Amherst, then the Jarrells, who first moved to Mas­sa­chu­setts and eventually to Washington, DC, where Gerald Williams also moved in 1973.96 Even as the group became geo­graph­ i­cally split, members envisioned ambitious plans of producing two editions of prints per member per year and undertaking a program of national exhibitions. During the early years, the group in Chicago, constituted by Jones-­ Hogu, Lawrence, Gerald Williams, Napoleon Henderson, Nelson Stevens, and new addition Howard Mallory, operated in a highly disciplined way. They met monthly (at each member’s home in turn), kept minutes, rigorously divided their l­ abor, and made calls during meetings to the East Coast members to make sure they had a chance to weigh in on each major decision.97 But distance took a toll on group relationships. The Chicago group’s minutes of June  11, 1972, expressed the sense that the group’s collective purpose was being lost amid all the business and production discussion, and that not enough time in meetings was spent on po­liti­cal and aesthetic concerns.98 As Gerald Williams put it, “by 1975 the Chicago members had begun to drift apart as the distance became a barrier to the cohesion that had existed. Barbara, Carolyn, and Howard submitted their written resignations, citing vari­ous reasons, and Napoleon ­later relocated to Boston.”99 Jones-­Hogu continued to paint, but she abandoned printmaking ­because the chemical fumes w ­ ere making her beloved young son, Kuumba—­whom she had to keep with her in her studio—­sick. And when she traveled to Washington to speak in a conference, the male speakers ahead of her took up all her time and she was never permitted to speak. africobra in its early years had included w ­ omen artists as full members of the collective, but until recently, w ­ omen artists who joined the East Coast iteration of the group w ­ ere always affiliate or associate members, never full. And in a broader sense, it is certainly meaningful that the w ­ omen of africobra, even if they had advanced degrees, ­were not offered teaching positions on the East Coast, and the men w ­ ere. In conversation Jones-­Hogu disputed Th e Black Fam ily

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the description offered by Wallace, who, she told me, never spoke with her.100 But the complexities of this story demonstrate the centrality of gender as a site for negotiating race and revolutionary politics, for articulating community, and for living in the painful entanglements of talent and po­ liti­cal commitment and self-­abnegation.

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­Until the Walls Come Down

5

Two artistic movements in Chicago find a single distinct point of origin in the Wall of Re­spect: the Black Arts Movement and the Community Mural Movement, which intersected with one another at multiple points. In the previous chapter, I addressed the theory of “positive images” and the idea of (gendered) collectivity within the Black Arts Movement in general and africobra in par­tic­u­lar. I now return to the mural movement to examine its internal development, its relationship to the idea of community and institutions, and its own par­tic­u­lar tensions around the idea of positive images. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the mural movement took off exponentially in Chicago, and painted walls indelibly altered the public landscape of the city. William Walker, the driving force b­ ehind the Wall of Re­spect, went on to paint many other murals, and ­others joined what became a citywide, indeed nationwide, mural movement. The Wall of Re­spect had carved out space for this medium and artists had to figure out what to do with it as they continued to work. Imagine: what if they could cover all the walls of Chicago and create a true museum of the streets? In the summer of 1969, John Pitman ­ eople in Weber, a young white artist, painted a mural titled All Power to the P the courtyard of St. Dominic’s Church with young p ­ eople from the nearby Cabrini-­Green housing proj­ects.1 That fall he received a phone call from Margaret Burroughs, who suggested that he meet William Walker. Soon ­after, Walker and Weber, along with other muralists—­including Mitchell Caton, Caryl Yasko, and ­others—­established a mural proj­ect ­under the umbrella of James Shiflett’s Community Arts Foundation, which also sponsored theater in the streets—in chapter 3 we got a glimpse of its theatrical work.

Originally known as the Chicago Mural Movement Group, the organ­ization changed its name late in 1972 and incorporated as a nonprofit, becoming the Chicago Mural Group (cmg).2 A big part of the impetus to paint on walls was to find a more direct way to convey po­liti­cal messages to a broad public. Weber wrote that he had participated in “artists’ contingents at demonstrations and in antiwar art shows with a mounting sense of frustration.”3 He does not specify its source, but one might guess: what audience was r­eally being reached through the medium of the antiwar art show or the po­liti­cal demonstration? Could it be it was just a group of like-­minded ­people congratulating one another for having the correct view of the world? Ricardo Alonzo said in 1973: “We bring art to a community instead of hiding it in a museum.”4 Alonzo, Weber, and ­others became active in the mural movement ­because they wanted to reach a broader public, to involve more ­people as participants in designing and executing the work, to shape the space around them, and to change ­people’s feelings. In the early 1970s, the National Endowment for the Arts (nea) and other government agencies began to fund murals, as the government had also done during the wpa period. Often produced by professional artists in collaboration with neighborhood residents, including c­hildren, murals became the epitome of “community art.” Eventually, as government agencies and businesses provided funding for them, the financial arrangements placed limits, implicitly or explic­itly, on the content of artistic expression. By some lights the “community mural” was less a mural of the community than for the community. Murals came to be seen as beautification proj­ects, efforts at restorative uplift, a more anodyne understanding of “positive images,” subject to all the pitfalls of “community” as identified by critics of the term. But when the “community” was actively involved in the content and execution of murals, it did not generally make for insipid content. Although eventually government agencies appropriated the language of community, the early murals painted on the streets ­were community-­supported in a real sense. Neighborhood residents obtained paint, helped put up scaffolding, and offered coffee and commentary to the artists. By their very nature, street murals attracted community participation and discussion. Mural painting was a vis­i­ble outdoor activity in neighborhoods where, in warm weather, ­there ­were always ­people on the street. And mural audiences ­were interested in debate, not platitudes. In the annual report the Chicago Mural Movement Group submitted in 1970, John Pitman Weber noted the energetic participation of community members in conversations about 216  /

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murals in pro­gress, which opened onto po­liti­cal discussions: “The community becomes involved in the spectacle of seeing the wall gradually being transformed into a painting. . . . ​The wall speaks for the artist and becomes a center of discussion. . . . ​This usually leads to a small group of men and ­women heatedly debating world politics.”5 Many murals had challenging, sometimes even explosive, content. The mural movement was multiracial, and operated primarily in Black, Latinx, and working-­class white areas of the city. Members had to be creative in negotiating ways of working for artists who w ­ ere not from the communities where the murals w ­ ere situated—­ whether or not they w ­ ere of the same race or ethnicity. They had to be receptive to community concerns. As a locus for creativity in collaboration and conversation with community members, including ­children, muralists did not shy away from confrontation. They displayed confrontations between the kkk and Black militants, scenes of Black-­on-­Black vio­lence, portraits of gang members and other street figures, and space for posting news items. They provide ample evidence to ­counter the perception of critics that “community art” results in a product that is boringly beneficent. Street Photography

In a conversation with the Chicago Mural Group, William Walker said that ­after the Wall of Re­spect, “we left from honoring the heroes” and turned to “making statements about conditions in the community.”6 This move seems like the polar opposite of the shift in the work of Barbara Jones-­Hogu, who changed her approach from critique to positive images. The idea that murals should pres­ent truths about conditions in the community resonates with the close relationship of murals and other kinds of street graphics like graffiti and posters that served a temporary documentary function (figure 5.1). As Romi Crawford has shown, murals also had a special relationship to photography.7 From the Wall of Re­spect onward, photog­raphers placed their work on walls. Indeed, in impor­tant ways, the Wall of Re­spect was built by photography. The four photog­raphers—­Lewis, Sengstacke, Abernathy, and Cowherd—­took part fully in the planning and execution of the mural (Onikwa Bill Wallace was involved in the early stages but was unable to contribute work to the mural following his participation in the Malcolm X Park takeover).8 It was unusual indeed for photog­raphers to participate in the creation of an outdoor mural by actually attaching their photographic prints to a wall. In subtle ways, the photo­graphs spoke to direct connections to ­people and events and spaces, pinning the photog­raphers’ presence Until t he Walls Com e D own

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5.1. Robert Abbott Sengstacke, checkers players in Bronzeville, ca. 1968. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

to the Malcolm X Shabazz Park renaming, the local church, the Nation of Islam, and the visit of Amiri Baraka to Chicago. Photo­graphs ­were also required, directly or indirectly, by the paint­ers, as a basis for designing their portraits of Black heroes and heroines, since most of the subjects ­were not available for direct observation. And fi­nally, ­there are the photo­graphs that documented the Wall, its making, the events that happened around it, and the community that gathered ­there. ­These images display a remarkable attention to the place of art in community. Around the Wall, photog­raphers devoted themselves to capturing community members: ­children, men, ­women, gang members, street vendors. Asked why he spent so much time photographing the community, Robert Sengstacke said, “They w ­ ere part of the Wall. . . . ​The ­whole ­thing was a community effort. And that’s what I liked about it. So I even focused more on the community than I would have d­ oing black and white for the Chicago Defender.”9 In other words, he turned to color film to shoot in the community around the Wall—­even though it was unnecessary for his work for the newspaper—­because of the vibrant scenes he saw. Like painting, photography could work to sustain the community by putting Black heroes on walls. But the imagery photog­raphers chose for the Wall of Re­spect worked differently from the paintings. It evinced a 218  /

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direct personal connection with the subject, placing the photographer in the event, fastening national figures to Chicago contexts, and expressing the relevance of ordinary ­people. Just by being pres­ent, Roy Lewis contributed his body to the occupation of Washington Park and its renaming as Malcolm X Shabazz Park; he did not merely document it. Darryl Cowherd had to be in Baraka’s presence to photo­graph him. And Robert Sengstacke’s photo­graphs of young girls humanized and personalized the “Religion” section, making connections to local places of worship. In a perceptive essay on Black photographic practices, bell hooks writes, “Cameras gave to black folks irrespective of class, a means by which they could participate fully in the production of images. . . . ​Access and mass appeal have historically made photography a power­ful location for the construction of an oppositional black aesthetic.”10 This meant that “the camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove repre­sen­ta­tions of ourselves made by white folks,” and hence it was “a po­liti­cal instrument.”11 The Wall of Re­spect itself could be understood as a public, civic version of the more intimate photographic ­family “altars” hooks describes, a form of accumulated evidence of excellence. A year ­after the creation of the Wall, Negro Digest would profile Sengstacke, presenting a se­lection of his photo­graphs. “To Sengstacke,” the unnamed writer noted, “as to a growing number of young black artists, the ghetto also is a place abounding in grace and beauty.”12 Many of Sengstacke’s photographer colleagues focused similarly on ­people on the street. When it involved establishing relationships between the camera and the ordinary folk who ­were its subjects, photography was a form of community art in and of itself. Soon a­ fter the unveiling of the Wall, in October 1967, Billy Abernathy’s exhibition called variously Love What You Are and Live Flicks of the Hip World opened at Shepherd’s Gallery (figure 5.2). Reviewer Kathy Slade described it as a “portrait of the soul of the black man” that “captured . . . ​ the very essence of Life in the black community.”13 It is not pos­si­ble to reconstruct a full account of the work Abernathy showed ­there, but photographic documentation of the exhibition by Robert Sengstacke shows that it was an eloquent array of photo­graphs of Black Chicagoans that tenderly monumentalized them. Perhaps alluding to W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk, Slade wrote of Abernathy’s “insight into the souls of Black ­people” that it “materialized as living evidence with his picture[s].” She quotes Abernathy quoting Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), “We are poems and poets. / And / All the loveliness h ­ ere in the World.” 14 By 1970 that loveliness was also terribleness: in that year some of the same photo­graphs appeared in Abernathy’s Unt il the Walls C ome D own

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5.2. Billy Abernathy, Live Flicks of the Hip World, exhibition at

Shepherd’s Gallery, 347 East 31st Street, October 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

collaboration with Baraka, the book In Our Terribleness. Baraka writes of Abernathy’s photo­graphs that they are living portraits, filled with magical spirit: “Of life being lived. Black ­People inspire us. Send life into us. Draw it in. Lead more energy in. From themselves thru to the Being from the Being to the Being. In Our Terribleness. We wanted to conjure with Black Life to re-­create it for our selves. So that the connection with you would be a bigger Self.”15 Presenting living photo­graphs of Black life that not only represent and amplify but nourish and re-­create that life itself, the artist becomes a priestly vehicle: “The way the terribleness of us gets thru thru him to us, again. The artist completing the cycle recreating.” Baraka h ­ ere adumbrates a theory of what photography can do, not only representing and documenting but vivifying. Fortified by this sense of the potential power of self-­representation with the photographer as vehicle, photog­raphers ­were ­eager to have their work seen by broader audiences. In February 1968, Roy Lewis showed a body of work that took a similar approach to portraying everyday Black ­people ­under the title Black and Beautiful at the South Side Community Art Center.16 Soon ­after the exhibition closed, he made a request of the Illinois Arts Council for funding to take it on tour. He wrote in his proposal, using the language of positive images, “The Black Community has suffered over three hundred 220  /

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years of almost complete invisibility. . . . ​A Black child can still grow up in Amer­i­ca watching T.V., reading the daily newspapers, and touring the city museums without seeing Blacks in a positive role. . . . ​It is against this negative backdrop that I have attempted to portray and disseminate that ‘Black is Beautiful.’ . . . ​Black photographic art is an essential part of developing a positive image of Blackness.”17 The council did not typically fund individual artists to put on exhibitions of their own work, but it was interested enough—­ following the events of the spring of 1968—to provide staff time to help rework the proposal to enable it to fit the par­ameters of a summer program designed to engage youth and communities in Chicago.18 The council’s rec­ ords describe the plan as follows: “Lewis . . . ​­will develop a program in photography workshops with the indigenous youth of the South and West Sides of the City to create a significant show of large photo­graphs of the p ­ eople in their area.”19 Presumably b­ ecause the summer program monies w ­ ere designated for organ­izations and not individuals, the grant eventually went to the South Side Community Art Center with Lewis as proj­ect director.20 Lewis brought in two other Black photog­raphers in Chicago—­Sengstacke and Bob Crawford—to create their own murals in Englewood and Bronzeville. They thereby extended the initial experiment of the Wall of Re­spect’s inclusion of photographic prints on walls that faced onto city streets. The locations chosen ­were meaningful. Each photographer layered his photo­graphs onto a highly vis­i­ble wall that had already distinguished itself—in one way or another—as a site for community-­based visual display. Crawford’s photo­graphs ­were installed in Bronzeville at 251 East 39th  Street on the façade of the Umoja Black Student Center, a site of po­liti­cal organ­izing and rallying for the Black student movement. A Chicago Tribune photo of the Umoja Center’s storefront with members posted at the entrance shows the extent to which the center’s win­dows ­were already used to display posters, photo­graphs, and artworks related to the Black student strug­gle (figure 5.3). Sengstacke placed his in Englewood at 62nd and Halsted Streets on a wall that already featured the biblical quote “Come unto me all ye that l­ abor and are heavy laden and I ­will give you rest” (figure 5.4).21 Roy Lewis placed his installation on the outer wall of Art & Soul’s building. Like the Wall of Re­spect, ­these murals celebrated African Americans, but not in this case famous heroes. The photo murals extended the “local heroes” component of the ­later iterations of the Wall of Re­spect, as well as the Wall of Truth that took shape opposite the first wall. But they depicted ­people who ­were not necessarily even “heroes.” They simply represented the community, as a collection of individuals. Lewis’s subjects ­were everyday U ntil t he Walls Come D own

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5.3. Umoja Black Student

Center, October 13, 1968 (Bob Crawford photo mural partially vis­i­ble). Photo by Val Mazzenga for the Chicago Tribune. 5.4. Robert Abbott

Sengstacke, photo mural in Englewood, 1968. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

­ eople in Lawndale. He was interested in ephemeral moments “that occur p for only a half second but convey a totality” and other­wise went uncaptured, unseen.22 While the Illinois Arts Council sought to promote a participatory form of community art, the artists seem to have worked with their subjects in their usual way—­neither more nor less. A Defender article highlights the way in which the photo­graphs expressed the “spirit” or “personality” of the three neighborhoods.23 For the three artists it was certainly also an opportunity to show their work in a highly public location. Lewis gave his installation the title West Wall with the subheading Proud of Being Black.24 He reproduced the photo­graphs displayed as part of West Wall in a booklet of the same title with a series of poems by Useni Eugene Perkins. West Wall was a doubly meaningful title: it was the west wall of the building and also a wall of images for the West Side, as opposed to the South Side locations of Crawford and Sengstacke’s proj­ects and, for that ­matter, of most murals that ­were part of the first wave of the community mural movement.25 Murals, Community, and Vio­lence

In a 1971 article in the Tribune, Angela Parker identified the mural movement as a “key aspect of the black culture revolution.” William Walker, interviewed for the article, suggested that the medium was attractive to Black artists ­because they ­were shut out of white galleries. Black audiences, he opined, are “too busy just trying to master the art of survival” to support the arts in an active way, and thus murals provided a means to reach large audiences without needing to use the commercial system. Parker concluded that murals w ­ ere a “coordinating force among blacks for publicly projecting art about life, history, and experiences of black p ­ eople.”26 Walker’s position on “positive images” was nuanced. The next step a­ fter the Wall of Re­spect, for him, was not a consolidation of “positive images” but rather the more assertive po­liti­cal stance he expressed in his account of “making statements about conditions in the community.”27 ­After adding the Black Power fist to the Wall of Re­spect, Eugene “Eda” Wade worked with Walker to paint the Wall of Truth across the street from the Wall of Re­spect. The Wall of Truth, as its name implies, served as a counterpoint to the first wall, imparting harder truths. The two lead artists w ­ ere joined by a number of ­others. ­These participants included Eddie Harris (who also painted a car with Black heroes, the “Blackmobile,” as a mobile version of the Wall of Re­spect [figure 5.5]), the young artist Louis Boyd, the young neighbor Ziff Sistrunk, and artists signing “Lonnie Loyo” and “Ronald.” Until t he Walls Come Down

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5.5. Photo of Eddie Harris’s “Blackmobile” at

Englewood Concourse Art Fair. Jet, July 16, 1970, 7. Photo by Herbert Nipson.

Most of ­these ­were neighborhood residents who painted their own critical statements on racism and vio­lence in American politics and culture. In one photo, young ­people are seen drawing preparatory designs on easels set up in front of the wall to be transferred to the mural (figure 5.6). Lettered on the Wall of Truth was a statement that expressed collective neighborhood owner­ship of the Wall: “We the ­people of this community claim this bldg. in order to preserve what is ours.” If both walls in their own way were an effort at halting demolition of the buildings as part of a new wave of gentrification, the Wall of Truth made this explicit. As we saw in chapter 1, when the walls were threatened in 1969, the surrounding community rallied to save them. Though their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful (both murals were gone by 1972), they demonstrate how the presence of murals could incite community organizing efforts. On the Wall of Truth Walker painted angry and determined ­faces, images of ­children living in poverty, and, in a style that mimicked the look of a stained-­glass win­dow, an affectionate ­family group and a scene of Black 224  /

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5.6. Wall of Truth, easels set up for youth participants, 1969.

Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl.

unity that suggested gang members coming together in peace. Eda painted portraits of heroes, Black revolutionary soldiers (some of them massive in size), and a scene of death by firing squad accompanied by Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die.” Harris painted scenes of violent bloodshed and a Black Christ on a cross. He also depicted the co­ali­tion of Black gang members who joined together in 1969—­marching at the Picasso sculpture downtown—to fight the racist exclusions of the construction trades.28 But Black-­on-­Black vio­lence is a constant theme. In one panel Harris painted a Black man kneeling in prayer with a figure—­also Black—­standing over him, holding his head chained, proffering a Bible, a syringe, and a flask (figure 5.7). Louis Boyd painted a bloody scene of Black-­on-­Black murder, with demonic white ­faces laughing in the background, above text that proclaimed, “A ­brother ripped off a ­brother and left a white—­laughing.” Walker used the idea of “Black laws” in several of his murals. On the Wall of Truth, a boarded-up doorway presented a changing scene with text that offered precepts against Black-­on-­Black vio­lence (figure 5.8). Another longer section of wall also carried the title “Black Laws,” along with painted imagery—­also changing, inspired by Walker’s motifs (such as angry confrontations between Black militants and kkk figures) but typically painted by nonprofessional artists. H ­ ere, paint wove over and ­under wheat-­pasted Unt il t he Walls Come Down

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5.7. Wall of Truth, section by Eddie Harris, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl.

clippings from newspapers and magazines, book covers, and photo­graphs that bespoke an interest in militant politics (figure 5.9). Under­lying Walker’s view of mural painting was a conception of art that should document real social conditions and real events, even if negative. He saw them as newspapers for the community, a function that became all the more evident in his 1970 masterpiece, Peace and Salvation: The Wall of Understanding, where the lower register of the mural served as a constantly changing message board.29 In this way murals delivered information and chronicled the times. As Walker put it to Murry DePillars, “What is meaningful this year may be passé next year. . . . ​The artist must be accessible, and he must have the ability to translate visually ­those new interests and issues of a given community.”30 Expressed through murals, it seemed that positive messages had their limits. Near Walker’s Peace and Salvation, a mural by Vanita Green, a young ­woman who had grown up in the Cabrini-­Green housing proj­ects, demonstrated some of ­those limits. Green was inspired by Walker’s work to paint a mural called Black ­Women, celebrating the lives of impor­tant Black ­women 226  /

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5.8. Wall of Truth,

doorway section by William Walker, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl. 5.9. Wall of Truth, “Black

Laws” section by William Walker, 1969. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl.

5.10. Vanita Green, Black ­Women / Racism, 1970. Mural at Chestnut and Orleans. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl.

in history. Almost immediately, vandals attacked it with yellow paint, and she changed its name to Racism (figure 5.10).31 As with the Wall of Truth, Don McIlvaine’s murals presented a critical view of con­temporary conditions. The second director of Art & Soul, ­McIlvaine was born in 1930 in New York City, and grew up in Mas­sa­chu­setts and Washington, DC. He studied art at the Newark Acad­emy of Art and Howard University—­his studies ­were often interrupted for lack of funds—­ before being drafted into the army in 1951. ­After that, he worked as an illustrator and draftsman in Washington, before moving to Chicago and g­ oing to work for the Chicago City Planning Office and, l­ater, the Community Renewal Program. McIlvaine developed his skills as a muralist while working at Art & Soul; this activity was the most vis­i­ble face of the proj­ect during his leadership. 228  /

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McIlvaine appears in the 1970 film Lord ­Thing working on a mural called Into the Mainstream (figure 5.11) just steps away from the art center. Lord T ­ hing, directed by DeWitt Beall, reenacts parts of the history of cvl, Inc., with young Vice Lords playing the parts of older members, demonstrating typical experiences and telling the history of the growth into a legitimate enterprise. It provides a view of the organ­ization’s activities in the late 1960s, including their po­liti­cal organ­izing and Mayor Daley’s response. Like all of McIlvaine’s murals, Into the Mainstream is now gone. In front of the mural, located at 3702 West 16th Street, was a patio created by the Conservative Vice Lords as a space for meetings and events; they had planted it with grass and trees as part of their neighborhood beautification proj­ects. The lower portion of the mural, taking up the majority of its space, is devoted to three blocky, monumental figures with abstracted features. They are three young Black men who together represent the united purpose and determined feeling of the gang. McIlvaine had altered his subject a­ fter beginning to work with c­ hildren in the neighborhood: one nine-­year-­old had lost an eye ­after being bitten by a rat, and another was suffering neurological symptoms from eating lead paint. Originally, he planned to emphasize the participation of African Americans in mainstream society; but the ­children’s situation convinced him that they ­were still not ­there. “It changed my feeling,” McIlvaine told a reporter.32 When McIlvaine changed course, he shifted the mood of the mural from a hopeful message about the possibility of young African American men entering mainstream society to an angrier one. In this way McIlvaine traveled in the same direction indicated by William Walker’s shift from the heroes of the Wall of Re­spect to the portrayal of bad conditions in the Wall of Truth. Yet McIlvaine’s mural also has some of the “actionary” quality identified by Barbara Jones-­Hogu in her own “positive” work. The three young men of the foreground of McIlvaine’s Into the Mainstream do not raise their fists in the Black Power salute of Unite, but their ­faces convey a steady determination, placing a demand on the viewer. “The youths are angry,” McIlvaine said in an interview, “­because they have been left out of the mainstream of life.”33 Entry into it is a requirement they are placing on society, not a polite request or a cherished hope. B ­ ehind the three young men stand tenement buildings; above is a frieze, a distinct space in which smaller-­scale repre­sen­ta­tions of Black heroes appear. It is one of ­these figures, Frederick Douglass, who provides the subject of discussion in one scene of the film Lord ­Thing in which McIlvaine appears painting the mural. (Elsewhere in the film, the mural’s imagery was featured prominently, punctuating transitions between scenes.) Until th e Walls C om e D own

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5.11. Don McIlvaine, Into the Mainstream, 1969. Mural at West 16th

Street and South Lawndale Ave­nue. Photo courtesy of Georg Stahl.

5.12. Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall. Don McIlvaine paints and converses with a young boy.

McIlvaine stands with his brush cocked, stopping his work long enough to ask a young boy if he knows who the figure represents (figure 5.12). A few confused missteps in the boy’s response, more questions from McIlvaine, and the viewer understands that the boy’s white teacher is not giving her students an adequate picture of Black history—­which was not just a ­matter of proper documentation of the facts of history but of giving ­children a sense of possibility, and the power to shape the pres­ent and ­future. McIlvaine painted several more murals around the city over the coming years. Several of them could be classed as “beautification” proj­ects. In 1970 he was asked by the city to work with a group of kids to paint murals on some of the city’s many underpasses. A city spokesman explained that the Department of Streets and Sanitation was happy with the idea ­because it would cover up graffiti—­“some of which,” the spokesman noted, “are not so nice.”34 They started with the 55th Street and South Shore Drive underpass, where McIlvaine found that volunteer paint­ers materialized readily from among the kids who just happened by. Older folks, too, tried their hand; McIlvaine touched up the work of ­these rather haphazard collaborators to create a unified final product.35 By this point, public painting proj­ects ­were happening all over the city. McIlvaine’s collaborative public art found a home on phone booths as well as on walls. In 1971 he and a crew of U ntil th e Walls C om e Down

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teen­agers painted African-­inspired figures—­“Haitian ­women” and “African tribesmen”—on a series of phone booths in Bronzeville: a set on Michigan Ave­nue and another set on King Drive. Referring to the booths as “­people’s art,” he told a reporter he hoped the aesthetic enhancements would reduce vandalism. The paint was provided by Illinois Bell Telephone, which presumably hoped so too.36 As we saw with the fate of Vanita Green’s Black ­Women / Racism, despite the sense that murals could forestall graffiti (recall Gwendolyn Brooks’s “no child has defiled” the Wall of Re­spect), they ­were not immune to vandalism. A brightly colored mural McIlvaine painted at Olive-­ Harvey College in 1973 was defaced—­for reasons unknown—­and had to be redone.37 Art & Soul continued to attract attention from the press ­under McIlvaine’s leadership. But ­there must have been some hesitation, in the wake of the mayor’s War on Gangs, to acknowledge the role the cvl was continuing to play in Art & Soul’s operations as they presented favorable stories on the art center. In March 1970 the Defender did a story on Art & Soul that does not refer to the cvl except in the photo caption, but l­ ater that year another article in the Defender acknowledged cvl, Inc., as the sponsor of Art & Soul and McIlvaine’s new mural.38 In April McIlvaine published a short piece in a journal called Art Gallery, part of a series of short essays on dif­fer­ent inner-­city arts programs.39 The text of his article did not mention the cvl, but again, a photo caption referred to ­children in the gallery as “young Vice Lords.” “Art & Soul,” McIlvaine explained, “is a new kind of community-­ dominated workshop, where the young ­people in the community can express their thoughts in artistic form.” His reference to the notion that the workshop was community-­led reflects the original conception, even as the Vice Lords’ involvement is downplayed. “The workshop activities help to create a desire in youth to excel in life, to expand their goals[,] to relieve frustrations by expressing with the vari­ous tools of art [what] the heart alone sometimes cannot express.”40 “Trees can grow in the ghetto,” McIlvaine said.41 But this was not an easy case to substantiate in Lawndale. The doctrine of “positive images” could not uniformly govern all Black art production; to some, indeed, it represented an overly optimistic view of the capacity of art. As McIlvaine absorbed the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seems he became less convinced of the possibility of smooth entry into an unruffled American society. Into the Mainstream pres­ents a sense of possibility in collective action. Another mural, Black Man’s Dilemma, painted on the side of Art & Soul’s building, asked w ­ hether Amer­i­ca could ever be a ­viable home for 232  /

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5.13. Don McIlvaine, Black Man’s Dilemma in progress, 1970. Mural at 3742 West 16th Street. Photo by Don McIlvaine. 5.14. Don McIlvaine, Black Man’s Dilemma, 1970. Photo by Larry Graff for the Chicago Sun-Times

5.15. José Chávez Morado, La Conquista de la Energía ( The Conquest

of Energy), 1952. Mosaic mural of Byzantine and Venetian glass, UNAM , Mexico City. Photo by Schalkwijk / Art Resource.

Black p ­ eople (figures 5.13 and 5.14). It was inspired formally by José Chávez Morado’s 1952 mural at unam in Mexico City, La Conquista de la Energía ­ ere entirely dif­fer­ (The Conquest of Energy) (figure 5.15) but its themes w ent.42 Displaying dev­ils and hucksters alongside figures representing broken lives—­drug addicts and prostitutes—it suggested a despairing return of the “negative.” A phallic snake, emblazoned with dollar signs, wends its way through the scene; a ­woman lights a fire; and on the lower right corner a bloody dagger lodges in a figure’s chest, impaling the Bill of Rights on its way. In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Lou Jones described “a confused and angry Afro-­American”—it is not entirely clear which figure this is—­“trapped and tormented by the commonplaces of the ghetto—­unemployment, crime, exploitation, narcotics, hustling and prostitution, to name a few.”43 An angelic figure points the way to the worship of an ancient African god (or, as the Defender described it, the African symbol of dignity).44 The mural reflects the extent to which “positive images” w ­ ere forced to meet up over and over again with the overwhelming sense of negative real­ity.

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The Mural Movement and Institutions

In this period, the early years of a revitalized mural movement, many paint­ ers ­were working on walls around the city. Mario Castillo’s Peace (Metafisica) (1968) at Halsted and Cullerton (figure 5.16) and Wall of Brotherhood (1969) at 18th and Halsted ­were the first outdoor Chicano murals in Chicago. Peace was created as part of the city’s Neighborhood Improvement and Beautification Program, which began as a program to clean up empty lots. Castillo proposed the creation of a mural in a vacant lot next to the Halsted Urban Pro­ gress Center, and the program supported it.45 The two mural designs ­were inspired by the Mexican muralists of a generation earlier and by indigenous imagery of the Amer­i­cas. The Wall of Brotherhood also incorporated a multicultural range of symbols connected to the multiethnic crew of students who worked with him on the proj­ect through the Neighborhood Youth Corps, as well as symbols that suggest a balanced polarity between yin and yang, and hope for the Earth as a global village.46 ­These murals w ­ ere located in the neighborhood known as Pilsen, or “Lower West Side.” In the 1960s, it still was in the midst of a transition from a majority Bohemian (Czech) population that had given it its name to a majority Mexican American neighborhood. When Mexican American activists successfully occupied the neighborhood’s Bohemian Settlement House in 1969, they renamed it Casa Aztlán, and Ray Patlán and other Mexican American artists painted murals inside and out (in the mid-1970s, Marcos Raya repainted the exterior murals). Over the years many artists worked with community members at Casa Aztlán, holding exhibitions and using studio space ­there, alongside the Benito Juarez Health Clinic run by the local chapter of the militant Chicano organ­ization the Brown Berets.47 Several of Ann Zelle’s photo­graphs of Art & Soul display the rainbow-­ striped mural painted on the storefront and side of the building ­under the direction of the Japa­nese artist Sachio Yamashita, newly arrived from art school in Tokyo. Yamashita was the second artist in residence at Art & Soul. The rainbow stripes, which took the place of Lewis’s West Wall and ­were in turn covered over by McIlvaine’s Black Man’s Dilemma, ­were a signature of Yamashita’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see figure 3.1).48 He was part of the mural movement in his own more abstract and idiosyncratic way, considering himself an environmental artist—in the sense of an artist who creates, or alters, environments.49 A native of Japan from Kagoshima prefecture on Kyushu Island, he had come to the United States in 1968 ­after finishing art school. A ­ fter the rainbow stripes at Art & Soul, he painted U nt il t he Walls Come Down

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5.16. Mario Castillo, Peace (Metafísica), 1968. Mural at Halsted Street and Cullerton Street.

other abstract rainbows and numerous other murals all over town—­for example, a “Wave” mural inspired by Hokusai’s famous print on an apartment building on North Ave­nue, and an “Acre of Murals” at the Park Forest Plaza shopping center. Yamashita was on a mission to paint all the approximately one thousand ­water towers in the Chicago area, starting in Old Town (he got about thirteen done).50 His work was supported by numerous grants—­from the Illinois Arts Council, the W. Clement Stone Foundation, the nea, and the Museum of Con­temporary Art. According to his friend Sam Yanari, Sachio’s sunny disposition made him a favorite of the news writers who hung out at the Billy Goat Tavern. They wrote him up and gave him advice—­telling him how to approach building ­owners and gain their permission for his work.51 One of the peculiarities of downtown Chicago is a system of streets below the regular streets. So, below Michigan Ave­nue ­there is “Lower Michigan Ave­nue”—­mainly used for loading docks but accessible to normal traffic (sometimes one finds oneself ­there accidentally, by taking a wrong turn). Yamashita deci­ded to paint rainbow stripes on all the walls facing 236  /

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Lower Michigan. To help fund the proj­ect, he approached all the building ­owners for contributions. Only the Chicago Tribune would not support the proj­ect. In response he left the area beneath the Tribune tower blank, except that he “accidentally” painted over all the “No Parking” signs. In the end they fi­nally did contribute, and he painted their stripes in—­but upside down. Irene Piraino wrote in the Daily News that the artist saw Chicago as “his coloring book” and ­imagined that if Yamashita had his way, “the entire area would float in a color bath of reds, blues, pinks, yellows and greens.”52 He also proposed turning the city’s elevated train tracks into bicycle paths, when the trains w ­ ere moved underground.53 (They have not moved underground, but Sachio’s plan anticipated by forty years a current plan to turn a decommissioned Chicago and Pacific Railroad elevated line into a greenway for pedestrians and cyclists, originally dubbed the Bloomingdale Trail, now officially known as the 606.) Yamashita’s work was abstract, utterly distinct from the positive and po­liti­cal images created by paint­ers and photog­ raphers of the mural movement. While po­liti­cally minded muralists found the more abstract styles promoted by the nonprofit organ­ization City Walls in New York to be anodyne decoration, it would have been hard to say the same ­thing of Yamashita’s work, b­ ecause of its comprehensive ambitions and the po­liti­cal negotiations required to realize them. As with other muralists, much of the work occurred in the community collaboration and the negotiations with authorities. Janet Bloom wrote of his work that “imagining the cumulative effect of his negotiations, you can almost agree with him that his work is the most po­liti­cal in Chicago.”54 Bloom may not have been aware of how much po­liti­cal strategizing and community negotiations ­were part and parcel of creating murals. The Chicago Mural Group, according to Weber, put “a premium on the development of community organ­izing skills in the artist.”55 Their work involved constant, delicate negotiations. And some of the most ambitious plans of the mural group failed. The Chicago Housing Authority (cha), through the intermediary of Richard Hunt, contacted William Walker with the idea of a mural proj­ect on cha buildings.56 The cha was interested in a mural to beautify the lower parts of some of its high-­rise buildings, which ­were badly defaced. Walker wanted to do something more ambitious: to cover the entire height of the outdoor elevator shafts at Robert Taylor Homes, striping the buildings with murals of monumental height. The group insisted on buy-in from the tenants, not least b­ ecause the muralists did not have friendly feelings t­ oward the cha administration.57 As eventually proposed by Walker, Caton, Eda, and Weber to the Illinois Arts Council (iac), it would have been a massive Until t he Walls Come Down

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undertaking and would have made a dramatic visual impression. The shafts ­were sixteen stories tall. The muralists proposed a $50,000 bud­get, half to be procured by grants, half cha matching funds.58 The iac offered them a grant; among the visual art panel members who rated the proposal highly ­were Margaret Burroughs, the white feminist artist Ellen Lanyon, and the aic’s African art curator Allen Wardwell.59 The artists presented slide shows and led bus tours to view their previous work, and sought to involve schoolteachers and their students through their contact with Ramon Price.60 They emphasized to work with ­children and community members in the proj­ect; in the proposal, they wrote that they would approach the tenant councils of the buildings they planned to work on in order to pres­ent the proj­ect and “enlist the support of the residents.” They would be sure to involve local youth: “Through their contacts in local art circles and their own wide knowledge of the area and its ­people, the artists ­will identify talented and interested young ­people to work with them in an apprentice-­style situation.”61 In other public art commissions, the views of community members usually played l­ittle part in decisions about the design and execution of the work. The Chicago Mural Group’s proposal described the paint­ers’ commitment to engaging deeply with the community: “As artists for the ­people, the four enter into a vital relationship with their vast but largely untapped audience, drawing on the p ­ eoples’ boundless potential for creativity. Their former proj­ects are located on streets in working-­class and deprived communities—­ their patrons and critics are new art lovers who live in the neighborhoods surrounding mural sites. They have always approached their work with the support of local community groups and have sought the aid and involvement of community residents.”62 The artists anticipated obstacles in winning over the Robert Taylor Homes residents. They expected the residents to be distrustful of the cha and of any proj­ect that seemed to be the tool of its administration. They assumed they would raise concerns about money: for instance the question of spending money on art when it could be spent “getting rid of the rats in the building,” as Mitchell Caton put it in a meeting, or on daycare centers that ­were also in the works.63 It seemed from the outset that tenants might also object on grounds of aesthetics, or b­ ecause they perceived the mural proj­ect to be emerging from the interests of the cha administration and its chairman Charles Swibel, or opposed the participation of Weber, a white artist.64 At first, the artists believed that they could win over the tenant councils by showing that they respected the residents, that they ­were, as Walker put it, “their servants.”65 It was to the tenant councils, not to the cha, that 238  /

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they intended to report; the tenants should define the proj­ect.66 “The murals have taught me,” Walker said, “that artists that work in communities are regarded in a dif­fer­ent way than the artists that’s exhibiting in museums and art galleries. B ­ ecause ­you’re regarded as a meaningful part of their community although you ­don’t live ­there physically. ­People re­spect you, the beauty that you bring, the dignity that you bring them, the re­spect that you bring them, and the fact that you talk with them.”67 Yet in the end, the effort failed. They had difficulty getting access to tenants for open discussion of the proj­ect. In discussions, orga­nizational partners offered differing views on w ­ hether the tenant councils themselves w ­ ere actually demo­cratic. Some felt they ­were, while ­others argued that their operational capacities ­were grounded in a patronage system like that of the Demo­ cratic wards, with ­little repre­sen­ta­tion for the “­little guy on the totem pole.”68 Some staff members slow-­walked the proj­ect ­because they simply d­ idn’t like it.69 In the end, the proj­ect found­ered in its efforts at gaining the approval of the proj­ect’s tenant councils, and the artists would not go forward without it. Undeterred, the artists tried again at the housing proj­ect Cabrini-­Green, also without success.70 That time, according to Weber, armed representatives of the city’s po­liti­cal machine appeared outside meetings to intimidate residents into voting the proj­ect down.71 Following ­these disappointing experiences they concentrated on more standard-­scale collaborations—­typically walls of one to three stories, with one or more experienced mural artists as lead artists, a small group of assistants, groups of c­ hildren, and casual day-­to-­ day volunteers. In the same way that the city and corporations and entities like the Illinois Arts Council picked up on the possibilities of using murals to beautify the landscape, museums recognized their significance. What did it mean for “people’s art” to appear in a museum space? Museums tried to bring the street into the museum, but ­whether that would bring the “mural-­viewing” public in or not was unclear. In 1971 the Museum of Con­temporary Art held an exhibition, Murals for the People, in which it invited four muralists—­Walker, Weber, Eda, and Mark Rogovin—to paint in the museum’s downstairs gallery.72 The muralists ­were clearly ambivalent about the opportunity, and held a press conference to express their sense of po­liti­cal purpose, not at the mca but at the South Side Community Art Center. They insisted on a certain number of ­free passes for community members (figure 5.17). And while the artists agreed to paint in the museum, the resulting works w ­ ere to be installed outdoors, and they ­were, with differing degrees of success. John Pitman Weber’s mural, Fuertes somos ya, was ­later installed at the Pedro Albizu Campos Center Until th e Walls C ome Down

