The Art of Blackness is an annual group art exhibition that allows for a meeting of the minds between African American artists and design professionals and its primary focus is to provide these artists with both an avenue of expression and an introduction to potential patrons and resources. Images are for the TAOB's social and event-based promotions.
So, for Black History Month 2020, we collaborated on this typeface based on the signage of Martin Luther King Jr's and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign that marked the expansion of their civil rights activities from the South to northern cities.
On 7 January 1966, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced plans for the Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign that marked the expansion of their civil rights activities from the South to northern cities. King and his family moved to one such Chicago slum at the end of January so that he could be closer to the movement.
Chicago civil rights groups invited King to lead a demonstration against de facto segregation in education, housing, and employment.
CCCO had already organized mass nonviolent protests in the city and was eager to engage in further action. In addition to tapping into this ready-made movement, Chicago politics made the city a good choice for a northern campaign. Mayor Richard Daley had a high degree of personal power and was in a position to directly mandate changes to a variety of racist practices. In addition to targeting racial discrimination in housing, SCLC launched Operation Breadbasket, a project under the leadership of Jesse Jackson, aimed at abolishing racist hiring practices by companies working in African American neighborhoods.
The campaigns had gained momentum through demonstrations and marches, when race riots erupted on Chicago’s West Side in July 1966. During a march through an all-white neighborhood on 5 August, black demonstrators were met with racially fueled hostility. Bottles and bricks were thrown at them, and King was struck by a rock. Afterward he noted: “I have seen many demonstrations in the south but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today” (“Dr. King Is Felled by Rock”).
By late August, Mayor Daley was eager to find a way to end the demonstrations. After negotiating with King and various housing boards, a summit agreement was announced in which the Chicago Housing Authority promised to build public housing with limited height requirements, and the Mortgage Bankers Association agreed to make mortgages available regardless of race. Although King called the agreement “the most significant program ever conceived to make open housing a reality,” he recognized that it was only “the first step in a 1,000-mile journey” (King, 26 August 1966; Halvorsen, “Cancel Rights Marches”).
Following the summit agreement, some SCLC staff stayed behind to assist in housing programs and voter registration. King himself stayed in Chicago until taking time off in January 1967 to write Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Jackson also continued his Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket with some success, though city officials failed to take concrete steps to address issues of housing despite the summit agreement. *