Peace and Salvation: Wall of Understanding (completed 1970; whitewashed 1991), 872 N. Orleans.
All of Mankind (1971-’73), interior and exterior, 617 W. Evergreen, the former San Marcello Mission, now the Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church.
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“My people are workers,” Walker says. Here he pays tribute to them. Before painting the mural, he boned up on labor history–reading such books as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and attending college classes–and then undertook a study of contemporary working conditions by visiting packinghouses and talking to union officials and employees. The right side of the wall shows slaughterhouse workers–mostly minorities and immigrants–toiling at various jobs, while the left side shows them confronting management and demanding better working conditions.
The mural’s jazzy, African-influenced left side, Wall of Daydreaming, is mostly Mitchell Caton’s composition, but those are Walker’s portraits of Klansmen and the so-called “Mayor of 47th Street,” a drug pusher with skulls in his eyes. The right side, Man’s Inhumanity to Man, is Walker’s work. Men are positioned as pieces on a chessboard. One figure with a limo strapped to its back stands next to starving children holding empty plates. It’s not all bleak, however. Siddha Webber wrote on the mural, among other things: “Love will give us connection 2 the SOURCE.”
The charges were eventually dropped, and Tibbs later wrote a poem about his ordeal on death row–he had a friend, sign painter Donnie Carter, letter it on the wall.
