Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Black was for the famished to eat./ in her 1954 poem Ballad of
Pearl May Lee.
-After the Wall of Respect, the Wall of Truth was created across the
street.
The seizure of the property used to create this Wall was a
reflection of one of the Black Arts Movement themes of bold
commandeering of public property.
This was encouraged by many artists of the time, and written
about in the poems of Brooks and Baraka.
-The national scope of the CBAM not only grew when Abernathy and
Baraka collaborated on In Our Terribleness, but with the black
celebrities who visited the Wall of Respect. Nina Simone and Eartha Kitt
both separately visited the Wall to see the legendary mural.
-The CBAM was considered to be an hour of ringing and the Wall of
Respect was one of the most resounding bells.
The Wall represented not only the breaking of boundaries
between different art forms, but the joining together of Black
people from different socioeconomic backgrounds due to
education levels.
The area of the Wall is now undergoing gentrification (something
I have witnessed myself in this area of Chicago) and any traces
of the Wall have been destroyed, but its legacy continues to live.