What photograph would the media use to remember your face if you were killed by the police?
Andrew Pisacane uses the Twitter hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown as a point of reference for his mural at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
The wall-sized work in the center’s temporary exhibition area juxtaposes images of black youths, and asks: Which image is accurate? Is it the young man in a graduation robe? Or the same man throwing up what some people believe to be a gang sign?
The question entered the Twitter vernacular last summer after Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Mo. It links issues of identity and civil rights — issues that have been linked since before Martin Luther King Jr.’s time.
The mural dominates the lobby outside the King gallery, the setting for a new exhibit of papers from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection.
The papers and mural are among a host of attractions and events in Atlanta connected to the observance of the King Holiday on Monday.
Pisacane is a Baltimore-based street artist who paints under the name “Gaia.” His installations have appeared in London, Vienna, Perth, Istanbul, Detroit and Chicago. He’s painted several walls in the Atlanta area, including one on the square in Decatur, and he’s been included in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30: Art and Style.”
Wearing paint-splashed shoes and his hair in a top-knot, Pisacane spoke about the issue on a recent afternoon, while using an air-brush to add a slash of purple to one of his figures.
The manipulation of image doesn’t just affect young black men, he said. One of his subjects is a female soldier, visualized in and out of uniform. “She said when she’s in uniform people shake her hand,” said Pisacane, “and when she’s not, people lock their doors.”
“Strategies of the Civil Rights Movement,” the exhibit of collection papers that opened this week, makes clear that King was not only a brave soldier, but a crafty gamesman.
He reveals the tactical thinking in the notes he scribbled while he was jailed in Albany; in his correspondence with President Lyndon Johnson; in the outline he wrote for his 1965 speech on Selma.
This week, as the city and the world pauses to recall King’s life, they will see that King, the strategist, was focused on identity, and the imperative, for African-Americans, to resist being defined by others. It was one of the reasons he and others in the movement dressed in professional attire.
Defining identity, then, as now, was important.
Information: 678-999-8990, www.civilandhumanrights.org.
» For more King Day events, see our story on ajc.com. We also have a page dedicated to volunteer opportunities for King Day.
The King Center
The King Center is hosting a week of events, including a “Salute to Greatness” gala dinner at 7 p.m. Saturday at Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency Hotel. Former president Bill Clinton will be honored.
Among those events is a commemorative service in honor of King at 10 a.m. Monday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church Horizon Sanctuary, with music by gospel great Sandi Patty and an appearance by Mathilde Mukantabana, Rwanda’s ambassador to the U.S.
The keynote speaker will be Gwendolyn E. Boyd, president of Alabama State University. Alumni from that Montgomery school, including Ralph D. Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth, became leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, and its president offered the King family a safe haven when King’s residence was bombed in 1956.
“In this generation we cannot forget the contributions of those unnamed foot-soldiers who worked with Dr. King and put their lives on the line for freedom and justice back then,” Boyd said. “Now, 50 and 60 years later, we are still dealing with some of those same issues.”
404-526-8961, www.thekingcenter.org.
King Historic Site
King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the subject of a Fulton County Superior Court hearing this week in which his children continue an extended fight over ownership of the civil right leader’s most cherished honor, is also the subject of a new exhibition at the King National Historic Site.
The long-term exhibit in the Historic Site’s Visitor Center brings to light Nobel documents that were classified for 50 years by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, revealing, for instance, that King was separately nominated by the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) and members of the Swedish Riksdag (or Parliament).
The yellowed pages of the Riksdag nomination letter note: “Dr. King’s efforts in the United States can serve as examples of the fight for justice and equality in other parts of the world and thus contribute to the solutions of various conflicts by peaceful means.”
The exhibit, which debuted at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, also reveals that King was among 44 people nominated for the Peace Prize. Among the 13 finalists: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Driven by wall text, the exhibit includes a video of King’s Nobel acceptance address, black and white photos from his journey to Norway with family and supporters and the program and manuscripts of speeches from a recognition dinner that followed his return in Atlanta.
The exhibit doesn’t measure the impact the award had on King’s life or the Civil Rights Movement, elevating it to the world’s stage, but its personal importance is suggested in a blown up excerpt from Coretta Scott King’s memoir “My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.” King’s widow recounted that he was getting a checkup and required rest at St. Joseph’s Hospital after a grueling European trip when she took a surprise call at home from a reporter bearing news of her husband winning the prize.
“Of course, the phone kept ringing and my first thought was that Martin had checked into the hospital only the day before and this meant that he would get absolutely no rest … On the other hand, I realized this was exactly the sort of lift Martin desperately needed.”
9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. 404-331-5190, www.nps.gov/malu.
» Visit our special section on Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy.
Morehouse College
To celebrate the holiday, King’s alma mater will offer lectures, a film and discussion, a church service and an open house Monday, Jan. 26, at the Atlanta University’s Woodruff Library, where the King papers are kept.
The Ritz Chamber Players, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based chamber ensemble, will present a special program Jan. 24 at Morehouse’s Ray Charles Performing Arts Center. Titled “Ties That Bind: From Swastika to Jim Crow,” the program features a variety of compositions, including Negro spirituals and a quartet written by Olivier Messiaen during his captivity in a German prisoner of war camp.
The program by the chamber players intends to show the shared interests of the African-American and Jewish communities in the U.S., both of whom find a connection with the story of Exodus.
404-681-7554, www.morehouse.edu.
Kennesaw State University
Activist, author and scholar Angela Davis will deliver the keynote address Sunday at Kennesaw State University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance.
Davis’ most recent book, “The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues,” draws upon her experiences in the early 1970s when she spent 18 months in jail and on trial. She had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list for her alleged role in a California courthouse killing, a crime for which she was acquitted in 1972. A distinguished professor emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Davis will sign copies of the book after the event.
Free and open to the public, the 6 p.m. observance is sponsored by the Kennesaw State African-American Student Alliance.
Dr. Bobbie Bailey and Family Performing Arts Center, 470-578-6650. www.web.kennesaw.edu/news.
About the Author