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5.17. ­Free pass to the

exhibition Murals for the ­People. Courtesy of SSCAC Archives. MCA

for ­People’s Health at the Latin American Defense Organ­ization (lado) at 2353 West North Ave­nue.73 (Weber was able to use his fluent Spanish to help make connections with Latinx artists and community members.) Eda’s mural panels w ­ ere to be added to his existing mural, the Wall of Meditation, painted in 1970 at Olivet Church in Bronzeville, but the presence of electrical wires eventually made it impossible. Mark Rogovin’s mural F­ ree Angela Davis was designed to circulate, and it traveled to po­liti­cal events and other venues ­after leaving the museum. William Walker’s Wall of Love, following its creation in the mca, was viewed as part of an open-­air seminar on Black art at Cabrini-­Green; guests included William Walker, Ben Bey, Caton, Weber, and Eda, with the discussion moderated by Herbert Nipson, then board president of the sscac.74 ­Later, the Wall of Love’s panels, which affectionately depicted everyday Black ­family life, w ­ ere installed over the cornice win­dows at the top level of the sscac façade. The center still owns the fragmentary panels, which must have quickly suffered the effects of weather. In the following year the center (where Walker also taught a class in “­people’s art”75) presented an exhibition of murals that used slides and blown-up photo­graphs to give a sense of the mural landscape in a show called On Chicago Walls.76 Was it anathema to what the murals r­eally ­were to bring them into the museum? They lost their communicative function if they only spoke to well-­heeled white patrons, and this is why the artists insisted that the completed murals travel to new sites in the city. The museum also put the pro­cess on display: rather than thinking of the object as the sole work of art, the museum display framed the painting pro­cess as a performative artwork in and of itself. And when the mca arranged a visit to the Wall of Re­spect,

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5.18. Visitors at the Wall of Re­spect. Photo by Duane Hall

for the Chicago Sun-­Times, March 2, 1971.

it was the museum’s patrons, fash­ion­able white visitors, who had the t­ ables turned on them and became objects on display—­for members of the community, and for readers of the Sun-­Times. In Duane Hall’s photo­graph of the tour for the newspaper (figure 5.18), some of the white ladies contemplate the Wall with absorbed interest; ­others appear less engaged. Perhaps ­these ­were the same white suburban “tourists” viewing murals from an air-­conditioned bus in a tour whose visit was chronicled by Tribune journalist Terri Schultz in a 1971 article called “Slum Art Slightly Disturbing, but Only Slightly.”77 She describes the trip as an “intellectual exercise” not intended to inspire passions. Getting out of their bus to view Eda’s mural in the basement of the DuSable Museum, they see “­faces of fear and desperation . . . ​slashed in red and black across the basement’s cement walls and heating ducts.” Eda apologizes for his anger, Schultz suggests, saying it is self-­destructive; he would do

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it differently if he had it to do over. “But it’s beautiful,” a viewer responds. The irony of “beauty” used as a rather clinical judgment of the color of a slashed and frozen lynching victim lingers as Schultz closes the article with a dig at the complacency she observed: “They know something is wrong. Part of the ­great American pie is not sliced just right. But someone ­will take care of it. As Americans, they know justice in the end prevails.”78 Mystery Man Genius

In a garage off a South Side alley at 610 East 50th Street, djs (“spinners”) would play rec­ords on Sunday after­noons, and p ­ eople would come to listen, dance, and hang out. As Georgia Geis explained in the Hyde Park Herald, “In the late 1950s, jazz dj and mechanic Arthur ‘Pops’ Simpson and his friend ­Little Chuck used to spin their favorite rec­ords—­the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker—in the garage where Simpson worked at 50th and Champlain Ave­nue. Word spread, and e­ very Sunday more ­people came out, toting their rec­ords.”79 The m ­ usic spilled out into the alley outside, which became a community hangout known simply as “The Alley.” C. Siddha Webber called it a “place to be hip.” In 1970 he worked with his friend Mitchell Caton to create a brightly colored mural ­there. Caton had already, in 1969, painted a wall on one side of the alley. It had a zigzagging white-­and-­black triangular backdrop and a semi-­abstract geometric dance of forms inspired by the m ­ usic being played in the space. In the summer of 1970, Caton and Webber painted an intricate mural on a portion of the wall opposite the first one: Caton created the imagery and Webber added poetry. Caton called it Rip-­Off. A photo­graph by Robert Sengstacke shows the two sides of the alley with the second mural in pro­gress (figure 5.19). Caton, who would soon join the Chicago Mural Group, was a talented easel painter who developed into one of the most breathtakingly inventive muralists of Chicago’s mural movement. He was a hugely talented draftsman, but he remains largely unknown outside a small circle of admirers.80 Called “the mystery man genius” and “the Stranger” in an unsigned Defender article in November  1971, he was elusive even at his most vis­i­ble.81 John Pitman Weber describes Caton’s work (which eventually covered dozens of walls around the city) as “a unique combination of surrealism, decorative cubism, and African design ele­ments.”82 Caton and William Walker ­were also good friends despite widely divergent personalities and sometimes explosive disagreements.83 Walker was retiring, restrained, and moderate; 242  /

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5.19. Mitchell Caton (in front) and Jimmy Ellis at The Alley with untitled

­ usic mural (left) and Rip-­Off / Universal Alley (right), 1970–74. Murals m off 50th Street between Champlain and St. Lawrence Ave­nues. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

Caton was a hipster who expounded cultural nationalist politics. Yet, John Pitman Weber recalls, he heard from both of them that, together, they would sneak into buildings slated for de­mo­li­tion and paint murals inside—­art that would never be seen. It was perhaps the ultimate ephemeral art.84 The idea that pro­cess was all is reflected in Caton’s statements about painting. In a mural group meeting, he tried to explain how difficult it was to write up a straightforward report on what had happened in the course of the proj­ect. The painting pro­cess was “more of a creation than something that’s preconceived and preplanned and scheduled out. . . . ​Even though you plan it, your plans ­don’t hardly ever come out as you would like them to. Actually verbalizing what happened, t­ here are strange events. . . . ​It’s a rewarding Until t he Walls Come Down

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e­ xperience, p ­ eople are so curious, [it] hits ­people in the face, wakes ­people up, just to see color, or just to see a scene before them bigger than life.” By “creation,” he seems to have meant that the mural was constantly changing, its imagery being improvised as ­people stopped by to look and talk, and as the ­actual colors on the wall changed with the light of the day: As the day goes on, the light changes, in the morning as ­you’re painting and the light is so bright, you see the colors one way, and as the day goes on, it looks one way at 10:00 in the morning, and at 2:00 you see the colors a ­little differently, ­because of the light, and then at 5:00 it looks so entirely dif­fer­ent to what it did at 10 that you try to take that same feeling ­you’re getting at 5:00 back the next morning to see it ­there . . . ​especially outside where you have this natu­ral light.85 Caton’s yearly reports on his summer mural painting proj­ects reflect this ethos. They are composed in a sometimes breathless, poetic style: reporting on the Wall of Pride and Self-­Awareness, he wrote, “The weather Beautiful all summer long (A long hot summer with sweet colors in the air!) Street art reaches deep into souls of the young, ­because they see in the painted murals colors much like the ones they are wearing, and line of simplified design. The Wild and young very alive and real.”86 ­W hether intentionally or not, this sense of the mural as reflecting the brilliant colors young ­people are wearing seems to concretize africobra’s use of “coolade colors,” reflecting their aesthetics back to them. Rip-­Off, the first part of the mural he painted at the Alley (figure 5.20), presented a scene of cards, dice, and a g­ iant gun bisecting two stylized, silhouetted figures with their hands up: a stickup. A skull with the word Peace inscribed on it bled a single bloody tear from an eye socket. African sculpture appeared—­reflected?—in the ­handle of the gun. Caton was identifying prob­lems in the community: guns, drugs, vio­lence that plagued the neighborhood and could even be a risk of the large, anonymous gathering in the alley itself. C. Siddha Webber composed and painted poetry to accompany many of Caton’s murals, beginning with this one. Webber ­imagined a somewhat dif­fer­ent role for art, one more in the vein of “positive images” as it was understood within the Black Arts Movement. It was not b­ ecause he was naïve about what was ­going on in the neighborhood. In fact, he was well acquainted with Chicago’s gangs. In the summer of 1971 he had already begun studies at Dartmouth College as part of the Foundation Years program.87 Not a gang member himself, Webber was benefiting from a program that 244  /

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5.20. Mitchell Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley, detail, “Rip-­Off” (with neighbors), 1970–74. Mural off 50th Street between Champlain and St. Lawrence Ave­nues. Photo by Mark Rogovin.

had been started with gang members in mind. He had heard about the opportunity through friends who w ­ ere Vice Lords, whom he had met while working at Marshall Field’s department store downtown. He had tried college before, but his radical politics got in the way. He deci­ded to give it another try. To him, Dartmouth was utopia: “What­ever you wanted to do, you could do.”88 Webber wanted a more positive statement for the Alley. The question was ­whether the mural should portray ­things as they ­were, or as they should be. He added a spiritual poem that he titled “Universal Alley” (figure 5.21), and several other poems. One called “Rip-­Off ” was a call for peace between ­brothers, contrasting any small offense another Black man might have caused with the massive injury of slavery: Until the Walls C ome D own

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Naw Naw ­little brotha U ­don’t shoot no brotha ­Don’t care what He said/U said/Nobody said He done—­Done No brotha never ripped U-­off A con-­ti-­nent Brotha ­wouldn’t think To snatch yo youth. Another text proclaims “Identity of Self Is Our Only Hope for Liberation and Salvation for Us.” One dated August 8, 1970, commemorated Fred Hampton’s birthday, tying his life and death to the idea of the Universal Alley. Webber hoped to use the mural to shape and uplift the space around it—as he put it, to create sacred space. A reporter wrote that the fact that murals ­were held to have effects was perhaps even more impor­tant than ­whether they did or not: “True or not, the first answer you get when asking about the effects of a mural is, ‘It ­hasn’t been defaced.’ ” ­There was a sense of an almost “magical” effect.89 From 1971, Caton painted all his murals on black backgrounds. This was a happy accident that resulted from conditions specific to the mural he painted that summer, Nation Time, on the wall of the A. A. Rayner Funeral Home at 4141 South Cottage Grove Ave­nue (see figure 2.8). (A. A. Rayner was also an alderman for the Sixth Ward from 1967 to 1971.) The deteriorating surface of the brick had been sealed with black tar, so that was the surface Caton used. He worked in lines and shapes that ­were both elegant and chunky, deftly patterning color blocks to flicker between surface and depth, suggesting glinting surfaces and dappled shadows. On the mural a ­giant head raises its voice to the sky, the word home in block letters slicing across its eyebrows, a forest of Black Power fists b­ ehind. Dancers fill urban space, a figure of M ­ other Africa (perhaps inspired by Picasso’s W ­ oman Ironing?) guides ­children at their books, and a huge hand holds lightning bolts as if ready to strike. Robert Sengstacke also applied photo­graphs to the mural, following the practice begun with the Wall of Re­spect. Weber wrote in the final report that “Mitchell’s love of subtle, unusual brilliant color and complex ­music is reflected in the very original eyefilling ‘collage’ look of the mural crammed with personal imagery” but also noted that the composition 246  /

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5.21. Mitchell Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley, detail, C. Siddha Webber, “Universal Alley” (poem), 1970–74. Mural off 50th Street between Champlain and St. Lawrence Ave­nues. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

would likely flake badly within two years b­ ecause Caton had not prepared the wall adequately.90 Caton continued the use of the black background in his Philosophy of the Spiritual (figure 5.22). Now covered by an adjoining building, the mural was painted in 1972 at 75th Street and Vernon in the Park Manor neighborhood of Chicago, a middle-­class Black neighborhood south and west of Woodlawn. The mural took its name from the 1971 jazz ­album by bassist Richard Davis. But it also reflected something about his relationship to the city and the community: “The more community involvement, the more spiritual a work of art,” he wrote in his final report on the mural.91 Caton expressed a rationale for the mural’s lyrical transformations in a few lines at the end of Until the Walls Come Down

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5.22. Mitchell Caton, Philosophy of the Spiritual, 1972. Mural at

75th Street and Vernon Ave­nue. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke. Courtesy of Estate of Robert Abbott Sengstacke.

his report written for the Chicago Mural Group and its funders: “Early in my life as an artist I had the idea of finding a technical approach which would enable me to capture what especially interested me in the city. The threading traffic, its lights, the river of humanity chartered and flowing through and around its self-­imposed limitations. Who knows consciously what they are ­doing when creating?”92 On the left edge of the wall, C. Siddha Webber painted a poem, “Run to the Sun,” combining spiritual and po­liti­cal wisdom. It depicted cult figures like Sun Ra—­with a policeman’s gun pointing at him—­and the “Cosmic Speaker,” KeRa Upra. The mural was an energetic dance of black and bright colors, round and angular forms, and multiple scales. A piano keyboard spilled out of the mouth of an African mask and another cradled a tall w ­ oman’s hair. A gaunt figure danced, arms outstretched. Hands beckoned for help from the ground line. Figures and forms scattered themselves across all the available space, ready to burst beyond the edges of the walls. Under­neath Webber’s poem, the monumental head of Sun Ra commanded the left edge of the wall, with a policeman’s gun and outstretched arm pointing at him from the right. As muralists had found in white middle-­class neighborhoods, some local 248  /

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residents associated murals with improvement efforts in impoverished areas, and w ­ ere hesitant to have one in their community. To them, it would imply poverty, not the striving middle-­class neighborhood they recognized around themselves. But Caton connected with the community, beginning with ­children and then persuading the adults. “From the very first day,” he wrote in his report on the proj­ect, “­children came asking could they paint and draw. We said yes and e­ very day helpers w ­ ere ­there.” He continued: “Painting in the street is fascinating. The wall is located in the Park Manor Community where a wall had never been painted before and ­people ­were curious. House­wives, businessmen, schoolteachers, musicians stopped to say hello, offering suggestions and criticism. For a theme we deci­ded on the Cosmic, the Black ­Woman, ­music, ­children, police.” Painting on the street ­every day, he inevitably came into contact with ­children seeking activity and connection, and entered into familial relationships with them: “The artist as a street f­ ather can be real. Many c­ hildren have lost their f­ ather through divorce or death, and talk to someone older, like a big ­brother. ­Children in the inner city grow up fast and are ready to accept adult responsibility. I talked with ­children about many ­things, as a ­father and a big ­brother.”93 The interaction with other community members was not s­ imple. While painting Nation Time, Caton had repeated interactions with a man who insisted that he include a Black cowboy, and he declined to do so; in a subsequent Chicago Mural Group meeting he noted that requiring community approval had pitfalls, especially when the lead artist had a distinct vision. Walker agreed: “­People are constantly walking up, talking about their ideas, why ­don’t you have this and that and so forth.” Weber noted, on the other hand, that many ­people who initiated such conversations around a given mural ended up as supporters of it, ­because they appreciated the muralists’ willingness to engage them in a respectful conversation.94 And neighborhood residents ­were even more engaged in Caton’s work repainting his mural in the Alley. By 1974, Rip-­Off—­the initial portion of the mural, which he had painted in 1970—­was in bad shape. Caton had not properly cleaned, conditioned, and primed the wall when he originally painted it. He now determined to repaint the mural and this time prepped it at length, wire brushing the wall, applying masonry conditioner, and then applying primer before painting his composition. Rip-­Off had covered a portion of the wall, at the entrance to the alley, but Caton deci­ded to extend the mural the full length of the side of the garage, extending deep into the alley (figure 5.23). The mural was a monumental size, 100 × 15 ft. By the time he could start actually painting a composition on the wall, the summer was Until t he Walls C ome D own

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5.23. Mitchell Caton, Rip-­Off / Universal Alley (full view),

1970–74. Mural off 50th Street between Champlain and St. Lawrence Ave­nues. Photo by Georg Stahl.

well u ­ nder way. “The Alley is buzzing with sounds,” he wrote. “­Children, dogs, car horns and ­people’s laughter. An artist feels nature.”95 ­There ­were always ­people in the alley—­volunteer artists, mostly untrained, discussing plans early in the morning; ­people walking by who helped put up the scaffolding. “This is a very unique environment,” Caton wrote, “much like a clan. The kind of spirit being shown by this group of ­people showed guts and initiative.” ­Children proposed designs and an older child with artistic talent helped redraw them for transfer to the wall. Jazz sets held in the alley helped raise money to buy materials and inspired the musical content of the murals—­giant musicians playing their instruments, swinging banners of colorful sound. As Caton explained, “Color is life—­life is color, the vibrating, vitalic energy.”96 When at a meeting of the Chicago Mural Group he questioned how Weber could write about other artists’ work in his planned book, Caton describes the challenge of writing about the painting experience as that of “color, what color is, the feeling of all of it, the power of that unknown force that makes it art.”97 Jimmy Stewart, writing about Black m ­ usic, had argued that m ­ usic forms 250  /

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“the ideal paradigm of our understanding of the creative pro­cess as a movement with existence,” meaning “to accompany real­ity, to ‘move with it’ . . . ​ and not against it, which all, yes all, the white cultural art forms do.”98 Caton’s mural captures this aspect of ­music as additive and cumulative, traveling along with life rather than opposing itself to life. The width of the alley made photography (or even a full view) of the entire mural difficult. To experience the mural was to move along with it, watching it unfold. In this it was itself like the community that gathered around the informal ­music and entertainment venue that the Alley constituted. It was a diverse multiplicity of individuals that could only be understood by experiencing it. Photog­raphers ­were also drawn to this community, and to par­tic­u­lar characters in it like the Sandman, who cleaned the streets and made elaborate crowns out of found materials. The photographer Mikki Ferrill came weekly to watch and take pictures of ­people dancing and enjoying the ­music; she displayed her photo­graphs inside the garage to allow community participants to see themselves. Jimmy Ellis (also a musician) and Kevin Harris took mainly outdoor shots of the community of ­people who hung out around the Alley. They, too, displayed them weekly to the community, posting them on a nearby abandoned storefront (figure 5.24). ­These walls, inside and out, served as a changing mural that responded to community members’ desire to see themselves represented and, indeed, to shape that repre­sen­ta­tion directly. Even as they painted, performed, and looked on in a spirit of optimism, artists and community members involved in murals must have often wondered ­whether they ­were destined for destruction. Murals constituted themselves and their interventions through an ongoing collective pro­cess and created new spaces for ongoing per­for­mance. Artists and musicians in Chicago ­were constantly finding and making space—­whether they had long-­term ambitions to build alternative institutions with a view to self-­ determination for the Black community or w ­ ere simply finding a way in the moment to get their work done and bring ­people in to see and hear it. Marking on walls was a way that disenfranchised ­people found to express themselves, ­whether they w ­ ere trained artists or not. At a time when the owner­ship of real estate was highly politicized, painting on walls became charged with po­liti­cal implications but was also a form of artistic expression. While gang members are associated with place-­marking tags that include only their group affiliations, some also painted figurative murals, such as the one on the “Psychedelic Shack” in Vice Lords territory (figure 5.25). Other kinds of “vernacular” imagery that p ­ eople created on walls throughout the city attracted the notice of artists (figures 5.26 and 5.27). Unt il the Walls C ome D own

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5.24. ­Children at The Alley, 1974. Photo by Kevin Harris.

5.25. Artist unknown, Psychedelic Shack murals, early

1970s. 3414 West 15th Street. Photo by Georg Stahl.

In the fall of 1974, in a meeting of the Chicago Mural Group, Walker argued with a younger muralist, Carlos Barrera, who saw art in the streets as basically a way of bringing happiness to neighborhood c­ hildren. Barrera objected to the imposition of what he saw as specific po­liti­cal dogma. Walker insisted that young ­people could understand complex po­liti­cal ideas and that simply to attempt to please them with images of flowers or abstract shapes was to fail to arm them with the tools they needed to encounter an oppressive society. Murals should, he argued, be “dealing with the ills of the society and pointing to the society . . . ​pointing out certain ­things in the society that ­people should be aware of.” Alluding to Gerald Ford’s p ­ ardon of Richard Nixon, Walker expressed the frustrations of an activist artist who had come through the late 1960s and early 1970s and seen ­little concrete change. “I’m saying that nothing has changed. Every­thing is the same. . . . ​The artist has got to be more forceful now than ever. . . . ​The artist must understand his or her responsibility to the p ­ eople. ­Because politicians are failing, every­body who’s supposed to be leading is failing. And I’m saying that it’s left ­really with creative ­people to bring back into focus meaningful thinking. And if the creative ­people fail, then it’s just complete hopelessness.”99 Walker expressed an uncompromising militancy; his younger interlocutor saw a desire for beauty and relief in neighborhoods that lacked basic resources. As with many such Until th e Walls Come Down

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5.26. Bertrand Phillips, Crossword, 1974. Silver gelatin print. 5.27. Bertrand Phillips, Black Ice, 1972. Silver gelatin print.

debates, the two differed sharply in po­liti­cal, aesthetic, even psychological analy­sis, even as both ­were committed to social change through art. Murals opened up the streets, expanding the possibilities of the imagination to shape space. We should take seriously the critical po­liti­cal messages pres­ent in murals of the early 1970s.100 But the po­liti­cal character of murals was not solely an effect of overt po­liti­cal messages. Gerald Williams gave me a surprising answer when I asked him to talk about how and why text was incorporated into africobra artworks. I expected him to talk about how text could help anchor the po­liti­cal meaning of works so that viewers or critics could not misinterpret. But his answer was more about form than about content. Like Jeff Donaldson talking about the Wall of Re­spect, he referred to graffiti: “When you looked at walls all over the city, everywhere you could find was some kind of graffiti or somebody expressing themselves on a wall. I can recall as clear as day, riding the El on the way to school, and early as 1960, the words ‘Bird Lives.’ On a wall, facing the El station at about 254  /

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43rd Street . . . ​in big letters, bird lives, and it stayed on that building for, oh, long time, prob­ably ­until the ’70s, mid-’70s.”101 Reportedly initiated by the artist Ted Joans in New York, “Bird Lives” graffiti quickly began appearing in Chicago too, and continued throughout the 1960s (figure 5.28). This phrase seemed to stick in p ­ eople’s minds, neither a claim of territory nor a statement of po­liti­cal militancy—­but an appeal to the surreal.102 A jazz columnist in the Defender pointed out in 1965 that Charlie “Bird” Parker was still commemorated in this way, ten years a­ fter his death, with “hand-­scrawled signs on walls, fences, win­dows, train stations.”103 In 1971 the phrase was “scratched in subways, u ­ nder viaducts, and on sidewalks.”104 And perhaps “Bird Lives” was a kind of promise of modern hopes unfulfilled. Parker was a jazz saxophonist, an iconic figure for midcentury hipster culture, who played in the fast, improvisational style called bebop. Only John Coltrane was a more impor­tant musical icon for the Black Arts Movement. In 1960 the young writer Frank London Brown (soon to die his own tragic death) published a short story in the Defender that must have been inspired by instances of ­actual graffiti.105 The protagonist lives in poverty in a Chicago tenement; the thought of Bird “allowed him to dream—­ and to fly up, out, and away, from the winoes, rentmen, swingmen, bosses, foremen and policemen that floated in and out of his life like corks upon a filthy sea.” That is, ­until Bird died. The piece continues: He wanted something, and before, the image of Bird sitting in some second floor in some big city, thinking up new songs, and finding new ways to say t­hings to his soul, before, this image had given his arms the feather and fiber of a bird—­before he’d sailed away. . . . ​D, as he was called, strode past the 58th Street “L,” down the alley, where t­ here lay a brick, white and soft. He looked around, saw no one looking, picked up the brick, and wrote in large letters, something that made the junkies and winoes and even serious p ­ eople shiver. The sign on the wall proclaimed: bird lives!106 Like other graffiti, this constituted a mark on the environment—­a way of laying claim to space. ­Here it was not, however, a claim to owner­ship or concrete power but a claim to the capacity of the imagination to change the character of urban space, to fill it up, to make it surreal. The “positive” of positive images was also a positive aesthetics of filling up space: filling up the space of the wall, the canvas, the street, the room, the city. Wadsworth Jarrell noted in an interview with Graham Lock that “we used John Coltrane as one of the models. His ­music was dubbed ‘sheets of Unt il t he Walls Com e Down

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5.28. “Bird Lives” graffiti, Chicago, 1964. Photo by Sandor Demlinger.

sound’ then and we w ­ ere making sheets of color. It was two-­dimensional. It was intuitive space, not deep space.”107 When Jarrell says that africobra’s use of space was “not deep space,” he means that they w ­ ere not interested in Eu­ro­pean perspectival space. He does not mean that the space was not deep and rich and shimmering, space in which you could lose yourself. Jarrell filled his canvases with bright dots and letters, and his figures—­such as Angela Davis in Revolutionary—­radiated outward from within the space of the painting, suggesting they could not be contained by it. Artists filled space: they filled it with their organ­ization of alternative spaces in which they could mingle and work; they filled the space of paintings. And with murals, they filled up walls, filled up city streets, filled up the eyes of passersby who could not get enough.

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Starring the Black Community

6

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, mural artists gave concrete shape to hopes of bringing art—as well as radical po­liti­cal messages—to the community. Murals changed urban space with brilliant and unexpected imagery that could translate into visual form the ideas and aspirations of ­people on the street, as well as their po­liti­cal critiques. Murals also displayed contradictions within artists’ ideas about what po­liti­cal art could or should do. Sometimes murals spoke in the first-­person voices of the most excluded and oppressed populations or constituted a dialogue in which they participated actively. Sometimes murals spoke to ­those groups. “Positive images” might remake consciousness, but their power to do so was also tied to par­tic­u­lar moments or circumstances, and muralists acknowledged this in viewing walls as spaces for ever-­changing imagery. And while positive images could rebalance the visual landscape of the city, they could not necessarily communicate the conditions that required action in the first place. In many ways, artists faced a tension between documenting real­ity—­ including negative realities—­and the doctrine of “positive images.” This conflict came to a head in 1971 with Melvin van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a film that provoked vigorous discussion within African American artist circles and inspired many imitators.1 This should be no surprise, as the film, made by a black director on a $150,000 bud­get, was the tenth-­highest grossing film in the United States that year. For another twenty years it held the title of highest-­grossing in­de­pen­dent film ever. It also presented itself as po­liti­cally revolutionary—­with a liberal sprinkling of smut. Van Peebles’s affectionate portraits of Black street life ran afoul of the

princi­ple of positive images. And the controversy the film provoked was nowhere more acute than in Chicago, where the debate around the film struck at the heart of the definition of community and its place in the arts. Van Peebles was originally from Chicago, and that may have contributed to the interest and eventually sharp critique his first feature film received from the Black cultural community in the city. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song tells the story of a sex-­show performer played by Van Peebles, acting ­under the name Brer Soul, who, early in the story, is moved to kill two white cops when they gratuitously beat up a Black militant. The character, Sweetback, spends the rest of the film ­running, fi­nally successfully, from the law. His run to freedom is punctuated by sexual encounters, portraits of the southern California landscape on his way to Mexico, and a series of scenes in which members of the “Black community” (the star of the film, according to its opening titles) speak directly to the camera, abetting Sweetback’s escape by denying having seen him. The audience hears, but does not see, a Greek chorus of “colored angels” (­later to be transmuted into “Black angels”) who urge Sweetback on in his flight. The film was hotly debated in the Black press. Two significant responses to the film came from Chicago’s Black cultural community: the Kuumba Workshop, a theater group closely associated with obac, and the Chicago-­based Ebony. In both cases, Sweetback provided—by contrast—­a means for Black cultural critics to establish a set of princi­ples for the “Black aesthetic.” Val Gray Ward, actor and activist, who had been described by Gwendolyn Brooks as a “­little black stampede” in her poem on the Wall of Re­spect, penned a five-­ part response to the film in the Chicago Defender on behalf of the Kuumba Workshop. Kuumba served as one of the chief proponents of cultural nationalism in Chicago. Each of their per­for­mances began with a dedicatory ritual that broke the fourth wall and involved the audience. Kuumba’s position on Sweetback emphasized damage done by the film’s pre­sen­ta­tion of negative, ste­reo­typical images—in par­tic­u­lar, degrading images of ­women and generally “deviant” repre­sen­ta­tions of Black sexuality and poverty. One context for this debate is the sense of a competition for audience between theater and film—­implicitly not just a ­matter of sales but of a profound po­liti­cal ­battle for that audience’s consciousness. In the 1960s, few African Americans w ­ ere vis­i­ble in tv or film or exercised any authority ­behind the scenes. During the April  1968 uprising, Warner Saunders, the director of the Better Boys Foundation, was hastily drafted to host a special tele­vi­sion program called For Blacks Only, which was so popu­lar it became a regular feature on the Chicago abc affiliate. This was one of the few Black-­ 258  /

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themed shows on tele­vi­sion, anywhere. As more Black-­oriented film and tele­vi­sion began to be produced, critics noted ironies. In the article “Black tv: Its Promises and Prob­lems,” Ebony noted the irony that tele­vi­sion had, since its inception, served as an “intelligence source” for African Americans: “They have shown the ‘hardware’ of material luxury and the ‘software’ of superior social and professional roles enjoyed by white society. In short, blacks have found out how far b­ ehind they r­eally ­were, what alternatives w ­ ere available and have been naturally motivated to press for improvements.”2 The question was ­whether ­there was more to ­these “improvements” than increased access to the same consumer existence that whites enjoyed. As the era of blaxploitation dawned in the early 1970s, observers wondered ­whether this actually constituted a form of liberation or, rather, its opposite.3 In Jet, Chester Higgins Sr. wondered ­whether the new spate of Black-­ oriented films constituted a “boom or bust” for African Americans. The respected actor Ossie Davis said of them, “I find that most of the stuff ­today is easy to forget. It has the same quality, the same surface values, the same nonsense relating to sex and vio­lence as the regular white films.” It would take time, he reflected, before “fi­nally we ourselves ­will say, ‘For God’s sake, this is junk! This is nonsense! Is this what we got f­ ree for?’ ”4 Struggling community theaters in the 1970s w ­ ere acutely feeling the squeeze of the movies’ and tv’s new appeal to Black viewers. Every­one at Kuumba knew ­people who had left Chicago for Hollywood. Members of Earth, Wind & Fire, who scored Sweetback, had gotten their start in Phil Cohran’s Affro-­Arts Theater, a short walk from where Kuumba performed at the South Side Community Art Center.5 Gordon Parks, who directed Shaft (his son Gordon Parks  Jr. directed the Super Fly series), had taught photo­ graphy and run the darkroom ­there. Sweetback and Shaft together signaled the launch of blaxploitation. Whereas before the 1970s Hollywood had made ­little direct appeal to Black audiences, change was clearly afoot. In 1972 James Murray wrote in tdr/The Drama Review, in an article titled “Black Movies/Black Theater,” that “film has become a threat to small community theater groups.”6 The New Lafayette Theater in Harlem put out a pamphlet stating that “T.V. and movies are as harmful to the ­mental health of the Black community, as drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are to its physical health. This is a fact. . . . ​The minds of our ­children are at stake. The mind of our ­future is at stake.” And ­under the heading “Save a Black Mind!” the pamphlet urged, “Support Your Local Black Artist. ­There are art exhibits, ­music concerts, poetry readings, plays, and even Black film showings g­ oing on in the community ­every day. . . . ​Take some ­children, any ­children. Do your part in S tarring the Black C om m unity

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the real revolution. Change some mind.”7 From this line of thinking, community is also about place and about face-­to-­face interactions, about evading the exploitation being practiced by Hollywood. Blaxploitation in the 1970s now tends to be understood through the production side, as rhetorical and artistic—an exploitative, sensationalistic approach to the pre­sen­ta­tion of Black themes, settings, and characters. But community theater groups who objected to it ­were just as concerned with the consumption side: that is, how ­these films (they believed) exploited and even psychologically harmed their viewers. It must have also irked Black Arts Movement critics of Van Peebles that he claimed to be working with a “Black aesthetic”—­and even more, that he invoked community with his opening title, “Starring the Black Community.” Van Peebles uses this phrase unironically, but ­others begged to differ, and the debate that flared up provides a pivotal tension for my exploration of the notion of community and its relationship to art. What, in this context, did community mean? For Kuumba, steeped in cultural nationalism, community was an organ­izing princi­ple, at the heart of its efforts. And at first blush, Sweetback the character seems to have ­little interest in community: he is radically individualistic. He resists solidarity with the young militant, Moo-­ Moo, whose life he has just saved: Moo-­Moo asks, “Where we ­going?,” and Sweetback replies, “Where you get that ‘we’ shit?” In Huey P. Newton’s extended defense of Sweetback, the Black Panther leader strains to demonstrate a transformation in the title character’s consciousness. Sweetback begins as an individualist, he acknowledges, but in the end he assumes a strong collective consciousness, a transformation that is itself instructive.8 The escape narrative is radically individual, though Sweetback receives assistance along the way from vari­ous ­people: a group of young ­people who set a police car on fire to provide a distraction, a group of Mexican farmworkers who help him flee. ­Toward the end of the film he is given an opportunity to escape by a Black biker and instead tells him to take Moo-­Moo: “He’s our ­future, br’er. Take him.” Responding to this point, Ward concludes that the paucity of insight given into Sweetback’s subjectivity, his frustrating opacity, can provide l­ittle justification for arguments for a revolutionary change of consciousness.9 Sweetback commits his initial act without any apparent motivation—he is a kind of cipher—­but grows into a quasi-­heroic role with the help of the community. Act precedes motivation in an existentialist vein. Indeed, Van Peebles’s film also reflects existentialist attitudes that w ­ ere a common cultural language in Paris of the 1960s, where he came of age as an intellectual and a

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filmmaker. It is hard to find a more apt description of Sweetback than t­ hese lines from Jean-­Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism and Humanism”: [Man] is what he ­wills, and as he conceives himself ­after already existing—as he ­wills to be ­after that leap ­towards existence. Man is nothing ­else but that which he makes of himself. . . . ​I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry—­but in such a case what is usually called my ­will is prob­ably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts e­ very man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.10 When Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Chicago’s Negro Digest, profiled Black American intellectuals in Paris in 1966, he made prominent references to Sartre and existentialism in an article that also described Van Peebles as “perhaps the most successful of the young Americans around Paris.”11 Thus, the intellectual orientation of Van Peebles’s French formation could have been legible to attentive observers. Indeed, the existential ambiguity of the film may have been what made it especially attractive to (predominantly white) avant-­garde moviegoers.12 Some p ­ eople help Sweetback escape, but seemingly by chance, and ultimately he is on his own. Perhaps the best parallel for Sweetback is that of a slave escaping to freedom (the weapons with which he beats the cops to death are his handcuffs), but at first blush, ­there is no hint of potential for an or­ga­nized, Underground Railroad–­style re­sis­tance. Rather, the film pres­ents re­sis­tance as part and parcel of an informal and ephemeral street culture. About two-­thirds of the way through the film, as the police go on a manhunt for the fugitive, a series of street scenes appears in a montage, indicating the comprehensiveness of their search and a series of short evasive statements by “ghetto folks” who come together to keep the police off the trail. Van Peebles used nonprofessional actors, sometimes observing them in their own context and providing minimal direction. This is where the “Black community” seems to have the potential for self-­ consciousness, but it is a negative self-­consciousness, a tactic of evasiveness. The script reads as follows:

Starr ing t he Black Com m uni ty

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MONTAGE—­STREETS—­LOOKING FOR SWEETBACK—­DAY

Wino in skid row with a ­bottle. He never heard of no Sweetback. vari­ ous shots of the inner city: bridges, roads, overpasses, Sweetback ­running, trains, a cop, Sweetback in a phone booth, cop cars squealing round corners, cops peering into shop win­dows, a guy fileting a fish, dogs barking, street sweeper, p ­ eople waiting for a bus, e­ tc., intercut with ghetto folks caught up in the manhunt.

ghetto folks 1. I told you one time I ­ain’t seen Sweetback . . . ​Never heard of him . . . ​W hat ­else do he go by? 2. I’m positive I’ve never seen him . . . 3. Huh? Yeah? Thank you. 4. I’ve been looking for him myself. 5. I ­don’t know no Sweetback! 6. I ­ain’t saw Sweetback. 7. I ­haven’t seen him.13 Any sense of a “community” is perhaps most evident in this portrait of the space of the neighborhood, the casual moments when community members hang out on the streets and deny having seen Sweetback. ­These repeated denials represent “the community” covering for the fleeing antihero. Lerone Bennett  Jr., editor of Ebony, criticized Sweetback in his evocatively titled article “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland.” He articulates many of the same criticisms of Sweetback as Kuumba Workshop’s, and likewise uses his assessment of the film to establish a program for Black image-­making. He argues that “such a preposterous reversal of images could only happen in a community without a real sense of the meaning of its experience and the overwhelming power of electronic and film media to distort and debase even the best artistic intentions.”14 Taking the notion of image very seriously, Bennett seeks art forms that w ­ ill “redefine the black image” using “­free black words that sculpt new images of the black man, the black ­woman, the black child”—­resulting, among other ­things, in a “new form of male–­female partnership.”15 The task of Black art is to “create images and symbols that w ­ ill lead [a man] to his manhood and his enemies.”16 First, the community must develop a consensus on what exactly the “ideal”

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images should be; only once that is established can cultural workers “get on with the task of creating and projecting directive images to channel the energy and desiring of the ­people.”17 “Directive images,” a version of “positive images” that emphasizes their agency, are a key part of his prescription. They would help establish relationships (between man and man, man and ­woman, and man–­woman–­child—­woman and ­woman, perhaps not surprisingly, being absent). “What is required now,” he writes, “is a core of directive images, shorn of the patina of archaism, authoritarianism and quietism”—­ these are qualities he associates with the Nation of Islam—­“and linked to the interests of the black collectivity in a perspective of radical po­liti­cal action.”18 ­These directive images are required to create a ­free Black real­ity. As I have hinted in the above, Sweetback touched another nerve in cultural nationalism: the latter’s very pronounced heteronormative politics. In the critique, the perversity of plot and values—­the absence of a clear message—­also seems linked to sexual perversity. Bennett makes his attitude ­toward queer sexuality clear in the way he conjoins discussion of Sweetback with Flip Wilson’s gender-­bending character Geraldine. “Nobody ever f***ed his way to freedom,” he wrote. Clearly, one of the ­things that bothered both Ward and Bennett was the queerness of the movie, which appeared in excess of the requirements of the plot. All sex in Sweetback is nonnormative: troublingly intergenerational, performed for onlookers, transracial, or involving sex workers. A per­for­mance involving lesbian sex with a “Good Dyke Fairy Godmother” opens the action, and late in the story three gay men appear taking part in the community’s denial of having seen Sweetback. (Reading the film as an allegory of Van Peebles’s experience with the film industry might in fact suggest a dif­fer­ent reading of the role of money and public per­for­mance in the sex scenes.) In her assessment of the film, Ward argues that “Van Peebles pictures sexual freakishness as an essential and unmistakeable part of black real­ity.” Such a film, Ward writes, “can only do further damage to . . . ​the movement t­ oward black identity and self-­love”; it “pres­ents no positive images of black p ­ eople or the black condition.”19 This leads her to won­der “­whether this new rage for black images is the product of concern for black p ­ eople’s liberation or merely the product of ‘black skins, white masks’ in which the black image-­maker has . . . ​totally absorbed and perpetuated the values of his oppressor.”20 Some of the emphasis on nonnormative sex could be “explained away”: Van Peebles intentionally gave Hollywood the impression he was making a porno film as a way of using nonunion, that is Black, l­abor. But in one of the

