CBAM

-nuances emerged in the intersection of poetry and visual art

-To understand the CBAM, one must first understand the Wall of
Respect
-Wall of Respect
43rd and Langley. Not economically sound, but culturally
rich.
30x60 outdoor mural, 1967-1971
center of cultural activity in the CBAM
dance, poetry, drama, public speaking
included a multitude of people: people from the
neighborhood, the artists who created the mural, poets
who read at the Wall, photographers whose art kept the
Wall truly alive, and other participants in the CBAM.
-Amiri Barakas collaboration with Chicago photographer and resident
of Barakas artist collective, Fundi Abernathy, brought the CBAM onto
the national scope.
They collaborated on the publication of In Our Terribleness,
described by the author as a call and response between
Barakas poetic narrative and Abernathys black and white
photos of Black Chicagoans.
IOT is considered to be one of the underrated masterpiece of the
BAM.
Layout arranged by Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, who also arranged
the layout of the Wall of Respect.
-Jeff Donaldson, one of the painters of the Wall of Respect and one of
the founders of AFRI-COBRA, insists that the wall was guerrilla art.
In a 2002 interview, he recalls the instrumental role and
management of a gang leader in the creation of the Wall. Painter
William Walker, the true leader in the idea to create the wall, was
granted permission to create this mural by a gang leader who
also purchased the paint and painted the wall white to start.
This is incredibly important in thought about the idea that the
creators of the Wall wanted to make art that would not
necessarily be accepted by politicians.
-Signatures were not included on the wall because the magnificent
collaborators on the Wall could not be reduced to a mere signature.
-The Wall was shaped around the following categories: rhythm and
blues, jazz, theater, statesmen, religion, literature, sports, and dance.

Members of the OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture)

workshop identified a list of the black cultural heroes who
would be represented on the Wall in each category.

-The community participation and grassroots involvement was one of

the guerrilla tactics included in the creation of the Wall. The artists
cared about the opinion of the people in the neighborhood and
understood that art was all around.
Jeff Donaldson had painted Nina Simone for the jazz category,
and a woman who lived across the street called it ugly. This led
the artists to understand that aesthetic judgments come in all
forms.
-The Wall was painted in one month in the summer of 1967.
The creators held impromptu poetry readings and dance
performances while they were creating it.
-The location of the Wall is a comment on the pathetic nature of the
Black situation, especially the housing.
-Gwendolyn Brooks made the transition from a negro poet to a black
poet. Madhubuti connects this transition to the black aesthetic that
was created in the 1960s.
The word black was seemingly born in the 1960s, which
signified a political and cultural awakening of the negro.
There was a grand focus on shifting from and overthrowing the
ideologies of slavery, anti-blackness, and self-hatred in Black
people.
Baraka hails this Blackness in his poem SOS, which was
painted on the Wall by Edward Christmas. This Blackness is
ideology and style.
-A lot of the art of this time focused on a rejection of White/Western
supremacy, and a rejection of the black self-hatred that this supremacy
leads to.
This led to Madhubutis creation of the metaphor of black light
as opposed to white light, or the light that is all around us
constantly. This black light became a theme in a great deal of
the poems of the BAM.
Gwendolyn Brooks delved into the sexual consumption of dark
skinned blackness, bringing her point of view as a black woman
and talking about black men placing yellow women on a
pedestal while Black women are seen as sexual prey. This is
exemplified by the lines, At school, your girls were the bright
little girls. /You couldnt abide dark meat. / Yellow was to look at, /

Black was for the famished to eat./ in her 1954 poem Ballad of
Pearl May Lee.
-After the Wall of Respect, the Wall of Truth was created across the
street.
The seizure of the property used to create this Wall was a
reflection of one of the Black Arts Movement themes of bold
commandeering of public property.
This was encouraged by many artists of the time, and written
about in the poems of Brooks and Baraka.
-The national scope of the CBAM not only grew when Abernathy and
Baraka collaborated on In Our Terribleness, but with the black
celebrities who visited the Wall of Respect. Nina Simone and Eartha Kitt
both separately visited the Wall to see the legendary mural.
-The CBAM was considered to be an hour of ringing and the Wall of
Respect was one of the most resounding bells.
The Wall represented not only the breaking of boundaries
between different art forms, but the joining together of Black
people from different socioeconomic backgrounds due to
education levels.
The area of the Wall is now undergoing gentrification (something
I have witnessed myself in this area of Chicago) and any traces
of the Wall have been destroyed, but its legacy continues to live.