| The People's Wall | |
|---|---|
 The mural in 2023 | |
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| Artist | Dion Henderson |
| Year | 1970 |
| Location | Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| 47°36′12.2″N122°18′23.4″W / 47.603389°N 122.306500°W | |
The People's Wall on 20th Avenue just south of Spruce Street in the Central District / Squire Park neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, U.S., is a mural that was commissioned in 1969 by the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and painted in 1970 by artist Dion Henderson.
The mural stood on the east side of what was then the BPP chapter headquarters in Seattle, the second building to serve that purpose (which it served from 1969 to either 1971 [1] or 1972 [2] ). The building was torn down very shortly thereafter, but as of 2023 the retaining wall and mural remain. The mural was retouched in 2008 by Seattle artist Eddie Walker. [2]
The wall is dedicated to nine fallen Panthers: Sydney Miller, Welton Butch Armstead, Albert Postel, Larry War, Lewis Jackson, Maud Allen, Carolyn Downs, Jim Graves and Henry Boyer. [3]
Eddie Walker, who retouched the wall in 2008, was a key figure in founding the Ethnic Cultural Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, [4] and painted the portraits of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth that hang in Seattle's Douglass-Truth Library. [5]
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
The Seattle Public Library (SPL) is the public library system serving the city of Seattle, Washington. Efforts to start a Seattle library had commenced as early as 1868, with the system eventually being established by the city in 1890. The system currently comprises 27 branches, most of which are named after the neighborhoods in which they are located. The Seattle Public Library also includes Mobile Services and the Central Library, which was designed by Rem Koolhaas and opened in 2004. The Seattle Public Library also founded the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL), which it administered until July 2008.
The Central Area, commonly called the Central District or The CD, is a mostly residential district in Seattle located east of downtown and First Hill ; west of Madrona, Leschi and Mt. Baker; south of Capitol Hill, and north of Rainier Valley. Historically, the Central District has been one of Seattle's most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and was once the center of Seattle's black community and a major hub of African-American businesses.
The Free Breakfast for School Children Program, or the People’s Free Food Program, was a community service program run by the Black Panther Party that focused on providing free breakfast for children before school. The program began in January 1969 at Father Earl A. Neil's St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, located in West Oakland, California and spread throughout the nation. This program was an early manifestation of the social mission envisioned by Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale along with their founding of the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. The breakfasts formed the core of what became known as the party's Survival Programs. Inspired by contemporary research about the essential role of breakfast for optimal schooling and the belief that alleviating hunger and poverty was necessary for Black liberation, the Panthers cooked and served food to the poor inner city youth of the area. The service created community centers in various cities for children and parents to simultaneously eat and learn more about black liberation and the Black Panther Party's efforts.
Denis Percy Arnold Walker, also known as Bejam Kunmunara Jarlow Nunukel Kabool, was an Aboriginal Australian activist. He was a major figure in the civil rights and land rights movements of the 1970s and continued to fight for a treaty between the Australian Government and Aboriginal nations through the 1990s and until his death.
Emory Douglas is an American graphic artist. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. As a revolutionary artist and the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Douglas created iconography to represent black-American oppression.
The Black Panther Party was an American Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
William Edouard Scott was an African-American artist. Before Alain Locke asked African Americans to create and portray the New Negro that would thrust them into the future, artists like William Edouard Scott were depicting blacks in new ways to break away from the subjugating images of the past. Scott, well known for his portraits, Haitian scenes, and murals, challenged the standard depiction of blacks in art in the first half of the 20th century by utilizing black subject matter in an uplifting way. However, just as his style remained traditional as opposed to abstract, he was relatively conservative in his portrayals of blackness.
Ruth Inge Hardison was an American sculptor, artist, and photographer, known particularly for her 1960s busts entitled "Negro Giants in History". Her 1983 collection called "Our Folks", which features sculpted portraits of everyday people, is also of note. Hardison's artistic productions largely surround historical black portraiture, and she is especially interested in creatively representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (BAAL), a group that encourages awareness of black artistic accomplishments, when this organization was founded in 1969.
Tina Allen was an American sculptor known for her monuments to prominent African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and George Washington Carver.
Cornelius Marion Battey was an American photographer who shot photographic portraits of black Americans in a pictorialist style. His photograph of black leaders appeared on the cover of the NAACP's magazine The Crisis beginning in the 1910s. He later founded and headed up the photography department at the Tuskegee Institute.
William Paul Coates is an American publisher, printer and community activist. In 1978 he founded the Black Classic Press (BCP), an imprint devoted to publishing obscure and significant works by and about individuals of African descent, particularly previously out-of-print books, and he also established the printing company BCP Digital Printing in 1995. He is the father of award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
LeRoy Foster (1925–1993) was an American painter from Detroit, Michigan. He is best known for the large murals he painted on the walls of Detroit institutions, such as “The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass,” at the Detroit Public Library’s Frederick Douglass Branch, and “Renaissance City,” at Cass Technical High School. He also painted portraits of prominent figures like singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson.
Dewey Crumpler is an American painter and an associate professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is featured in the permanent collections of the Oakland museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Crumpler has received a Flintridge foundation award, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant, and the Fleishacker Foundation, fellowship eureka award. A digital image of his murals have been included in the 2017 Tate Modern’s exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power in London.
The Twelve Labors of Hercules is a series of murals by Washington State artist Michael Spafford commissioned in the early 1980s for the State of Washington. The works were completed in 1981 and permanently installed on the walls of the House of Representatives' chambers at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia; the building was designed in the 1920s to accommodate murals, but they were not funded until the 1970s. The "stark, black-and-white, modernistic" paintings depict "the mythic tasks performed by the Greek hero Hercules".
A Black Lives Matter mural was painted outside Seattle City Hall, in the U.S. state of Washington, in 2021.
Eugene "Eda" Wade, sometimes written as Eugene "Edaw" Wade, was an African American muralist, educator, and artist mainly based in Chicago, Illinois. His artworks concentrated on Black power and Afrocentric themes. He was also an active member in the Black Arts Movement.
The Douglass-Truth Branch is a library building and Seattle Public Library branch in Seattle, Washington, United States. Named after Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, the library houses the West Coast's largest collection of African-American literature and history.
Public art in the library includes two mural portraits, painted by Eddie Walker, which depict Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.Landmark Designation.
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