| Presenting Gerald Williams |
to partying in LA, an airline strike forced three day bus trip through placid California valleys, Utah canyons, Wyoming rolling hills, Dakota plains, corn fields of Iowa, Illinois, and finally, bam! the stark reality of brown brick walls of the downtown high rise of the Board of Education in hot, late Summer 1966 Chicago, when alewives died enmasse in slate colored Lake Michigan. Amidst an office filled with a bevy of bureaucrats who were escapees from classrooms, waiting to move up to bigger and better things in the system, it was a place for me to be, too, to earn a few bucks while attending art classes at night and on weekends. Mind numbing chatter about the Bears, Adam Clayton Powell's situation, the location of the best Wisconsin ski slopes added to the afternoon din and flips of paper that stuck in my memory like so many ear worms, that helped to awaken me to the fact of civilian life. After four months of convincing myself that day dreaming was normal, the boss's lieutenant held a little debriefing to make sure I wasn't really crazy for leaving them in that nice cozy nook to take a lower paying job at a College on the far Northwest side, even if that meant traveling 20 miles farther by train, along with domestic workers who left the inner city each daybreak to work in the affluent communities on the North side and suburbs. It was there at Northeastern Illinois State College (Northeastern Illinois University) where I met Jeff Donaldson, who was assistant professor in the Art Department. My title was technical assistant.
Jarrell, who along with a few artists, would meet to talk about forming some kind of Black artists union. Asked what I thought about the idea of forming such a group, I told him that I hadn’t given it any thought, but would attend. In fact, I was uncertain, about my own artistic interests at that time, for I was still mulling over the offer of a nice job working in the computer center of a bank where I could visualize a future paved with gold, as opposed to the other road most traveled by, that the work-a-day world of the “city of broad shoulders” considered a dalliance for all but the most privileged. The vision of being immersed in the muted world of whirs, blips, beeps, and florescent lighting lost its luster in favor of the heavily traveled road where dreams and possibilities play acrobatics with one another against the gritty, heavily forested backdrop of doubt, fantasy, and reality.
conversation centered around frustrations with the lack of opportunities that existed for Black artists to get recognized and to show in main street galleries. There was discussion about a few artists who were accepted into the mainstream and the kinds of images projected in their works, which seemed to be given the stamp of approval as being non-threatening to establishment sensibilities, the people who ultimately had the deep pockets. The randomness of the discussions allowed a lot of views to be aired about Black society and culture in general, and about the gathering winds of change in the emotionally charged atmosphere that inevitably erupted into massive riots after Dr. Martin Luther King’s death. For someone who had recently returned to civilian life, and had finally overcome the culture shock of seeing policemen driving around with shotguns and blue riot helmets in the windshields of patrol cars; experiencing Black people referring to each other as brother and sister outside of church; witnessing the Boogaloo die; wearing my first dashiki; and being amazed at the blazing neighborhood store, owned by Greek immigrants whose hothead son had shot a young brother in the back for allegedly stealing some food, going up in flames; my mind was opened wide by the allure of being part of an energized community, albeit the part made up of artists not likely to take to the street with rifles. |
