Walls of Slavery, Walls of Freedom
This is first major collection of murals focused on resistance, empowerment and slavery. It currently brings together murals from the United States from the 1920s to present day, with a large focus on murals depicting historical slavery and antislavery. In this collection, we see the abolitionists and heroic figures of black history emerge from community walls as ancestors for 20th-century social justice leaders.
Creator: Hannah Jeffery
Project Director: Zoe Trodd
In 2014, muralist Maryanna Donnelly created this pop art style mural at the Frederick Douglass Academy Elementary School in Los Angeles.
In 1970, a group of seven black UCLA art students created a mural titled The Black Experience on the first floor of the Ackerman Student Union building. The mural, which measures 10 feet by 27 feet, was obscured for 20 years by a false wall erected in front of it during building renovations in 1992.…
In 2005, an anonymous artist painted a mural in Los Angeles that depicted many heroes of African American history. The faces of antislavery leaders Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, alongside Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, lined the street. By 2015, the…
The artist St George completed this stencil of a young Frederick Douglass in 2013. It had been destroyed by 2017.
In 1991, a group of artists – Eddie Orr, David Mosley, William T. Stubbs, Norman Maxwell and Michael McKenzie – collaborated to paint “Black Seeds” on an empty wall in Leslie N. Shaw Park on Jefferson and 3rd Avenue in Los Angeles. The idea for the mural, which appears as an African American…
This mural of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass appeared in south-central LA in 1999 and had been destoyed by 2010.
In 2000, a graffiti collective called Rocking The Nation (RTN) began The Crenshaw Wall, colloquially known as The Great Wall of Crenshaw. At 7,787 feet long, the mural has become a landmark for the area. The timeline depicts African American history, and features the antislavery figures Frederick…