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final portraits of “the Black community,” a “street” character looks right at the camera and says, a tad coquettishly, “I’m a militant queen.” The moment is neither about suffering, in the manner of older social realist repre­sen­ta­tion, nor “positive” or “directive” in the heteronormative vein proposed by cultural nationalists. It calls into question the presumed relationship between heteronormativity and militancy. And with no relationship to the plot, ­there is simply no recuperating this moment for acting, or fiction. In the place where the queer and the “real” met, Sweetback was at its most transgressive. But the negative character of solidarity, the negative character of Sweetback’s own heroism, combines with what Kuumba saw as “deviant” sexuality, leaving nothing positive to hold onto, and no mechanism for radicalization, despite the veneer of revolutionary politics. Bennett’s publication, Ebony, was, of course, beholden to advertising dollars, and a cigarette ad in the ­middle of his article illustrates the gendering of the sophisticated messaging that commodified and marketed “Black” imagery and sexuality, cultural nationalist and other­wise (figure 6.1). With the placement of the w ­ oman’s oversize “natu­ral” at the man’s crotch, and the prominent titles “It’s only natu­ral” and “Extra long,” the Salem Extra Long ad mobilizes a rather brilliant constellation of oral gratification, subordination of ­women, and penis size, together with the idea of “the natu­ral” (which covers the hairstyle, gendered sexual submission, and racially coded male anatomy all in the context of outdoor sex). It shares with Sweetback both moral ambiguity and the selling of sex, but it emphasizes the heteronormative. And certainly, the movement tended to enforce traditional norms of gender and sexuality in support of reproduction as a revolutionary act: think of Curtis Mayfield’s lyric in “This Is My Country”: “­every ­brother is a leader, ­every ­sister is a breeder.” ­Women in heterosexual relationships might choose willingly to subordinate themselves to their male partners, but the results ­were not always entirely happy. And if the movement’s reproductive politics sometimes subjugated ­women, it very consistently and vocally excluded homo­sexuality. This put some gay and lesbian Black artists in painful situations, at odds with movement “­family.” Some acquiesced to norms and entered heterosexual marriages, or remained other­wise closeted; ­others found common cause with white artists rather than the nationalist community. Kuumba worked in other ways to provide alternatives to Hollywood’s “Black” imagery. In the theater group’s own contemporaneous work, it did not shy away from the negative but accompanied it with a message. Months before the controversy over Sweetback, Kuumba had presented The Leader, a play that criticized the venality of (some) Civil Rights Movement lead264  /

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6.1. Ad for Salem Extra Long cigarettes from Ebony, September 1971.

ers through one par­tic­u­lar character (whose immorality is partly expressed through his seduction by a white w ­ oman). They would go on to support the making of a documentary on Iceberg Slim that depicted marginal characters like “hustlers, pimps and junkies” in order to urge viewers not to idolize them. Rather than censoring such images and topics, Kuumba members wanted them to serve a hortatory purpose. According to Ward, “Black art must be functional. . . . ​It must educate; provide a deeper understanding of black ­people and the forces shaping their lives, cause blacks to examine their lives and the lives of ­others, critically examine society, and ultimately enlist blacks in the strug­gle for liberation.”21 Kuumba, she argues, “has no arguments with displays of nudity, sex, or vio­lence so long as such aspects of life are displayed to achieve some moral or aesthetic purpose, not just as ends in themselves.”22 ­There ­were other performance-­based responses, too, to blaxploitation. In September  1972, the near West Side group forum (Full Opportunity Redirected to Uplift Mankind), which also protested slum landlords and drug dealers, performed street theater to attack the “visual oppression” of the blaxploitation genre. Artists and musicians performed a mock funeral, parading coffins down the street outside the Oriental Theatre, at Randolph and State, where Super Fly was being shown.23 In the fall of 1973, Kuumba produced S tarri ng the Black Comm un ity

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Useni Eugene Perkins’s play The Image Makers (figure 6.2), a pointed critique of blaxploitation.24 As  D. Soyini Madison puts it, the play demonstrated how Hollywood “erased the ­labor of the hard won anti-­stereotype work, of black cultural producers, by riveting the liberatory ‘black is beautiful’ back onto [Hollywood] with distorted gusto and buffoonish Technicolor to make ste­reo­typical images anew.”25 In the Kuumba production of The Image Makers, actors in whiteface played Mr. Hollywood, the Ministers of Propaganda and Finance, Dr.  Frankenstein, and Miss Amer­i­ca (figure  6.3), while Black characters included U ­ ncle Tom, who helps the white power structure by rounding up a Pimp, a Dope Pusher, a Street Man, and an Alcoholic to be transformed by Frankenstein into Sweetback, Super Fly, Shaft, and Blacula. Blacula appears swirling his cape in a striking photo­graph produced for Kuumba by Doyle Wicks (figure 6.4). The play ends when the militant Black characters Domino, Anhur, and Antar infiltrate and interrupt the blaxploitation proceedings. When they first appear, at the Headquarters of the Black Image Corp., Anhur—­presumably speaking for many in the Black Arts Movement—is complaining about the genre: “Just when we ­were beginning to have a positive influence on our community, they come up with t­hese jive black movies.”26 Domino replies didactically, but with more optimism: “The system has always tried to create images for us. It ­will take time to change them.”27 The Collage Aesthetic and the Superreal

Most of the “community members” in Sweetback face the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as if being interviewed by a news reporter. ­These scenes, and the assertion that the Black community is the star of the film, allies Sweetback with a ­whole range of hybrid fiction/documentary films of the 1960s and 1970s that focused in part or in w ­ hole on Black themes. Their blending of fact and fiction, and the use of nonactors to play themselves or their peers, suggests the experiments of Jean Rouch’s midcentury ethnographic films (sometimes called “ethnofictions”). His fiction film Jaguar, filmed in the 1950s but released only in 1967, was (as Paul Henley puts it) a “fiction without a screenplay”—­its story improvised in collaboration with the young African men who played the protagonists. Rouch used documentary techniques to film a fictional story, Henley writes, to “show the full range of . . . ​ experience” of mi­grants traveling for work from Niger to the Gold Coast (now Ghana).28 The white American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin did something similar with Come Back, Africa (1959), a portrait of the barbarity of apartheid. 266  /

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6.2. The Image Makers poster,

1973. Courtesy of SSCAC Archives. 6.3. Doyle Wicks, “Miss

Hollywood” (The Image Makers). Special Collections, Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Library.

6.4. Doyle Wicks, “Blacula” (The Image Makers). Special Collections,

Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Library.

Rogosin shot the film surreptitiously in South Africa using nonactors—as well as (or including?) the singer Miriam Makeba, who went on to pursue her ­career in the U.S. and married Stokely Carmichael in 1968. In the summer of 1967, Come Back, Africa screened at P ­ iper’s Alley in Chicago, in the Old Town neighborhood. It was described alluringly by the Defender as “contraband.”29 To blend fiction with documentary thus had a strong association with experimental films shot on the African continent that had implicit or explicit po­ liti­cal messages. As we have seen, Sweetback’s message was less legible. Its queerness ran ­counter to the ­family politics espoused by Black cultural nationalists. And for them, its existentialist orientation positioned it as fundamentally opposed to the doctrine of “positive images” and damaging to Black po­liti­ cal consciousness. Yet the relationship it forges between real­ity and fiction closely parallels other developments in Black art in the period. Val Gray Ward herself appeared in the Black Militants sequence of Medium Cool, in which artists as actors seized the platform of the film to make their own statements in their own voices—­appropriating the camera to their own ends. At another end of the spectrum of documentary options w ­ ere shots of street life in which p ­ eople served merely as props—­their permission to be filmed presumably not having been secured—to provide authenticity. Another way of thinking about this and similar experiments in time-­based media 268  /

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might be through Gerald McWorter’s obac position paper, in which he had ­imagined art forms that would derive their strength and their content from experience, “at the same time embodying a spiritual message of the truth, or the insight, or the meaning, of that experience.” This could be interpreted as a doubleness: real­ity plus interpretation, real­ity plus imagination, coexisting in the artwork. “So, on the one hand,” he wrote, “art deals with managing the ambiguity of our lives, as well as making a prophetic declaration about our lives. On the one hand, dealing with the black, and the white, and the many grays of our communal and personal experiences, as well as making a profound, precise, and forceful declaration about that experience.”30 Van Peebles’s opening title, “Starring the Black Community,” implied that the film, and perhaps more particularly the vignettes in which he incorporated journalistic-­style interactions with nonactors, ­were true to life. They could not, however, be understood as social documentary in the same sense as Paul Car­ter Harrison’s pejorative reference to the “static imagery that comes with photographic duplication of natu­ral life, the theatrical hot-­house that nurtures the emotions of Social Realism.”31 Ward writes that some have argued that “the film portrays ‘real­ity.’ . . . ​They . . . ​miss,” she says, “a fundamental point about black art: it must do more than merely manifest a real­ity.”32 Don L. Lee wrote, “We have an abundance of that which we d­ on’t need in the black community. We have 24 hours of bad, negative reflections. Nobody nowhere needs to tell us how we live; we live it ­every day.”33 But if it documented “the community,” Sweetback did not do so with the hope of achieving an emotional response and thus spurring charitable action. And despite the controversy it engendered, it might be argued that Sweetback actually typified a component of the Black aesthetic, at least as formulated by africobra: the “superreal,” a term used by Jeff Donaldson in his essay “AfriCOBRA 1.” africobra was producing “Superreal images for superreal ­people,” he wrote, reflecting “the superreality that is our ­every day all day thang.”34 This was a form of surrealism that was not distortion but reality-­plus, refusing to abandon the intensity of life as lived in ­favor of a separate, pure, or even fantastical aesthetic experience. It related to, but also extended, the idea of “mimesis at midpoint”—­the space between repre­sen­ta­tion and abstraction—­ which africobra members derived from African aesthetics.35 It was art that filled up, added to, and exceeded real­ity—­but was not apart from real­ity. It “moved with existence.”36 Inspiration may have come from a famous statement by Romare Bearden: “I ­don’t need to go looking for happenings, the absurd, or the surreal,” he said in 1964, ­because ­things ­were ­going on right outside his studio win­dow “that neither Dali nor Beckett nor Ionesco would Starr ing the Black Comm un i ty

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6.5. Teen painting

Frederick Douglass, Art & Soul, 1968 or 1969. Photo by Ann Zelle.

have thought pos­si­ble.”37 Bearden, in other words, looked at the scenes he witnessed e­ very day and rejected existing forms of art as model. Rather than denying lived experience in ­favor of aesthetic pursuits, “superreal” art added to it. The Chicago africobra artists did not remove figuration but added to it in color and luminosity, in the use of text, and in what the group’s manifesto refers to as “syncopated, rhythmic repetition”—­ inspired both stylistically and sometimes also in subject m ­ atter (especially 38 in the case of Wadsworth Jarrell’s work) by m ­ usic. A number of works by africobra artists and o­ thers in their orbit imply this notion of the superreal as something added to but not displacing the real. On a basic level, this manifests pre­ce­dents in the par­tic­u­lar material practices that “positive images” required. To paint positive—­and recognizable—­images of African Americans required source material. In the days before Photoshop this typically meant clippings, that is, found images culled (literally cut) from print media. In one of Ann Zelle’s photos of a class at Art & Soul, a young boy paints a picture of Frederick Douglass from a small photo­graph (figure 6.5). 270  /

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Creating picture galleries of Black history for curricular purposes, Margaret Burroughs accumulated imagery in her museum and collected and traced images from books, magazines, and newspapers. F. H. Hammurabi’s Black history calendars w ­ ere collages of such images. In conversation, Douglas Williams remembered working for him as a student at his House of Knowledge on the third floor of the sscac, cutting out clippings—­images of notable African Americans—­from books and articles to paste up into the calendar pages.39 Some artists played with found images in sophisticated ways. Ralph Arnold’s collage paintings, for example, combined abstract painted shapes and lines, often in primary colors, with found imagery—­typically black-­and-­ white or sepia-­toned photo­graphs collaged into paintings or reproduced in paint. José Williams created a painting, Ghetto, around a collaged newsprint photo, a dejected boy on a city stoop (figure 6.6). A grid of tightly packed black architectural forms surrounds the boy, delineated by thin, reedy lines

6.6. José Williams, Ghetto, ca. 1969. Acrylic and mixed

media on canvas. South Side Community Art Center. Starr ing the Black Com m uni ty

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of color. The excessive density suggests the overcrowded Bronzeville conditions that led so many residents to seek housing elsewhere once they had the opportunity. “Ghetto is about a young kid coming to Chicago,” said Williams, “and not seeing all of ­those buildings [downtown], not seeing anything like that.”40 In his work, Williams often explored visual rhymes between urban and rural Black life. Faintly overlaying the crowded city grid in the painting are thick swirls of black and red paint—­flourishes, letters, or perhaps musical notes—­lyrical in a way that might suggest, within a claustrophobic space, the opening up of a space of ideation or fantasy. Gerald Williams also used collage in Wake Up, a painting that he transformed into his print for the africobra collective printmaking proj­ect (figure  6.7). The painting uses an a­ ctual broadside that alleged a government plan for concentration camps for African Americans called the “King Alfred Plan.” It was based on a fictional account, but it was a believable fiction of the time. The painting incorporates the pamphlet by collage, and at the same time documents the encounter with the man who offered it to Williams, a real moment on the street. The idea of art that documents an encounter might be extended to a mixed-­media piece by Douglas Williams that included the cast of a young ­woman’s face, a teenager from Robert Taylor Homes who told him she thought she was ugly. To reflect her beauty back to her, he made a cast of her face using plaster gauze, painted it in bright colors, and surrounded it with a hooked-­rug halo in black, red, and green, the colors of the African liberation flag (figure 6.8). The cast suggests a direct form of pre­sen­ta­tion that serves—in its directness—as an affirming communication from artist to the subject of his work. Jeff Donaldson’s own J.  D. McClain’s Day in Court (figure  6.9) creates a precise relationship between a source photo and the painting that surrounds it and amplifies and interprets it. Donaldson’s striking image provides an interpretation of a newspaper photo that captures a moment in a 1970 incident known as the “Marin County Court­house Incident.” James McClain was an inmate at San Quentin Prison on trial for allegedly stabbing a prison guard. In the course of the trial, the African American activist Jonathan Jackson threw him a gun and directed him to hold it to the presiding judge’s head. Jackson had planned the action as a hostage taking in order to negotiate the freedom of the Soledad B ­ rothers, another group of accused prisoners who included his b­ rother, George Jackson. By the end of the day’s dramatic events, Jonathan Jackson, McClain, the judge, and one other man ­were dead. The incident also led to the arrest of Angela Davis, b­ ecause the guns Jackson used w ­ ere registered to her. In the newspaper image McClain 272  /

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6.7. Gerald Williams, Wake Up, 1971. Screenprint. South Side Community Art Center.

6.8. Douglas Williams, A Tribute to My Black ­Sister, ca. 1970.

Installation shot from exhibition at South Side Community Art Center. Photographer and pres­ent location unknown.

holds the gun to the judge’s head, which, in the painting, becomes a skull, its sockets studded with two baleful eyes. The judge’s pale hand grasps for McClain’s crotch. Donaldson’s signature stencil-­like letters spelling “glass” appear as if on a surface that separates the viewer from the scene; moreover, the viewer’s access to the figures is obstructed as light and color refract. It is McClain’s outstretched hand that frames the clipping: if the newspaper image represents documentary veracity, the real, the painting incorporates it, expands upon it, and abstracts it all at once. In ­these works, responding to the revolutionary conditions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists created a double mode of repre­sen­ta­tion, one that incorporated a central documentary or indexical image and then exploded it, expansively, or layered colorful fantasy imagery over and around it. Black Film and Tele­vi­sion

Given access to mass-­media tools, could activist media makers do something similar and express both the real­ity and the imagination of po­liti­cal strug­ gle? In Vincent Harding’s article “Black Students and the Impossible Revolution,” published in the Journal of Black Studies in 1970, he asks the reader to imagine what it would mean for the mass media to give full expression to the lives of African Americans. This idea is part and parcel of the impos274  /

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6.9. Jeff Donaldson, J. D. McClain’s Day in Court, 1970. Paint on

cardboard with ink on paper. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.

sibility of his vision. “Who can imagine,” he wrote, “what tele­vi­sion would be like if it w ­ ere not only filled with black images, but if it reflected a vision of life that came out of the black encounter with oppression, suffering, strug­ gle, and endurance?”41 The idea of using film and tele­vi­sion po­liti­cally was a natu­ral outgrowth of the ambition to reach a broad audience that underlay the mural movement on the one hand and the media-­savvy activism of the Black Panthers on the other. Many efforts w ­ ere ­under way to establish community film and tele­vi­sion training programs. If Blacks could gain access to ­these mass media, it seemed, perhaps film and tele­vi­sion could be not just a reflection of but a driving force ­behind something like a broad social and cultural revolution. But the ambition to reach a mass audience, to establish a sense of community, and to promote liberation butted up against the constraints of the cap­i­tal­ist organ­ization of the media. Clearly, to produce a film required backers, and to produce a tele­vi­sion show required advertisers. They also required technological infrastructure involving major capital investments. And they required skills. In an article on Black youth art programs in the Saturday Review in July 1970, Don D. Bushnell emphasized opportunities for growth in the area of media education, highlighting programs teaching film and radio and, potentially, tele­vi­sion, with a progressive, even utopian, social agenda: “The arts, in alliance with the new participatory technology, can build a sense of community where only isolated ­people and fragmented neighborhoods existed before. Frantz Fanon suggests that a community ­will evolve only when a p ­ eople control their own communications network. The young minority artist ­will be a major ­factor in forging the links.”42 This period also saw the founding of the Community Film Workshops. Chicago’s Community Film Workshop received initial funding from the Office of Eco­ nder the leadership of nomic Opportunity (oeo) in 1971, and continued, u Jim Taylor, supported by volunteer ­labor and other grants ­after the oeo funding ceased in 1972.43 Technical training was imperative (and part of the initial oeo agenda), but workshop leaders also made sure participants learned analytical skills and gained “understanding of aspects of audience manipulation, racism, and propaganda in films.”44 As in other contexts, organizers of media education initiatives had to pres­ent their work to funders in terms of job training or social adjustment, even if it might have more revolutionary aspirations. This is the context in which Don McIlvaine began teaching film to the students at Art & Soul. He wrote in November to the Playboy Foundation, “We have presently more than thirty-­five young ­people who have shown remarkable ability in film-­making and 276  /

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could possibly go on to become fine useful technicians as cameramen, film editors, sound men, ­etc.”45 Don McIlvaine was interested in developing the talents of his young students as media makers themselves—as he also sought to make art that incorporated an au­then­tic voice of the street. One of the films he worked on with them, called Street Art in the Ghetto, surveyed murals on both the South and West Sides. It seems that Street Art may never have been completed, but Jan van der Marck took enough of a continuing interest in Art & Soul that he agreed to purchase a copy of the film for the mca for $250; he also sent letters out to solicit other potential buyers.46 The film would have included appearances by Margaret Burroughs, William Walker, Jeff Donaldson, and young Vice Lords, as well as McIlvaine himself. The DuSable Museum sponsored the proposal for a youth film workshop, and Margaret Burroughs wrote a letter of support.47 In the extended proposal, McIlvaine described technical and staffing needs for a full-­fledged film workshop that would train students and produce documentary films suitable for tv. “We have seen very apt young ­people with a definite flair for the arts,” he wrote, “literally snuff out their lives in foolish ventures in crimes as a result of the unavailability of progressive programs as we recommend ­here.” The workshop would help “develop a sense of positive pride.”48 In June 1971 he wrote to the W. Clement and Jessie Stone Foundation to arrange a screening of the unfinished film.49 In one of his proposals, McIlvaine described plans to “explore in an or­ga­ nized, and effective way, creative ways of utilizing . . . ​filmmaking, to teach and pres­ent visual documents . . . ​of life as it exists in the black inner-­city areas of Amer­i­ca ­today.”50 The idea of the “visual document” extended beyond a chronicle of mural painting to vignettes based on real characters and situations of McIlvaine’s acquaintance, which in another proposal he described as “the vari­ous aspects of community activities and behavioral patterns related to environmental surroundings.”51 In this context, his filmmaking efforts also included a film called Back Alley Rip-­Off (a title that resonates with Mitchell Caton’s Rip-­Off, painted in the Alley), for which he wrote a treatment and portion of a script and shot sample scenes. In the treatment, three street p ­ eople split a lottery ticket that turns out to be a winner, and have to find one another again to claim their prize. The portrait of life on the margins, loving but cynical, includes street hustlers, a lesbian voodoo practitioner named Miss Cupid, a “Superfly dude with two white girls,” a “Sissy walking down street (switching),” a marijuana-­smoking storefront preacher (Rev. Herb) who delivers a monologue in the toilet about S tarr ing t he Black Com m unity

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the t­ emple of meditation he wants to build, and a group of militants trying to keep their revolution alive by acting like gangsters—­intimidating store ­owners and moving in on the drug trade. A nightclub scene features a per­ for­mance by the real-­life singer, comedian, and transvestite performer Wilbur “Hi-­Fi” White, followed by his attempted seduction of a painter named Tommy Green. The characters in the sample reel McIlvaine shot and edited to send to Hollywood constantly blur the line between acting and not-­acting—­indeed the drunk characters seem actually to be drunk.52 In the portions for which film footage still exists, comic exaggeration sits side by side with extended, nonnarrative shots that provide a portrait of life on the West Side. A shot of the two militants strutting down 16th  Street provides an opportunity to see both the façade of Art & Soul—­with new, hip signage (“art & soul art gallery”)—­and Black Man’s Dilemma, the mural by Don McIlvaine that replaced Sachio Yamashita’s stripes on the side of the building (figure 6.10). Like the mural film, this one remained unfinished. The script is inspired both by local context and by the sense of possibility in Hollywood’s newfound interest in Black subject ­matter that spawned the blaxploitation trend. The very character types suggest conflicting values: honest depiction, entertainment appeal, and the “positive images” of the Black Arts Movement. Though the fiction film was obviously intended as a comedy, it also addressed the goal of portraying “community activities” and “behavioral patterns related to environmental surroundings”—­thus channeling youth “into constructive creative occupations.”53 McIlvaine’s efforts may have derived energy and ambition from the making of the film Lord ­Thing (1970). Directed by DeWitt Beall, Lord ­Thing presented the history of the Conservative Vice Lords and chronicled the organ­ ization’s efforts in the realms of business, culture, and politics. Lord ­Thing tells the cvl story with ­actual gang members “playing” themselves, or reenacting scenes from the gang’s past. Coalition-­building meetings, protest scenes, and McIlvaine’s mural Into the Mainstream (figure 5.10) appear in color, thus set decidedly in the pres­ent or the very recent past. Other footage is marked as historical by virtue of being shot in black and white. The opening presented standard shots of “ghetto” poverty, with the superimposed (and fictional) date of 1955. In other scenes specific to the earlier history of the gang, including fight scenes conducted with gusto, young Vice Lords reenacted the past exploits of older members. Hints at temporal confusion appear, though: in one of the black-­and-­white scenes, the apparently diegetic ­music of a h ­ ouse party about to turn violent is James Brown’s (rather horrify278  /

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6.10. Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall.

ing) 1969 release “Licking Stick.” Around thirty-­seven minutes in, one of the earlier black-­and-­white scenes—­the fateful fight that started Goat on the path ­toward becoming a Vice Lord leader—­repeats, this time in color, unfolding this time with an audio track from a meeting in which Bobby Gore exhorts renegade factions to give up vio­lence (figure 6.11). In color, it is more obvious than in the first appearance of the sequence that one of the actors is wearing a dashiki—­very much a late 1960s article of clothing. The fact of the reenactment is revealed, collapsing past and pres­ent, as Gore criticizes continued vio­lence that threatens the community-­oriented work the cvl is ­doing. At the end of the film, the three ­faces of Into the Mainstream are rhymed visually with the ­faces of Fred Hampton, Leonard Sengali (spokesman of the Black P Stone Nation, who narrates the film), and Bobby Gore (figure 6.12). The arrangement of the three figures also strongly resembles the composition of Gerald Williams’s Messages (see figure 4.10). Another film flirted with the “blaxploitation” genre to serious po­liti­cal purpose, constructing a dif­fer­ent type of “superreal.” The Spook Who Sat by the Door, written and produced by Sam Greenlee (a member of obac), was based on his novel of the same title. It shows in very precise ways what Sweetback’s radical individualism did not do: how to set off rebellions or­ga­nized by politicized gangs that would grow into a nationwide Black revolution.54 In Spook, the character Don Freeman, the cia’s first African American agent, returns home to Chicago to put the skills he has learned as a spy to train and or­ga­nize gang members to use the cover of urban unrest Starr ing t he Black Comm un ity

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6.11. Lord ­Thing, 1970. Still from film directed by DeWitt Beall.

Graphic with end credits. 6.12. Back Alley Rip-­Off, 1970. Still from film directed by Don McIlvaine.

to generate revolution. Freeman’s own cover identity is that of a well-­paid social worker who enjoys fine liquor, art, and the latest jazz. Like Sweetback, this film, too, had a cover: to raise funds, the filmmakers showed United Artists shots of a nightclub scene and riots, carefully omitting the revolutionary message to create the impression of a more standard blaxploitation film. Spook also plays with real­ity and fiction, creating a thriller that also seems like a step-­by-­step didactic blueprint for revolution. Indeed, it must have been taken as such: it was pulled from all theaters soon ­after the beginning 280  /

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of its run. For de­cades, ­there was not a film print to be found; it circulated only in bootleg video versions. That Kinda Style Goes On

Vincent Harding wrote in 1969: “Only in the deepest, probing, dream-­like sections of the mind can we imagine a black throng surging into e­ very institution of American society.”55 This mass would reorder Amer­i­ca through its Third World consciousness, its identification with “the wretched of the earth” (a phrase Harding uses without quotes or citation, suggesting he assumes his Ebony readership is well acquainted with Frantz Fanon’s book of that title). “White Amer­i­ca would have to die,” he suggests, meaning not (necessarily) that whites would have to die but that the national formation of Amer­i­ca as “White Amer­i­ca” would have to die—­perhaps, indeed, it was already ­dying. The title of his article refers to the revolution it would take to bring this about as an “impossible revolution”: impossible, yet necessary. Harding first published his article in Ebony in the fall of 1969, and then republished it in the Journal of Black Studies the following year. Insisting on a break with traditional American national identity was easier in the pages of the journal, with its minimal advertising, than it was in Ebony, where Harding’s article was punctuated by ads for beer, insurance, and hair-­care products—­pomades, wigs, straighteners, shampoo (including a shampoo ad featuring three models with long, silky, straight hair in shades of red, black, and blonde). Opposite his article, an ad for U.S. Savings Bonds displays a light-­skinned Black male speaker who says, “I used to stand up and say the world was a miserable place. Then I would sit down and do nothing about it.” The action the ad proposes—­the alternative to ­doing nothing to make the world better—is to buy bonds: to “take stock in Amer­i­ca.” It is a strange phrase: the more typical idiom would be to take stock of Amer­i­ca, which might, however, entail finding it wanting. Perhaps the copywriter, given the implied call to civic duty, hesitated at the more overtly commercial word buy. Instead, the suggestion seems to be that without any obvious causal link, “taking” stock in Amer­i­ca means to create an efficacious stake (for African Americans) in Amer­i­ca’s ­future. The irony of this juxtaposition with Harding’s article seems almost too much to bear. Even in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in the context of one of the most genuinely revolutionary artifacts of Black liberation, the main character, Freeman, displays superior taste, if not supreme enjoyment, in the vari­ous requisite ele­ments of American consumerism (figure 6.13). He serves the best liquor, has the most up-­to-­date stereo S tarring the Black Comm uni ty

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6.13. Spook Who Sat by the Door, 1973. Still from film directed by Ivan Dixon.

system, home décor, and clothes. In the novel, it is clear that he maintains distance from t­hese accessories (“His glasses w ­ ere of crystal, his beer mugs pewter, his salad bowl Dansk and his w ­ omen phony. . . . ​He slipped on his cover like a tailored suit. . . . ​He fell into step with o­ thers like himself, safe, tame, ambitious Negroes, marking time to a distant drummer, the beat hypnotic, unsyncopated, the smiles fixed on their ­faces.”56). In the film, the distance is less clear; he seems to enjoy ­these trappings. Perhaps it is just that he enjoys how well he can wear a false identity, but considering the film as a genuine effort to activate revolution, its repre­sen­ta­tion of sleek comforts seems like it might get in the way, a l­ittle. It might even be harder to imagine Freeman giving up all ­these pleasures than it is to accept the vio­lence he must commit in the ser­vice of the cause. In ­these years, advertisers ­were busy figuring out precisely what degree of racial integration in advertising images would win over Blacks without alienating whites.57 They also ­were just beginning to segment the Black population socioeco­nom­ically, rather than as a homogeneous racial group—­ for example, by income level, social ambition, and urban or rural location. A 1970 article in the Journal of Marketing noted that “advertisements by big city agencies which show most blacks sporting Afro hair styles may appeal to blacks in the city, but can fail throughout the country where only a small percentage of Negroes as a ­whole identify with the Afro look.”58 Advertisers also began to exploit the power of positive images along the lines promoted by the Black Arts Movement. This could involve, as the article explained, 282  /

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exploiting the emotional leverage of a normative, patriarchal f­ amily model: “Negroes ­were . . . ​unusually receptive to advertisements in which the black male of the h ­ ouse is pres­ent, appearing stable, loving, and protective of his home, wife, and ­children.”59 Looking back from the 1980s, Cornel West assesses the cultural shifts of the late 1960s as an escalating “veneration of ‘black’ symbols, rituals, styles, hairdos, values, sensibilities and flag.”60 Harold Cruse, in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, had already sounded a note of concern that “the mere fact of self-­identification, of the ideology of pro-­blackness, the glorification of the black skin, the idealization of every­thing African, the return to the natu­ral quality of African hairstyles, the rediscovery of black female beauty, or the adoption of African tribal dress—­all of ­these phases and moods signify a return to the root origins of self which can also be transformed into protective mystiques.” ­These mystiques, he argued, had to be translated into “positive trends of action” rather than “nihilistic fantasies of black supremacy.”61 Other social commentators noted prob­lems with reliance on style as a sign of revolution. In his essay “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I’ll Touch Yours,” in the anthology The Black Aesthetic, Julian Mayfield describes the Black aesthetic using a complex transracial sexual innuendo. The title itself seems to suggest sexual difference as a meta­phor for aesthetic diversity and sexual contact as a meta­phor for sharing that diversity. His main argument is that ­because the Black aesthetic can be learned—­whites can learn to play jazz or jive talk just as well as Blacks (not a universally accepted view, of course)—­the aesthetic is not the proper vehicle for revolution. Style can be commodified, such that white w ­ omen wear Afro wigs and white men wear dashikis, and “last night I saw Sammy Davis Jr. kiss not one but two white ­women on tele­vi­sion.”62 What is essential to blackness, then? On the way to his conclusion, Mayfield begins to suggest that the penis is the one t­ hing the Black man has that cannot be taken away from him ­unless by vio­lence. This implies that sex—­who you sleep with—­expresses fundamental personal truths that may be at odds with po­liti­cal posturing. It also, obviously, subordinates ­women. At the end of Julian Mayfield’s essay, he shifts his definition of what constitutes Black identity. What cannot be taken away from African Americans is not “what we look like” (it is not the penis ­after all; nor is it style, which can be imitated). Rather, it is “what we have felt . . . ​what our eyes have seen,” an idea that resonates with Romare Bearden’s description of the daily surreal and with Gerald McWorter’s experientialism.63 When Angela Davis became a revolutionary icon, so did her Afro. The hairstyle was part and parcel of the image—as is clear in Wadsworth Jarrell’s S tarr ing the Black Comm un ity

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6.14. Don McIlvaine, Angela Davis, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Heruanita McIlvaine Collection.

painting Revolutionary (see figure 4.2), and also in Don McIlvaine’s painting of Davis (figure 6.14) (both ­were based on the same iconic photo­graph of Davis speaking at a rally). Writing years l­ater, Davis herself notes with alarm how her Afro now reads nostalgically as style, without a sense of its under­ lying politics. Post-1970s memory “reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.”64 But this concern was amply pres­ent at the time, as writers complained about “part-­time” or “pork-­chop” revolutionaries. Johari Amini put it this way: “If the values of the African community had been fully oriented away from the Eu­ro­pean standard prior to, or simultaneous with, the projection of Natu­ral hair as an African, Black beauty symbol, ­there may still have been Eu­ro­pe­ans wearing ‘natu­ral’ wigs in 1968, but ­there would not commonly have been African w ­ omen who wear ‘natu­ral’ wigs manufactured for Africans over their straightened or Eu­ro­pe­anized hair.”65 Lerone Bennett associated ­these concerns with Sweetback: the idea that in it (and elsewhere) “blackness” becomes a trend, a type of stylishness, its politics 284  /

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and its moral and psychological imperatives evacuated. If blackness could be created through image, was it then to be reduced to image? If revolutionary consciousness was a ­matter of wearing a “revolutionary suit,” was it no longer revolutionary? In this discourse, gender relations became a manifestly po­liti­cally charged site for the contradictions between words and deeds, between appearance and essence, to be explored and critiqued. This appears as the phenomenon of “talking black and sleeping white,” as in Don L. Lee’s “Contradiction in Essence” in black pride.66 In this poem he meets a “part / time / re / vo / lu / tion / ist . . . (natu­ral hair, african dressed, / always angry, in a hurry &c.) / talk /​ ing / black / & / sleep / ing / whi / te.” H ­ ere, each typographical slash is a line break; the poem is ­shaped to establish a contradiction between portions of text laid out horizontally and vertically, between the “always in a hurry” tempo and the poet’s slow, surgical dissection of that pose. Beyond ­these stark typographical devices, poetry had other resources to render the contradictions of style and soul poignant. In “Breakthrough,” Carolyn Rod­gers explores with brilliant, anguished nuance the prob­lem of developing a shared aesthetic practice in the face of a hostile culture that works to demolish the poet’s sense of self.67 This is to say, the strug­gle to establish full personhood for African Americans—at any rate the state of that strug­gle in Chicago circa 1970—­required both collective effort and the capacity to encompass individuality. But ­these two priorities could come into conflict. What if a cultural object did not come down squarely on one side or the other? What if (as with Van Peebles) individual freedom risked contradicting a collective consensus? What if—­more abjectly, from the poet’s point of view—it failed to appeal to it? Rod­gers’s poem begins with an exploration of the “tangled feelings” that leave her with her “mouth . . . ​open” but unable to speak. The question—­the source of “partial pain”—is put in syncopated short verses, first as a prob­lem of the materialization of the self in writing. how do I put my self on paper the way I want to be or am and be not like any one e­ lse in this Black world but me The tensions between individual voice and collective cultural forms is specified—­and moves from paper to voice—in what follows. How to find an audience that can appreciate her individuality, if, in order to be understood and appreciated, she has to sound like the vaguely familiar words of “twenty othas”? Starri ng the Black Com m unity

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how do I sing some lyr­ics ev’ry most could dig but ­don’t always be riffin like twenty othas ev’rybodi’s faintly heard. the trou­ble is I tell you, how can I sound just like and only my self and then could you dig it if I could? To be herself and only herself risks solipsism; to be legible risks repetition and boredom. The prob­lem is not just one of expression of a stable, preexisting self but in fact that “­there are several of me and / all of us fight to show up at the same time.” This sentiment resonates with the way Gerald McWorter had ­imagined the relationship of individual and community in his obac handout, but in a more anxious vein. From poetry Rod­gers turns to a generic encounter with an unknown man on the street that crystallizes the frustration that lies at the intersection of individual feeling and communal style. I walk around the street with my hurt my mind and some miscellaneous little brotha who’s ultimately playin with my feelins sayin “what’s happenin beautiful Black sistuh?” can u dig why I want to say to him “why should u care?” and “why would u make me love and puff all over again” and instead i end up smiling and sayin “U got it ­little bro” ­because I think he needs, and he thought I needed and the be cause is the why, and that kinda style goes on and I become trite in my dreams . . . This street exchange between Black man and Black ­woman, conventionalized and circular (“the be cause is the why”), typifies the prob­lem of self-­ expression that trou­bles the poet. How can Rod­gers (that is, her poetic voice) have individuality if, in order for her allegiances to be intelligible on the street, she styles herself according to a set of communal conventions, and then finds herself caught in them? Though she contemplates making a meaningful (and antagonistic) response, the speaker defaults unhappily to convention; “U got it” is not strictly speaking an answer to “What’s happenin.” The miscellaneousness of Rod­gers’s “miscellaneous ­little brotha” hints at a class divide. The implica286  /

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tion is that he is hanging out on the street, with all that entails: one of any number of ­others, not distinct as an individual in the way that she—in her poetic voice—­wants to style herself. From one point of view, he is hassling her, asserting male power through racial solidarity, perhaps seeking to even out the class divide he perceives. She does not read the encounter as aggressive, dangerous, or diminishing, but it is still somehow irritating. It points to the frustration of a conventionalized sexual exchange, of collectivity experienced as the boredom of well-­rehearsed styles, but also to the fragility of “Black” as a shared discourse for all African Americans: the breaking point of class in Amer­i­ca, even for African Americans identifying as Black. Legacies of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago

However genuine the expression and practice of solidarity with the street, however poignant and deeply felt the desire for real revolution, ­there was always the risk that in the end, cultural blackness would do more for traditionally educated middle-­class Blacks like Rod­gers than it did for the “­little brothas” of the street corner. As advertisers increasingly targeted middle-­ class African Americans as a demographic, as Nixon began to dismantle the liberal welfare state, as Daley and Hanrahan launched the War on Gangs, the already pres­ent fissures in “blackness” deepened. Many of the artists I have studied in this book left Chicago, including many of the members of africobra, as well as Darryl Cowherd, Roy Lewis, Ann Zelle, Jackie Hetherington, and Reggie Madison. The energies devoted to Black art and community in the late 1960s in Chicago had many impor­tant consequences. National corporations and mainstream institutions (­either headquartered in Chicago, or seeing an interest in cultivating Black consumers ­there) began hosting exhibitions and programs fueled by t­ hese energies. Roo­se­velt University held a Black Con­temporary Festival of the Arts in July and August 1969. That same year Coca-­Cola created a Black Trea­sures traveling exhibit that brought Black art all over the city in a van, and ­later that year Loyola University held a Black Artists Show.68 In 1971 at Northwestern Jeff Donaldson or­ga­nized the confaba conference, which consolidated the discourse of the Black Arts Movement; Illinois Bell sponsored an exhibition called Black American Art/1971 (with nearly 150 works by Black artists from around the country in the Lobby Gallery in its com­pany headquarters at 225 West Randolph Street),69 and the artist Keith Morrison curated a Black Experience exhibition of Chicago artists at the Bergman Gallery at the University of Chicago. S tarri ng the Black C om m unity

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In the same year, with support from the Chicago Defender, the ubiquitous artist-­organizer Douglas Williams curated the Museum of Science and Industry’s first Black Esthetics exhibition, broadening and deepening the community of artists and audience. As director of the South Side Community Art Center beginning in 1966, he had developed many contacts among other artists.70 Black Esthetics included dance, ­music, and scholarly lectures as well as an exhibition of visual arts. Williams solicited work from young ­people through their high school art teachers. He said, “My t­hing was, I wanted every­body involved”; he saw his role as being “the bridge between the art creator and the art appreciator.”71 Among the artists whose work was exhibited at Black Esthetics ­were established artists like Walter Sanford, Eda, and Mitchell Caton; Judge Mark Jones, a respected jurist who created mixed-­media artworks in his spare time; Sandman (a self-­taught artist and performer who made crowns exquisitely adorned with found objects and costume jewelry); the jeweler Nii-­Oti; Nathan Wright (who had begun painting while wrongfully imprisoned for attempted robbery); and Ben Bey (an ex-­offender artist and or­ga­nizer). Ben Bey’s work suggests another definition of community engagement. He had begun studying art while incarcerated at the Stateville Correctional Center, was released in 1968, and quickly began making a living through his art. Bey started an organ­ization for other ex-­offender artists called Looking t­oward Freedom, ­later incorporated as Freedom through Art, with a space at 125 West Hubbard Street. He exhibited widely, at venues inside and outside the white art world and the standard art cir­cuits of the Black Arts Movement, including hospitals, high rises, schools, and shopping centers: along with Black Esthetics, he exhibited at the Old Town Triangle Art Center, the Stateville Prison Art Fair at Six Corners Shopping Center, St. Anne’s Hospital, the Englewood Concourse Art Fair, the lobby of the Garland Building, Thornton Community College, Jewel Supermarkets, and the Third World Arts and Crafts Festival at Kenwood Acad­emy, and at the University of Chicago’s Center for Continuing Education.72 In his own paintings, Bey perfected an affectionate realist portrait mode but also ventured into abstraction (figures 6.15 and 6.16). As Black Creativity, the exhibition Douglas Williams curated at the Museum of Science and Industry, takes place annually to this day. Many of the art spaces founded during the late 1960s went on to thrive during the next de­cade. Oṣun Art Center carried on its multidisciplinary programming through the early 1980s. Per­for­mances and the regular community hangout at The Alley continued and evolved. New groups emerged, such as bag (Black Arts Guild), founded in 1970 by Turtel Onli. Members, including 288  /

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6.15. Ben Bey, Ghetto Child, 1970. Oil and acrylic on canvas. South Side Community Art Center.

