Updated: September 13, 2011 1:28AM
When artist William Walker helped paint the "Wall of Respect" in 1967,
black faces were seldom seen in school textbooks, the mainstream media
or on the walls of galleries or museums.
But the mural of African-American heroes on the side of a liquor store
at 43rd and Langley sparked a people's art movement that quickly
spread across the nation.
One of the fathers of the community mural movement, Mr. Walker, 84,
was found dead at his South Side home Monday.
Quiet, soft-spoken and intensely private, Mr. Walker was quick to
credit the work of the nearly 20 other artists who climbed the
scaffolding to work with him on the Wall of Respect.
The artists had banded together to produce a collaborative work, but
the idea for a mural was generally credited as being his.
Depicting 50 African-American political, religious, artistic and
sporting icons, including Malcolm X, Cicely Tyson, Miles Davis and
W.E.B. DuBois, the wall belonging to an absentee white landlord was
painted in consultation with community members after a series of
public meetings.
An inscription on the mural stated that it was painted to "Honor our
Black Heroes, and to Beautify our Community."
By the time it was destroyed in a fire in 1971 it had become a focal
point for political action and been substantially reworked, a move
which caused infighting among the artists and cost Mr. Walker some
friends.
He went on to paint two dozen murals across Chicago, of which three
remain.
Born in Alabama in 1927, Mr. Walker moved to Chicago in 1938. At
Englewood High School he showed an early flair for art, and he was one
of only two black artists enrolled in the early 1950s at the Columbus
College of Art and Design in Ohio, where he studied while serving with
the Army Air Corps.
He toured the South in the years following his graduation, painting
nightclubs and barbecue stands.
On his return to Chicago he joined the Organization for Black American
Culture, working as a mail sorter and a sign painter to support his
art, and becoming a leading figure in the community mural movement.
He co-founded Chicago Mural Group in 1970 and continued painting until
1988, when he completed his final mural, which honored Mayor Harold
Washington. One of his masterpieces, "Wall of Daydreaming and Man's
Inhumanity to Man," was restored in 2003 and can still be seen at 56th
and Stony Island. Another, "All of Mankind," is under threat at
Strangers Home Church near Cabrini Green.
"Bill chose to work on the streets, with the people," said writer Jeff
Huebner, who is working on a book about Mr. Walker. "His work
commented on the social ills and the prejudice that plagued the urban
community, but it never presented a conflict without offering a
resolution."
Muralist Olivia Gude, a professor at the University of Illinois,
Chicago, said Mr. Walker remained engaged and opinionated about the
mural scene even after he hung up his brushes.
He believed that the mural movement should be multi-racial — an
attitude that sometimes irked other black artists who felt white
artists could not be trusted, Gude said. But Mr. Walker told her,
"They are here pointing their faces to the wall and their backs to the
community while they paint: they trust us and we should trust them."
Gude said, "Any time you see a mural in Chicago, in some ways it's a
tribute to Bill Walker."
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