Tales from The b.a.SKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover

By D. Amari Jackson

This week, we reach into the b.a.SKET and pull out one of the greatest baseball players to ever walk away from the game…

In the spring of 1967, at the advent of the ”long, hot summer” that saw urban unrest explode in cities across the country, a major incident occurred on the campus of Texas Southern University (TSU) after increasing racial tensions reached a boiling point. TSU students had long been active in civil rights demonstrations for equitable treatment and, as a result, were regularly targeted and harassed by both the Houston Police department and white male students from the nearby University of Houston.

On May 17, 1967, a day after white students provoked turmoil and reaction by speeding down Wheeler Street and shouting racial insults at Black female students, police officers stormed the TSU campus, reportedly firing over 3000 shots into the Lanier dormitory. During the chaos, hundreds of students were arrested, injured, forced from their dormitory beds, and made to lie on the ground while their rooms were ransacked by cops allegedly “searching for weapons.”

This violent, heavy-handed treatment by law enforcement led to a subsequent congressional hearing at which witnesses and TSU faculty members testified. Among the faculty was art department chair, Dr. John Biggers.

Along with testifying in front of Congress, Biggers documented and chronicled such civil rights era events and inequities by spearheading a series of images at TSU’s Hannah Hall. The Hannah Hall Murals evolved into a graduation requirement where seniors could freely and openly express their personal or political views in imagery without Biggers or any other faculty or administrators censoring their efforts.

That said, Biggers was known to be strict in terms of both the technical and time requirements for the mural projects. According to his rules, if a student did not complete a mural within a specified time, or produced a work that was deemed to be lacking in effort or technique, the wall was given to another student. However, this was rarely the case since students were inspired by the prospect of producing public art to be seen by hundreds of campus visitors.

Because of Biggers’ innovative program, TSU remains the only university in the United States to have over 128 student murals on campus, dating from 1949 to 2013. In addition, Biggers created three famous campus murals himself.

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Amari Jackson is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.

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