Dalton Brown, Obie Creed, Kenneth Hunter, Espi Frazier, and Jim Smoote, along with Onli, met at Robert Paige’s carriage ­house and worked and exhibited together regularly.73 The Chicago Mural Group eventually transformed into the Chicago Public Art Group and continued its work. William Walker eventually separated from the group to pursue his own proj­ects; other muralists came and went, but cpag continues its work with communities to this day. Another offshoot of the early mural movement was Mark Rogovin’s Public Art Workshop, which worked with neighborhood c­ hildren painting murals on the West Side. Out of this proj­ect grew Chicago’s Peace Museum, active in the 1980s and 1990s. Performing arts organ­izations—­Kuumba Workshop, the eta Creative Arts Foundation, the aacm and Artistic Heritage Ensemble, and many o­ thers—­continued to pursue their work. The Black cultural community helped elect Harold Washington as the city’s first Black mayor. And the South Side Community Art Center continues working to this day, hosting classes, exhibitions, and events, and nourishing cultural life on the South Side. S tarring th e Black Comm uni ty

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6.16. Ben Bey, Strug­gle Black/White, 1974. Acrylic on board. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions. Photo­graph © 2017 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

The Black Arts Movement was a movement in the arts, but it was also a po­ liti­cal movement. In telling this story, I have attempted to interweave its street interventions, its organ­izing challenges, its ideological sophistication, and its media tactics. Art amplified politics, but art was not always what achieved maximum visibility, and prac­ti­tion­ers knew it well. ­After the “Arts and the Inner City” conference at Columbia College Chicago, Billy Abernathy introduced Robert Paige to filmmaker Haskell Wexler. Abernathy and Paige had participated in the cobra protest along with Jeff Donaldson, Muhal Richard Abrams, and o­ thers. Wexler visited Paige’s coach­house studio at 4933 South Woodlawn and invited him, Donaldson, Abrams, Val Gray Ward, Barbara Jones, Walter Bradford, and several o­ thers to participate in his film, Medium ­ ere to play members of a group of “Black militants.”74 Cool. They w Medium Cool is known for its blending and blurring of fiction and real­ ity.75 Wexler seized upon the pace of events in the summer of 1968, filming it amid the chaos that surrounded the Demo­cratic National Convention. The film chronicles the muddying of the ostensibly “objective” view of the news media through the point of view of the main character (cameraman John Cassellis, played by Robert Forster). In the first instance, it pres­ents the position of journalistic objectivity as callous: when faced with suffering, the story comes first. But Cassellis slowly (and tragically) discovers a moral compass as he realizes that his supposed journalistic objectivity is indelibly tainted by its relationship to structures of power. In its “Black militants” sequence, the film explores a dif­fer­ent challenge to journalistic practice. ­After an African American cab driver, Frank Baker, turns in $10,000 found in the back of his car, he becomes an instant and highly uncomfortable object of media attention. Cassellis goes to his home to attempt a follow-up story on him and is thrust into a tense series of confrontations with some of Baker’s more militant friends. “Acting” as himself (several of the characters go by the actors’ own first names), Jeff Donaldson pops up in the scene and relentlessly turns the t­ables on the reporters, mocking their words and diction and providing faux-­journalistic commentary on their appearance and movements. Calling on “Richard” (Abrams) to join in with him, he launches a sardonic attack on Cassellis’s sound engineer Gus (played by Peter Bonerz), first insinuating that he is a Chicago cop or fbi agent. When Gus explains that he’s a “sound man,” indicating his pager (which he calls his “pageboy”), Donaldson mockingly sexualizes the object: “And what do you do with ‘my pageboy’?” Gus replies, “Well I d­ on’t do anything with it, it just hangs ­there” ­until the station calls him to send him on a story. Donaldson snatches it away, and explains allusively that Gus is a sexual bottom with S tarr ing the Black Com m un i ty

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re­spect to the tv station bosses: “He means he’s a receiver and not a sender.” As it turns out l­ater, the first suggestion—­that the reporters are cops—is not far from the truth. The tv reporters’ work is the unwitting instrument of the Feds. A key plot point turns on the discovery by Cassellis, when he questions po­liti­cally imposed directives to cover or not certain stories, that his station is systematically turning over news footage for review by the fbi. Another male character develops the critique further. White journalists cannot expect “­things to be like they are,” ­because their very presence inevitably distorts the situation on which they are attempting to report. They have “brought LaSalle Street [the financial district] . . . ​and City Hall, and all the mass communications media. And you are the exploiters, y­ ou’re the ones who distort, ridicule and emasculate us. And that ­ain’t cool.” As Wexler put it in an interview with Roger Ebert, the African American artists he recruited for the Black militant roles “­didn’t want to ‘act.’ They would only agree to be in the scene if they could say what they believed about the way the media treat black p ­ eople.”76 At the end of the sequence, an unnamed character played by Felton Perry (who went on to an extensive Hollywood ­career), delivers a monologue that we are allowed to imagine is being filmed by Cassellis. In a way he echoes Daley’s own position on the media. The only way for poor African Americans to make their concerns vis­i­ble, he argues, is to commit acts of vio­lence. You d­ on’t want to know, man. You ­don’t know the ­people. You ­don’t show the ­people, Jack. I mean, dig, ­here’s some cat who’s down and out, you dig, I mean he’s nobody, you know. So he says to his old man, you know, he says, man like I’m nobody. And I’m gonna die, man, and ­ain’t nobody gonna even know I lived. Dig? So the cat finds a brick, throws it through Charlie’s win­dow, you understand? Or he takes a gun, and shoots. And the cat lives, man. He ­really lives, you dig? A hundred million ­people see the cat on the tube, man. And they say, woo, the former invisible man lives. Every­body knows where he went to school, they know about his wife and kids, every­thing. Dig? Cause the tube is life. Life. You make him an Emmy, man, you make him the tv star of the hour. On the six, the ten, and the twelve o­ ’clock news. ’Cause what the cat is saying is truth, man. Why ­don’t you find out what ­really is? Why you always got to wait till somebody get killed, man? ’Cause somebody is gon’ get killed. Just as the actors in this sequence metaphorically seized the filmmakers’ camera to amplify the points they wanted to make, so too does the down-­and-­ out cat seize the attention of the media.77 292  /

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Perry’s monologue provides a dif­fer­ent framework for interpreting destructive acts: to think of the object of the actions like the 1968 West Side uprising not as so many buildings burned but as the statement intentionally inscribed in the public consciousness through media attention. “The ­whole world is watching,” chanted protesters at the 1968 dnc. Fully aware of these conditions, the Black Panthers painstakingly fashioned their media image. It was a stroke of tactical genius that the Illinois Black Panthers opened the West Side apartment in which spokesman Fred Hampton was killed by fbi and police operatives in 1969 to guided tours. Community members and the media lined up outside to see the evidence of what had happened. ­People of differing po­liti­cal stripes made this pilgrimage; for example, though he was skeptical of the Panthers’ knowledge and instincts, Phil Cohran brought his Malcolm X College students to see the evidence.78 “In the eyes of many in the black community,” a New York Times journalist wrote, “the apartment has rapidly become a combination shrine and po­liti­cal education center.”79 A few years l­ater, the West Side organ­ization forum , which also staged street theater as cultural critique, employed a dif­fer­ent tactic for inviting the public to view conditions in private space. With video cameras borrowed from uic , they documented the poor conditions in West Side housing proj­ects and hosted viewing parties of their tapes, inviting neighbors and local officials.80 Both proj­ects suggest the potential of appropriating the tools of the mass media—­directly or by proxy—to communicate facts about injustice. In The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the revolutionaries carefully plan their media presence, using radio stations and newspapers to serve as vehicles to get their message out—to appear, and thus essentially to be, more power­ful than they “actually” ­were. Boy Breaking Glass

When artists of the Black Arts Movement invested new value in the relationship between artist and community, they adumbrated a number of dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble permutations for ­these terms. Art could take community members as its subject. The Black community could be the privileged audience for art. Community members could be understood as participants in artists’ proj­ects. Many ­were also makers in their own right. In some sense, however, to fully consider the poorest and most oppressed members of the community as makers of art would require a redefinition of what constitutes art—­one that went further than most of the S tarring the Black C om m unity

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artists in the movement would have been willing to go. In The Cry of Jazz, Alex pronounces the death of the jazz “body” ­because its scope is too limited to enact the “colossal” revolution that the plight of a soulless Amer­i­ca requires. A shot of burning buildings accompanies his suggestion that what is required is nothing less than “the destruction of Amer­i­ca’s ­future”—to be accomplished by the “spirit of jazz.” Gwendolyn Brooks made a similar homology between art making and destruction in her poem “Boy Breaking Glass”: “Whose broken win­dow is a cry of art / . . . ​is raw: is sonic: is old-­eyed première. / . . . ​‘I ­shall create! If not a note, a hole. / If not an overture, a desecration.’ ”81 The evocation of aggressive art-­making—­“is raw: is sonic”—­also echoes the rhythm of Brooks’s description of actor Val Gray Ward (“is tract, is treatise”) in her poem on the Wall of Re­spect. What if the urban uprisings known as “riots” could themselves be understood as a gesture of creation rather than mere wanton destruction? The West Side uprising is often seen as the raw, undirected rage of an excluded class: a futile gesture of rage that accomplished nothing but the destruction of numerous Black-­owned businesses. For Lerone Bennett Jr., in the Ebony essay that referred to Black rage as an avalanche in the making, it was impor­tant to pres­ent the rage that sparked riots as a force of nature, the inevitable consequences of society’s malign neglect of its young and poor citizens. In this view the effects ­were predictable. It could hardly have been other­wise. Responsible ­people (the argument suggests) should have expected it, could have prevented it, could work, now, to prevent ­future vio­lence. But the act of uprising, however dangerous, however destructive its consequences, and however doomed, should also be understood as a conscious attempt at visibly reshaping space and ­human relationships to it. On the most dramatic scale, action through destruction resulted in riots that lit fires, shattered plate-­glass store win­dows, reduced buildings to rubble. On a smaller scale it might also mean a child making a mark on his or her environment by breaking a pane of glass or writing her name on a wall. Recall, too, the story of how the Vice Lords went “conservative,” and the precipitating moment: the younger Lords’ justification for their desire to “make a fall” through the fact that the older Lords had “made a name for themselves.” Vio­lence in its several guises was one of the few forms of making available to ­these kids. Studies done in the aftermath of riots in Detroit and Newark suggested that rioters ­were more likely than o­ thers to have a developed Black consciousness, to be aware of Black writers and civil rights leaders, and to assert 294  /

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the need for Black history and culture in schools—­and to have a “positive self-­image.”82 This suggests that they had a self-­understanding of their actions as po­liti­cal: “not incoherent freakouts,” as Andrew Kopkind puts it, but “specific responses . . . ​to oppression.”83 From another perspective, looting was a direct commentary on the consumer activity that seemed to define Americanness in the age of supposed abundance. Acts of destruction ­were not totally spontaneous; participants had seen riots on tv, and had interpreted them as uprisings.84 Nor ­were they indiscriminate: in the West Side uprising, participants refrained from attacking buildings that displayed the words Soul ­Brother or Church. More than fire, the meta­phor that returns again and again in discussions of street creativity is that of broken glass. It ran the gamut from the daily experience of deprivation to dramatic media event. Glass was a material that ­children had readily to hand. One of the cvl’s first programs, its neighborhood beautification program, was known as “Grass, Not Glass,” so much broken glass was ­there to be found in the neighborhood. Douglas Williams very explic­itly turned broken glass into art with the ­children in a class at Martin Luther King Jr. Urban Pro­gress Center. Finding them one day breaking ­bottles in an alley, he persuaded them to gather the pieces (carefully) and turn them into a mosaic. “Some p ­ eople call it junk,” he said; “I call it art supplies.”85 Surely without any direct connection, but resonant with Williams’s experience, is an anecdote John Walley told of László Moholy-­ Nagy in 1945, stopping a group of colleagues to watch a boy playing on a street corner, refracting sunlight onto a piece of painted tin through pieces of colored glass. “The child was so absorbed,” Walley wrote, “that he d­ idn’t even become aware of our presence. Moholy pointed and said, ‘This is what I try to achieve with the students. I seek total involvement, total wonderment, and falling in love with a set of events.’ ” Walley calls the experience the “open type of education” that was typical of Moholy-­Nagy.86 The cover copy for Brooks’s three-­part poem, Riot, published by Broadside Press in 1970, states that it “arises from the disturbances in Chicago ­after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.” Brooks cites King himself in an epigraph: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Weaving a rich web of references, Brooks rages against white privilege and g­ ently explores the young ghetto dweller’s experience: “Fire. / That is their way of lighting candles in the darkness.” She had begun teaching a poetry workshop for members of the Blackstone Rangers in 1967, as Oscar Brown Jr. was working with them on Opportunity Please Knock. She makes a nod in her poem to the Rangers’ discipline, naming specific leaders: “This Peanut w ­ ill not let his S tarring the Black C om m unity

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6.17. Jeff Donaldson, Ala Shango. 1969. Gouache on

cardboard. South Side Community Art Center. Purchase prize, Black Expressions ’69.

men explode. / And Rico ­will not. / Neither ­will Sengali. / Nor Bop nor Jeff, Geronimo nor Lover.”87 Jeff Donaldson’s painting Ala Shango became the frontispiece for Riot.88 Ala Shango belongs to the collection of the sscac (having won the purchase prize in the center’s show Black Expressions ’69) (figure  6.17). In it, Donaldson depicts two figures, young men who stand facing the viewer, each with one hand held up against what seems to be a wall of glass that blocks their way (the word glass appears three times vertically in the painting). The glass distorts the figures slightly, creating broken, watery fields of color. Around the figures’ heads, and around the taller figure’s hand and the statuette of an African deity that he carries, are bursts of brilliant, tiny color fragments. ­These bursts also circle around the taller figure’s hand and the sculpted axe—­that of the Yoruba thunder deity Shango, as Nicholas Miller has shown—­that he carries.89 It is as if the statuette is poised to break through the glass. In the text of her master’s thesis, Barbara Jones-­Hogu suggested an interpretation of the word glass, which appears ­here and elsewhere in Donaldson’s work. It represents, she argues, Euro-­American culture that “exploited and took as their own cultures which ­were produced by other races or cultures.”90 Glass has no color of its own but can take on all other colors—­ which, in this view, means appropriating and distorting their vibrancy. It also can be broken, as the stance of the youthful figures in Ala Shango, one brandishing an African sculpture like an ancestral weapon, implies. Framing destruction as art means taking seriously the creativity and agency of some of the most dispossessed members of society. But it should not detract from its po­liti­cal force. This is a m ­ atter of shifting our frame of reference to see expression rather than vio­lence or idleness. In Kenneth Lovette’s Sun-­Times photo of a young man writing “Black Power” in shaving cream on the street (figure 6.18), is the futility of riot allegorized in the young man’s medium? Or is this an artistic form of creative activist intervention? The young man must have known that writing with shaving cream was—­ unlike expressing himself with spray paint or broken win­dows—­unlikely to get him arrested. But he also knew that it would blow away at the slightest breeze, at the briefest gush of w ­ ater from a fire hose. Within minutes, the environment would render t­ hese fragile marks on the street illegible—­indeed they ­were already so faint that the newspaper’s photo editor retouched the photo to make the words more legible. Shaving cream is not a way to make a lasting statement. Not lasting, that is—­unless it is photographed. It needs only be performed, ­there, for the brief moment that the anonymous young man can take hold of the newsman’s attention. It is totally of that moment. Starr ing t he Black Comm un ity

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6.18. Young man writing “Black Power” in shaving cream. Photo by Kenneth Lovette for the Chicago Sun-­Times, April 7, 1968.

Consider what consciousness of the power of the media is embedded in this act. This is not the photographer capturing a moment with his agile eye, but the appropriation of the medium by the young writer who drives the action. Like the down-­and-­out cat of Felton Perry’s monologue, he seizes the opportunity of the camera. With brilliant creativity, he captions the entire experience of the riots, making an assertion about what they put on view: Black Power.

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Notes

Note: Chicago Defender, Chicago Daily Defender, and Daily Defender articles ­were accessed through the Proquest database ser­vice. When no edition is noted following the newspaper title, articles are from the daily edition. Introduction

1 Norman Mark, “A ­Matter of Black and White,” Chicago Daily News, Pa­norama, May 18, 1968, 3. 2 Victor Sorell, “Interview with William Walker” (excerpt), Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach, eds., The Wall of Re­spect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 300–306. 3 “Wall of Re­spect,” Ebony 23, no. 2 (December 1967): 49. 4 Don L. Lee, “The Wall,” in Black Pride (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 26, reprinted in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Re­spect, 39–40. A slightly dif­fer­ent version appeared in the Chicago Daily Defender, August 29, 1967. 5 Jeff Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1 (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists): 10 in Search of a Nation,’ ” Black World 19, no. 12 (October 1970): 80–89, 83. 6 Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), 10. 7 See, for example, Critical Art Ensemble, “Observations on Collective Cultural Action,” Art Journal 57, no. 2 (summer 1998): 73–85. 8 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76. 9 Adolph Reed, “The Curse of ‘Community,’ ” in Class Notes (New York: New Press, 2000), 11. 10 Reed, “The Curse of ‘Community,’ ” 12. 11 Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle, “Simply Agreeing to Appear Together: A Conversation about Street-­Level Video; Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle Interviewed by Rebecca Zorach,” in Art Against the Law, ed. Rebecca Zorach (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014), 150.

12 Murry DePillars addressed ­these points on call and response and aesthetic distortion in his dissertation: Murry DePillars, “African-­American Artists and Art Students: A Morphological Study in the Urban Black Aesthetic” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1976), 113–21. 13 ­There is a large Black Arts Movement lit­er­a­ture with re­spect to lit­er­a­ture and theater. See, for example, James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2010). 14 See Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Anne Meis Knupfer, The Chicago Black Re­ nais­sance and ­Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr., eds., The Chicago Black Re­nais­ sance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Leslie King Hammond, Black Printmakers and the wpa, exhibition cata­logue (Bronx, NY: The Gallery [Lehman College Art Gallery], 1989); and Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: American Art and Lit­er­a­ture, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 15 See George J. Mavigliano and Richard A. Lawson, The Federal Art Proj­ect in Illinois: 1935–1943 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); John Franklin White, Art in Action: American Art Centers and the New Deal (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987). 16 Margaret T. G. Burroughs, Life with Margaret: The Official Autobiography (Chicago: In Time Publishing, 2003), 99–100. 17 Carline Evone Williams Strong, “Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs: Educator, Artist, Author, Founder and Civic Leader” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 1994), 180–81. 18 Thanks in large part to Jane Addams’s partner Ellen Gates Starr, Hull-­House offered classes in arts and crafts, possessed an art gallery with a lending library of art reproductions, and eventually developed a ­Labor Museum. On art at Hull-­House, see Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “Art at Hull House, 1889–1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr,” ­Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (spring/ summer 1989): 35–39. On early twentieth-­century bohemia and protest forums including Bug­house Square, iww forums, the Dil Pickle, Hobo Colleges, and ­others, see Sophia Fagin, Public Forums in Chicago, with the Writers Program of the Work Proj­ects Administration of the State of Illinois (Chicago: Adult Education Council of Chicago, 1940). 19 John E. Fleming, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs: Artist, Teacher, Administrator, Writer, Po­liti­cal Activist, and Museum Founder [interview],” Public Historian 21, no. 1 (winter 1999): 37; Ian Rocksborough-­Smith, “Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Black Public History in Cold War Chicago,” in “UMass Conference: Black

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Art & Power in Movement,” special issue, Black Scholar 41, no. 3 (fall 2011): 32. Rocksborough-­Smith dates the revocation of Burroughs’s South Side Community Art Center (sscac) membership to 1956, but other sources suggest the date of 1953, on Burroughs’s return from Mexico. See Mattie Smith Cold, “Chicago Art Center Elects New Officers,” Atlanta Daily World, June 18, 1953. 20 See, for example, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, eds., The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1997). 21 The art world in Chicago was small enough to be strongly affected by a lecture given by Jean Dubuffet in 1951 at the Arts Club of Chicago titled “Anticultural Positions” in which he enumerated a series of “points concerning the Occidental culture with which I ­don’t agree” and suggested “new myths and new mystics” as the proper subject ­matter for modern art. Chicago had its rather conservative art establishment, but it also had its share of rebellious and radical artists for whom Dubuffet’s talk resonated. Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” in Primitivism and Twentieth-­Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 292–98. 22 Eu­ro­pean surrealist art was popu­lar among Chicago collectors, and had an impact on Chicago artists. Peter Selz, “Surrealism and the Chicago Imagists of the 1950s: A Comparison and Contrast,” in “The Visionary Impulse: An American Tendency,” special issue, Art Journal 45, no. 4 (winter 1985): 303–6. 23 Jane Allen and Derek Guthrie, “The Tradition,” in The Essential New Art Examiner, ed. Terri Griffith, Kathryn Born, and Janet Koplos (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 29. 24 Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). See also Romi Crawford, “Ghetto: An Historical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Modality” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011). 25 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 233. 26 Susan Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 27 bell hooks, “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” Lenox Ave­ nue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 1 (1995): 67. 28 Samella Lewis, African American Art and Artists (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1978] 1990), 3–4; Sharon Patton, African American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 212–20. 29 The orthography of africobra is still debated by members. Many of the original members of the group prefer the version in all capital letters, though a strong argument can also be made for “AfriCOBRA.” In the early years of the organ­ization one could also find “Africobra,” “AfriCobra,” and

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even “Afro-­Cobra” being used. I use africobra ­here for simplicity ­because, for print purposes, a decision has to be made. 30 Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, eds., The Freedom Princi­ple: Experiments in Art and ­Music, 1965 to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, eds., Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London: Tate Publishing, 2017). On obac, africobra, and individual members, see Lisa Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-­American ­Women Artists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129–31; Kirstin L. Ellsworth, “AfriCOBRA and the Negotiation of Visual Afrocentrisms,” Civilisations 58, no. 1 (2009): 21–38; George Lewis, “Purposive Patterning: Jeff Donaldson, Muhal Richard Abrams, and the Multidominance of Consciousness,” Lenox Ave­nue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 5 (1999): 63–69; nka 30 (spring 2012), which includes several short essays by africobra members; Robert L. Douglas, Wadsworth Jarrell: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York: Pomegranate Press, 1996). Susan Cahan mentions the group briefly in Mounting Frustration, 37. 31 Kellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, exhibit cata­log (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum and University of California; Munich and New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011); Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones, eds., Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 60s, exhibition catalogue (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum; New York: Monacelli Press, 2014). 32 Kymberly Pinder, Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). Earlier books on the mural movement include James Prigoff and Robin J. Dunitz, Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride; Eva Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art: The Con­temporary Mural Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977); African-­American Historical and Cultural Museum, The ­People’s Art: Black Murals, 1967–1978 (Philadelphia: African-­American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1986). On the Wall of Re­spect, see Margo Natalie Crawford, “Black Light on the Wall of Re­spect,” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 23–42; Jeff Donaldson, “The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of the Wall of Re­spect Movement,” International Review of African American Art 15, no. 1 (1998): 22–26; and Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect. On Black artists in Los Angeles, see Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 33 Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-­Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­First-­Century Black Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Darby En­glish, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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34 Darby En­glish, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007), 59. 35 hooks, “Aesthetic,” 68. 36 See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (fall 2004): 51–79; Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 37 ­There is now an extensive lit­er­a­ture on social practice. Terms that form part of its genealogy include relational aesthetics (see Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics [Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002]) and “new genre public art” (see Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art [Seattle: Bay Press, 1995]). A few key texts in social practice include Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, and Eva M. Olson, eds., Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture in Chicago (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Miwon Kwon, One Place ­after Another: Site-­Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2002); and Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), as well as other works by ­these and other authors. 38 Mike Sell, “The Black Arts Movement: Per­for­mance, Neo-­Orality, and the Destruction of the ‘White ­Thing,’ ” in African American Per­for­mance and Theater History, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58. 39 Sell, “Black Arts Movement,” 63. 40 Paul Car­ter Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove, 1972), 231. 41 See, for example, Diane Weathers, “The Collective Black Artists,” Black World 23, no. 1 (November 1973): 74: “Of all the art forms that have contributed to shaping the Afro-­American creative experience, ­music has been its strongest component.” 42 Marion Brown, “Improvisation and the Aural Tradition in Afro-­American ­Music,” Black World 23, no. 1 (November 1973): 15. 43 See Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” Signs 14, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 5–24; Mike Sell, Avant-­Garde Per­for­mance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), in par­tic­u­lar chapter 7; Charles H. Fuller Jr., “Black Writing: Release from Object,” Liberator 7 (September 1967): 17, 20; and James Stewart, “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” in Black Fire, ed. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (New York: Morrow, 1968), 3–10. 44 LeRoi Jones, Blues ­People: Negro M ­ usic in White Amer­i­ca (New York: Morrow, 1963), 16. 45 Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in ­Music,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 79.

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46 Stewart, “Introduction,” 80. 47 John Runcie, “The Black Culture Movement and the Black Community,” Journal of American Studies 10, no. 2 (August 1976): 193. 48 Vernon Dixon, “The Black Student and the ­Brother in the Streets,” Negro Digest 18, no. 1 (November 1968): 28–35. 49 Lerone Bennett Jr., The Negro Mood (Chicago: Johnson, 1964), 112. 50 Gerald McWorter [Abdul Alkalimat], “obac: Organ­ization of Black American Culture (all-­purpose handout),” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect. 51 McWorter, “obac,” 134–35. 52 McWorter, “obac,” 136. 53 McWorter, “obac,” 146. 54 In a 1972 article Johari Amini also pursues this dialectical thinking, arguing that the artist creates from “what he Is individually and collectively, alone and as part of his ­people.” Johari Amini, “Re-­Definition: Concept as Being,” Black World 21, no. 7 (May 1972): 4–12, 11. 55 McWorter, “obac,” 146–48. 56 McWorter, “obac,” 148. 57 McWorter, “obac,” 149. 58 McWorter, “obac,” 131. 59 Jeff Donaldson handwritten index cards, box 7, obac folder, card #6, Jeff Donaldson Papers, Archives of American Art (aaa hereafter). 60 Seymour Sarason, Creation of Settings and the ­Future Socie­ties (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, 1972). I discuss Sarason’s notion of the setting at more length in chapter 3. 61 Jonathan Fenderson, “Journey ­toward a Black Aesthetic: Hoyt Fuller, the Black Aesthetic, and the Black Intellectual Community” (PhD diss., University of Mas­sa­chu­setts, 2011). On Black publishing in Chicago, see also Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Ethan Michaeli, The Chicago Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed Amer­i­ca (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016); Myiti Sengstacke, Chicago Defender (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2012). 62 Charles M. Christian mapped the economic status of black neighborhoods of Chicago in 1950 and 1960 in his Social Areas and Spatial Change in the Black Communities of Chicago, 1950–1960, Occasional Publications of the Department of Geography, Paper no. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, 1972). See also Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 63 Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-­Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 318.

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64 In 1961 protesters of the de­mo­li­tion of the near West Side neighborhood that became the site of the University of Illinois Circle Campus placed a mock coffin at the site with a sign that read, “Buried ­here by Mayor Daley is his promise of a better community which ­will never come true.” “Vacant Property Razed for uic, 1962,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://­www​.­encyclopedia​ .­chicagohistory​.­org​/­pages​/­3620​.­html. 65 Carolyn Rod­gers, “Prodigal Objects,” Carolina Quarterly 50, no. 1 (fall 1997), 61. 66 U.S. Census data, National Historical Geographic Information System, accessed June 19, 2017, http://­www​.­nhgis​.­org. 67 Natalie Moore and Lance Williams, The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011). 68 On the Black Panthers, see (among many recent publications) Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007); Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 69 The Apache Rangers ­were a subgroup of the Blackstone Rangers. The address of the building appears on the back of the Chicago Daily News photo­graph, August 1, 1966 (author’s collection). Chapter 1. Claiming Space, Being in Public

1 City of Chicago, 1968 Pro­gress Report, Workable Program for Community Improvement (Chicago: Department of Development and Planning, 1969), 54, ­table 2. 2 On the Stroll and the cultural and intellectual life of the Black ­Belt, see Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the ­Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 3 Arnold R. Hirsh, “Restrictive Covenants,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2005), encyclopedia​.­chicagohistory​.­org​/­pages​/­1067​.­html. 4 Quoted in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1993), 70. 5 On the ­Great Migration in general, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010). On Chicago as destination, see James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the ­Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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6 Map showing change in white and nonwhite population in Hyde Park, 1950– 56, a map prepared by Sol Tax for paper on prob­lems of the local community, given February 4, 1957; data from urban renewal survey, norc, and Chicago Community Inventory, Map Collection, University of Chicago Library. 7 Mary Pattillo provides a useful account of how this pro­cess worked in North Kenwood, a neighborhood adjacent to Bronzeville, in her book Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 8 ­These conditions and the strug­gle against them are chronicled in Beryl Satter, ­Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban Amer­i­ca (New York: Macmillan, 2009). 9 See Hilary Herbold, “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the gi Bill,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 6 (winter 1994–95): 104–8. 10 David Young, “Trying to Achieve Business ‘Re­nais­sance’: Lawndale Fights to Halt Industry’s Flight,” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1972. 11 See William J. Grimshaw, ­Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Signet, 1971), 167–70. 12 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of ­Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), particularly chapter 2, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety,” 29–54. 13 Brian J. L. Berry, Sandra J. Parsons, and Rutherford H. Platt, The Impact of Urban Renewal on Small Business: The Hyde Park-­Kenwood Case (Chicago: Center for Urban Studies, University of Chicago, 1968), 117. 14 On “creative disorder,” see Arthur Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-­In, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Vio­lence (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). 15 Gregory v. City of Chicago, 394 U.S. 111, 124 (1969). 16 On the disillusionment of the late 1960s Civil Rights Movement, see Alan B. Anderson and George Pickering, Confronting the Color Line (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). 17 Cornel West, “The Paradox of the Afro-­American Rebellion,” Social Text, no. 9/10 (spring–­summer 1984): 49. 18 Donald J. Bogue and Richard McKinlay, Militancy for and against Civil Rights and Integration in Chicago: Summer 1967 (Chicago: Community and ­Family Study Center, University of Chicago, 1968), 17, ­table 1. 19 Bogue and McKinlay, Militancy, 8. 20 Bogue and McKinlay, Militancy, 17, ­table 1. 21 Haki Madhubuti, interview with author, June 11, 2013. 22 See Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Proj­ect in Illinois, 67–71, 79–81. 23 “Art Center ­Will Be Object Lesson on Art,” Afro-­American, July 27, 1940. The article identifies Ollie Bell Anderson, Stanford Welcker, Perthay Dillard, Harriette Pulson, Theodore Kigh, Burtis Simson, Sidney Baumstein, Stanford

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Drennan, Charles Glass, Harold Jones, George Johnson, Leonard Havens, Torre Bueno (Theodore Torre-­Bueno), and George Heyman as participants. Anderson and Pulson ­were introduced as designers to the center’s board at a meeting in July 1940. Minutes of July 1940 Meeting, part 1, box 1, folder 4, South Side Community Art Center (sscac hereafter) Archives. Bredendieck had been a student of Moholy-­Nagy’s at the Bauhaus in Germany, and upon immigrating to the United States, he became a teacher at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. When the New Bauhaus reopened as the School (­later Institute) of Design, he did not immediately rejoin but rather joined the fap Design Workshop as a special con­sul­tant; Walley was the director. John Walley, “The Influence of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, 1938–1943,” in Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 1975), 76. Bredendieck was skilled in plywood lamination and built “devices for the hot and cold forming of plywood.” Mavigliano and Lawson, Federal Art Proj­ect in Illinois, 47. As a teacher at the nb-­sd-­id, Bredendieck gave workshop instruction in the foundation course and made “hand sculptures, which could be held in the hand and perceived by the sense of touch.” Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, Moholy-­ Nagy: Mentor to Modernism (Cincinnati: Flying Trapeze Press, 2009), 561–62. 24 “Art Center ­Will Be Object Lesson on Art.” 25 Walley, “Speech Delivered at Chicago Artists Union—­October 1940,” Selected Papers, 17–24, 22. 26 This was first mentioned to me by Faheem Majeed, former director of the center. 27 South Side Community Art Center, “Open the Doors . . . ​to the South Side Community Art Center,” n.d., “Miscellaneous pamphlets, cata­logs, ­etc.,” Chicago History Museum (chm hereafter). 28 Bill Mullen, Popu­lar Fronts: Chicago and African-­American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 85. 29 Unpro­cessed archival materials, sscac Archives. Several individuals who knew Dr. Burroughs have confirmed to me that she was sympathetic to Communism if not a Party member. 30 Louis P. Dumetz, “8 American Artists Make Cultural Tour of Rus­sia,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), October 15, 1966. 31 fbi Operation solo documents, Airtel, March 8, 1966, http://­vault​.­fbi​.­gov​ /­solo​/­solo​-­part​-­100​-­of​-­101​/­view. 32 Fleming, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs,” 37. 33 Roi Ottley, “Artist Promotes Negro Culture: Motivated by Deep Belief,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 20, 1959. 34 Fleming, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs,” 39. 35 Cold, “Chicago Art Center Elects New Officers”; confidential source. 36 Fleming, “Dr. Margaret Burroughs,” 39–40. 37 Mark Durham, “Museum Traces Negro Past,” Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1967. 38 Fleming, “Dr. Margaret Burroughs,” 41–42.

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39 “Afro-­American History Classes at Museum,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), August 26, 1967, national edition; “Afro-­American Course Has 65 Students Enrolled,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1968. 40 See “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), November 23, 1968. 41 Sarah Ross and Erika Meiners, “ ‘And What Happens to You Concerns Us ­Here’: Imaginings for a (New) Prison Arts Movement,” in Art Against the Law, ed. Rebecca Zorach (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014), 15–30. 42 “Lincoln Centre Begins Hull House Affiliation,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), September 24, 1966. 43 “Name Library for Editor,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 16, 1969. 44 Eugene Perkins, “We Are Discovering Our Heritage and Our Hope: The New Voices Sing of Black Cultural Power,” Chicago Daily News, Pa­norama, December 7, 1968. 45 “New Art Gallery to Bow,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 29, 1968. See also “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily, Defender, April 16, 1968. Louis Boyd also painted on the Wall of Truth, across from the Wall of Re­spect, and exhibited work at Art & Soul in 1969. “­Today’s Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 11, 1969. 46 “Keeping Pace with the Lively Arts: Art and Exhibits,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), May 12, 1973. 47 Gerald Williams, personal communication, July 22, 2015. 48 “You are respectfully summoned . . . ,” invitation to obac meeting, box 7, Jeff Donaldson papers, aaa. 49 “New Donaldson Works in Lakeside Gallery,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 9, 1968; “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 24, 1968; Barry L. Plotkin, interview with author, June 8, 2015. 50 In meeting minutes she was also sometimes referred to as Bejai, a phonetic spelling of her initials. 51 Harold Haydon, “Memo to Ray E. Brown,” n.d. (prob­ably late 1950s or early 1960s), box 1, folder 13, Lorado Taft-­Midway Studios Papers, University of Chicago Library. The studio had previously been occupied by the painter James McBurney. Mulligan is listed with that address in the Cliff Dwellers Year Book (1916), p. 39. Jarrell also heard from the artist Bacia Gordon, the owner of the building, that it had been occupied by a sculptor who worked on the Columbian Exposition. Wadsworth Jarrell, personal communication, November 2012; “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 24, 1968. 52 Barry Plotkin, interview with author, June 8, 2015. At the 57th Street Art Fair, Reggie Madison also met Hans Morgenthau, a University of Chicago professor who gave him advice on travel to Eu­rope. Reginald Madison, interview with author, August 2011.

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53 The Chicago Defender chronicled the Englewood Concourse Art Fair in many articles. On the three originally sponsored by the ccuo, see “Art Fairs Successful,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 3, 1969. 54 “Union of Black Artists,” directory, 48, box 9, folder 7, Frances Minor Papers, Vivian Harsh Collection (vhc hereafter), Car­ter Woodson Library, Chicago Public Library. 55 William Walker also saw Eugene “Eda” Wade’s painting of Malcolm X ­there for the first time. Eugene “Eda” Wade, unedited transcript of interview with author and Marissa Baker, April 17, 2015. For the address of The Arts, “Art Collectors?” classified ad, Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1967. Regarding meetings ­there, Darryl Cowherd, interview with author, April 19, 2015. 56 “Union of Black Artists,” directory, 36, box 9, folder 7, Frances Minor Papers, vhc. 57 “Confetti,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 12, 1969; “­Today’s Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 19, 1969. 58 “ ‘Birdland’ Continues at Afam Gallery,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 15, 1970. 59 “Gallery Ensemble Jam for Poor Arts,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), July 21, 1973. 60 Box 10 of the Jeff Donaldson Papers includes reports and program from the conference and its task forces. aaa. 61 “Unusual Goods at Unique Shop ­Here,” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), December 14, 1972; “Baraza Wa Afrika, an In Place,” Chicago Defender, December 13, 1973. The Native Shop also sold African crafts, at 2606 E. 79th Street. “Surveying businesses . . .” (photo caption), Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), August 27, 1974. 62 “ankh Studio: A Center of Creativity,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), September 2, 1972; “Lester Lashley,” interview with Rebecca Zorach, Beverly Normand, and Howard Wiley, The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, exhibition cata­logue (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2018). 63 For more on the Catalyst, see Damali Carol Adams, “In the Black,” in Rise of the Phoenix: Voices from Chicago’s Black Strug­gle, 1960–1975, ed. Useni Eugene Perkins (Chicago: Third World Press, 2017), 216–22. 64 DePillars, “African American Artists,” 129. 65 “Opportunity Centers to Stage Art Show,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 24, 1967. Robert Paige (along with Amir Nour) was listed as a member of africobra in the program for confaba, the conference Jeff Donaldson or­ga­nized at Northwestern in 1970. “confaba. Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art,” program, unpaginated, box 10, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa.

