Black Thought Wall launches in South Madison

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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October 22, 2020

“It’s an opportunity for the Black community to share our thoughts, our hopes and our dreams”

By David Dahmer, madison365.com

South Madison is now home to Wisconsin’s first-ever Black Thought Wall…. where the Black community is encouraged to share their thoughts and dreams, what makes them feel safe, and what the world would be like if all Black people were truly free.

…Vanessa McDowell, CEO of the YWCA-Madison, tells Madison365. “We are inviting the Black community to come and see it and participate in answering the questions whenever they see fit….We invite you to bring your precious Blackness, the beauty of our community into this public space.”

Black Thought Wall in Madison, Wisconsin

“One of the keynote speakers for the [YWCA Racial Justice] Summit was Alicia Walters and her podcast was about her Black Chalk Walk that she created in Oakland, Calif….We did some research on it and tried to figure out how we could do a Black Chalk Walk here in Madison and we checked to see if she would agree to coaching us through it and bringing it here to Madison,” McDowell says. “It all worked out…. This is the first time that it has gone outside of Oakland, California.

There are three questions on the wall:

What do you love about yourself?

What does your healing look like?

Imagine a world where All Black people are without fear or limitation. Tell us about it.

Chalk is readily available for anybody to write whatever may come to their minds. Community members can write as much or as little as they like. [B]ut also an opportunity for the non-Black community to protect, honor, and witness.

Read the full article here.

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