A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun by Angela Jackson

Author:Angela Jackson [Jackson, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2505-5
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Committee for the Arts began meeting in Chicago in 1966. In 1967, it would become the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Its members included Gerald McWorter (later known as Abdul Alkalimat), sociologist; Jeff Donaldson, visual artist; Conrad Kent Rivers, poet; Joseph Robinson, community organizer; E. Duke McNeil, attorney; and Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest, long known to Gwendolyn. Also known to Gwendolyn was Ann McNeil (later Dr. Ann Smith), whom Gwendolyn had met at Northeastern Illinois University, when both were teaching there.

The idea behind OBAC was the belief that art has properties that would heal and restore the collective psyche of the black citizens of Chicago, so as to enable them to achieve political and socioeconomic empowerment. In other words, OBAC’s goal was to create art that makes people whole and self-determining. OBAC was named by Jeff Donaldson after the Yoruba word Oba, meaning chief or leader. OBAC was divided into several workshops on the visual arts, writing, community organizing, and drama, whose presentations were overseen by Ann McNeil. There was no music workshop as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians already existed. OBAC’s drama presentations did not compete with Val Gray Ward’s Kuumba Theater.

OBAC’s visual arts workshop was headed by Jeff Donaldson, later dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University. Participants in that workshop painted the famed Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural celebrating black heroes. This mural, painted on the side of a building at Forty-Third and Langley Avenue, would spark a mural movement across America. The Wall of Respect was dedicated on August 27, 1967, a singular public event for Gwendolyn, aligning her with a new breed of black people. Portrayed were Gwendolyn, Lerone Bennett Jr., H. Rap Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Wilt Chamberlain, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, John Oliver Killen, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughan. The Wall of Respect also carried Baraka’s poem “S.O.S.,” which called to all blacks to help form a black solidarity.8 The community had chosen its own heroes.

The most long-standing of the OBAC workshops was the writer’s workshop, chaired by Hoyt W. Fuller. Among the founding members were Don Lee, Carolyn Rodgers, Jewel Latimore (later known as Johari Amini), Cecil Brown, and Ronald Fair. Gwendolyn’s workshop and OBAC overlapped for a time. A literary movement was on.

Unfortunately, her longtime mentor and friend Langston Hughes would not be there for it. He passed away after surgery on May 22, 1967. He had been a source of support and inspiration from the generation before her.

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