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66 Wadsworth Jarrell, email to author, February 21, 2013. On the Woodlawn Experimental School, see Barbara Sizemore, Walking in Circles: The Black Strug­gle for School Reform (Chicago: Third World Press, 2008). 67 “Black Art Gallery Now at Illinois Federal,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), May 22, 1971. 68 Anna M. Tyler, “Planting and Maintaining a ‘Perennial Garden,’ Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center,” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 4 (January 1994): 36. 69 “Wanted: A Printer and a Weaver,” flyer, part III, box 20, Administrative: Board of Directors, sscac Archives. 70 I draw ­here on rec­ords assembled by Marissa H. Baker in work for the sscac. “Marvin M. Young,” flyer, part I, box 4, folder 21, sscac Archives; Thomas Willis, “But ­after ­You’ve Figured ’Em Out?,” Chicago Tribune, January 26, 1969; Doris E. Saunders, “Confetti,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 18, 1969; The Image of Man: An Exhibition of Paintings by Garrett Whyte, flyer, part I, box 4 (1957–71), folder 23, sscac Archives; “Show Eskimo Masks at Field Museum,” Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1969 (with additional reference to Garrett Whyte exhibition), “C. Rodger Wilson—­Douglas R. Williams Exhibit,” exhibition Checklist, part I, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 5, sscac Archives; “Two for the Show Opens at Southside Art Center,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 21, 1970; “Frank Hayden Art Show ­Here Sunday,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 21, 1971; Harold Haydon, “The Artist’s Role as Pioneer,” Chicago Sun-­Times, April 19, 1970; A Man and His Work: A Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by the Late Elliott Hunter, 1938–1969, flyer, part I, box 4 (1957–71), folder 14, sscac Archives; Reference to Herbert Salone show in Grace N. Leaming, President’s Annual Report: 1970, part I, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 2, sscac Archives; Stan Williamson, Press Release, undated, part 1, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 11, sscac Archives; “Britton and Jose: Paintings, Prints, Drawings, Sculpture,” flyer, part I, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 8, sscac Archives; “Paul Collins: Pictures from an African Journey,” flyer, part I, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 9, sscac Archives; “Gary Jones, Writin on the Wall: Geographic Testaments of Black Sentiment,” flyer, part I, box 5 (1970–71, undated), folder 14, sscac Archives; “A De­cade of the Art of Norman Parish,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives; Jane Allen and Derek Guthrie, “Norman Parish’s Black Pride Shows thru the Whitewash,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1972; “Calendar of Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 29, 1973; “Clifford Lee: An Exhibit of Paintings and Drawings,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1973, sscac Archives; “Show Ralph Arnold’s Art at S.S. Center,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), July 14, 1973. 71 “Black Expressions ’69,” flyer, part I, box 4 (1957–71), folder 22, sscac Archives; “Black Heritage: An Exhibition of African Sculpture and Artifacts,” flyer, box 7, folder 21, William McBride Papers, vhc. The exhibition also

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included anonymous loans and works from Etta Moten Barnett’s and Joseph Kersey’s collections. 72 “Seeds Within,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives. 73 “Afro-­Cobra Art Exhibit Is Well Received,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), August 18, 1973; Afri-­cobra, flyer, part III, box 20, Administrative: Board of Directors, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives. 74 “Black Art Is Alive and Well in Chicago: Yaounde Olu, Douglas Williams,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives. 75 “Fragments: Geraldine McCullough,” news release, November 1, 1973, part III, box 20, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives; “Fragments: Geraldine McCullough,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1973 (1), sscac Archives. 76 “Mary Reed Daniel and Sylvester Britton,” flyer, part III, box 20, folder 1974, sscac Archives; “Art Exhibit at Center,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 19, 1974; “Art Legacy to Go Public,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 25, 1974; “Art and the Black ­Woman,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), October 12, 1974. 77 My discussion of the Wall of Re­spect ­here shares a ­great deal with my contributions to Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, which ­were composed in tandem with this text. I am grateful to my coeditors, Northwestern University Press editors, and external readers for helpful comments that ­shaped this text. 78 Donaldson, “Rise, Fall and Legacy,” 25. 79 Committee for the Arts [pre-­obac], “Invitation Letter and Statement of Purposes.” In Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 113–14. Hoyt Fuller also enclosed the “Statement of Purposes” in an April 30, 1968, letter to Mirron Alexandroff, Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. Record group 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords. Unpro­cessed. College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 80 obac, “Festival of the Arts,” March 19, 1967, in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Re­spect, 117–18. 81 Alicia L. Johnson, “On May 21 for a Dedication,” in Realities vs. Spirits (n.p., 1969), unpaginated. 82 A document in the Vivian Harsh Collection, Car­ter Woodson Library, Chicago Public Library, details the judicial outcome for one participant. “Injustice in Amer­i­ca’s Courts . . . ​Again—­Report by Afroamerican Student Association on Trial and Conviction of Darryl Fields,” box 4, folder 27, Leonard Wash Papers, vhc. According to the report on Fields’s conviction, he was “guilty of attempting to aid a photographer who was beaten to the ground by police who had kicked six of his ribs in.” 83 Jeff R. Donaldson and Geneva Smitherman Donaldson, “Upside the Wall: An Artist’s Retrospective Look at the Original ‘Wall of Re­spect,’ ” in The ­People’s Art: Black Murals 1967–1978 (Philadelphia: African American Historical and

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Cultural Museum, 1986), unpaginated. Douglas Williams, interview with author, June 1, 2013. 84 “You are respectfully summoned . . . ,” invitation to obac meeting, box 7, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa. 85 Jeff Huebner, “The Man ­behind the Wall,” Chicago Reader, August 28, 1997. 86 ­Because of Walker’s experience as a muralist and his role in bringing the Langley wall to the group’s attention, it was clearly “Walker’s wall” to some participants. Darryl Cowherd, interview with author, April 19, 2015. 87 Jeff Huebner, “William Walker’s Walls of Prophecy and Protest,” in Art Against the Law, ed. Rebecca Zorach (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014), 38. 88 Robert Sengstacke, interview with author, September 2016; “ ‘Wall’ Neighborhood Vexed by Black Power Connection,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 1, 1967. 89 Ziff Sistrunk, interview with author, May 2018. 90 McWorter, “obac,” 147–48. 91 Dates of the receipt for scaffolding rental from Gilco Scaffolding are August 11 to August 28. “Lease of Equipment,” box 7, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa. 92 Donaldson and Smitherman Donaldson, “Upside the Wall.” Another discrepancy in this list is the omission of James Baldwin, whose portrait in the “Lit­er­a­ture” section is absent from some ­later photo­graphs of the Wall. Robert Sengstacke, interview with author, September 2016. 93 James Earl Jones appears in Gerald McWorter [Abdul Alkalimat], “Who Is on the Wall and Why,” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 164. Dick Gregory substitutes for him in Jeff Donaldson’s list, in Jeff Donaldson, “Rise, Fall, and Legacy,” 26, but this seems to be an error. 94 Florence Hawkins, interview with author, April 2015. 95 Paul Robeson appears on Jeff Donaldson’s list, but not in photo­graphs of the Wall. 96 See “White ­Women Set off Two-­Hour Melee in Chicago,” Jet 32, no. 9 (June 8, 1967): 7. 97 Gwendolyn Brooks, “II. The Wall” (part of “Two Dedications”), in In the Mecca (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 42–43. 98 “Wall of Re­spect,” Ebony 23, no. 2 (December 1967): 49. 99 Many of the heroes and heroines depicted on the Wall also visited it, for example, Nina Simone (depicted in a 1968 photo­graph by Roy Lewis in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Re­spect, 245) and Muhammad Ali (depicted in a photo­graph, photographer and location unknown, auctioned by Lelands in 2016, https://­lelands​.­com​/­bids​/­bidplace​?­itemid​=­80765, accessed December 15, 2017). 100 The contrast between the two poems has been noted frequently. See William H. Hansell, “Aestheticism versus Po­liti­cal Militancy in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Chicago Picasso’ and ‘The Wall,’ ” cla Journal 17, no. 1

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(September 1973): 11–15; D. H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 178–81; and Daniel Punday, “The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia,” New Literary History 37, no. 4 (autumn 2006): 789–92. 101 Margaret G. Burroughs, “Voice of the ­People,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1966. 102 Margaret Burroughs, “On Civic Center Plaza,” unpublished (to my knowledge), unpro­cessed Burroughs papers, sscac Archives. 103 “Picasso 5-­Story Sculpture Slated for Civic Center,” Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1966. 104 Sheila Wolfe, “What’s It Has Town Talking,” Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1967; Phil Lanier, writer/producer, Pablo and the Boss (Chicago: Network Chicago/ wttw, 2001). 105 “Statue ‘What You Make It,’ ” Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1967. 106 Mike Royko, “Picasso and the Cultural Rebirth of Chicago,” Chicago Sun-­ Times, August 16, 1967. 107 The Letter Edged in Black Press v. Public Building Commission of Chicago, 320 F. Supp. 1303 (1970), U.S. National Archives, G ­ reat Lakes Region, Chicago; Hartmann to Penrose, July 28, 1967, exhibit attached to Hartmann Deposition. 108 Gwendolyn Brooks, “I. The Chicago Picasso,” part of “Two Dedications,” in In the Mecca (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 40–41. 109 “Governor Kerner,” in Letter Edged in Black, exhibit attached to Hartmann Deposition. 110 Chicago Surrealist Group, “This Too ­Will Burn,” in The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976, ed. Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1997), 21–22. 111 The sign is vis­i­ble in two films of the event, The Bride Stripped Bare (Tom Palazzolo, 1967, 12 minutes) and Pablo and the Boss. 112 “35,000 Black Students Return to School ­after Showing Power,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 16, 1968. 113 Pemon Rami, personal communication to author, March 10, 2014. According to Rami, among the planners w ­ ere Victor Adams from Harrison High School, Rhonada Masequa Myers from Calumet, Patricia Smith from Marshall High School, Harold Green from Lindblom, Steve Hurst from Wendell Phillips, Riccardo James from Austin, Omar Aoki from Lindblom, Sharron Matthews from Harrison, Harold Rush from Englewood, and David Jenkins from Harlan. 114 Faith C. Christmas, “Boycotters ‘Bury’ School Bd. in Loop Rite,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 29, 1968. 115 Faith Christmas, “4,000 Jam Civic Center,” Chicago Daily Defender, September 23, 1969.

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116 A photo also appeared in the Chicago Daily News, March 31, 1970. Toni Anthony, “Jail Fr. Clements in Evictions: Nab Fr. Clements in Evictions,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 31, 1970; Toni Anthony, “Joe Robichaux on cbl Spot,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 6, 1970. 117 Don L. Lee, “The Wall,” in Black Pride (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 26. Leroi Jones, “Black Art,” in Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1969), 116; Don L. Lee, “The Wall,” in Black Pride (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 26, reprinted in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Re­spect, 39–40. A slightly dif­fer­ent version appeared in the Chicago Daily Defender, August 29, 1967. 118 Eugene Perkins, “Black Culture,” in Black Is Beautiful (Chicago: ­Free Black Press, 1968), 8. Also published in Catalysts Cultural Committee, Black Cultural Directory Chicago ’69 (Chicago: Catalysts, 1969), 12, and reprinted in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Re­spect, 41–42. 119 Perkins, “Black Culture,” 8. 120 John Fry, Fire and Blackstone (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969), 3. 121 Jae Jarrell, personal communication, September 2017. 122 “Black Pride Theme for Dedication Festivities,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), September 30, 1967. 123 In addition, sign painter Curly Ellison painted the lettering “Wall of Re­ spect.” Victor Sorell, “Interview with William Walker (excerpt),” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 301; “William Walker Discusses the Wall,” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 310. 124 “William Walker Discusses the Wall,” 310. ­Later, Elijah Muhammad personally asked that his portrait be removed, and Walker obliged. 125 Crawford, “Black Light on the Wall of Re­spect,” 26. See also DePillars, “African-­American Artists,” 122. 126 DePillars, “African-­American Artists,” 122. 127 Rebecca Zorach and Marissa Baker, “Interview with Eugene ‘Eda’ Wade” (edited transcript of April 17, 2015, interview) in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 313. 128 Allen and Guthrie, “Norman Parish’s Black Pride.” 129 Robert Sengstacke, interview with author, September 2016. 130 Roy Lewis, transcript of School of the Art Institute of Chicago symposium, April 2015. 131 Jeff Donaldson, The HistoryMakers interview, April 23, 2001. Jeff Donaldson (The HistoryMakers A2001.023), interview by Julieanna Richardson, April 23, 2001, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, session 1, tape 4, story 1, Jeff Donaldson discusses the Wall of Re­spect, fbi disruption of obac and the mural movement. 132 E.g., Investigator’s Report, “Activity Report Relative to a Meeting Held in the 43rd Block of Langley,” October 1, 1967, Coordinating Council on Black Power

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files, box 195, file no. 1054, Red Squad Collection, chm, and subsequent related reports. The existence of several reports suggests the presence of multiple police officers, at least one of them recording the proceedings on audiotape. Police also recorded license plates of all the cars that ­were pres­ent and checked o­ wners’ names against existing files. 133 Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 4. 134 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, personal communication. See Jeff Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” Black World (October 1970): 80–89; and Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 4. 135 Adalisha Safi, personal communication; “Crowds Gather,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 2, 1967. See also Donald Mosby, “Gun Cache Found at Black Power Hangout,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 31, 1967, and Donald Mosby, “Wall Neighborhood Vexed by Black Power Connection,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 1, 1967; Red Squad Collection, chm. 136 Lee, “The Wall,” 26, reprinted in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of R ­ espect, 39. 137 Lee, “The Wall,” 26, reprinted in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Respect, 39. 138 Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 4. 139 Mark, “A ­Matter of Black and White.” 140 “Wall of Re­spect,” Ebony 23, no. 2 (December 1967): 49. 141 Ziff Sistrunk, interview with author, May 2018. As Robert Sengstacke put it, “The kids used to charge a ­little fee to explain the Wall. They made money explaining who’s on the Wall, the sections and all that. They ­didn’t charge much, but they made a nice piece of change.” Robert Sengstacke, interview with author, September 2016. 142 On the Conference for New Politics, see Simon Hall, “ ‘On the Tail of the Panther’: Black Power and the 1967 Convention of the National Conference for New Politics,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 1 (April 2003): 59–78. 143 Roy Lewis, Transcript of “The Wall of Respect and People’s Art since 1967,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago symposium, April 18, 2015. 144 Brooks, “The Wall,” 43. 145 See Christian, Social Areas and Spatial Change, 1, 12, 13, 24, 36. 146 Howard Wood, “Chicago Points New Way to Slum Clearance: Private Initiative Paves Way for Rehabilitation,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 14, 1938. 147 Prigoff and Dunitz, Walls of Heritage, 64. 148 “C[osmopolitan] C[hamber] of C[ommerce] Unit Joins Drive to Save Wall,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 26, 1969; “Save the Wall Drive Gains Steam,” photo, Chicago Daily Defender, August 26, 1969. 149 “Applaud 43rd St. Wall Razing Delay,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 28, 1969. 150 “Soon to be destroyed,” photo caption, Chicago Daily Defender, June 8, 1970.

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151 “Wall of Re­spect Tumbles Down,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 29, 1972. This date revises an error that crept into Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 4. Chapter 2. Cultural Nationalism and Community Culture

1 Richard Christiansen, “Chicago Gang Puts on Negro Revue,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1967. Christiansen wrote for the Chicago Daily News. 2 David Katzive, “Oscar Brown Jr. and the Rangers Triumph,” Hyde Park Herald, May 31, 1967. Christiansen was also largely favorable, though not quite so ecstatic. Christiansen, “Chicago Gang.” 3 “Rangers’ Show Aired Sunday,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 23, 1967. 4 “Opportunity Please Knock,” Ebony 22, no. 10 (August 1967): 104. 5 Oscar Brown, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2000.010), interview by Julieanna Richardson, September 19, 2000, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, session 1, tape 3, story 3, Oscar Brown Jr. recalls his dismissal from the Communist Party. 6 Oscar Brown Jr., Opportunity Please Knock (playscript), Oscar Brown Jr. Papers, Maggie Brown Collection. 7 Fry, Fire and Blackstone, 12. The Woodlawn Organ­ization obtained a large grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity to fund a job training program that employed gang leaders as subprofessionals and gave a stipend to the trainees; this is the program discussed in the introduction. Other support came from the Kettering Foundation. 8 James Porter, “­Brother, Where Art Thou?” (interview with Oscar Brown Jr.), Roctober 15 (2005), reprinted in Jake Austen, ed., Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll: Conversations with Unjustly Obscure Rock ’n’ Soul Eccentrics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 23. The interview is also quoted in Moore and Williams, The Almighty Black P Stone Nation, 43–44. 9 “Opportunity Please Knock” (Ebony). 10 Oscar Brown Jr., “Gang Gone Good” (unpublished manuscript), 13, Oscar Brown Jr. Papers, Maggie Brown Collection. 11 Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1967), 456. 12 Bennett, The Negro Mood, 112. 13 Bernard Goss, former husband of Margaret Burroughs, provided art direction, and presumably also—­perhaps even from Margaret Burroughs’s own collection—­the African sculpture that adorns Alex’s apartment. 14 I refer of course to Audre Lorde’s classic short essay “The Master’s Tools ­Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical ­Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Latham, NY: Kitchen ­Table Press, 1981), 98–101. 15 Clovis Semmes, Cultural Hegemony and African American Development (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 237.

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16 Doris Saunders, “Confetti,” Chicago Defender, January 17, 1967, and February 21, 1967. 17 ProQuest stats for Chicago Defender, accessed January 29, 2012. Many of the references to “black” are presumably not racial, and in any event t­ hese numbers should not be taken as absolute—­rather, they should be understood in relative terms. 18 Mary Ellmann, “Chicago! ­Behind the ‘I ­Will’ Spirit It Is Ner­vous and Erratic,” New York Times, July 14, 1968. 19 Malcolm X, “Malcolm X and Revolutionary Black Nationalism,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Re­sis­tance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology, ed. Manning Marable (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 417. 20 William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 131. 21 Val Gray Ward, Gerald McWorter, and Hoyt Fuller, “Black Power Leader Forms Group ­Here,” Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1967. 22 Abiola Irele, “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (October 1965): 321. 23 Quoted in Bradford Chambers, ed., Chronicles of Negro Protest: A Background Book for Young ­People, Documenting the History of Black Power (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 291. 24 Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 171. 25 E. U. Essien-­Udom, “The Nationalist Movements of Harlem,” Freedomways 3, no. 3 (summer 1963): 342, where he also called nationalists the “wing of Negro protest which is most insistent on self-­assertion and self-­help by the Negro as a group.” 26 William Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 215. 27 Carolyn Rod­gers, “Breakforth in Deed,” Black World 19, no. 11 (September 1970): 14. This echoes Sigemonde Wimberli, who refers to himself as a “medium” (in both the artistic and the “spirit” sense). Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Chicago’s Black Artists: A New Breed,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 17, 1968, 1. 28 See Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 54, quoting Huey P. Newton, “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement,” in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1995), 50. 29 Cruse, Crisis, 343. 30 Cruse, Crisis, 344. 31 James Turner, “The Sociology of Black Nationalism,” in “Black Politics,” special issue, Black Scholar 1, no. 2 (December 1969): 18. 32 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 83.

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33 Ronald Milner, “Black Theater, Go Home!,” Negro Digest 17, no. 6 (April 1968): 10. 34 Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 34. 35 Bill Mullen’s Popu­lar Fronts is an examination of the po­liti­cal views and artistic contributions of this generation. 36 Oscar Brown Jr., The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, session 1, tape 3, story 3, Oscar Brown Jr. recalls his dismissal from the Communist Party. 37 Robert Paige, personal communication, November 2016. 38 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William Van Deburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 52–56, 53, 52. See also Martin ­Favor, Au­then­tic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Re­nais­sance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 39 James Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), 90. 40 ­There are many examples; among ­others, see E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Per­for­mance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 22–25; Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 67. 41 House of Umoja, “ ‘umoja’: A proposal for the development of a positive expression of Black Unity and Brotherhood,” “House of Umoja File” (folder), Illinois Arts Council, Administrative Files, 1963–76, rec­ord series 312.001, Illinois State Archives. This is one of many folders kept by the iac on organ­ izations active in the arts in Illinois. 42 Jeff Donaldson, “The Role We Want for Black Art,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William Van Deburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 219. 43 Amiri Baraka, “Speech to the Congress of African ­Peoples, 1970,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William Van Deburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 148. 44 Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 186. 45 Barbara J. Jones, “Black Imagery: The Black Experience” (master’s thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1970), 43. 46 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interview by Rebecca Zorach and Skyla Hearn, Never the Same, 2012, https://­never​-­the​-­same​.­org​/­interviews​/­barbara​-­jones​-­hogu​/­. 47 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interview by Rebecca Zorach and Skyla Hearn. 48 I thank Bridget Madden, Paul Jaskot, Erika Stuart, Suzanne Blier, and Marguerite Horberg for help deciphering this photo. 49 James Yuenger, “$50,000 Gang Report Is Worthless, McClellan Charges,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1968. 50 Daniel Lewis and Christian James, eds., fbi Files on Black Extremist Organ­ izations (Bethesda, MD: LexisNexis, 2005–10), November 4, 1966. The report is located in Rec­ord Group 65: Rec­ords of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,

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1896–2008. Series: Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957–78. File Unit: Chicago, [Illinois]—157-1465 (“Coordinating Council for Black Power”). National Archives and Rec­ords Administration. 51 Lawrence Landry, “ ‘­There Is No Such ­Thing as a Bad Boy’—­Unless He Happens to Be Black,” working paper/speech, box 2, folder 14, Leonard Wash Papers, vhc. 52 Lewis and James, fbi Files, Coordinating Council for Black Power, Files on Stokely Carmichael, May 16, 1967 (event was at Prince­ton Hall on May 14, 1967). The report is located in Rec­ord Group 65: Rec­ords of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1896–2008. Series: Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957–1978. File Unit: Chicago, [Illinois]—157-1297-­Sub A-­v.1 [Classification—­Civil Unrest] Stokely Carmichael. National Archives and Rec­ ords Administration. 53 Lerone Bennett Jr., “How to Stop Riots,” Ebony 22, no. 12 (October 1967): 35. 54 Sol Tax, ed., The ­People vs. the System, a Dialogue in Urban Conflict: Proceedings, Community Ser­vice Workshop (Chicago: Acme Press, 1967), 414. 55 Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of ­Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). 56 Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement, 89. 57 Bennett, “How to Stop Riots,” 29. 58 “Art as a Social Vehicle ­towards a Better Pattern of Living,” typescript statement, part 1, box 1, folder 9, item 33, sscac Archives. 59 See Stanley S. Madeja, “Art and Government: A Review of Activities and Proj­ ects in the Visual Arts Supported by the Arts and Humanities Program,” Art Education 21, no. 3 (March 1968): 22. 60 “U.S. Cash Aids Negro Spiel of White Hatred: Enacted in Makeshift Harlem Theater,” Chicago Tribune, December 1, 1965. 61 See Anthony C. Gibbs Jr., The Woodlawn Organ­ization Youth Proj­ect: Final Report, Office of Economic Opportunity Grant cg8734 a/o (Chicago: Woodlawn Organ­ization Youth Proj­ect, 1968). 62 Bennett Schiff and Stephen Goodell, The Office of Economic Opportunity during the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 1963–­January 1969 (Washington, DC: n.p., 1969), 79. 63 Schiff and Goodell, Office, 80–81. 64 Schiff and Goodell, Office, 81. 65 Eugene Perkins, “Introduction,” in Black Expressions: An Anthology of New Black Poets, ed. Eugene Perkins (Chicago: ymca, 1967), unpaginated. 66 Lawrence William Sherman, “Youth Workers; Police and the Gangs: Chicago, 1956–1970” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1970). 67 It followed a program called S.T.R.E.E.T.S. that had been dismantled by the ccuo following the candidacy of a youth worker (Fred Hubbard) for alderman. Sherman, “Youth Workers,” 26.

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68 David Dawley, A Nation of Lords (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1992), 112. 69 “Keep a Cool Summer: An Editorial,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), July 15, 1967. 70 See, e.g., Andrew Kopkind, “White on Black: The Riot Commission and the Rhe­toric of Reform,” in Cities ­under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968, ed. David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 234–35. 71 “Youth Concert Rocks Beach House,” Hyde Park Herald, August 9, 1967. 72 “Neighborhood Happenings,” Hyde Park Herald, May 10, 1967. 73 “Neighborhood Happenings.” Funding came from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; schoolchildren ­were bused in for the show. 74 Semmes, Cultural Hegemony, 235; George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The aacm and American Experimental ­Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 124–25. 75 Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 124. 76 Kelan Phil Cohran, interview by Rebecca Zorach, Never The Same, 2011, https://­never​-­the​-­same​.­org​/­interviews​/­phil​-­cohran​/­. 77 In the second year, artists involved in teaching and directing the program included Useni Perkins, Richard Muhal Abrams, Lawrence Kabaka, Jenny Peters (the dance instructor), and Donnie Ray Car­ter (a visual artist). Douglas Williams, interview with author, July 2016. 78 Perkins, “Introduction,” unpaginated. 79 Gwendolyn Brooks “II. The Wall,” 43. 80 Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 294–95. 81 Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 164–65. 82 B. Jones, “Black Imagery,” 36. 83 Semmes, Cultural Hegemony, 237. 84 Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 110–11. 85 Kelan Phil Cohran, interview, Never The Same. 86 “On the Beach Final Sketch: duSable’s Life,” Chicago Defender, August 26, 1967. 87 Kelan Phil Cohran, interview, Never The Same; Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 119. 88 Bob Hunter, “District Police Padlock Affro Arts Theater,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 1, 1968. 89 The Affro-­Arts Theater is not to be confused with the Afro Arts Theater in Atlanta, though its name was often confusingly misspelled with one “f.” 90 Pemon Rami, interview with author, March 2012. 91 This information derives from Hunter, “Officials Act to Re-­Open Affro Arts Theatre,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 9, 1968; and letter from Howard Whittaker of Cleveland Summer Arts Festival to Julius Cahn, Asst. to the Vice President, May 16, 1968. Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968.

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record group 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords. Unpro­cessed. College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 92 Kelan Phil Cohran, interview, Never The Same. 93 Hunter, “District Police Padlock.” 94 “Malcolm X Day Rites Erupt in 2 City Schools,” Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1968. 95 The event was titled “Smash Their Jelly-­W hite Justice,” and LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muhammad Ali, and many o­ thers attended. “Smash Their Jelly-­W hite Justice,” poster, Posters 1958–1981, Hoyt W. Fuller Papers, Atlanta University Center. 96 Kelan Phil Cohran, interview, Never The Same. 97 Hunter, “District Police Padlock.” 98 Hunter, “District Police Padlock.” 99 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 82. 100 See Satter, F­ amily Properties. 101 University of Chicago Law Review, “Criminal Justice in Extremis: Administration of Justice during the April 1968 Chicago Disorder,” University of Chicago Law Review 36, no. 3 (spring 1969): 612. 102 Sally Fitzgerald, “Chicago Gangs Aid in City Vio­lence Control Efforts,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 9, 1968; Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: Amer­i­ca in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 193. 103 Fitzgerald, “Chicago Gangs.” 104 Hunter, “Officials Act to Re-­Open.” 105 Bob Hunter, “Cohran Vows to Keep Affro-­Arts Closed,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 9, 1968. 106 Alexandroff ’s account of the conference appears in his A Dif­fer­ent Drummer: The History of Columbia College Chicago (Chicago: Columbia College Chicago, 2003), 91–94. 107 “The Arts and the Inner City” (mission statement). Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­ cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 108 Information gleaned from multiple items in Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. See also Alexandroff, A Dif­fer­ent Drummer, 92. 109 Invitation. Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 110 Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Whites ­Can’t Interpret Our Art: Black Group,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 14, 1968. 111 Hoyt Fuller to Mirron Alexandroff, April 30, 1968. Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­ cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago.

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112 Hoyt Fuller comments on press release, box 10, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa. 113 Robert Paige, discussion with Rebecca Zorach ­after screening of Medium Cool, “Revolution on Film” series, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, July 12, 2013, http://­africobra​.­uchicago​.­edu​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2016​/­01​ /­AFRICOBRA​_­robert​_­paige​.­pdf. 114 Robert Paige, discussion with Rebecca Zorach ­after screening of Medium Cool. 115 “What Happened,” typescript. Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 116 Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Artists in ‘Food Boycott’ at Banquet,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 16, 1968. 117 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 82. 118 Thomas Willis, “Arts and the Inner City Conference: Happening Almost Missed Happening,” Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1968. 119 Willis, “Arts and the Inner City.” 120 Fitzgerald, “Whites ­Can’t Interpret Our Art.” 121 Mark, “A ­Matter of Black and White,” 3. 122 “What Happened,” Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 123 Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Affro-­Arts Theater Open Again; July 4 Fete Is Set,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 2, 1968. 124 “Afro-­Arts Theater May Get License,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1968; Fitzgerald, “Affro-­Arts Theater Open Again.” 125 “Affro-­Arts Theatre Sets Black Cinema,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 5, 1968; Semmes, Cultural Hegemony, 239. 126 “Afro-­American Course Has 65 Students Enrolled,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1968. 127 “College Grad Joins Afro Arts Staff,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), August 31, 1968. 128 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 80. Chapter 3. An Experimental Friendship

1 Sigemonde Kharlos Wimberli, “Pro­cession for the urban mau mau,” in Ghetto Scenes (Chicago: ­Free Black Press, 1968), 27. 2 Don McIlvaine, “Dreams of a Better Life,” in “A Sense of Identity: Nine Centers of Pride,” special issue, Art Gallery 13 (April 1970): 48. 3 Donald Mosby, “Westside Gang Plans Business Ventures,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 4, 1968. 4 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Proposal to Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (signed Alfonso Alford, to Joseph Black, Director, Humanities and Social Sciences), 2, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rec­ord group (rg hereafter) 1.2 (Proj­ects),

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series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Archives (rf hereafter). 5 “Revised Proposal,” Speech of Bobby Gore at the Founding of Operation Bootstrap, February 14, 1968, 5, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967– 1970,” rf. This story is repeated verbatim in many of the cvl’s proposals. 6 “Revised Proposal,” Speech of Bobby Gore at the Founding of Operation Bootstrap, 6. 7 “Revised Proposal,” Speech of Bobby Gore at the Founding of Operation Bootstrap, 7. 8 Bobby Gore, interview with author, June 2011. 9 David G. Dawley, “Vice Lords, Inc. ‘Where All the Fellows Meet,’ ” 5, Rocke­ fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 10 Dawley, Nation of Lords, 111–14. 11 Kopkind, “White on Black,” 241. 12 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Proposal to Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (signed Alfonso Alford, to Joseph Black, director, Humanities and Social Sciences, December 20, 1967), Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 13 “Response to jeb—­Proof of Not-­for-­Profit Status,” undated letter from Alford to Black received January 11, 1968, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 14 “Response to jeb—­Proof of Not-­for-­Profit Status,” Memo from ph to jeb, January 12, 1968, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 15 “jeb and cvl Meet,” January 19, 1968, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), series 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 16 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Proposal to Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (signed Alfonso Alford, to Joseph Black, director, Humanities and Social Sciences, December 20, 1967), rf. 17 ymca Chicago “Grant in Aid,” February 18, 1968, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ects), subseries 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­ Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 18 Wanda Ross, interview with author, January 2012. 19 Dawley, Nation of Lords, 164. 20 R. Lincoln Keiser, The Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets (Boston: Wadsworth, 1979), 11. 21 Dawley, Nation of Lords, 8. 22 Richard Kraus, “Providing for Recreation and Aesthetic Enjoyment,” in “Governing the City: Challenges and Options for New York,” special issue,

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Proceedings of the Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal Science 29, no. 4 (1969): 98. Krauss also pointed to the inadequacy of “emergency recreation ser­vices” in par­tic­u­ lar ­because they existed only in summertime (99). 23 Bobby Gore, interview with author, June 2011. 24 David Dawley includes a document in his Nation of Lords that shows the cvl organ­ization requesting parents’ cooperation in keeping their ­children from interfering (through rough play and sabotage) with two neighborhood construction proj­ects. “To the Parents of Lawndale,” in Nation of Lords, 130. 25 Raymond Broady, interview with author, January 2010. 26 Press release, Conferences, “Arts and the Inner City,” May 1968, Columbia College Chicago Archives. 27 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Report to the Public (Chicago: Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., 1969). 28 Bobby Gore, interview with author; Keiser, Vice Lords, 52. 29 Lewis and James, fbi Files, Coordinating Council for Black Power, Files on Stokely Carmichael, May 16, 1967 (event was at Prince­ton Hall on May 14, 1967). 30 Oscar Brown Jr., “Gang Gone Good,” 10–11, Oscar Brown Jr. Papers, Maggie Brown Collection. 31 bbr Youth and Training Center of the Chicago Youth Centers, “Open House and Black Soul,” event program in rec­ord series 312.001, Illinois Arts Council, “Administrative Files,” “Black Soul” (folder), Illinois State Archives. 32 According to the “Calendar of Community Events,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 29, 1968, “The Roman Saints Variety Show of original acts ­will be performed at the Central Park Theatre, 3535 W. Roo­se­velt Rd. at 5 and 8 pm.” The caption to a photo the previous week noted that the Saints had put together the event without outside help. Chicago Daily Defender, February 22, 1968. 33 The Lord’s Word 1, no. 3 (July 7, 1968); “Field Foundation Beautification. Newsletter to Joseph E. Black.” Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Rec­ords, rg 1.2 (Proj­ ects), subseries 200, box 113, folder 997, “ymca-­Chicago—­Youth Groups, 1967–1970,” rf. 34 Bobby Gore, interview with author, June 2011. 35 Daniel transferred to Marshall High ­because he skipped so much school; he did not know as many ­people at Marshall so the thought was that it would be “a better environment.” Zelle, personal communication. 36 Eugene “Eda” Wade, interview with author and Marissa Baker, April 17, 2015; Mark Elder, personal communication, December 30, 2013; Michelle-­Renee Perkins, personal communication, November 2017. 37 Jerry Hetherington, interview with author, July 2011. 38 Seymour Sarason, Creation of Settings and the ­Future Socie­ties (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, 1972), ix. 39 Sarason, Creation of Settings, 2.

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40 Stephen Carr and Kevin Lynch, “Where Learning Happens,” in “The Conscience of the City,” special issue, Daedalus 97, no. 4 (fall 1968): 1285. 41 Richard Feigen, Tales from the Art Crypt (New York: Knopf, 2000). 42 Jan van der Marck, application, statement (“Some Social and Cultural Aspects of the Museum of Fine Arts in Con­temporary Society”), 3, Rocke­fel­ler Foundation rec­ords, rg 10.1, fellowships, fellowship files, 1917–1979, Series 650, subseries 650.E, Box 407, Folder 5888, rf. 43 Jan van der Marck, letter to John Marshall, enclosure, “The Art Museum in Amer­i­ca: Its contribution in the realm of communication,” August 20, 1958. Meyer Schapiro and Sigfried Kracauer both noted van der Marck’s eagerness to absorb American methods of sociology, an eagerness neither could wholly endorse. Rocke­fel­ler Foundation rec­ords, rg 10.2, fellowships, fellowship recorder cards, box 5, “Jan van der Marck” (folder), rf. 44 Jan van der Marck, “The American Art Museum in Con­temporary Society” (1958), 5. Rocke­fel­ler Foundation rec­ords, rg 10.1, fellowships, fellowship files, 1917–1979, Series 650, subseries 650.E, Box 407, Folder 5888, rf. 45 In the mca’s 1967–68 Annual Report he pursued the themes of his earlier research: “It would seem that the first ­battles are won. Chicago fi­nally has a museum of con­temporary art. Now we must direct our attention to an optimum use of the institution with which we are entrusted. ­There is concern within the profession that ­until now museums have cared more for the objects we pres­ent than for the ­people to whom we pres­ent them. We have . . . ​to study the most effective methods to reach ­those segments of our urban community that ­until now ­were hopelessly beyond our reach.” Jan van der Marck, “Director’s Report,” Museum of Con­temporary Art Annual Report 1967–1968 (n.p.), Publications Archive, mca Collection of Non-­Departmental Publications, 1967–2011, box 3, folder 1, Museum of Con­temporary Art (mca hereafter) Archives. 46 See Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Levine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 88–103. 47 See Rebecca Zorach, “A Potpourri of Harangues,” Proximity 8 (winter 2010): 83–89. 48 Elizabeth Stevens, “The Arts and the Ghetto: Getting Museums and Ghetto Together: ‘Art Belongs to the ­People,’ ” part IV of “The Urban Museum Crisis,” Washington Post, Times Herald, July 2, 1972, F1 and F7. 49 With the notable exceptions of Yayoi Kusama and Niki de Saint-­Phalle, they ­were almost exclusively white and male: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint-­Phalle, Christo, Yayoi Kusama, Les Levine, François Dallegret, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, Billy Apple, and ­others. Proposal, June 1, 1967, box 592/394A, folder “Museum of Con­temporary Art,” Ralph Newman Papers, chm.

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50 At the time the mca was on Ontario Street; the trustees may have met at a club or ­hotel on Delaware Place, and van der Marck added “Riviera” to indicate the glittering scale of his original ambitions. Untitled pre­sen­ta­tion by van der Marck to Collector’s Forum, 2005. Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, Box 1, Folder 14 (mca Related Activities) mca Archives. 51 “Sesqui Statues,” Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1968, B3. 52 Van der Marck to Newman, letter, July 9, 1968, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­Proposals,” Newberry Library. 53 The institute was originally planned for a vacant World War I Negro Regiment armory at 36th and Giles. Memo, Joyce Warshaw to rgn and vls [Ralph G. Newman and Ver Lynn Sprague], October 31, 1966, “Re: Discussion on Negro Cultural Center”; Letter, Ralph G. Newman to Robert M. Johnson, October 31, 1966; A. L. Thomas letter (“Dear Friend”), August 8, 1967, and enclosed materials, all in Ralph G. Newman Papers, box 592, folder “Museum of African American History,” chm. 54 Vari­ous documents in the folder “Heritage, Negro.” Ralph G. Newman Papers, isc, Box 390, chm. 55 Margaret Burroughs to Helen Garrity, July 1, 1967; Margaret Burroughs to Ralph Newman, July 21, 1967; William E. Keller to Margaret Burroughs, July 11, 1967; Michael W. Bergen to William E. Keller, July 6, 1967. “Museum of African American History” folder, chm. 56 Ralph Newman to Officers and Directors of the Illinois State Historical Society and Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, undated letter (September or early October 1968), incorporating letters from several organ­ izations. Box 387, “Du Sable Heritage Committee Folder,” Ralph G. Newman Papers, chm. 57 Memo from Anne Coyne to Ralph G. Newman, Don Howorth, and Evelyn Nelson, April 8, 1968, box 387, “Du Sable Heritage Committee Folder,” Ralph G. Newman Papers, chm. Coyne traveled to St. Charles, Missouri, to verify that that was actually the grave site of Chicago’s Du Sable. 58 Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago during the Week of the Demo­ cratic National Convention of 1968 (New York: New American Library, 1968), 1–2. 59 Mike Alk and Howard Gray, dirs., American Revolution 2 (Chicago: Film Group, 1969). 60 B. Jones, “Black Imagery,” 41. 61 “City Proj­ect Brings Arts to Street Corner,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1968. According to Cohran, the program organizers insisted that the white group take pre­ce­dence by performing first. 62 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” August 4, 1968, Jan van der Marck Papers, Box 7, Folder 17, Archives of American Art (aaa hereafter). All pages from the Time Sheet are in the same folder. Another copy exists in Jan van der Marck

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Papers, ac0006, Box 1, folder 19, “Art and Soul—­Zelle,” mca Archives. The original is located in Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s Organ­izing Timeline,” Newberry Library. 63 “The Lord’s Word” 1, no. 3 (July 7, 1968). 64 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 2, 1968. 65 “Meeting on Proposed West Side Art Proj­ect,” August 12, 1968, Jan van der Marck Papers, Box 7, Folder 17, aaa. Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, Oversized Box 1, folder 4, “Art and Soul—­Zelle,” mca Archives. Also in Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­Proposals,” Newberry Library. 66 “Meeting on Proposed West Side Art Proj­ect.” 67 “Meeting on Proposed West Side Art Proj­ect.” 68 James Houlihan, interview with author, January 2010. 69 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 2, 1968. 70 Ann Zelle, interview with author, November 2010. 71 “­Free University 1972” (course listings), box 19, folder 7, “­Free University, 1972” (folder name), Office of Student Activities Rec­ords, University of Chicago Library. See also Zorach, “A Potpourri of Harangues.” 72 Ellmann, “Chicago! ­Behind the ‘I ­Will’ Spirit.” 73 Students for a Demo­cratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 2nd ed. (New York: Students for a Demo­cratic Society, 1964), 4. 74 Karl Meyer, interview with author, March 2012. 75 U.S. census data. On North Lawndale in the 1990s, see Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 76 Arcilla Stahl discovered the works and I identified them as Arnold’s missing collage piece. 77 Robb Baker, “A Vio­lence in the House,” Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1968, a8. 78 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 17, 1968, and October 29, 1968. 79 “Culture Consciousness in Chicago,” Negro Digest 16, no. 10 (August 1967): 87. An invitation to an obac Visual Arts Workshop meeting did indeed pose this question, although the word artist was repeated rather than writer. Invitation to obac meeting, box 7, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa. 80 A useful account of this distinction is in Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon. In the realm of visual art, an excellent account of this shift and of the responses of artists is chapter 5, “Black Is a Color,” in Powell, Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth ­Century. 81 “Negro Art to Go on Display in Center,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1965, scl2. 82 “Sesqui Statues,” b3. 83 Grace Glueck, “Negroes’ Art Is What’s in Just Now,” New York Times, February 27, 1969, 34. 84 “Biography,” in The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, exhibition cata­logue, Springfield, Illinois State Museum, 1977), n.p.

