by Jason Smith

ineteen sixty-seven—43rd and Langley on Chicago's South Side. A handful of African American artists laid claim to one wall of a dilapidated building. They got out their brushes and covered the wall with black pride—they put Malcolm X up there, and Thelonius Monk, and W.E.B. DuBois. They painted Muhammad Ali and Billie Holiday. When the mural was finished, the artists named it The Wall of Respect.

Some of those artists would go on to form AfriCobra—the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists—because they wanted to create an aesthetic that tuned in to African American sensibilities.

"It was art for people," Michael Harris says. "It wasn't necessarily art for art's sake; it was art for people's sake."

Harris joined AfriCobra in 1979. Now an assistant professor of African and African American art, he's writing a book titled Colored Pictures: Issues of Race and Visual Representation.

AfriCobra, Harris says, is merely one chapter in a long history of resistance by African American artists—a resistance to the way whites have portrayed African Americans in popular culture and art, a resistance that has allowed African American artists to create their own cultural identities, on their own terms.

hink about how pop culture's deck has been stacked: Blacks have been negatively stereotyped and caricatured as far back as the late eighteenth century. Distorted lips, bulging eyes. Sambo. Pickaninnies. Mammies. Blacks have been portrayed as laughable, grotesque, inferior. These indignities have appeared in postcards, in advertisements, in film—in almost every aspect of popular culture. After-school cartoons depicted blacks either as ill-tempered, washboard-toting mammies, or as bumbling, bone-through-the-nose savages, forever wide-eyed as they tried to escape the tiger. Such cartoons were produced as late as the 1940s—and were still being aired 40 years later.

Next: "....a momentum of perception"

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