The Artists
On mural creators, William Walker & Eugene "Edaw" Wade.
Embedded Files
William Walker, Eda Wade and OBAC artists collective, Wall of Respect (partial view) created 1967, revised ca 1969, Chicago.
Photo Credit: Mark Rogovin, ca 1969, gift of Michelle Melin-Rogovin to the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago
William Walker
William Walker
William “Bill” Walker’s life began in 1927 in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. He moved to Chicago in 1938 to live with his mother after she had spent 9 years in the city looking for work, separated from him.
Walker was drafted during World War II, later re-enlisting in the military in order to receive four years of college tuition. During his time in the military, he painted his first-ever mural in 1947. After serving in the Korean War and as an MP in the 99th Pursuit Squadron, Walker left his military career to study commercial art, later switching to fine arts at the Columbus Gallery of Art (now the Columbus College of Art and Design) in Ohio. In 1952, Walker was the first African American man to win the school’s 47th annual group exhibition award. Upon graduation, the artist traveled to Memphis where he lived and worked for a year painting murals. Then he traveled back to Chicago in 1955 where he worked as a postal worker and decorative painter.
In the summer of 1967, William Walker participated with 13 other African American artists in the Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC) collective to conceive and execute the Wall of Respect, a mural honoring African American “heroes and she-roes.” To create the mural, located on the side of a building at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, the artists negotiated with gangs operating in the area as they painted in public.
William Walker in 1971.
Photo credit: https://my.ccad.edu/blogs/alumnus-left-mark-chicago
The mural depicted 50 notable Black leaders from a variety of fields, with each artist responsible for a portion depicting a different area of achievement. Walker painted the section on religious leaders that featured a portrait of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Walker’s invitation to Eugene Wade to re-paint a portion of the mural caused considerable friction within the OBAC group.
After the wall's completion, Walker went on to co-found the Chicago Mural Group– now known as the Chicago Public Art Group– with fellow artists and friends, John Pitman Weber and Eugene “Eda” Wade. The Wall of Respect had a tremendous impact, and it started a nationwide movement of people’s art by inspiring outdoor murals in inner-city neighborhoods all around the country.
William Walker, For Blacks Only series no. 4, 1979, felt-tip pens on paper, Collection of the Chicago State University Foundation.
Photo credit: Isadore Howard, Hyde Park Art Center
Later Work
Later Work
In the late 1970’s William Walker began hanging out around 47th street and sketching. He explained that he felt he didn’t really know the people that he had been interacting with while painting the Wall of Respect. In the fall of 1984, these sketches were included in an exhibit titled "Images of Conscience: The Art of Bill Walker" debuted at Chicago State University. The exhibit faced backlash and criticism due to the violent nature of some of the work. Over the course of his career, Walker painted more than 30 murals in Chicago. He passed away on September 12th, 2011 at the age of 84.
Eugene “Edaw” Wade, ca. 1964, https://eugenewade.wordpress.com/
Eugene "Eda" Wade
Eugene "Eda" Wade
Eugene “Eda” Wade was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on November 27th, 1939. As Jeff Huebner has written, in his early years Wade gave himself the nickname and art signature “Edaw” which was his last name spelled backwards. “Edaw” was later shortened to “Eda.”
Eda Wade’s fascination with artwork began at the age of 7, when he saw, “a little boy drawing a cowboy, and he told himself he wanted to do that,” according to his daughter, Martha. By the fifth grade, teachers were offering Wade extra credit for decorating their classrooms, which he happily obliged.
Wade graduated from Southern University in 1964 with a Bachelors of Science in Art Education. After his graduation, he moved to Leesburg, Florida for a year to teach art. The following year, Eda moved to Chicago where he taught art at McKinley Upper Grade Center for the next four years.
Edaw working on mural at Kennedy King College, Chicago, 1999. https://eugenewade.wordpress.com/murals/.
In 1967, Eda Wade was invited by William Walker to repaint sections of the Wall of Respect in Chicago. In an interview in Detroit on the the television program “Colored People’s Time,” Wade stated that he decided to join Walker because he felt called to represent Black people honorably:
“...[I wondered] how could I best exhibit my talent for the elevation of my own Black people and as I began to search and find ways I discovered that…one of the best ways I could…utilize my talent to elevate Black people is to paint the past history.”
“...[I wondered] how could I best exhibit my talent for the elevation of my own Black people and as I began to search and find ways I discovered that…one of the best ways I could…utilize my talent to elevate Black people is to paint the past history.”
In the same interview, he stated that he wanted to bridge the gap between the Black history that white people presented and the history that actually occurred.