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85 “Biography,” n.p. 86 B. Jones, “Black Imagery,” 3. 87 See also Vincent Harding, “Black Students and the Impossible Revolution,” Journal of Black Studies 1, no. 1 (September 1970): 84: “Black students have learned that the eyes of blackness are the eyes of the majority of the ­peoples of the earth. They are the eyes of the colonized, the eyes of the oppressed and the humiliated, the eyes of ­those who search for a new coming of their deepest powers. (To see such ­things surely invites revolution.)” 88 The copy of the book at the library of Loyola University Chicago (where he chaired the art department) must have come from his book collection; it is inscribed with his name. 89 “Arts Reach Out to Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1968, n16; “W. Side Store Front Becomes Sculpture Studio,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 18, 1969. 90 Ann Zelle, interview with author, November 2010; “Ralph Arnold Show Works in Loyola Galleries,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), February 21, 1970. 91 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” September 30, 1968. 92 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 1, 1968. 93 James Houlihan, interview with author, February 10, 2010. 94 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 31, 1968. 95 “Art and Soul, a Community Art/Book Center for All Ages,” program, Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, Box 7, Folder 17, aaa; “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” July 10, 1968. See also Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, box 1, folder 10, “Art and Soul—­Zelle,” mca Archives 96 Robert Nolte, “Artists Paint a Bright Spot on West Side,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1968. 97 James Houlihan, interview with author, February 10, 2010. 98 Illinois Arts Council, African Sculpture 1969–1970: A Traveling Exhibition Or­ ga­nized for the Illinois Arts Council, an Agency of the State of Illinois, by the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Huron Press, n.d.). The cata­log lists twenty-­ eight objects (one of which consists of five Ashanti gold weights), mostly masks and figures from West and Central African countries. Twelve objects are illustrated. Seven ­were gifts to the aic from Herbert Baker, who also took an interest in Art & Soul. The exhibition was curated by Allan Wardwell. 99 “An Eve­ning of Black Poetry,” mca news release, May 2, 1969, Jan van der Marck Papers, Box 7, Folder 18, aaa. Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, box 1, folder 10, “Art and Soul—­Zelle,” mca Archives. 100 Ann Zelle, interview with author, November 2010. 101 cvl, Inc., “A Unique Friendship between the Street and a Museum: Art and Soul,” grant proposal, 1969, Jan van der Marck Papers, Box 7, Folder 18, aaa. Jan van der Marck Papers, ac0006, box 1, folder 10, “Art and Soul—­Zelle,” mca Archives.

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102 Steven Pratt, “Sesquicentennial Group Helps Gang to Open Art Gallery-­ Studio,” Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1968, w2. 103 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 2, 1968. 104 “Art & Soul Time Sheet,” October 7, 1968. 105 In addition, in the film Lord ­Thing, what appears to be one of Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s prints also appears on the wall inside the African Lion clothing store run by the cvl. See my detailed discussions of figures 3.16 and 3.17 in chapter 4, where I discuss how ­these artworks represent the Black ­family theme of africobra. 106 “Black Expressions,” checklist, part I, box 4 (1957–1971), folder 22, sscac Archives. 107 “Black Esthetics,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 29, 1970, p. 20. 108 Bobby Gore, interview with author, June 2011. 109 Richard Foster, “Soul Is the Agenda of Lawndale Gallery,” Chicago Sun-­Times, November 14, 1968. 110 Wadsworth Jarrell and Jae Jarrell, interview with author, August 2012. 111 Reginald Madison, interview with author, August 2011. 112 Peter Gilbert, interview with author, December 2010. 113 Jerry Hetherington, interview with author, July 2011. 114 An extensive unpublished narrative of the Foundation Years program exists in Dartmouth’s archives: Howard Hawkins, “A Tale of Two Communities: The Foundation Years Program Revisited,” da-29, box 8975, “Foundation Years Program (Tucker Foundation),” Office of Public Affairs Rec­ords, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. 115 Invitation, September 15, 1968, da-114, fy Bud­gets, Office of Public Affairs Rec­ords, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. 116 John D. Vasilopoulos, “Vice Lords Founder Off to College,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), September 20, 1969, 1–2. 117 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Proposal to Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (signed Alfonso Alford, to Joseph Black, director, Humanities and Social Sciences, December 20, 1967), 2–3. 118 Meeting of Leadership Group at Sears ymca. mca time sheet, August 8, 1968. 119 Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., Proposal to Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (signed Alfonso Alford, to Joseph Black, director, Humanities and Social Sciences, December 20, 1967), 2–3. 120 David Dawley, “Vice Lords, Inc.: Where All the Fellows Meet,” rg 1.2, series 200, box 113, folder 997, rf. 121 Baker E. Morten, “Cellar Boheme Revue Has Thin Spots, but Talented Performers,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 12, 1960, a17. 122 Reginald Madison, interview with author, August 2011. 123 Jerry Hetherington, interview with author, July 2011.

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124 Hanrahan, quoted in John Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 79. 125 “Boyle Defends Shamberg in Setting Bond,” Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1969, 9. 126 Perry, quoted in Vasilopoulos, “Vice Lords Founder Off to College,” 2. 127 Among other articles, see James Strong, “Negroes Pack Civic Center Plaza in Protest of Job Discrimination,” Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1969, 9. See also Dawley, Nation of Lords, 132; Andrew Diamond, “From Fighting Gangs to Black Nations: Race, Power, and the Other Civil Rights Movement in Chicago’s West Side Ghetto, 1957–1968,” Revue française d’études américaines, no. 116 (February 2008): 51–65. The Picasso had of course itself given work to industrial laborers in Gary—­most of whom, to judge from the U.S. Steel publicity photos, ­were white. 128 Hagedorn, World of Gangs, 66–72. 129 Sigmund Kunstadter to Joseph Shapiro, letter, September 3, 1968, Joseph Shapiro Papers, ac0010 Box 1, Folder 13 (mca Administrative Documents), mca Archives. Shapiro’s papers include an article referring to Bobby Gore’s arrest (Thomas J. Dolan, “Hanrahan Criticizes Groups That Give Money to Street Gangs,” Chicago Sun-­Times, November 15, 1969) in Box 2, Folder 1 (Correspondence), ac0010. Jan van der Marck was unhappy with Joseph Shapiro’s refusal to continue funding. Van der Marck to Joseph Shapiro, June 30, 1969, in Box 2, Folder 1 (Correspondence), ac0010, on the termination of Ann Zelle. “Art and Soul, with the coming of summer, has entered upon a new round of activities, funded by vari­ous individuals, foundations and community organ­izations. Ann ­will continue working at Art and Soul as an unpaid volunteer for the duration of the summer. ­There are strong indications that the University of Illinois at Circle Campus ­will take Art and Soul ­under its wing . . . ​If we consider our ser­vice to the community and the public enhancement of our image through identification with the strug­gle among blacks for cultural equality, then I believe that the alliance has been highly rewarding for the museum. I very much regret that the Board does not feel sufficiently encouraged to continue the collaboration and make a bud­get available for that purpose.” 130 Two dif­fer­ent letters from Alfonso Alford to Jan van der Marck (beginning “As we prepare . . .” and “For the past several months . . .”), both dated February 10, 1969, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “Ann Zelle—­Art & Soul,” Newberry Library. 131 Warren Gilmore, Y.O.U. (Washington, DC: Youth Organ­izations United, 1970), copy in Ann Zelle Papers, folder “Youth Organ­izations United,” Newberry Library. 132 Jerry Hetherington, interview with author, July 2011. 133 “Ex-­Youth Gang Runs a Smart African Boutique in Chicago,” Jet 36, no. 17 (July 31, 1969): 48–49.

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134 “Proposal for a Joint Program between the Conservative Vice Lords of Chicago, Illinois and the Department of City and Regional Planning of Harvard University,” 1970. The GSD History Collection, Academic Affairs. Subseries db: Sponsored Research—­Other Sponsored Research. Folder db007. Special Collections, Frances Loeb Library, Gradu­ate School of Design, Harvard University. 135 “Booming Paper Business: Ghetto Groups Thrive on Cast-­Off Products,” Chicago Daily Defender, December 9, 1969, 6. See also West Side Community Development Corporation, West Side Community Development Corporation (Chicago: West Side Community Development Corporation, [1970?]). 136 Model Cities proposal, p. 70, box 1, folder 6, School of Urban Planning and Policy, Center for Urban Studies Archives, Rec­ords, 1967–1982, rec­ord id 00606-01-01, University of Illinois at Chicago (uic hereafter) Archives. 137 “Request for immediate action with regards to continuing the Art & Soul art workshop,” letter from the Conservative Vice Lords Inc., Art & Soul Workshop, to Simon Steiner, Chairman, Department of Art, uic, on Art & Soul stationery, with no personal signature (dated July 1969 in handwriting at the top of the page, which is consistent with the reference to ten months of operation), Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­U of I, Chicago,” Newberry Library. 138 Memorandum, August 20, 1970, from James C. Griggs, Educational Assistant Program, to Lenora Cartwright, Center for Urban Studies, Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 139 “Lake Meadows Art Fair Presented June 17–18,” Chicago Daily Defender, June 14, 1961. 140 “Teacher Tries to Spark Creativity in Youths,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1969, a16. The idea of Art & Soul also got some moral support from a report written by Arthur Rissman as a con­sul­tant for the Community Colleges of Chicago; he suggested that “Store-­Front Arts Workshops” should be sponsored by institutes of higher learning, and thereby used as incubators for educational innovation. The report was carbon copied to several faculty members at uic. Memo from Arthur Rissman, Con­sul­tant, to Meyer Weinberg, Coordinator, Innovations Center, Re: Neighborhood Arts Workshop Inquiry, April 25, 1969. Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­Chicago City College,” Newberry Library. 141 “A Proposal Prepared by the Center for Urban Studies” (University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, June 1969), 2, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­U of I, Chicago,” Newberry Library. 142 Proposal for sensory gymnasium, box 25, folder 5, John Walley Papers, rec­ord group 006-03-20-01, uic Archives. 143 “Photography and Typography,” State of Illinois Board of Higher Education Title I proposal, box 8, folder 1, John Walley Papers, rec­ord group 006-03-2001, uic Archives.

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144 “The development of behavioral patterns that ­will increase the possibility of vocational success,” box 25, folder 3, John Walley Papers, rec­ord group 006-0320-01, uic Archives. 145 Jackie Hetherington to the Members of the Art & Soul Advisory Council, July 10, 1969, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s Advisory Board,” Newberry Library. 146 Burt Lazar to Kenneth Parks, July 24, 1969, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s Advisory Board,” Newberry Library. 147 Burt Lazar to Kenneth Parks, July 24, 1969, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s Advisory Board,” Newberry Library. 148 Kenneth Parks to Art & Soul Staff, Art & Soul Board of Advisors, July 25, 1969, Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s Advisory Board,” Newberry Library. 149 “Cacophony in Black Echoes in Huge Mural,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1969. 150 College of Architecture and Art Annual Report, 1968–69, College of Art, Architecture, and Urban Sciences, Publications—­Annual Report 1962/3–1970/71, rec­ord group 006-00-02, uic Archives. Edward Dean and Peter Gygax are listed as “Vice Lords Proj­ect Faculty.” 151 “Art & Soul Fills Need,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 12, 1970, 22. 152 Photo (no title), Chicago Daily Defender, October 23, 1969, 8. Chapter 4. The Black ­Family

1 Donaldson, HistoryMakers interview. 2 obac, “Visual Arts Workshop Report,” June 29, 1967, in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 124–25. 3 For a summary of the group’s philosophy as of 1973, see Barbara Jones-­Hogu, “The History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,” area Chicago, no. 7 (fall 2008), originally published in Afri-­Cobra III (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts at Amherst, 1973), revised by the author, http://­www​ .­areachicago​.­org​/­the​-­history​-­philosophy​-­and​-­aesthetics​-­of​-­AFRICOBRA​/­ and reprinted as Barbara Jones-­Hogu, “Inaugurating AfriCOBRA: History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics,” nka 30 (spring 2012): 90–97. 4 Jones-­Hogu, “History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics.” 5 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 86. 6 Fitzgerald, “Chicago’s Black Artists.” 7 Gerald Williams, interview with author, September 2012. 8 In the end, the group did not appear in the documentary, which showcases the DuSable Museum and Zambezi Artist Guild. Many thanks to Anna Burkart for providing access to the film. wgn News, Black Pride, November 30, 1968; see also “tv Highlights for This Week,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), November 30, 1968.

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9 It does not represent their own ­family, or only partially. Jae provided the model for the ­mother, and a photo­graph of an unknown man on the street served as the model for the ­father. The Jarrells’ oldest child, Wadsworth Jr., was born in January 1968, and was thus old enough to serve as the model for the younger child in the painting. Personal communication, Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell, June 2013. 10 Margo Natalie Crawford, “Must Revolution Be a ­Family Affair? Revisiting The Black ­Woman,” in Want to Start a Revolution?, ed. Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 188. Jean Carey Bond and Patricia Peery, “Is the Black Male Castrated?,” in The Black ­Woman, ed. Toni Cade (New York: Mentor, 1970), 114, wrote that Moynihan’s ideas ­were “so successfully pop­u­lar­ized that even Blacks have swallowed his assumptions and conclusions hook, line, and sinker.” 11 See Hortense Spillers’s brilliant analy­sis, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in “Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection,” special issue, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer 1987): 64–81. 12 B. Jones, “Black Imagery,” 38. 13 Juan Declan, dir., AfriCOBRA: Art for the ­People (New York: tv Land, 2011). 14 See Erina Duganne, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 10–12, for a discussion of the idea of positive images as articulated in the discourse of photography. 15 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interview, Never The Same. 16 Margo Crawford and Bob Crawford, unedited interview transcript, October 23, 2008 (edited version published at http://­areachicago​.­org​/­bob​-­crawford​-­and​ -­margo​-­natalie​-­crawford). 17 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 83, 85. 18 Ralph Ellison, “Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections,” Crisis 77, no. 3 (March 1970): 81. 19 In Fanon’s diagnosis of René Maran’s character Jean Veneuse as an “abandonment-­neurotic,” he argues that the be­hav­ior that seems to typify him as a Black man seeking white approval by marrying a white ­woman (yet never feeling worthy of her) is a pathology, not the statement of an essential racial type. The chapter, a psychological analy­sis of the possibly autobiographical main character of René Maran’s Un homme pareil aux autres, begins with the suggestion that when Black men desire white ­women it is as an ultimate sign of freedom and as an expression of the desire to be, themselves, understood as white. René Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres (Paris: Arc-­en-­ciel, 1947). 20 “For the satisfaction of being the master of a Eu­ro­pean ­woman . . . ​without my knowledge I am attempting to revenge myself on a Eu­ro­pean ­woman for

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every­thing her ancestors have inflicted on mine throughout the centuries.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove, [1952] 1967), 78, citing Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres, 185. 21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 86. 22 Stuart Hall, ed., Repre­sen­ta­tion: Cultural Repre­sen­ta­tion and Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University, 1997), 272. 23 In “The Ego-­Function of the Rhe­toric of Protest,” Philosophy and Rhe­toric 4, no. 2 (spring 1971): 71–91, Richard B. Gregg notes that the need to combat negative self-­image is a significant theme in 1960s protest speech. Gregg’s article is deeply flawed and full of prejudice, but he does identify several strategies movements used to establish a more positive ego formation, including the identification of enemies, the supportive role of group cohesion, and style. 24 The Committee for the Arts (pre-­obac), “Invitation Letter and Statement of Purposes,” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 113–14. The Statement of Purposes was also enclosed with Hoyt Fuller, letter to Mirron Alexandroff, April 30, 1968, in Conferences: Arts and the Inner City, May 1968. rg 03.07, Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords, unpro­cessed, College Archives and Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago. 25 This is evident from statements from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (aacm), for example, which strove “to set a high moral standard for musicians and to return the public image of creative musicians to the level of esteem which was handed down from past cultures” and to “stimulate Spiritual growth.” Ronald Radano, “Jazzin’ the Classics: The aacm’s Challenge to Mainstream Aesthetics,” Black ­Music Research Journal 12, no. 1 (spring 1992): 85. 26 Martin Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 27 Harrison, Drama of Nommo, 220. 28 Tax, The ­People vs. the System, 343. 29 Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone, Success through a Positive M ­ ental Attitude (New York: Pocket Books, 1960), 22. 30 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righ­teous Discontent: The ­Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 187. 31 I am grateful to E. Patrick Johnson for helping me clarify this point. 32 Reginald Butler, “The ­People’s Art: Introductory Essay,” in The ­People’s Art: Black Murals, 1967–1978, quoted in Prigoff and Dunitz, Walls of Heritage, 26. 33 S. Hall, Repre­sen­ta­tion, 274. 34 Michèle Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990), “Introduction,” 1–10, and “Negative Images: ­Towards a Black Feminist Cultural Criticism,” 241–55. 35 Wallace, Invisibility Blues, 1.

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36 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 34. 37 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 37. 38 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 34. 39 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 35. 40 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 40. 41 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 39–40. 42 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interview, Never the Same. 43 Margaret Walker, “For My P ­ eople,” Poetry Magazine 51, no. 2 (November 1937): 81–83; Marion Perkins, Prob­lems of the Black Artist (Chicago: ­Free Black Press, 1971), 10; McWorter, “obac,” 158. 44 Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson, “Special Reports: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,” Black World 23, no. 1 (November 1973), 74. 45 M. Perkins, Prob­lems of the Black Artist, 2. 46 Eugene Perkins, “The Black Arts Movement: Its Challenge and Responsibility,” in The Black Seventies, ed. Floyd Barbour (Boston: P. Sargent, 1970), 86. 47 Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 83. 48 M. Perkins, Prob­lems of the Black Artist, 2, 5. 49 Clyde Taylor, “The Re-­Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in The Birth of Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 15–37. 50 Carolyn Lawrence, “Art for Black Students: A Change in Objectives,” School Arts 68, no. 6 (February 1969): 19. 51 Robert Motherwell, “The New York School,” in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 78. See also Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 52 Motherwell, “New York School,” 80. 53 This “freedom” was also being mobilized as international Cold War propaganda—­painting a portrait of specifically American freedom even as police batons ­were raining down on Civil Rights demonstrators. See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011). On the relationship between abstract expressionism and the left, see David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 54 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 55 See, for example, Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam Jr., Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, Tom Lloyd, William Williams, and Hale Woodruff, “The Black Artist in Amer­i­ca: A Symposium,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 5 (January 1969): 245–60. 56 Margaret Burroughs, “To Make a Painter Black,” in The Black Seventies, ed. Floyd Barbour (Boston: P. Sargent, 1970), 135.

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57 On the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, see “Black Light on the Wall of Re­ spect,” an impor­tant essay by Margo Natalie Crawford. In the same collection, New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Crawford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), is an essay by Mary Ellen Lennon, “A Question of Relevancy: New York Museums and the Black Arts Movement,” 92–116, which addresses issues in New York similar to ­those the pres­ent chapter addresses for Chicago. 58 See, for instance, the essays collected in Addison Gayle Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). 59 James C. Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: African-­American Culture and the American Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. 60 Meeting minutes, June 11, 1972, Gerald Williams Collection. 61 The exposures ­were done at Advantage Silkscreen and at the studio of Ruben Aguilar (not a member of the group). They ­were sold for ten dollars, mainly at art fairs, exhibitions, and conferences. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interview with Rebecca Zorach and Skyla Hearn, July 1, 2011. When printed by group members, the cost per print was twenty-­six cents for ink and paper. Minutes of meeting, June 20, 1971, Gerald Williams Collection. 62 Meeting minutes, July 11, 1971, Gerald Williams Collection. 63 “C. Siddha Webber,” interview by Rebecca Zorach, Never the Same, 2013–14, https://­never​-­the​-­same​.­org​/­interviews​/­c​-­siddha​-­webber​/­. 64 KeRa Upra, interview by Robert A. Sengstacke, January 9, 1971. 65 Veela Sengstacke, personal communication, June 2018. 66 Amus Mor, “The ‘Ghetto Psychic’ Expanded Black Thought: KeRa Upra, S. Side Cosmic Speaker,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), February 26, 1972, 6. 67 Mor, “The ‘Ghetto Psychic,’ ” 6. Mor, born David Moore, also delivered his Beat-­flavored verses on Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light. 68 Robert A. Sengstacke, text on poster, “We Are the Spirit of the Original Black Man.” Robert Sengstacke personal collection and personal communication, December 2014. 69 Amus Mor, The Coming of John (Chicago: 21st ­Century Atoma, 1969). 70 Notable too is that Mor places Coltrane in a butterfly chair, the type of chair in which Huey P. Newton also sat for an iconic photo­graph. 71 Malcolm Preston, “The Image: Three Views—­Ben Shahn, Darius Milhaud and James Baldwin Debate the Real Meaning of a Fash­ion­able Term,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 24–31. 72 Don McIlvaine, “Developmental Uses of the Black Art Medium Proj­ect,” proposal, undated (prob­ably early 1970s), Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 73 Comments preceding reading of “Blackman/An Unfinished History,” on Don L. Lee, Rappin’ & Readin’, recorded at Wayne State University, 1970.

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74 “Mural of Black History,” Tribune staff photo by Roy Hall, Chicago Tribune, June 28, 1970. 75 ­Virginia Julien, director of the Negro History Action Committee, to the Officers and Directors of the Illinois State Historical Society and the Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, September 10, 1968 (with cover letter from Ralph Newman), Ralph Newman Papers, Box 387, “DuSable Heritage Committee” folder, chm. 76 Phyl Garland, “The Gang Phenomenon: Big City Headache,” Ebony 22, no. 10 (August 1967): 96–103. 77 “Negro History Museum Planned,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), May 20, 1967. 78 Lerone Bennett Jr., The Challenge of Blackness (Chicago: Johnson, 1972), 194–95. This text is extensively quoted in DePillars, “African-­American Artists,” 105. 79 On Rod­gers, see Cheryl Clarke, ­After Mecca: ­Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), especially 14–16, 69–70. 80 Carolyn Rod­gers, “Feelings Are Sense: The Lit­er­a­ture of Black,” Black World 19, no. 8 (June 1970): 11. 81 Rod­gers, “Feelings Are Sense,” 11. 82 Rod­gers, “Feelings Are Sense,” 11. 83 Compare Don L. Lee’s “A Poem Looking for a Reader,” in ­Don’t Cry, Scream (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969), 61: “black is not / all inclusive, / t­ here are other colors. / color her warm and womanly, / color her feeling and life, / color her a gibran poem & 4 ­women of simone. / ­children ­will give her color / paint her the color of her / man.” 84 Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics,” 80. 85 Gayle, introduction, in The Black Aesthetic, xxii. Obviously, ­there are also questions of gender to be addressed ­here. 86 For a plea for humanism from a member of an older generation of African American writers profoundly affected by the Black Arts Movement, see Margaret Walker, “The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-­American Lit­er­a­ture,” American Libraries 1, no. 9 (October 1970): 849–54. 87 In 1974 a photo of Moore together with Amiri Baraka and Jeff Donaldson at the Sixth Pan-­African Congress in Tanzania appeared in Ebony. Lerone Bennett Jr., “Pan-­Africanism at the Crossroads,” Ebony 29, no. 11 (September 1974): 152. James Turner was the chair of the U.S. del­e­ga­tion. 88 “The Black Scholar Interviews: Queen ­Mother Moore,” Black Scholar 4, nos. 6–7 (March–­April 1973): 53. 89 “Opening Session of obac,” April 19, 1967, box 7, obac folder, Jeff Donaldson papers, aaa. 90 Cade, “On the Issue of Roles,” in The Black ­Woman, ed. Toni Cade (New York: Mentor, 1970), 103. See also Gwen Patton, “Black ­People and the Victorian

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Ethos,” in Cade, The Black ­Woman, 143–48; and Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” Black Scholar 1, nos. 3–4 (January–­February 1970): 8–16. 91 Linda La Rue, “The Black Movement and ­Women’s Liberation,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 7, black revolution (May 1970): 39. 92 Cade, “On the Issue of Roles,” 110. 93 Carolyn Rod­gers was quoted in an article in Ebony saying that “the feminist movement is one of middle-­class white ­women. . . . ​White ­women have been do-­nothing dolls and one gathers that they now want to be white men or something e­ lse.” Helen H. King, “The Black ­Woman and ­Women’s Lib,” Ebony 26, no. 5 (March 1971): 68–76. See Crawford, “Must Revolution Be a F­ amily Affair?” Meanwhile, many Black w ­ omen saw white ­women not only as equal oppressors but sometimes even worse oppressors than white men, for example, in case of false accusations of rape. “The Black Scholar Interviews,” 48. 94 Erika Doss implies that the bpp’s vision of Black masculinity was uniformly accompanied by sexist attitudes ­toward ­women—­a view I think is too ­simple—in her “ ‘Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation’: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther,” New Po­liti­cal Science 21, no. 2 (June 1999): 245–59. 95 Michele Wallace, “Daring to Do the Unpop­u­lar,” Ms. 2 (September 1973): 24. 96 Personal communication, Gerald Williams, July 2018. 97 The division of ­labor was observed both for the printmaking pro­cess and for the task of exhibiting the work at art fairs and the Black Expo, for example, for which members presented a printmaking demonstration, and maintained a detailed schedule detailing individual time commitments. Minutes, June 13, 1971, and Minutes, September 12, 1971, Gerald Williams Collection. “Perform at Expo Cultural Section,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), October 2, 1971. 98 Minutes, June 11, 1972, Gerald Williams Collection. Money questions—­such as the financing of the production of Donaldson’s print (which was considerably more expensive than the ­others) and the cost of rental of the group’s Chicago studio—­produced some strain. Gerald Williams, personal communication, July 2018. 99 Gerald Williams, personal communication, July 2018. Jones-­Hogu resigned from the group by the end of 1975 and Lawrence in September 1975. Barbara J. Hogu to africobra, March 7, 1975; Barbara J. Hogu to africobra, December 29, 1975; Carolyn Lawrence to africobra, September 29, 1975, all in Gerald Williams Collection. 100 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, personal communication, July 2011. Chapter 5. ­Until the Walls Come Down

1 Jeff Huebner, “Moving Pictures: Mural Artist John Pitman Weber Reflects on the Slow Pro­cess of Change,” Chicago Reader, December 17, 1998.

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2 On the Chicago Mural Group, see chapter 6, “The Chicago Mural Group,” Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 148–68. 3 Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 150. 4 “Malcolm X Offers Mural Painting,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), November 17, 1973, 23. 5 Chicago Mural Group, “Annual Report,” 1970, 15, Chicago Public Art Group (cpag hereafter) Archives. 6 “William Walker Discusses the Wall: Chicago Mural Group Conversation,” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 311. 7 I am especially grateful to Romi Crawford for sharing her deep knowledge of the photography of this time period in the course of working on The Wall of Re­spect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago. In the same volume see in par­tic­u­lar her “Black Photog­raphers Who Take Black Pictures,” 193–211. 8 See Rebecca Zorach, “Paint­ers, Poets, and Per­for­mance: Looking at the Wall of Re­spect,” in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 22; “William Walker Discusses the Wall,” 302. 9 Robert Sengstacke, interview with author, September 2016. 10 bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), 57. 11 hooks, “In Our Glory,” 59, 60. 12 “Photos of Love, Pride, and Strength: Bob Sengstacke,” Negro Digest 18, no. 1 (November 1968): 88. 13 Kathy Slade, “ ‘Hip World’ . . . ​A Photographic Statement,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 7, 1967. 14 Slade, “ ‘Hip World.’ ” 15 Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Fundi (Billy Abernathy), In Our Terribleness (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1970), unpaginated. 16 “Roy Lewis Photo Show Due at Southside Community Art Center,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 7, 1968. 17 Roy Lewis, “Black and Beautiful Photographic Proposal,” March 1968, proposal; minutes, Advisory Panel on Art Meeting, Tuesday, May 21, 1968, Illinois Arts Council, “Advisory Panel Minutes,” Rec­ord Series 312.003, Illinois State Archives. 18 Council meeting minutes, May 24, 1968, Illinois Arts Council, “Council Minutes,” Rec­ord Series 312.002, Illinois State Archives. 19 Minutes, Advisory Panel on Art Meeting, June 6, 1968, Illinois Arts Council, “Advisory Panel Minutes,” Rec­ord Series 312.003, Illinois State Archives. 20 “New Walls for City,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 22, 1968, 14. 21 “New Walls for City.” Roy Lewis’s mural also appears in Catalysts Cultural Committee, Black Cultural Directory Chicago ’69, 29. Crawford’s wall is also vis­i­ble in a photo­graph of the Umoja Center that accompanied an article on a student boycott: “Chicago Pupils Boycott; Board Member Agrees,” Jet 35, no. 4 (October 31, 1968): 28.

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22 Lewis, “Black and Beautiful.” 23 “New Walls for City.” 24 “New Walls for City.” 25 Eugene Perkins and Roy Lewis, West Wall (Chicago: ­Free Black Press, 1968). 26 Angela Parker, “Portraying the Black Heritage on City Walls,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1971. 27 “William Walker Discusses the Wall: Chicago Mural Group Conversation,” 311. 28 This scene is depicted, to my knowledge, in a single photo­graph taken by a German photographer (currently in my personal collection). 29 Rebecca Zorach and Marissa Baker, “Interview with Eugene ‘Eda’ Wade” (edited transcript of April 17, 2015, interview), in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, The Wall of Re­spect, 318. See also Pinder, Painting the Gospel, 87–88. 30 DePillars, “African-­American Artists,” 127. 31 The story of Green’s mural is told in Robbyelee, “Vandals Destroy Mural: It Makes You Stop and Think,” Liberation News Ser­vice, January 27, 1971, and, in a slightly dif­fer­ent version, in Eva Cockcroft’s “­Women in the Community Mural Movement,” Heresies 1, no. 1 (January 1977): 14. ­There is ­little rec­ord of Green ­after this, though she received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College Chicago in June 1976 (Columbia College Chicago, Digital Commons, http://­digitalcommons​.­colum​.­edu), and died in 2011 at fifty-­eight (http://­ whitepages​.­com). 32 “Cacophony in Black Echoes in Huge Mural,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1969. I am making the assumption that the paint was lead. 33 “Cacophony in Black.” 34 Jerry Crimmins, “Paint Jobs Slated for 27 Pedestrian Underpasses,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 1970. 35 Mary Lou Jones, “­Until the Walls Fall Down, Paint Them,” Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1971. 36 “ ‘­People’s Art’ Colors Booths,” Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1971. 37 Untitled photo and caption, Chicago Defender, September 12, 1973, 1. 38 “Art & Soul Fills Need,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 12, 1970. The July article states, “The wall, ‘Black Man’s Dilemma,’ is an Art & Soul proj­ect sponsored by the Conservative Vice Lords.” “­People and Pictures in the News,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 15, 1970, 16. 39 McIlvaine, “Dreams of a Better Life,” 48–50. 40 McIlvaine, “Dreams of a Better Life,” 49. 41 “Cacophony in Black.” 42 I thank Georg Stahl for suggesting this connection to me. See also John Towns, “Aesthetics of Transformation: The African-­American Experience of the Chicago Community Mural Movement, 1967–1970” (EdD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2002), 251–52. 43 M. Jones, “­Until the Walls Fall Down.”

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44 “­People and Pictures in the News,” 16. 45 Mario Castillo, personal communication, October 2017. 46 Mario Castillo, personal communication, November 2017. 47 See Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 225–37. 48 Sam Yanari, interview with author, November 17, 2010. 49 Yamashita showed other work ­there in May 1969, along with work by his students at Prairie State College—­a group of sculpture students calling themselves the “Oriental Space Design Group.” Poster in the Ann Zelle Papers, folder “a&s—­Programs,” Newberry Library. 50 Sam Yanari, interview with author, November 17, 2010. 51 Sam Yanari, interview with author, November 17, 2010. 52 Irene Piraino, “He’s Out to Paint the Town,” Daily News Suburban Week, June 13 and 14, 1973. 53 Sue Roll, “One Artist’s Colorful Plan to Dress Up Our Naked City,” Chicago T ­ oday, February 1, 1974, 35. 54 See Eva S. Cockcroft and James D. Cockcroft, “Cityarts Workshop—­People’s Art in New York City,” Left Curve 4 (summer 1975): 14; Janet Bloom, “Changing Walls,” Architectural Forum 138, no. 4 (May 1973): 25. 55 Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 20. 56 Chicago Mural Group (cmg) recording, tape 17, Chicago Mural Group Collection, cpag Archives; Minutes, Architecture and Environment panel meeting, February 28, 1972, Illinois Arts Council, “Advisory Panel Minutes,” Rec­ord Series 312.003, Illinois State Archives. 57 cmg recording, tape 17, cpag Archives. 58 Minutes; “A Proposal for ­People’s Art in Public Housing,” Architecture and Environment panel meeting, February 28, 1972, Illinois Arts Council, “Advisory Panel Minutes,” Rec­ord Series 312.003, Illinois State Archives. 59 Barbara S. Howorth, a public relations staffer at the cha, was the mural group’s contact. “Cherokee Charlie Says,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), May 22, 1971; cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. They also coordinated with an organ­ization called Common Concern. 60 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 61 “Proposal for ­People’s Art in Public Housing.” 62 “Proposal for ­People’s Art in Public Housing.” 63 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 64 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 65 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 66 cmg recording, tape 3, tape 17, cpag Archives. 67 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 68 cmg recording, tape 17, cpag Archives. 69 cmg recording, tape 19, cpag Archives.

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70 John Pitman Weber, interview with author, October 2016. 71 John Pitman Weber, interview with author, October 2016. 72 “Murals for the ­People,” Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1971. 73 “Unlicensed Clinic on West Side Aids Latin Community,” Chicago Tribune, October 14, 1971; “Con­temporary Art: A Clash of Emotion and Object,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1971. 74 “Hold Seminar on Black Art,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), September 18, 1971, 3. 75 Parker, “Portraying the Black Heritage.” 76 “On Chicago Walls,” Hyde Park Herald, November 8, 1972. 77 Terri Schultz, “Slum Art Slightly Disturbing, but Only Slightly,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1971. 78 Schultz, “Slum Art Slightly Disturbing.” 79 Georgia Geis, “Jazz in the Alley Celebrates History, Rebirth,” Hyde Park Herald, August 8, 2007, 16. 80 Jeff Huebner, “Wailing Walls,” Chicago Reader, February 26, 1998. 81 “Caton—­‘The Stranger’ Tells of His Latest Creation,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 4, 1971. 82 Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft, ­Toward a ­People’s Art, 159. 83 cmg recording, tape 17, cpag Archives. 84 John Pitman Weber, interview with author, October 2016. 85 cmg recording, tape 11 (side 1 of 2), cpag Archives. 86 Mitchell Caton, “Wall of Pride and Self-­Awareness,” Annual Report and Documents, 1973, cpag Archives. 87 See the brief discussion of the Foundation years program in chapter 3 and note 113. 88 C. Siddha Webber, interview with author, February 2012. 89 Bloom, “Changing Walls,” 20. 90 John Pitman Weber, writing in cmg annual report, 1971, 13, 18, cpag Archives. 91 Mitchell Caton, “Philosophy of the Spiritual,” Annual Report and Documents, 1972, cpag Archives. 92 Caton, “Philosophy of the Spiritual.” 93 Caton, “Philosophy of the Spiritual.” 94 cmg recording, tape 3, cpag Archives. 95 Mitchell Caton, “The Alley,” Annual Report and Documents, 1974, cpag Archives. 96 Caton, “The Alley.” 97 cmg recording, tape 16, cpag Archives. 98 Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics,” 80. 99 cmg recording, tape 16, cpag Archives. 100 For a study of one of Walker’s murals that addresses the question of the negative in the making and afterlife of the mural, see Caitlin Frances Bruce,

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“Public Art, Affect, and Radical Negativity: The Wall of Daydreaming and Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” Subjectivity 10 (2017): 223–41. 101 Gerald Williams, interview by Rebecca Zorach, Never The Same, November 2011, https://­never​-­the​-­same​.­org​/­interviews​/­gerald​-­williams​/­. 102 See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 103 “The Jazz Bit,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 15, 1965. 104 Harriet Choice, “Tribute to Pop of Bop,” Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1971, b17. 105 Brown was a multitalented writer who migrated with his ­family from Kansas City, Missouri, to Chicago; he was the first author to read short stories (as opposed to poems) to jazz accompaniment. His life was cut short by leukemia at the age of thirty-­four—­the same age at which Bird had died of hard living. 106 Punctuation has been emended. Frank London Brown, “Bird Lives,” Daily Defender, April 4, 1960, 13. My thanks to Robert A. Sengstacke for identifying the author from his initials. 107 “Wadsworth Jarrell and africobra: Sheets of Color, Sheets of Sound,” interview with Graham Lock in The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, ed. Graham Lock and David Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 155. Chapter 6. Starring the Black Community

1 On the criticism the film faced, see Norma R. Jones, “Sweetback: The Black Hero and Universal Myth,” cla Journal 19, no. 4 (June 1976): 559–65. On “queer Sweetback,” see Adam Coombs, “Queer Oedipal Drag in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Baadasssss!” African American Review 50, no. 1 (spring 2017): 41–58, and Robert F. Reid-­Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007). On Sweetback and revolution, see Benjamin Wiggins, “ ‘You Talkin’ Revolution, Sweetback’: On Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Revolutionary Filmmaking,” Black Camera 4, no. 1 (winter 2012), 28–52. 2 “Black tv: Its Promises and Prob­lems,” Ebony 24, no. 11 (September 1969): 89. See also Walter M. Gerson, “Mass Media Socialization Be­hav­ior: Negro-­W hite Differences,” Social Forces 45, no. 1 (September 1966): 40–50. See also bell hooks’s quote on learning critique in Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Tele­vi­sion and Black Civil Rights (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003). 3 Don McIlvaine spoke of tele­vi­sion as a narcotic: “In this area hope is rather a hopeless ­thing and fantastic dreams are a favorite pastime. Tele­vi­sion becomes a narcotic . . . ​an escape—­a ready escape.” McIlvaine, “Dreams of a Better Life,” 48. Studies done with ­children in New York suggested that “ghetto ­children employ much more fantasy in their descriptions of objects and events”; researchers tried to coax them to believe “that the real world

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holds as much excitement as their imaginary world.” Francis Shoemaker, “Communication Arts, the Humanities, and the Urban Community,” in “Communicating,” special issue, High School Journal 52, no. 8 (May 1969): 448. 4 Chester Higgins Sr., “Black Films: Boom or Bust?,” Jet, June 8, 1972, 59. 5 Earth, Wind & Fire had been formed in part by members of the Pha­raohs, which overlapped in its membership with the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, and had come to be the ­house band at the Affro-­Arts Theater. Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White learned how to play the electrified mbira by watching Cohran play the frankiphone. See Semmes, Cultural Hegemony, 240. 6 James P. Murray, “Black Movies/Black Theater,” Drama Review 16, no. 4 (December 1972): 56. 7 “tv and Movies: Harmful to ­Mental Health of Black ­People,” box 1, folder 16, Bill Lathan Collection, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University Library. 8 Huey P. Newton, “He ­Won’t Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analy­sis of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Black Panther, June 19, 1971. 9 Val Gray Ward, “Does Sweetback Harm Black Art?,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 15, 1971. 10 Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 287–311. 11 hwf [Hoyt Fuller], “On the Paris Scene,” Negro Digest 15, no. 5 (March 1966): 49–50. Van Peebles’s screenplay for Panther, a 1995 film directed by his son Mario, has Eldridge Cleaver refer to Sartre. 12 See also Frances Foster, “Changing Concepts of the Black ­Woman,” Journal of Black Studies 3, no. 4 (June 1973): 433–54. “Whereas whites have always included their politics in their art but denied its presence and have denounced as propagandistic and nonaesthetic any politics not in line with theirs, Blacks are quite frank about po­liti­cal writings” (447). 13 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, script, http://­www​.­aellea​.­com​/­emruf3​ /­sweetback​.­html. 14 Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” Ebony 26, no. 11 (September 1971): 106. 15 Bennett, “Emancipation,” 108. Blacks are “immobilized by the conflicting demands of contradictory images.” 16 Bennett, “Emancipation,” 110. 17 Bennett, “Emancipation,” 110. 18 Bennett, “Emancipation,” 110. 19 Val Gray Ward, “Kuumba’s ‘Sweetback’ Stand,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 14, 1971. 20 Val Gray Ward, “Black Artists ­Here Assail ‘Sweetback,’ ” Chicago Daily Defender, July 12, 1971. “The way she curls her legs around the boy make

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this and other scenes like it more fit for stag films—to be shown to white ­people—­than as part of any film for black ­people.” 21 Ward, “Does Sweetback Harm.” 22 Ward, “Does Sweetback Harm.” 23 Michael L. Culbert, “Films of ‘Hip Black Dudes’: Good or Bad Image?,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), September 30, 1972; Gaddi Ben Dan, interview with author, November 30, 2014. 24 Eugene Perkins, The Image Makers, script (presented October 1973), series I, box 1, folder 9, Special Collections, Kuumba Theatre Collection, Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Library. 25 D. Soyini Madison, “Image Making: Kuumba Workshop and Black Liberation Theatre,” in Rise of the Phoenix: Voices from Chicago’s Black Strug­gle, 1960– 1975, ed. Useni Eugene Perkins (Chicago: Third World Press, 2017), 51. 26 Perkins, The Image Makers, 28. 27 Perkins, The Image Makers, 28. 28 Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 29 “Contraband Movie Is Scheduled ­Here,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 31, 1967. 30 McWorter, “obac,” 145–46. 31 Harrison, Drama of Nommo, 220. 32 Ward, “Does Sweetback Harm.” 33 “For the world’s richest country, we live ­under some of the worst living conditions extant. ­Every Black ­father, ­mother and child knows or ­will learn this. That’s definite!” Don L. Lee, “The Bittersweet of Sweetback; or, Shake Yo Money Maker,” Black World 21, no. 1 (November 1971): 43–48, 45. 34 Jeff Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA 1,” 86. 35 africobra’s idea of mimesis was initially articulated in Jeff Donaldson’s “AfriCOBRA 1,” 85. The idea of “mimesis at midpoint” appears in Jones-­Hogu’s “History, Philosophy, and Aesthetics.” It seems to have derived from a Yoruba concept that Robert Farris Thompson, the historian of African art, labeled “mimesis at the mid-­point” in his “Esthetics in Traditional Africa,” ARTnews 66, no. 9 (January 1968): 45. 36 Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics,” 80. 37 Untitled review, Time, October 16, 1964, 59. 38 Fitzgerald, “Chicago’s Black Artists,” 1. 39 Douglas Williams, interview with author, July 2016. 40 José Williams, interview with author, January 2016. 41 Harding, “Black Students,” 95–96. Originally published in Ebony 24, nos. 10–11 (August–September 1969). 42 Don D. Bushnell, “Black Arts for Black Youth,” Saturday Review 53 (July 18, 1970): 44. 43 “Filmmaking: A New Area for Youths,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), March 31, 1973.