Later Work
After finishing the Detroit murals, Eda Wade enrolled in Howard University in Washington D.C to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting. Two years later, he returned to Chicago to become one of the Chicago Artists-in-Residence for Mural Painting. He worked there for 8 years before accepting a position at Kennedy King College where he taught until his retirement in 2005. After retiring, Wade moved to Louisiana. However, he could not stay retired for long, as, after only three years of retirement, he went back to teaching Art Appreciation part-time at Southern University and Baton Rouge Community College. His work can be found in Kennedy King College, the DuSable Museum, Malcolm X College, and Olive-Harvey College. Eda Wade passed on April 21st, 2021, at the age of 81. More information about his work can be found on his personal website https://eugenewade.wordpress.com/.
Wade and Walker interviewed by Tony Brown on WTVS “Colored People’s Time” television program Episode 13, 1969.
Photo credit: Screenshot taken from recording available at https://abj.matrix.msu.edu/videofull.php/id=198-733-548/
Creating The Murals:
A year after completing the Wall of Respect, Walker, accompanied by Eda Wade, was invited to travel to Detroit, Michigan to paint the Wall of Dignity. They brought with them panels painted by Edward Christmas and Elliot Hunter, two members of the Chicago OBAC group. Over the next year, Walker and Wade arranged commissions for two additional murals in Detroit: the Wall of Pride and the Harriet Tubman Memorial Wall. While the Chicago mural offered a template for the work they would do in Detroit, each of the three Detroit murals played out differently amid the changing dynamics of the city’s neighborhoods and institutions.
Walker explained to his biographer Jeff Huebner that he took the opportunity to do the murals because, “things in Detroit were not good at all, but we worked towards painting about love, unity, and understanding, as best we could. People understood— they had a desire to get along.” Wade added, when interviewed on television in 1969, that he wanted Black people to gain, “a sense of understanding [about] themselves.”
A Critical Perspective
William Walker and Eda Wade’s work in Detroit shows the importance of public art and how it can impact a whole community. That begs the question of how did the Wall of Dignity, the Wall of Pride, and the Harriet Tubman Memorial Wall murals impact the community in Detroit? For starters, all three walls are now gone showing how in some cases the community did not place importance on upkeep. This led these murals to be very unknown and mysterious to later generations, with very little information about them.
In an interview with Brenda Philpott, a member of Grace Episcopal Church who attended the church while the Wall of Pride mural was up, spoke about the congregation's negative reaction to its presence. She stated that, “[they] didn't like it. They were very upset that we had that ‘Black stuff’ painted on our church. ‘Why do we have that? Ooh.’ They didn't even look to see who it was and nothing. ‘It's just that we don't want that Black thing on our church.’ So what I remember is them talking about what to do with it to get rid of it quickly.”
She also went on record stating that she, herself, did like the Wall of Pride mural. Her reaction shows that while most of Grace’s members did not care for the Wall of Pride, certain individuals within that community did. In contrast, Huebner recounted the efforts of Deacon Allen McNeely at St. Bernard of Clairvaux to preserve the panels of the Harriet Tubman Memorial Wall even after the mural was dismounted from the church due to weather damage.
In my opinion, though the walls might have meant something at the time to some people, one overall reaction was indifference. This can be seen through the Grace Episcopal Church members’ overall negative reactions, and the fact that the murals had no upkeep. I believe that these things show that the murals were not a priority to the community at the time.
Written by Miranda Ludwick
Works Cited
Works Cited
Jeff Huebner, "The Man Behind the Wall, " Chicago Reader, Aug 28, 1997, https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/the-man-behind-the-wall/.
Walls of Prophecy and Protest : William Walker and the Roots of a Revolutionary Public Art Movement. (Northwestern University Press, 2019).
Holmes Art Gallery, "William Walker (1927-2011) “ The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art , n. d. accessed December 2024. https://www.holmesartgallery.com/williamwalker
Eugene Wade, "Artist Bio – Eugene "Edaw" Wade." Eugenewade. n.d., https://eugenewade.wordpress.com/about/.
Maureen O’Donnell, “Eugene ‘Eda’ Wade, Black Arts Movement artist on Chicago’s Wall of Respect, Malcolm X College doors, dead at 81,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 7, 2021. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/5/7/22423108/eugene-eda-wade-painter-wall-respect-black-arts-movement-public-malcolm-x-college-doors
Abdul Alkalimat, Rebecca Zorach and Romi Crawford, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago. (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Tony Brown (host and producer), Colored People's Time episode 13, aired January 22, 1969 on WTVS, Detroit. https://abj.matrix.msu.edu/videofull.php/id=198-733-548/
Antislavery Usable Past Project, University of Nottingham, “Wall of Dignity,” Antislavery Usable Past, accessed December 2024 https://antislavery.ac.uk/items/show/2384
Brenda Philpott, Oral History Interview by Brynne Smith, Detroit Black Powers Murals Project, December 2, 2024. available on this website.
Jeff Huebner, “In Search of Detroit’s Lost Walls of Dignity, Pride, and Freedom,” Detroit Metro Times , February 26, 2020. https://www.metrotimes.com/arts/in-search-of-detroits-lost-walls-of-dignity-freedom-and-pride-23943418
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