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44 Sharon Scott, “Community Film Workshop Group ­Doing Its ­Thing for Filmmakers,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), February 26, 1972. 45 Don McIlvaine to Margaret Standish, Playboy Foundation, November 16, 1970, Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 46 Van der Marck to McIlvaine, May 6, 1970; van der Marck to Bernard Rogers, May 6, 1970, both in Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 47 Margaret Burroughs to Leonard S. Pas (Illinois Arts Council), June 1, 1970; Don McIlvaine, “Proposal Re: Film Workshop,” on DuSable letterhead, 1971, both in Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 48 McIlvaine, “Proposal Re: Film Workshop.” 49 Letter from Don McIlvaine to Len Borman, June 15, 1971, Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 50 McIlvaine, “Developmental Uses of the Black Art Medium Proj­ect.” Heruanita McIlvaine Collection. 51 McIlvaine, “Proposal Re: Film Workshop.” 52 He never heard anything, and was then surprised to see a very similar story appear in the 1974 film Uptown Saturday Night. Heruanita McIlvaine, personal communication, conversations 2013–16. 53 McIlvaine, “Proposal Re: Film Workshop.” 54 ­There is a growing bibliography on The Spook Who Sat by the Door. See Elizabeth Reich, “A New Kind of Black Soldier: Performing Revolution in The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” African American Review 45, no. 3, Special issue: On Black Per­for­mance (fall 2012): 325–39. 55 Harding, “Black Students,” 95–96. 56 Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, [1969] 1990), 81–82. 57 Dorothy Cohen, “Advertising and the Black Community,” Journal of Marketing 34, no. 4 (October 1970): 3–11. 58 Cohen, “Advertising,” 9 and 9n37. 59 Cohen, “Advertising,” 10 and 10n39. 60 West, “Paradox of the Afro-­American Rebellion,” 62. He also critiques the Black pe­tite bourgeoisie: “Like any other pe­tite bourgeoisie, the ‘new’ black ­middle class ­will most likely pursue power-­seeking life styles, promote black entrepreneurial growth, and perpetuate professional advancement” (55). 61 Cruse, Crisis, 439–40. 62 Julian Mayfield, “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I’ll Touch Yours,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 29. 63 Mayfield, “You Touch,” 29. 64 Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (autumn 1994): 37. 65 Amini, “Re-­Definition,” 8–9. 66 Don L. Lee, “Contradiction in Essence,” in black pride (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 28.

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67 Carolyn Rod­gers, “Breakthrough,” in Songs of a Black Bird (Chicago: Third World Press, 1969), 31–33. See also Don L. Lee, “History of the Poet as a Whore (to all negro poets who deal in whi-te paronomasia),” in Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations, ed. Ahmed Akinwole Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara (Detroit: Black Arts Publications, 1969), 98. 68 “Coke’s Black Art Van Ends Its Chicago Tour,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 15, 1969; “Lewis Towers Art Exhibit Features Black Artists,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), November 25, 1969. 69 “Black Art Exhibit Opens January 13th,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 4, 1971. 70 “Southside Art Center Names New Director,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), June 4, 1966. 71 Douglas Williams, interview with author, July 2016. 72 “Ex-­Prisoner Artists Set Exhibition,” Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), June 13, 1970; photo, Chicago Daily Defender, October 8, 1970, 6; photo, Chicago Daily Defender, June 22, 1971, 12; photo, Chicago Daily Defender (Big Weekend Edition), April 15, 1972, 22; photo, Chicago Defender, February 20, 1973, 6; photo, Chicago Defender, February 27, 1973, 7; “Englewood in Tribute to Art,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), June 23, 1973; Earl Calloway, “A G ­ reat Day in Harpers Ct.,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), July 7, 1973; photo, Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), August 3, 1974, a 12; Joy Darrow, “Finding a New Way of ‘­Doing Time,’ ” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1975. Exhibition flyer, University of Chicago Center for Continuing Education, 1972, Ben Bey Collection. 73 Turtel Onli, interview by Reecca Zorach, Never The Same, 2012, https://­never​ -­the​-­same​.­org​/­interviews​/­turtel​-­onli. Robert Paige, personal communication. 74 Robert Paige, discussion with Rebecca Zorach ­after screening of Medium Cool, “Revolution on Film” series, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, July 12, 2013, http://­africobra​.­uchicago​.­edu​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2016​/­01​ /­AFRICOBRA​_­robert​_­paige​.­pdf. 75 Among other articles, see Murray Smith, “Double Trou­ble: On Film, Fiction, and Narrative Author(s),” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1 (2009), 1–23. 76 Roger Ebert, “Haskell Wexler: See, Nothing Is ‘Real,’ ” Roger Ebert Interviews (blog), August 10, 1969, http://­www​.­rogerebert​.­com​/­interviews​/­haskell​ -­wexler​-­see​-­nothing​-­is​-­real. 77 Ebert, “Haskell Wexler.” 78 Phil Cohran, personal communication. 79 John Kifner, “Chicago Panther Mourned: Raid Scene Visited,” New York Times, December 10, 1969. 80 Video was a medium newly available to consumers with devices such as the Sony Rover, introduced in 1967. Michael L. Culbert, “W. Sider Hit-­Run Victim: En Route forum Parley,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 19, 1972, 35; Culbert, “Films of ‘Hip Black Dudes,’ ” 6.

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81 Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass,” Negro Digest 16, no. 8 (June 1967): 53. ­Later published in In the Mecca, 36–37. 82 Nathan Caplan, “The New Ghetto Man,” in Cities ­under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968, ed. David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 351. 83 Kopkind, “White on Black,” 246. He is describing the view of the younger social scientists working for the Kerner Commission who ­were “released” from commission staff ­after producing a po­liti­cally charged section for the commission’s report. 84 See Dawley, Nation of Lords, 107. 85 Douglas Williams, interview with author, June 1, 2013. 86 John Walley, “Creativity,” in Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, 1975), 34–35. 87 Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970), 15, 18. 88 It seems the original plan was for it to be on the cover, but the publisher, Dudley Randall, wanted “the single large word R I O T burning across the cover.” Gwendolyn Brooks to Jeff Donaldson, October 10, 1969, box 10, Jeff Donaldson Papers, aaa. 89 Nicholas Miller, “Vulnerable to Vio­lence: Jeff Donaldson’s Ala Shango and the Erasure of Diasporic Difference,” Nka: Journal of Con­temporary African Art 36 (May 2015), 40–47. 90 Jones, “Black Imagery,” 19.

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No t e s to Ch apter 6

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Archives Consulted Archives of American Art (AAA) Jeff Donaldson Papers Atlanta University Center Hoyt W. Fuller Papers Ben Bey Collection (personal archive) Maggie Brown Collection (personal archive) Oscar Brown Jr. Papers Chicago History Museum (CHM) Ralph G. Newman Papers Red Squad Collection Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) Archives Chicago Mural Group Collection Chicago Public Library, Special Collections, Harold Washington Library Kuumba Theatre Collection Chicago Public Library, Vivian Harsh Collection (VHC), Car­ter Woodson Library Frances Minor Papers Leonard Wash Papers William McBride Papers

Columbia College Chicago Archives Mirron “Mike” Alexandroff Rec­ords. Emory University Library Bill Lathan Collection Frances Loeb Library, Gradu­ate School of Design, Harvard University

gsd History Collection, Academic Affairs Heruanita McIlvaine Collection (personal archive) Illinois State Archives Illinois Arts Council Rec­ords Museum of Con­temporary Art (MCA) Archives, Chicago Jan van der Marck Papers Joseph Shapiro Papers Newberry Library Ann Zelle Papers Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs Rec­ords Rocke­fel­ler Foundation (RF) Archives Fellowships Proj­ects Robert Abbott Sengstacke Collection (personal archive) South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) Archives University of Chicago Library Office of Student Activities Rec­ords Lorado Taft-­Midway Studios Papers Map Collection University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Archives Center for Urban Studies Archives College of Art, Architecture, and Urban Sciences, Publications John Walley Papers U.S. National Archives, ­Great Lakes Region The Letter Edged in Black Press v. Public Building Commission of Chicago. 320 F. Supp. 1303 (1970). Gerald Williams Collection (personal archive)

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate images. aacm (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), 53, 57, 108, 112, 120, 195, 289, 334n25 Abernathy, Billy, 58–59, 63, 75, 217, 218f, 219–20, 291 Abernathy, Sylvia, 59, 61, 64 Abraham Lincoln Centre, 45, 58, 151 Abrams, Muhal Richard, 109, 120, 122, 195, 291, 320n77, 336n67 Abstract Expressionism, 61, 197, 199 “actionary” images, 190, 201, 229. See also Barbara Jones-­Hogu activism. See Civil Rights Movement; ­labor; militancy; protests and protestors; school boycotts; uprisings actors, 17, 43, 63–65, 113, 145, 258–61, 266–69, 279, 291–94. See also film; theater Adams, Carol, 52 Addams, Jane, 11, 12, 300n18 advertising, 264–65, 265f, 276, 281–83, 287 aesthetics, 15, 22, 95–96, 172, 196, 199, 201, 232, 238, 283; African, 18, 22, 65, 66, 269, 345n35; collage, 266; Imagists’ scrappy, 12; jazz and, 89;

machine, 171; politics and, 16, 20, 28, 29, 57, 189, 213, 254; and racism, 197; relational (art movement), 17, 19, 303n37; superreal, 269–70; Western, 9, 17–18, 97, 183, 195, 198, 204, 256, 284, 300n12; young ­people and, 106–7, 129, 244. See also African art; Black aesthetic Afam Studio and Gallery, 50–53 Affro-­Arts Theater, 113–22, 114f, 117f, 139, 143–44, 259, 320n89, 344n5 Africa, 45, 86, 97, 112–13, 122, 184, 192, 195, 199, 247, 268; African art, 14, 16, 18, 22, 43, 45, 54, 65–66, 89, 96, 135, 158–60, 147–75, 202, 232, 238, 242, 244, 248, 269, 297; African culture, 18, 91–93, 108, 111–13, 131, 172, 196, 212, 232, 234, 266, 283–85; Africans, 111, 284; Dakar, Senegal, 95; liberation, 153, 272; ­Mother Africa, 192, 247; Niger, 266; Swahili, 115; Biafra, 122. See fashion; Sixth Pan-­African Congress African Information Center, 52 African Lion. See fashion

africobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), 7, 29, 123, 212; aesthetic princi­ples, 63, 111, 122, 161, 181, 183, 186, 194, 206, 244, 254, 256, 269–70; autonomy and commitment to community, 195–96, 200; Black ­family theme, 123, 160, 179, 183–86, 208; capitalization, 301n29; exhibitions, 53–54; and gender, 206, 213, 215; members, 47, 74, 83, 122–23, 160, 181, 197, 200, 206, 208, 213, 287, 309n65; and ­people’s art, 7, 196; printmaking, 190, 200–201, 208, 272; scholarship on, 15, 302n30; temporality and, 63, 93, 195; text in artworks, 70, 111, 179, 181, 183, 185, 194–95, 208, 210–11, 254, 270; writings, 58, 120, 122–23, 181, 186, 195, 197. See also Co­ali­tion of Black Revolutionary Artists (cobra); “coolade colors”; individual member names Afro-­American Museum. See DuSable Museum Afro-­Cobra. See africobra Afro hairstyle. See fashion Aguilar, Ruben, 336n61 Akin, Kathryn, 74 Alabama. See American South Ala Shango (Donaldson painting), 296–97, 297f Alcindor, Lew. See Jabbar, Kareem Abdul Alexandroff, Mirron “Mike,” 118–20, 131, 321n106. See also Arts in the Inner City Conference; Columbia College Alford, Alfonso 127, 174 Ali, Muhammad, 5, 63, 77, 312n99, 321n95 Alinsky, Saul, 102 Alkalimat, Abdul, 20–23, 56, 59, 171, 195–96, 268–69, 283, 286 Allen, Jane Addams, 12 Alley, The (informal m ­ usic venue), 242–47, 243f, 245f, 246f, 249–52, 250f, 252f. See also Caton, Mitchell;

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Ellis, Jimmy; Rip-­Off/Universal Alley; Webber, C. Siddha Almighty Vice Lord Nation. See Conservative Vice Lords Alonzo, Ricardo, 216 Amer­i­ca III (Jones-­Hogu print), 190–91, 191f American Association of Museums, 137, 140 American Friends Ser­vice Committee, 142 American South, 3, 23–25, 31, 34–35, 81, 108, 135. See also migration Amini, Johari, 284, 304n54 Anacostia Museum, 137 Angela Davis (McIlvaine painting), 283–84, 284f Ankh Studio, 52 Aoki, Omar, 313n113 Apache Rangers. See Blackstone Rangers appropriation, 14, 58, 65–66, 216, 268, 293, 297 architecture, 12, 66–67, 142, 156–57, 167; architects, 39, 48, 130, 134, 175, 178 Arnold, Ralph, 54, 150, 153–57, 156f, 160, 271, 327n76 Art Gallery, 137, 232 Art Institute of Chicago (aic), 54, 66, 68, 134–35, 138, 158–59; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 122, 190 Artistic Heritage Ensemble. See Cohran, Kelan Philip Art & Soul, 25, 132f, 149f, 179, 221, 270, chapter 3 Arts and the Inner City Conference, 29, 118–22, 142–43, 291. See also Columbia College assimilation, 5, 18, 95–96, 151–52 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. See aacm avant-­garde, 13–14, 20, 66, 172, 261 Baker, Herbert, 160, 328n98 Baldwin, James, 119, 312n92

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (aka LeRoi Jones), 10, 18, 63, 96–97, 101, 218–20, 337n87 Baraza Wa Afrika, 51 Barrera, Carlos, 253 Bauhaus. See New Bauhaus Baum, Don, 12 bbr Youth Center. See Boys Brotherhood Republic Beall, DeWitt, 166, 229, 231, 278–79. See also Lord ­Thing Bearden, Romare, 186, 269–70, 283 Beat culture, 11, 169, 171, 336n67 beautification programs, 127, 131–32, 175, 216, 229, 231–39, 295 beauty, black, 242, 272, 283–84 Be Black (Cowherd photo), 70, 71f bebop, 96, 255. See also ­music Beck, Sherman, 54, 123 Benito Juarez Health Clinic, 235 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 20, 88, 104–5, 141, 204, 262–64, 284, 294. See also Ebony Berger, Martin, 188 Better Boys Foundation, 94, 128, 130, 141, 145, 149, 176, 258 Bey, Ben, 158, 240, 288 Be Your ­Brother’s Keeper (Jones-­Hogu print), 143, 144f “Bird Lives,” 254–56, 256f. See also Parker, Charlie Black aesthetic, 14–18, 22, 96, 153, 187, 194, 199, 205, 219, 260, 269, 345n35; The Black Aesthetic, 205, 283; collective creation of, 58, 122, 179, 181, 194, 199, 258, 285; and ­music, 17–18, 61, 89; positivity, 187, 205, 255, 265; and Sweetback, 258, 260, 269 Black Arts Repertory Theatre, 106 Black ­Belt, 1, 23, 31–32, 39. See also Bronzeville Blackburn, Darlene, 74, 110, 112, 116 Black ­Children Keep Your Spirits ­Free (Lawrence painting), 197, 198f



Black Creativity. See Black Esthetics exhibition Black Esthetics exhibition, 110, 161, 288 The Black ­Family (Jones-­Hogu print), 183f, 183 Black ­Family (W. Jarrell painting), 160, 163f, 183 Black history, 40, 41, 43–45, 56, 80, 110, 187, 203–4, 231, 271, 294 Black Liberation Movement, 19, 56, 78, 90–91, 106, 121, 186, 259, 276, 284; art and, 21, 95, 153, 263–65, 272, 281; and gender issues, 206–8 Black Madonna and Child (Madison painting), 168–69, 170f Black Man’s Dilemma (McIlvaine mural), 232–35, 234f, 278 Black Men We Need You (Jones-­Hogu print), 208, 210f, 211 Blackmobile. See Harris, Eddie blackness, 15–16, 18–22, 92–96, 111–12, 172, 199, 221, 283–87 Black Panther Party (bpp), 27, 90–94, 128–29, 142–43, 167, 208, 212, 260, 276, 293 Black pride, 43, 116, 185, 277, 285 Black P Stone Nation. See Blackstone Rangers Black Re­nais­sance (Chicago), 10–11, 38, 89–90 Blackstone Rangers, 27, 70, 98, 101f, 103–6, 117, 129, 295; and Affro-­Arts Theater, 113–17, 139; and Opportunity Please Knock, 85–87, 133–34, 137, 295; and Wall of Re­spect, 5, 59; Apache Rangers, 27–28, 70, 305n69 Black Studies College (program of Affro-­Arts Theater), 115, 122 Black Women/Racism (V. Green mural), 228f Black World/Negro Digest, 23, 26, 90, 199, 261. See also Fuller, Hoyt W., Jr.

Index

/  377

Bland, Edward. See Cry of Jazz blaxploitation, 259–60, 265–66, 278–80. See also film Bloomingdale Trail (aka 606), 237 blues, 22, 61, 89, 96, 124. See also ­ music bookstores, 45, 53, 140–41, 157, 187, 200 Boyd, Louis, 45, 223, 225, 308n45 Boys Brotherhood Republic, 134, 141–42 Bradford, David, 47, 74 Bradford, Walter, 291 Bredendieck, Hin, 39 Britton, Sylvester, 47, 54 Broady, Raymond, 130, 131, 156 Bronzeville (neighborhood of Chicago), 1, 3, 25–27, 31, 45, 48, 113, 221, 232, 240, 272; economic decline of, 80–81. See also Black ­Belt Brooks, Gwendolyn, 64–69, 78–80, 110, 119–20, 142, 158, 232, 258, 294–96, 321n95. See also Wall of Re­spect Brown, Abena Joan, 52–53 Brown Berets, 235 Brown, Dalton, 288–89 Brown, Frank London, 255 Brown, H. Rap, 64, 75 Brown, James, 183, 278–79 Brown, Jim, 64 Brown, Oscar, Jr., 28, 41, 63, 95, 120, 141, 166; and the Blackstone Rangers, 85–88, 134, 137, 295; and Kealan Philip Cohran, 108–9, 112–15 Brundage, Margaret, 11 Brundage, Slim, 11 Burroughs, Charles, 41, 43 Burroughs, Margaret, 38–45, 48, 65, 95, 140–41, 158, 172, 176, 199, 215, 238, 271, 277; artistic work, 40–41, 48, 54; and DuSable Museum, 10–11, 43–44, 54, 203; and South Side Community Art Center, 10–11, 39–40, 43. See also Lake Meadows Art Fair

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In d e x

Cabrini-­Green (housing proj­ect), 124, 145, 148, 215, 226, 239–40 Cade, Toni, 206–7 Caldwell, John, 51 caricatures, 159, 165, 187 Carlos, John, 192 Carmichael, Stokely, 56, 64, 75, 104, 115, 134, 268 Carroll, Cora, 83–84 Car­ter, Donnie Ray, 320n77 Car­ter, William, 45 Casa Aztlán, 235 Casey, Henry, 171 Castillo, Mario, 235–36 Catlett, Elizabeth, 192 Caton, Mitchell, 101–3, 171, 215, 237–38, 240, 241f, 242–51, 277, 288 Cayton, Horace, 13, 30, 89–90 Cellar Boheme, 171 Chamberlain, Wilt, 64 Chicago Boys Club, 87, 107 Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity (ccuo), 48, 119, 130, 319n67. See also Arts and the Inner City Conference Chicago Circle Campus. See University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago Defender, 23, 90, 107–8, 232, 288 Chicago Freedom Movement, 35–36 Chicago Housing Authority (cha), 3, 237–39, 341n59 Chicago Public Art Group (cpag). See murals Chicago Public Library, 142, 157 Chicago Surrealists, 11–12, 67 Chicago Tribune, 106, 237 ­children and youth, 34, 125, 139, 145, 166–67, 189, 211, 229, 231, 259, 262, 263, 283, 295, 297–98, 320n73, 343n3; art programs for, 106–7, 110, 276–78, 288, 289, 295, 315n141; at Art & Soul, 135, 147, 149, 155, 157, 159, 178; depiction in art, 1, 40, 86, 88, 101, 159, 169,

183, 185, 197, 206, 208, 211–12, 219, 224, 229, 271–72, 294, 297, 333n9; education of, 23, 35, 40–41, 43–45, 91, 125, 135, 176, 188, 197, 231, 247, 276–77, 294, 295; graffiti and vandalism by, 70, 78, 130, 232, 294–95, 324n24; as members of community, 9, 19, 40, 218; and murals, 8, 70, 78, 215–17, 221, 224, 226, 231–32, 235, 238–39, 244, 249–50, 253; playing, 26, 78, 130; and street organ­izations (gangs), 25–26, 85, 98, 107, 125–34, 173, 175–76, 203, 232, 278, 294, 324n24; white teens, 148. See also Black history; students (high school and college) Christmas, Edward, 63 Christo, 17, 138, 325n49 churches, 92, 102, 135, 144, 167, 189, 218, 295. See also religion; names of individual churches Civic Center Plaza, 65–69, 173 Civil Rights Movement, 5, 15, 31–36, 56, 77, 91, 107, 116, 173, 188–89, 264, 294 classes and workshops: at Affro-­Arts Theater, 113–16; at Ankh Studio, 52; at Art Institute of Chicago, 135; at Art & Soul, 131, 145, 155, 157–58, 175, 178, 232, 270, 277, 289; at DuSable Museum, 44; at On the Beach, 109–10; at Oṣun Center for the Arts, 48; and school boycott, 68; at South Side Community Art Center, 10, 221, 240; at uic Department of Art, 176. See also Community Film Workshop; film; Kuumba Workshop; obac Clay, Robert, 45 Cleage, Albert, 75 Clevertones, 133 Co­ali­tion for United Community Action, 173 Co­ali­tion of Black Revolutionary Artists (cobra), 120–22, 291. See also africobra



Cohran, Kelan Philip (Phil), 29, 50, 64, 90, 94, 108–22, 114f, 134, 142–45, 259, 293; Artistic Heritage Ensemble, 50, 64, 108–10, 116, 121, 142, 145, 289; frankiphone, 108, 112, 114f. See also On the Beach Colbert, Herbert, 59, 75 Coleman, Ornette, 63, 75 collaboration, 17, 83, 110, 136, 251; and africobra as collective, 7, 122–23, 172, 181, 183, 186, 192, 200–201, 206, 208, 213, 215, 272; and communism, 42; and cvl, Inc., 28–29, 127, 130–31, 137, 157–59, 172–73, 176, 330n129; In Our Terribleness, 219–20; with non-­ artists, 9, 16, 18–19, 21, 25–26, 28–29, 73, 97, 104, 130–31, 216–17, 231, 237, 239, 266; Oscar Brown, Jr., and Phil Cohran, 109, 113, 120; on Wall of Re­ spect, 1, 5, 59–64, 77; in social action, 33–34, 110, 224, 232, 285. See also africobra; Art & Soul; settings collage, 59–60, 150–53, 156–58, 247, 266, 271–72 collectives, 1, 5, 7, 37, 61, 200; 57th Street Artist Colony, 11, 47; Black Arts Colony, 45. See also africobra College of Complexes, 11 Collins, George, 126 Collins, Paul, 54 Coltrane, John, 63, 161, 202, 255–56, 336n70 Columbia College, 29, 118–23, 131, 137–38, 140–42, 153, 291. See also Arts in the Inner City Conference; Alexandroff, Mirron Columbian Exposition, 30, 47–48, 308n51 comedy, 12, 35, 87, 143, 278 communalism, 20–21, 269, 286 commune. See AfriCOBRA Communism, 11, 41–43, 67, 85, 95, 208; Soviet American Friendship Society, 42

Index

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community: around the Alley, 249–51; areas (official Chicago neighborhood designation), 25, 37–38; art, 8–9, 16, 25, 39, 93, 131, 172, 175, 216, 219, 223; art centers, 10–12, 29, 39, 45, 51, 54, 84, 131–39, 147, 167, 229, 232, 288 (see also South Side Community Art Center); artists working with, 5, 7–22, 25–30, 59, 73–74, 110, 196, 226, 235–40, 293; Black community, 7–9, 20–23, 28, 56–57, 64, 97–98, 104, 109–10, 119, 123, 128, 166, 186–90, 195, 211, 219–21, 244, 251 (and See chapter 6); Community Action Program, 104–5; Community Arts Foundation, 144–45, 215; critique of, 8–9, 216–17; diversity and contestation within, 7, 9–10, 18, 22, 29, 40, 53, 65, 145–47, 167, 189, 216–17, 249, 260; interracial in Hyde Park/Kenwood, 88; involvement in art by members of, 74–77, 80, 97, 108, 112–13, 119–20, 216–17, 237–38, 247; as leaders of proj­ects, 146–47, 151, 232; mural movement, 8, 29 (and See chapter 5); relationship of museums to, 138–41, 145, 166; organ­izing and development/preservation of neighborhoods, 11, 27, 39–40, 53, 59, 75, 81, 83–84, 97, 108, 126, 131, 166, 176, 224, 237; speaking for themselves, 7, 26–29, 53, 60, 133, 137, 145, 167, 217, 232, 290–98; as subject ­matter, 9, 74, 96–97, 196, 208, 221, 293; surrounding the Wall of Re­spect, 5–9, 56–59, 64, 69, 73–74, 218–19; talents in, 56, 87, 133–36, 145, 187, 238, 250, 277; temporary, 37, 136; theater, 259–60. See also gangs; murals Community Film Workshop, 276 Conda, Bebe, and Simon Conda, 109 confaba, 50–51, 196, 287, 309n65

380  /

In d e x

conferences, 61, 78, 91, 137–43, 213. See also Arts in the Inner City Conference; confaba consciousness, Black, 17, 20–21, 89–91, 97, 110–11, 116, 136, 190, 201–2, 257–61, 268, 281, 285, 294 Conservative Vice Lords (cvl, Inc.), 25, 29, 108, 118, 126–31, 166–67, 173, 229, 278, 294; Almighty Vice Lord Nation, 101; and Art & Soul, 131–34, 133f, 137, 145–47, 167, 174, 229, 232; at Dartmouth, 166, 245; enterprises and community involvement, 131–34, 132f, 168, 174–75, 279, 295, 329n105; grants, 127–29; playground construction, 130, 324n24; rat campaign, 145; as Vice Lords (not Conservative), 27, 36, 103, 104, 125, 166, 251, 277; and vio­lence, 117–18, 125–26, 173–74, 279; War on Gangs harassment of, 173. See also gangs; Lord ­Thing “coolade colors,” 181, 183, 194, 210, 244. See also africobra Copley, William, 67–68 correctional facilities, 10, 27, 40, 45, 117–18, 125–26, 173, 272, 288 Cowherd, Darryl, 63, 70, 78, 217–19, 287 craft, arts and, 46–47, 51–52, 110, 300n18. See also Illinois Art and Craft Proj­ect Crane College. See Malcolm X College Crawford, Bob, 186, 221, 223 Crenshaw, John, 54 crime, 27, 88, 100, 125, 129, 188, 234, 277. See also gangs Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. See Cruse, Harold criticism/critique: artists as critics, 89, 153, 196, 224, 293; by Black intellectuals, 15, 88, 189, 199, 206, 258, 292; of community art, 8–9, 216–17; group critiques, 179, 181, 183; of lack of inclusion, 118–21, 137; mainstream/ white art critics, 8, 16, 70, 152–53,

196–99, 205; neighborhood critics of art, 73–75, 97, 167, 238, 249, 257; po­liti­cal critique, 159, 190, 194–95, 203, 254, 257, 285; of Sweetback, 257–66, 343n1 Creed, Obie, 289 Crisis, The, 96. See also naacp Cruse, Harold, 88, 92, 283 Cry of Jazz, The, 88, 89f, 92, 95, 152, 293–94. See also film cvl. See Conservative Vice Lords Daley, Richard J., 26, 33, 35, 65–68, 117, 143, 173, 229, 232, 287, 292, 305n64 Daley Plaza. See Civic Center Plaza dance, 48, 74, 110–12, 115–16, 122, 144–45, 288 Daniel, Mary Reed, 45, 54 Dan Ryan Expressway, 3, 34, 37, 81 Dartmouth College, 166, 173, 244–45 dashikis. See fashion Dave Matthews Band, 170–71 Davis, Angela, 181–82, 240, 256, 272, 283–84 Davis, Ossie, 63, 259 Davis, Richard, 247 Dawley, David, 127, 129, 134, 149, 166, 168, 324n24 debates: art and aesthetics, 25, 96, 118, 153, 199, 202–3, 216–17, 258, 260, 301n29; social issues, 8–9, 25, 253 Dee, Ruby, 63 de­mo­li­tion. See real estate demonstrations. See Civil Rights Movement; protests and protestors; uprisings Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 174 DePillars, Murry, 47–48, 52, 75, 226, 300n12 Dirksen Federal Building, Chicago, 100–101 discrimination, 25, 35–36, 95, 115, 173. See also housing; segregation



Dixon, Vernon, 19–20 documentary: blended with fiction, 92, 266–68; films, 185, 186, 265–66, 277, 293, 332n8; function of art, 187, 188, 199, 217, 220, 226, 257, 269, 272, 274, 277, 293; social, 88, 92, 188, 269, 293; techniques, 266, 268. See also individual film titles; photography Donaldson, Jeff, 143, 161, 272, 274, 277, 337n87; and africobra, 7, 74, 93, 120, 122–23, 160, 179, 181, 183, 186, 196, 200, 269, 338n98, 345n35; on art and the Black strug­gle, 97, 116, 179; Arts and the Inner City Conference and cobra, 120–23, 291; book illustration by, 73, 161, 164f, 296–97, 348n88; or­ga­nizer of confaba, 51, 196, 287, 309n65; correspondence with Hoyt W. Fuller, 120; experientialism, 22, 196; and Hyde Park galleries, 46–47, 49f; in Medium Cool, 291; move to east coast, 200, 213; and the super-­real, 269; and the Wall of Re­spect, 5, 7, 56, 58, 61, 63, 75, 77, 160, 254, 314n131 Douglas, Aaron, 60 Douglass, Frederick, 229, 270f Drake, St. Clair, 30, 89–90 drugs, 115, 129, 166, 202, 234, 244, 259, 265, 278 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 108 Dunn, Ken, 147 du Sable, Jean Baptiste Point, 30, 43–45, 65, 112, 140–41 DuSable Museum of African-­American History, 10–11, 40, 44–45, 44f, 50–54, 141–42, 150, 158, 176, 203, 241, 277. See also Burroughs, Margaret Duster, Alfreda Wells, 141 Earth, Wind, & Fire, 259, 344n5 Ebon (poet), 73 158, 161, 164 Ebony, 23, 258–59, 264–65, 281

Index

/  381

Ebony ­Family (J. Jarrell dress), 160, 161–62f, 184 Ebony Museum of Negro History. See DuSable Museum of African-­ American History education: art education, 8, 160, 171, 197; artist-­educators, 101, 119, 122, 198–99, 295; Black history classes, 203, 265; Black solidarity and, 97, 110, 135, 139, 141, 204; Board of Education, 68; media education, 276–77; in museums, 138; neighborhood education programs, 40, 111, 126, 139, 175–76, 276, 293, 295; mainstream (white), 203–4, 231, 287. See also classes and workshops; Columbia College; Northwestern University; University of Chicago; University of Illinois at Chicago Egan, Monsignor, 145 Egyptian Cobras, 27, 128. See also gangs Eisenhower Expressway, 34, 37, 116–17 El Rukns. See Blackstone Rangers Ellington, Duke, 74, 242 Ellis, Jimmy, 243f, 251 Ellison, Curly, 77, 314n123 Ellison, Ralph, 186 Ellis’s Bookstore, 45, 187 Englewood (Chicago neighborhood), 25, 48, 54, 221–24, 288 Englewood Concourse Art Fair, 48, 54, 224f, 288, 309n53 environment: arts, 235, 255, 297; built, 81, 87, 106, 136, 142, 277–78, 294; natu­ral, 196; social, 250, 324n35 essentialism: and blackness, 15–16, 91, 96; and gender, 208 eta Creative Arts, 52–53, 289 Eu­rope: 171, 172, 308n52; culture, 97, 171, 183, 284; Eu­ro­pean arts and artists, 10, 17, 69–70, 138, 171, 195, 198, 204, 256, 284, 301n22. See also Western culture

382  /

In d e x

Evans, Allen “Tiny,” 166 exhibitions. See names of individual exhibitions existentialism, 260–61, 268 experientialism, 16, 21–22, 195–96, 283. See also obac exploitation, 32, 121, 234, 282–83, 292, 297. See also blaxploitation fashion: clothing, 83, 95, 112, 175, 279, 283; cosmetics, 133; hair, 91, 111–12, 167, 184, 192, 212, 248, 264, 281–85; stores, 51, 133, 165, 174, 329n105; wigs, 281–84 families: in advertising, 282–83; and demographic changes, 32–33; in murals, 224, 240; nontraditional, 249, 264, 268. See also africobra, Black ­family theme; gender; Moynihan Report; positive images Fanon, Frantz, 187, 276, 281, 333n19 ­fathers: in artworks, 183–85, 191; fatherhood, 185; figures, 32, 70, 86, 135, 249; ­Great White, 121 fbi, 42, 77, 103–4, 291–93 Federal Art Proj­ect (fap), 8, 10, 39 Federal Housing Authority (fha), 32–33, 81 Feldman, Eugene, 41, 43 feminism, 189, 206, 208, 238, 338n93 Ferrill, Mikki, 251 festivals, 287–88; Festival of Creativity, 74; Festival of the Arts, 57–59, 108, 110, 287, 311n80; On the Beach, 108–12 Field Museum, 43 Fields, Marva Alvita Spaul­ding, 54 film: filmmakers, 165, 166, 261, 266, 280, 291–92; at Affro-­Arts Theater, 122; American Revolution 2, 143, 326n59; at Art & Soul, 134, 178, 276–77; Back Alley Rip-­Off, 277–78; Bride Stripped Bare, The, 67; Come Back, Africa,

266–67; Hollywood, 259–67, 278, 292; Making It, 166; po­liti­cal use, 276; Rouch, Jean, 266; traveling exhibition, 176–77; Uptown Saturday Night, 346n52. See also blaxploitation; Community Film Workshop; Cry of Jazz, The; Lord ­Thing; Medium Cool; Spook Who Sat by the Door, The; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song First Presbyterian Church, 85, 87 Fitzgerald, Ella, 242 France, Erwin, 118, 141 frankiphone. See Cohran, Kelan Philip Franklin, Lenore, 48, 58 Frazier, Espi, 289 ­Free Street Theatre, 158 Fry, John, 70, 87 Fuller, Hoyt W., Jr., 23, 56, 120, 151, 185, 199, 261 galleries. See names of individual galleries Gallo, Frank, 140 gangs, 5, 9, 19, 25, 26–28, 83, 98, 101, 107–8, 115, 125–31, 166, 177–78, 203, 218, 229, 244–45; art and creative expression, 25–27, 58, 70, 85, 87–88, 103, 133–34, 136, 160, 251; co­ali­tions and summits, 27, 68–69, 98, 101, 108, 117, 125–26, 225; depicted in art or film, 165, 217, 229, 278–79; leaders, 26, 27, 101, 115, 118, 126, 130, 133, 157, 173, 177–78, 279; positive contributions and po­liti­cal potential, 5, 59, 65, 75, 98, 101, 103–4, 118, 131, 139, 141, 145–47, 172–75; rivalries, 5, 26–27, 59, 87, 98; territory, 26, 27, 36, 70, 104, 126, 128, 134, 145, 147–48, 251; and the Wall of Re­spect, 5, 59, 77–78; War on Gangs, 28, 173, 232, 287; white, 26, 35, 36, 170, 173. See also Blackstone Rangers; Conservative Vice Lords; other individual gang names



Gangster Disciples, 5, 26–27, 59, 117. See also gangs Garvey, Marcus, 64, 92, 205 Gayden, Fern, 53, 176 Gayle, Addison, 42, 205 gender, 37, 135, 161, 165, 185–86, 212–15; and advertising, 264; in africobra, 206, 213; feminism, 189, 206, 208, 238, 338n93; intersectionality, 208; manhood, 113–15, 185–86, 206, 262, 292; masculinity, 113, 115, 185–86, 189, 206, 358n94; and Moynihan report, 185, 333n10; and patriarchy, 115, 185, 264, 283; queer sexuality, 262–64, 268, 291; relations between men and ­women, 208, 212, 263, 283, 285–87; transgression of norms, 263; ­women’s and gay rights movements, 208 genocide, 98–102, 117 ghetto, 12–13, 118–19, 125, 130–31, 188, 234, 261–62, 295; reclaiming positive value in, 19, 70, 93, 219, 232. See also housing; segregation Ghetto (J. Williams mixed media), 271–72, 271f Ghetto Child (Bey painting), 288, 289f Gilbert, Peter, 160, 163–68, 163f Gore, Bobby, 118, 126, 130, 133, 157, 165, 173, 279, 330n129 graffiti, 7, 27–28, 58, 60, 70–71, 78, 80, 165, 217, 231–32, 254–56 Green, Vanita, 226, 228, 232, 340n31 Greenberg, Clement, 196, 205 Greenlee, Sam. See obac; Spook Who Sat by the Door Gregory, Dick, 35, 74, 143, 312n93 Guthrie, Derek, 12 Haar-di, 48 hair. See fashion Hairston, Eugene, 27, 115 Hairy Who, 12, 171 Hall, Stuart, 187, 189

Index

/  383

Halsted Street, 23, 221, 235–36 Hamburg Athletic Association. See Daley, Richard J. Hammurabi Robb, Fidepe, 45, 46, 60, 271 Hampton, Fred, 94, 247, 279, 293 Hancock, ­Will, 74 Hanrahan, Edward, 173, 287 Hansberry, Lorraine, 31–32, 35 Happening (artistic event), 64–65, 78, 120, 159, 269 Harding, Vincent, 274, 281 Harlem (New York City neighborhood), 106, 118, 120, 123, 137, 139, 259 Harlem Re­nais­sance, 38 Harlem School of Arts, 139 Harper Ave­nue, 46, 51, 87 Harper Theater, 87 Harris, Eddie, 223–24, 224f Harris, Kevin, 251 Harrison, Paul Car­ter, 17, 188, 269 Hartmann, William, 67 Hawkins, Florence, 63–64, 74 Hayden, Frank, 54 Haydon, Harold, 48 Henderson, Napoleon. See Jones-­ Henderson, Napoleon heroes and heroines, 1, 19, 59, 61, 74, 153, 181, 217–25, 229, 312n99 Hetherington, Danny, 134–36, 146–49, 153–55, 155f, 166, 174 Hetherington, Jackie, 134–36, 146–50, 153–56, 159–60, 164f, 166, 168, 170f, 173–74, 177–78, 287 Hetherington, Jerry, 135, 166, 173 Higgins, Paul, 78, 79f History. See Black history Hodo, Maurice, 54 Hoffman, Abbie, 142 Hokusai, 236 Hollywood. See film hooks, bell, 14–15, 219 Houlihan, James, 146–49, 157–59, 168 House of Umoja, 97

384  /

In d e x

housing: issues, 25, 30–32, 34–37, 48, 69, 81, 108, 166, 168, 272, 341n58; proj­ects, 3, 25, 30–31, 34, 37, 81, 124, 145, 148, 215, 226, 237, 239, 299; tenements, 31, 36, 145, 229, 255. See also Cabrini–­Green; Chicago Housing Authority; Federal Housing Authority; segregation Howard University, 60, 190, 213, 228 Hughes, Langston, 95–96, 119 Hull House, 11, 45, 107, 300n18. See also Addams, Jane ­human: definitions of humanness, 7, 18, 57, 88–89, 121, 188, 196, 206; ­human figure as artistic subject, 7, 12, 41, 179–80, 199, 206; humanism, 179, 196, 205–6, 261. See also positive images Hunt, Richard, 140, 152–53, 160–61, 161f, 165, 168, 237 Hunter, Elliott, 54, 61, 63 Hunter, Kenneth, 289 Hyde Park (Chicago neighborhood), 3, 25–27, 31, 34, 46–50, 54–55, 88, 102, 160, 169–71; Hyde Park–­Kenwood, 3, 25, 34, 56, 88, 288 Hyde Park Art Center, 12 Illinois Art and Craft Proj­ect, 10, 39 Illinois Arts Council (iac), 119, 142–44, 158, 220, 223, 236–39 Illinois Bell Telephone, 202, 232, 287 Illinois Black Panthers. See Black Panther Party Illinois Federal Savings and Loan, 53 Illinois Institute of Technology, 39, 50, 190. See also New Bauhaus Illinois Sesquicentennial, 136, 139–42, 146, 152, 155, 159, 174 Imagists, 12–13, 197. See also Hairy Who immigration, 23, 39, 139, 307n24. See also migration Industrial Areas Foundation, 120

In School—­Together (Burroughs linocut), 40, 41f integration, 5, 33, 40, 97, 107, 138, 282 intellectuals: African American, 20–21, 23, 45, 88, 92–96, 171, 260–61, 283; white, 205 International Council of Museums (icom), 174 Into the Mainstream (McIlvaine mural), 229, 232f, 278–79 Islam, Nation of. See Nation of Islam Jabbar, Kareem Abdul, 64, 74 Jackson, George, 272 Jackson, Jonathan. See Marin County Court­house Incident Jackson, Spencer, 109–10, 116 Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies. See Abraham Lincoln Centre Jacobs, Jane, 34 Jarrell, Jae, 47–49, 47f, 49f, 70–72, 122–23, 160–62, 161f, 179, 183–86, 206, 213. See also africobra Jarrell, Wadsworth, 47–49, 49f, 61, 72–74, 122–23, 160–65, 179–86, 200, 206, 213, 255–56, 270, 283. See also africobra jazz, 11, 17–18, 70, 74–76, 88–96, 109, 112, 171–72, 181, 247, 250, 255, 280, 283, 293–94. See also aacm; Cry of Jazz, The; ­music; Wall of Re­spect; individual performers J. D. McClain’s Day in Court (Donaldson mixed media), 272–74, 275f Jet, 23 Joans, Ted, 255 Johnson, Alicia Loy, 57–58 Johnson, Lyndon, 102–3, 106 Johnson Publishing Com­pany, 23, 90. See also Black World/Negro Digest; Ebony; Jet Jones, Barbara. See Jones-­Hogu, Barbara Jones, Calvin, 50 Jones, Elvin, 63, 75



Jones, Kellie, 15 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Imamu Amiri Jones-­Henderson, Napoleon, 49f, 52, 54, 55f, 123, 200, 213 Jones-­Hogu, Barbara: and africobra, 122–23, 181, 186, 190–95, 200, 212–13, 332n3; her critique of Western culture, 153, 297; exhibitions, 48, 54, 55f; views on gangs, 98–101, 117, 143; and gender, 185–86, 206, 210, 211–13; and Medium Cool, 291; name change, 48; positive (“actionary”) images, 186, 190, 194–95, 217, 229; as printmaker, 190, 192, 200–201, 336n61; as teacher, 135; and Wall of Re­spect, 63, 122; works by, 93, 94, 112, 143, 144, 183, 329 journalism. See individual newspapers and magazines Kabaka, Lawrence, 320n77 Kaprow, Allan, 64–65. See also Happenings Karenga, Ron (aka Maulana), 90–91, 93, 96 Keiser, Lincoln, 129 Kennedy, Robert, Jr., 142, 150 Kenwood (Chicago neighborhood). See Hyde Park–­Kenwood Kerner Commission, 67, 127, 129–30, 140, 348n83 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 35–36, 64, 74–75, 116, 125, 142–43, 150, 295 King Alfred Plan, 272 Kinginga, Edfu, 50f Krauss, Rosiland, 13–14 Kreinberg, Lew, 145 Kuumba Workshop, 53, 57, 64, 258–60, 262, 264–66, 289. See also Ward, Val Gray ­labor, 11, 39, 176–77, 200, 263, 266, 276 La Conquista de la Energía (Morado mural), 233–34, 234f

Index

/  385

Lake Michigan, 3, 23, 81, 108, 140. See also On the Beach Lama, Omar, 123 Land Where My ­Father Died (Jones-­ Hogu print), 190–91, 191f Landry, Lawrence, 103–4 Langley Ave­nue. See Wall of Re­spect Lanyon, Ellen, 238 Lashley, Lester, 50, 52–53 Latin American Defense Organ­ization (lado), 239–40 Lawndale/North Lawndale (Chicago neighborhoods), 25, 33–34, 48, 124–30, 136, 141–42, 145–48, 159, 165–68, 172, 176, 223, 232 Lawrence, Carolyn, 74, 123, 197, 200, 206, 208, 213 Lazar, Burt, 177–78 Leader, The, 264–65. See also Kuumba Workshop Lee, Clifford, 54 Lee, Don L. See Madhubuti, Haki Lerner, Nathan, 39 Lewis, George, 108–9, 112 Lewis, Ramsey, 87 Lewis, Robert. See Nurullah, Seitu Lewis, Roy, 6–7, 53, 57, 64, 74–78, 217–23, 235, 287 Lewis, Samella, 14 liberation. See Black Liberation Movement Lord ­Thing, 166, 229, 231f, 278–79, 279f, 280f, 329n105. See also Beall, DeWitt; Conservative Vice Lords; film; McIlvaine, Don Madhubuti, Haki, 7, 38–39, 70, 77–78, 158, 181, 203, 269, 285, 337n83 Madison, Reginald “Reggie,” 160, 165, 168–72, 170f, 287 Makeba, Miriam, 267–68 Malcolm X. See X, Malcolm

386  /

In d e x

Malcolm X (Hetherington painting), 153, 154f Malcolm X College, 45, 94, 134–35, 175, 224, 293 Malcolm X Shabazz Park, 57–58, 58, 60, 64, 76f, 217–19 Mallory, Howard, 45, 213 manhood. See gender Marin County Court­house Incident, 272–73 Marshall, Sam, 45 masculinity. See gender Matta-­Clark, Gordon, 159 Mayfield, Curtis, 124, 188, 264 Mayfield, Julian, 283 McBride, William, 54 McBurney, James, 48, 308n51 McClain, James D., 272, 274 McCullough, Geraldine, 54 McDonald’s Corporation, 54, 160–61 McIlvaine, Don, 125, 177–78, 203, 228–33, 231f, 235, 276–78, 280, 284, 343n3; murals, 228–32. See also Art & Soul; Lord ­Thing McKay, Claude, 225 McNeil, Claudia, 63 McWorter, Gerald. See Alkalimat, Abdul Medium Cool, 268, 291–93. See also film Megwa, Anastasia Onyewa, 122 men. See gender Messages (Williams painting), 206, 207f Metcalfe, Ralph, 118 Mexico, 10, 43, 60, 192, 234, 258. See also murals Meyer, Karl, 148 Midway Plaisance, 48, 98, 117 Midwest Boys Club, 155 migration, 12, 23, 25, 31, 266. See also immigration militancy, 35, 74, 90–91, 143–44, 166, 185, 253, 266; artists and militant imagery, 90, 106, 116–18, 123, 153, 192, 199, 201, 217, 225–26; in film, 258, 260,

264, 268, 277–78, 291–92; militant leaders, 56; police surveillance of, 77; Young Militants, 59, 64, 75 Mingus, Charles, 63 minimalism, 197–98 Mississippi. See American South modernism, 7, 13, 16, 18, 39, 65–69, 89, 169, 172, 198–99, 205, 301n21 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 39, 295, 307n23 Monk, Thelonious, 75 Montgomery, Betty, 109 Montgomery, Kenneth, 166 Montgomery, Lucy, 171 Moore, David. See Mor, Amus Moore, Queen ­Mother, 205–6 Mor, Amus (aka David Moore), 109, 151, 202 Morado, José Chávez, 232–34 Morrison, Keith, 287 ­Mother of Man (Jones-­Hogu woodcut), 192, 193f Motherwell, Robert, 197 Moynihan Report, 185, 333n10 Muhammad, Elijah, 61, 63, 314n124. See also Nation of Islam Mulligan, Charles, 48, 308n51 murals: 61, 142, 144, 158, 160, 204, 257, 277, 278, 302n32, chapter 5; Black history and, 203, 231; Community Mural Group (­later Chicago Public Art Group), 215–17, 237–39, 242, 247, 289, 341n59; community mural movement, 8, 15, 29, 142, 215–16, 223, 276, 314n131; government funding, 8, 60, 142, 216, 236–39; at Malcolm X College, 134–35; Mexican muralists, 40, 60, 233–34; part of neighborhood culture, 26, 77, 224, 249; and photography, 220–23, 339n21; in Pilsen, 235; and politics, 216–17, 224, 237; William Walker and, 5, 15, 59, 61, 74, 217, 223–26, 237–40, 242, 253, 312n86, 343n100. See also Illinois Arts Coun-



cil; Museum of Con­temporary Art; Wall of Re­spect; individual mural titles and muralist names Museum of Con­temporary Art (mca), 17, 236–40, 236f, 277. See also chapter 3 Museum of Science and Industry, 108, 161, 288 museums. See individual institutions ­music: bands/ensembles, 50, 63–64, 87–88, 108–10, 112, 116, 121 142, 145, 157, 170–71, 181, 334n25, 344n5; artist-­musicians, 48, 50, 251; centrality to Black aesthetic, 9, 17–18, 61, 90, 96, 112, 172, 187, 202, 250, 255, 270, 272; musicians, 38, 48, 50, 56–57, 65, 90, 108–9, 145, 171–72, 187, 202, 249–51, 265, 335n44; and protest, 25; and specific works of art, 70, 243, 247; and the Wall of Re­spect, 26, 56–57, 61–63, 65, 78. See also aacm; Affro-­Arts Theater; Alley, The; Artistic Heritage Ensemble; blues; Cry of Jazz, The; jazz; On the Beach; Opportunity Please Knock; theater; and individual musicians Myers, Claudine, 111–12 Myers, Rhonada Masequa, 313n113 Nation of Islam, 61, 90, 263. See also X, Malcolm Nation Time (Caton mural), 101, 103f, 247, 249, Nation Time (Jones-­Hogu print), 98, 99f, 101 Nation Time (G. Williams painting), 73, 73f, 101 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. See Kerner Commission National Association for the Advancement of Colored ­People (naacp), 96, 169–70

Index

/  387

National Center of Afro-­American Artists, 123 National Endowment for the Arts (nea), 216, 236 National Endowment for the Humanities, 43 nationalism: cultural, 27–28, 88–96, 101–2, 111, 115, 189, 206, 243, 258–64, 268, 317n25; internationalism, 90, 208. See also Cohran, Kelan Philip; Karenga, Ron; Kuumba Workshop National Mobilization to End the War (mobe), 142 natu­ral hairstyle. See fashion Negro Digest. See Black World/Negro Digest Negro Mood, The, 20, 88. See also Bennett, Leone, Jr. Negro vs. Black, 90, 151–52, 205–6 Neighborhood Youth Corps, 235 New Bauhaus, 10, 39, 176, 307 New Concept Era Theatre, 50 New Lafayette Theater, 259 Newman, Ralph, 140–41, 146–47, 155–56 newspapers. See Chicago Defender; Chicago Tribune Newton, Huey P., 208, 260, 336n70 New York, 11, 13, 106, 123, 139, 152–53, 159, 171, 197, 237, 255 Nii-­Oti, 51–52, 52f, 288 Nipson, Herbert, 53–54, 240 Nixon, Richard, 129, 253, 287 Nommo. See Harrison, Paul Car­ter nonviolence, 35, 118. See also protests and protestors; vio­lence North Lawndale. See Lawndale/North Lawndale Northwestern University, 43, 51, 160, 196, 287, 309n65 Nour, Amir, 309n65 Nurullah, Seitu (aka Robert Lewis), 52

388  /

In d e x

obac (Organ­ization of Black American Culture), 45–46, 51, 56–60, 64, 74–77, 91, 120, 151, 159–60, 187, 206, 258; and aacm, 57, 108; McWorter position paper on Black Experientialism, 20–23, 59, 195, 268–69, 286; Visual Arts Workshop, 5, 15, 48, 51f, 57–58, 74, 77, 83, 122, 179, 197; Writers’ Group, 45, 115, 181. See also experientialism; Wall of Re­spect Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), 102–6, 118, 175, 276, 316n7 O’Higgins, Pablo, 43 Oldenburg, Claes, 67, 138, 159, 171, 325n49 Olu, Yaoundé, 48, 50, 54 On Chicago Walls exhibition, 240 On the Beach, 86f, 108–12, 111f. See also Cohran, Kelan Philip One ­Thing Leads to Another (Arnold mixed media), 153–54, 156f Onli, Turtel, 288–89 Operation Bootstrap, 126–27 Opportunity Please Knock, 85–88, 86f, 103, 108, 120, 133–34, 181, 295. See also Blackstone Rangers Organ­ization of Black American Culture. See obac Orozco, José, 40 Osborne, Hugh, 188–89 Oṣun Center for the Arts, 48, 50, 50f, 288 Paige, Robert, 53, 120, 181, 289, 291, 309n65 painting, 70, 109, 270; on car, 223; with collage, 271–75; easel paintings, 18, 47, 61, 101, 184–85, 197–98, 204–6; 208, 213, 256, 270, 284, 296–97, 309n55; lead paint, 229; as meta­ phor, 89; mural, 1, 3, 5, 7, 59–61, 63–64, 74–75, 77, 98, 277, 289, 308n45, chapter 5; paint­ers, 5, 40, 48, 61, 70, 73, 202, 218, 223, 278, 288 (see also

individual artist names); painting as object, 78; sign painting, 77, 113, 224, 314n123 Palazzolo, Tom, 67, 313n111. See also film Paris, France, 171, 205, 260–61 Parish, Norman, 5, 54, 64, 74–77, 309n55 Parker, Angela, 223 Parker, Charlie, 172, 242, 255 pastors, 70, 87, 135, 145, 157. See also religion Patlán, Ray, 235 patriarchy, 115, 185–86, 282–83 Peace (Metafisica) (Castillo mural), 235–36, 236f Peace and Salvation: The Wall of Understanding (Walker mural), 226 Peace Museum, 289 Pedro Albizu Campos Center for P ­ eople’s Health, 239–40. See also Latin American Defense Organ­ization Penrose, Roland, 67 Peppilow (aka Pep). See Perry, Edward per­for­mance: and Art & Soul, 158, 160; centrality to Black Arts Movement, 10, 17–18, 91, 201, 251; visual arts as, 63, 201, 240; and Wall of Re­spect, 5, 56, 59–61, 64, 78. See also dance; Kuumba Workshop; ­music; On the Beach; Opportunity Please Knock; spaces; theater; and individual venues Perkins, Marion, 41, 95, 176, 194–97 Perkins, Useni Eugene, 45, 52, 70, 78, 94, 110, 149, 158, 195–96, 223, 265–66, 320n77 Perry, Edward (aka Pep or Peppilow), 134, 166, 173 Perry, Felton, 292–93, 298 Perry, Fred, 85 Pettus, James. See Upra, KeRa Philosophy of the Spiritual (Caton mural), 247–48, 248f photography, 1, 28, 30, 43, 66, 110, 160, 188, 202, 217–19, 223, 266; of Art & Soul,



149, 153, 155, 157, 160, 165, 168, 178, 232, 235, 270; as art form, 45, 53, 142, 219–21; Black, 142, 219, 221, 339n7; classes in, 176, 178, 221, 259; documenting po­liti­cal action, 57, 68–69, 75, 78, 98, 100–102, 131, 188, 218–19, 221, 284, 297, 318n48; ­family, 219; of graffiti, 27, 70–71, 256, 305n69; as historical source material, 28, 43, 100–101, 110, 113, 157, 160, 165, 241; In Our Terribleness, 219–20; and murals, 217, 221–23, 237, 240, 242, 247, 251–52, 340n28; police attacks on photog­raphers, 311n82; pro­cess and aesthetic, 188, 190, 200, 269, 333n14; school photos and neighborhood change, 30; as source or material in art, 153, 181, 226, 270–74, 284, 333n9; street, 217–23; as vehicle for community members, 29, 68, 78, 297–98; and the Wall of Re­spect, 1, 7, 57, 59–64, 74–75, 78, 113, 217–19, 221, 247, 312n92, 312n95, 312n99. See also individual photog­raphers’ names Picasso, Pablo, 65–70, 73, 78, 140, 152, 173–74, 225, 330n127 Pilsen, 235 Playboy Foundation, 276–77 playwright. See theater Plotkin, Barry, and Josephine Plotkin, 47–48 poetry, 53, 69–70, 158, 187, 202–3, 219, 225, 259, 285–87; and Wall of Re­ spect, 1, 5, 7, 56–57, 63–65, 69, 78; and Picasso sculpture, 66–69. See also obac; and individual poets Poitier, Sidney, 63 police: closure of Affro-­Arts Theater, 115–16, 118; and Demo­cratic National Convention, 142–43; harassment and brutality, 58, 69, 101, 293; helpful, 35, 126, 133; as provocateurs, 83; Red Squad, 27, 77, 314n132; response to uprisings, 117, 143; in Sweetback, 260–61

Index

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Poor ­People’s Campaign, 142. See also King, Martin Luther, Jr. Porter, James, 96 Port Huron Statement, 148 portraits: africobra aesthetic, 185, 206; in murals, 217–18, 225; on Wall of Re­spect, 5, 57, 61, 63–64, 75, 77, 80. See also photography positive images, 16, 19, 29, 41, 44, 56, 92, 212, 237, 255, 333n14, 343n100; as “actionary” images, 190, 192, 194, 201, 203, 229; and advertising, 282; and the Black Arts Movement, 186–88, 201, 278; in contrast to blaxploitation film, 257–58, 263–66; 268–69; critique of 189–90; as “directive” images, 263–64; in relation to modernism, 205; and murals, 215–17, 220–23, 226, 229, 232, 234, 244–45, 257; self–­image, 19, 91, 187, 294–95, 334n23; and the “super-­real,” 270 posters, 43, 55f, 70, 217, 221, 267f; africobra poster prints, 200 poverty, 88, 107, 153, 172, 188, 224, 249, 255, 258, 278; antipoverty programs, 103–5, 153 Powell, Adam Clayton, 64 prejudice. See racism President’s Council on Youth Opportunity, 127 press. See journalism Price, Ramon, 53, 157–58, 238 pride. See Black Pride; Wall of Pride Prince No-­Rah, 113 prints and printmaking, 10, 40–41, 50, 52, 54, 98, 101, 112, 117, 143, 153, 183, 185, 208–13, 236, 329n105; africobra print proj­ect, 200–201, 213, 336n61, 338nn97–98; classes and training in, 52, 158, 178; Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s master’s thesis work, 190–95; letterpress printing, 113; newspaper clippings and collage, 60,

390  /

In d e x

226, 270–74, screenprint/silkscreen, 63, 143, 178, 183, 192, 200, 336n61; woodcut, 153–54, 185, 192. See also Burroughs, Margaret; Jones-­Hogu, Barbara prison. See correctional facilities property. See housing; real estate protests and protesters, 25–26, 77, 100–102, 169, 173, 188, 190–91, 265, 278; and Arts and the Inner City conference, 120–21, 291; and the Demo­ cratic National Convention, 142–43; and Picasso statue, 67–69; school boycotts, 34–35, 68, 69f. See also Civil Rights Movement; uprisings Pulson, Harriette, 306n37 Ra, Sun, 88, 108, 202, 248 racism, 13, 36, 68, 81, 89–90, 102, 121, 144, 152, 197, 207, 228, 276; art against, 190, 192, 224–25; racist images, 159, 165, 186–88. See also segregation Rainbow Beach, 169–70 rallies. See protests and protestors Rami, Pémon, 68, 113, 313n113. See also Umoja Black Student Center Ramsel Rec­ords, 87 Randall, Dudley, 348n88 Rangers clubs. See Blackstone Rangers Raya, Marcos, 235 Rayner, A. A. “Sammy,” 118, 247 real estate: 31–34, 81, 117, 251, 306n8, 321n100; Chicago Real Estate Board, 31; de­mo­li­tions, 30, 34, 37–38, 47–48, 81, 83–84, 117, 224, 243, 305; developers, 170–71. See also housing; urban renewal realism. See social realist art rebellion. See uprisings Red Squad. See police religion, 15, 18, 61, 64, 107, 201, 219, 302n32. See also pastors; names of individual churches

renewal. See urban renewal restrictive covenants. See housing; segregation revolution: cultural, 14, 17, 20–21, 90–91, 95, 97, 136–37, 151, 223, 259–60, chapter 4; reproduction as revolutionary, 208, 264; revolutionary fashion, 95, 283–85; revolutionary potential of film, 257–60, 264, 274–76, 279–82, 293. See also Black Panther Party; cobra; protests and protestors; uprisings Revolutionary (Angela Davis) (W. Jarrell painting), 181, 182f, 256, 283–84 riots. See uprisings Rip-­Off/Universal Alley (Caton mural), 242–46, 243f, 245f, 246, 247f, 249–50, 250f, 277. See also Alley, The; Caton, Mitchell Rise and Take Control (Jones-­Hogu silkscreen), 63, 93, 94f, 194–95 Rissman, Arthur, 331n140 Rivera, Diego, 40, 60 Rivers, Conrad Kent, 56, 171 Robb, F. Hammurabi. See F. H. Hammurabi Robert Taylor Homes, 37, 237–38, 272 Robeson, Paul, 43, 85, 95, 312n95 Rocke­fel­ler Foundation, 127–28, 137 Rod­gers, Carolyn, 25, 91, 204–5, 285–87, 338n93 Rogers, Bernard, 134, 145, 157 Rogosin, Lionel, 266, 268 Rogovin, Mark, 239–40, 289 Rollins, Sonny, 63 Roman Saints, 134, 324n32 Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, 40 Roo­se­velt University, 287 Ross, David, 40 Ross, Wanda, 128–29, 167 Royko, Mike, 66 Rubin, Jerry, 142



Runcie, John, 19 Russell, Bill, 64 Rus­sian Rangers. See Blackstone Rangers Salone, Herbert, 54 Sandman (artist), 251, 288 Sanford, Walter, 288 San Francisco, 120, 140, 148, 159 San Quentin Prison, CA, 272 Sao Paulo, Brazil, 12 Sarason, Seymour, 23, 136 Sartre, Jean-­Paul. See existentialism Saunders, Doris, 90 Saunders, Warner, 145, 149, 258 Savage, Leon, 45 Say It Loud (Williams painting), 183–84, 184f Schapiro, Meyer, 138, 325n43 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (saic). See Art Institute of Chicago school boycott. See protests and protestors schools. See education screen print. See prints and printmaking sculpture, 140, 158, 204–5; African, 158, 161, 244, 297, 316n13; sculptors, 41, 48; statuary, 175, 297. See also Gilbert, Peter; Hunt, Richard; Madison, Reginald; Picasso, Pablo; Williams, Douglas; Zelle, Ann Sears Foundation, 44 Sears Roebuck Co., 33, 44, 126–27 segregation, 13, 31–36, 81. See also ghettos; housing Sell, Mike, 17 Sengali, Leonard, 279, 296 Sengstacke, Robert Abbott, 59, 61–63, 70, 98, 201–2, 217–23, 242, 247, 315n141 setting (so­cio­log­i­cal concept), 19, 23, 37, 136, 159, 260. See also space sexuality, 187, 258–59, 263–65, 283

Index

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Shelley v Kraemer, 32 Shepherd Studio and Gallery, 45, 218f, 219, 220 Shiflett, James, 143–45, 215 Simmons, Howard, 113, 157, 160 Simone, Nina, 75, 312n99 singers. See ­music Siqueiros, David, 40, 60 Sistrunk, Irene, 59 Sistrunk, Ziff, 59, 78, 223 slavery, 18, 92, 165, 185, 206, 208, 245–46, 261 Slim, Iceberg, 265 Smith, Patricia Ann, 109 Smith, Tommie, 192 Smoote, Jim, 289 Smothers ­Brothers, 87 S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop) (postcard), 67 sncc Freedom Singers, 111 social realist art, 61, 199, 264, 288 sociology, 23, 37, 89–90, 92, 138 solidarity, 9, 18–22, 97, 206, 260, 264, 287 songs. See ­music Sound of Blackness, 157, 158f. See also ­music South Exchange. See Ankh Studio South Side. See Bronzeville; Hyde Park–­Kenwood; South Shore; Washington Park; Woodlawn South Shore (Chicago neighborhood), 25, 31, 48, 50f South Side Community Art Center, 10–11, 39–45, 50, 53–55, 70, 106, 110–12, 176, 220–21, 239–40, 289 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 61 Southern United States. See American South Southworks (U.S. Steel plant), 168–71 space: for artists, 37–40, 43–56, 122, 172, 235, 242, 251, 256, 288; changing/ claiming of, 5, 7, 23, 25, 27–28, 35–37, 60, 68, 83, 113, 216, 247, 254–55, 257,

392  /

In d e x

294; museum, 239; pictorial, 61, 63, 113, 150, 153, 179, 185, 205, 217, 229, 248, 255–56, 269, 272; public, 28, 56–57, 60, 65, 68; racialized organ­ ization of, 12, 30–35, 46; recreational, 3, 129–30, 169; safe, 106; street, as space and community, 5, 9–11, 19, 23, 25–27, 30, 56, 70, 73–75, 98, 131, 143, 160, 181, 216, 219, 239, 249, 255, 257, 262, 272, 277, 286–87, 293–98. See also environment; setting speeches, 39–40, 67, 104, 115, 126, 195 Spook Who Sat by the Door, The, 279–82, 282f, 293. See also film sscac. See South Side Community Art Center State Street, 3, 23, 37, 265 St. Charles Youth Prison, 27, 125 ste­reo­types. See racism Stevens, Nelson, 123, 200, 213 Stewart, Jimmy, 18, 205, 250–51 Sticks and Stones, 46 Stone, W. Clement. See W. Clement and Jessie Stone Foundation Stop Genocide (Jones-­Hogu print), 98–101, 100f, 117 Strug­gle Black/White (Bey painting), 288, 290f students (high school and college), 19, 64, 75, 94, 95, 135, 139, 143, 274, 293; activism by, 68, 90, 128, 221; Umoja Black Student Center, 45, 68, 221 Studio Museum, NY, 123, 137 studios, 36, 45–46, 52, 122, 131, 140, 235, 291; recording, 133,145; WJ Studios, 48–50, 49f, 73. See also individual artists and galleries Studio Watts, 139 subjectivity, 16, 19, 190, 205–6, 260 ­Sullivan, Louis, 48 Sun Ra Arkestra. See ­music; Ra, Sun Superfly, 265–66, 277. See also blaxploitation; film

surrealism, 11–12, 67, 242, 269, 283, 301n22. See also Chicago Surrealists Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 257–66, 269, 279–80, 284. See also film; van Peebles, Melvin

Turner, James, 92, 337n87 Turner, Nat, 61 Two ­Toward Revolution (Donaldson painting), 160–61, 164f, 179, 180f Tyson, Cicely, 63

Tastee Freez, 131, 175 Taylor, Jim, 276 Taylor, Lawrence, 54 tele­vi­sion, 188, 203, 258–59, 274–76, 283 temporality, 95; africobra princi­ ples of past, pre­sent, and ­future, 63, 93, 181, 195, 211–12; anachronism, 278–79; the ­future, 87, 89, 187–88, 190, 231, 281, 294; history as change over time, 9, 14; heritage, 92, 138; “hopeless hours” (Sigemonde Wimberli), 125; and revolution, 208, 281; and trauma, 18, 80, 86, 92. See also Black history textiles, 39, 52–53. See also Jarrell, Jae; Paige, Robert theater, 53, 68, 142, 144, 258–60; and African cultural forms, 17, 93, 188; Image Makers (Perkins play), 265–68, 267–68f; plays, 50, 171, 265–66; section of Wall of Re­spect, 62f, 63, 74, 98; street theater, 11, 56, 78, 159, 215, 265, 293; temporary spaces, 37. See also Affro-­Arts Theater; Harper Theater; Kuumba Workshop; Opportunity Please Knock Third World Gallery, 46 Third World Press, 161 Three on Three (J. Hetherington print), 153, 154f To Be ­Free (Know the Past and Prepare for the ­Future) (Jones-­Hogu print), 195, 208–12, 211f Travis, Dempsey, 141 Tribute to My Black ­Sister, A (D. Williams mixed media), 272, 274f

Umoja Black Student Center, 45, 68, 221, 222f, 339n21 Unfinished Collage (Arnold collage), 150, 150–51f ­unions, 11–12, 38, 39, 52, 169, 263. See also Chicago Artist Union; ­labor; Union of Black Artists Unite (Jones-­Hogu print), 192–93, 194f, 206, 210, 229 unity, 22, 61, 83, 97, 110, 181, 190, 208, 225, 318n41 University of Chicago, 48, 105, 188, 287–88; role in urban renewal, 33–34, 46–47 University of Illinois at Chicago, 68–69, 134; and Art & Soul, 175–78, 330n129; Center for Urban Studies, 175; role in urban renewal, 30, 33, 37, 305n64 Uphold Your Men (Lawrence print), 208, 209f Upra, KeRa 201–2, 248 uprisings, 190–91, 294–98; Demo­cratic National Convention police riot, 142–43 (and see Medium Cool); in response to King assassination, 116–20, 128–31, 143; summer of 1967, 105, 115; See also Kerner Commission; protests and protestors; Spook Who Sat by the Door, The Urban Pro­gress Centers, 110, 141, 235, 295 urban renewal, 8, 12, 25, 30, 33–37, 45–47, 81 Urban Wall Suit (J. Jarrell fabric art), 70, 72f utopia, 37, 88, 105, 176, 245, 276



Index

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vandalism, 125, 130, 228, 232, 340. See also graffiti van Deburg, William, 91, 97 van der Marck, Jan, 137–40, 142, 145, 150, 156–57, 160, 161f, 167, 170f, 174, 277, 325nn43–44, 326n50, 330n129 Van Peebles, Melvin, 257–58, 260–64, 269, 285, 344n11. See also Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Vaughan, Sarah, 63, 75 Vice Lords. See Conservative Vice Lords video, 17, 177, 293, 299, 347n80 Vietnam War, 33, 67, 101, 142, 148, 153–54, 192 vio­lence: “Black-­on-­Black,” 98, 217, 225; as expression, 106, 150, 292, 294, 297; nonviolence, 35, 107–8, 126, 279; white, 32, 35, 98. See also gangs; protests and protestors; uprisings volunteers, 73, 107, 115, 146, 231, 239, 250, 276 Voss, Jerrold, 175 Wade, Eugene “Eda,” 5, 75, 78, 134–35, 203, 223–25, 237, 239–42, 288, 309n55 wade-in. See Rainbow Beach Wake Up (G. Williams print), 273–74, 273f Walker, William, 58–59, 60f, 171, 223, 226, 229, 242–43, 249, 253, 277, 289; and Museum of Con­temporary Art, 239–40; other murals, 15, 215, 217, 225, 237–38. See also Wall of Re­spect; Wall of Truth Walker, Wyatt Tee, 61, 75 Wallace, Onikwa Bill, 217 Wallace, Michèle, 189, 213–14 Walley, John 39, 175–76, 295, 307n23 Wall of Brotherhood, 235 Wall of Love, 240 Wall of Pride and Self-­Awareness, 244 Wall of Re­spect 1–3, 3f, 5, 6f, 7, 9, 28–29, 56–64, 73–84, 76f, 79f, 85, 98, 110, 113, 122, 142, 160, 179, 181, 203, 204,

394  /

In d e x

240–41f, 254, 308n45, 312n332, 314n123, 314n131; collective creation of, 5, 56; changes and relationship to community, 5, 7, 74–77; and mural movement, 8, 215, 217; and per­for­ mance, 5, 61, 63, 64; and photography, 7, 29, 217–19, 221, 247, 339n7; poetry about, 64–65, 69–70, 78, 204, 232, 258, 294; and positive images, 1, 19, 59, 61, 63–64, 217, 218, 221, 223, 229; pro­cess, 48, 51f, 56–59, 60f, 62f; scholarship on, 15, 302n32, 311n77, 336n57; sections, 61–64; in struggling neighborhood, 80–81; subject of play, 50; de­mo­li­tion, 83–84, 224. See also community; murals; obac; Wade, Eugene “Eda”; Walker, William; Wall of Truth Wall of Truth, 80f, 81, 82f, 83, 135, 221, 223–29, 225–27f, 308n45. See also Harris, Eddie; Wade, Eugene “Eda”; Walker, William Wall of Understanding. See Peace and Salvation: The Wall of Understanding war: between gangs, 5, 87; post-­WWII period, 13, 25, 33, 37, 80; War on Gangs, 28, 173–74, 232, 287; War on Poverty, 103, 105. See also Vietnam War Ward, Francis, 142 Ward, Theodore, 95 Ward, Val Gray, 64, 142, 258, 260, 263, 265, 268–69, 291, 294. See also Kuumba Workshop Wardwell, Allan, 238, 328n98 Warhol, Andy, 171, 325n49 Warren, Lynne, 37 Washington Park (park and neighborhood), 11, 25, 32, 45, 57, 58f, 76f, 153, 219. See also Malcolm X Shabazz Park Washington, DC, 127, 137, 174, 153, 213, 228 Washington, Harold, 289

wbbm, 85 W. Clement and Jessie Stone Foundation, 128–29, 189, 236, 277 weapons, 115–16, 125, 208, 244, 261, 272; art as, 70, 77, 90; in artworks, 244, 248, 273–74, 297 Weaver, Myrna 48, 58, 63–64, 75 Webber, C. Siddha, 171, 201, 242, 244–48, 246f Weber, John Pitman, 215–16, 237–43, 247–50 Welcker, Stanford, 306n23 Wendell Phillips High School, 113, 313n113 West, Cornel, 35, 283 West Side. See Lawndale/North Lawndale; Pilsen West Side Art Proj­ect. See Art & Soul Westside Federation, 141, 145 Western culture, 17–18, 65, 67, 89, 153, 199, 204. See also Eu­ro­pean Wexler, Haskell, 291–92. See also Medium Cool wgn-­t v, 185 What ­Shall I Tell My ­Children Who Are Black. See Burroughs, Margaret White, Charles, 60 White, Wilbur “Hi-­Fi,” 278 white supremacy, 13, 19, 88, 153, 185 Whitney Museum, 153 Whyte, Garrett, 54 Wicks, Doyle, 266 wigs. See fashion Williams, Douglas, 54, 109–10, 271–72, 274, 288, 295 Williams, Gerald, 53, 73, 101, 122–23, 183, 200, 206, 213, 254, 272, 279 Williams, Jack, 106–7 Williams, José, 45, 50, 53–54, 271 Williams, Timothy. See Nii-­Oti Williamson, Stan, 54 Willis, Benjamin, 35



Wilson, C. Roger, 46, 54 Wilson, Flip, 263 Wimberli, Sigemonde, 124–25, 158, 317n27 Winbush, LeRoy, 176 womanhood. See gender ­women. See gender ­Women Strike for Peace (organ­ization), 142 woodcuts. See prints and printmaking Woodlawn (Chicago neighborhood), 25, 27, 31–32, 48, 70, 85–87, 102, 134, 145, 169 Woodlawn Organ­ization, 53, 102–3, 316n7 Woodruff, Hale, 60 workshops. See classes and workshops Works Pro­gress Administration (wpa) 8, 10, 39, 60, 216 Wright, Nathan, 91, 288 Wright, Richard, 95 writers. See criticism/critiques; classes and workshops; obac; names of individual writers X, Malcolm, 57, 64, 75–77, 90, 115, 122, 135, 153, 309n55 Yamashita, Sachio, 235–37, 278, 341n49 Yanari, Sam, 236 Yasko, Caryl, 215 Yippies, 142 ymca, 107, 127–28, 130 Yoruba, 3, 297, 345n35 Young, Marvin 54 Young Militants, 59, 64, 75 Young Patriots, 143 youth. See ­children Youth Organ­izations United (you), 174 Zambezi Artist Guild, 51, 52f, 332n8 Zelle, Ann, 137, 145, 147–60, 174, 235, 270, 287, 330n129

Index

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