This post is part two of a two-part series on SCAD and the Savannah Protest Movement.
To read part one of this series, click here.
Nonviolent activist and community leader W.W. Law helped me, the young founder of a new art college in Savannah, Georgia, understand how stories of the past help us make and remake our future.
I carried Mr. Law's lessons with me, as SCAD grew. With the addition of each new SCAD structure, I saw the stories inside every edifice, what each building had been, and what it could be. I saw how the layers of the community's history were manifest in the façades and interiors of Savannah’s built environment, in the buildings' very bones. Over the next decades, my spirit was transformed by what I saw, learned, did.
In 2001, I was transformed by the story of the First African Baptist Church at Raccoon Bluff on Sapelo Island, by witnessing how a structure unites a congregation.
Not long after, I was transformed through the restoration of Arnold Hall, during which we discovered a historic Works Progress Administration mural depicting the great leaders of the city with one curious omission: I saw no women represented. Earlier this year, SCAD was honored to illuminate the Arnold Hall Theater with the Savannah Women of Vision. If you're in Savannah or plan to visit, I urge you to visit SCAD's Arnold Hall and see the grand relief portraits of these daring women, flanking the historic proscenium mural.
With every adaptive rehabilitation project at SCAD, we learned something new, peeling back the layers of the city, like the coats of paint and plaster on ancient walls, to reveal more stories. In 2009, during the rehabilitation of the SCAD Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation, I learned of the noble sacrifices of the Missionary Sisters of the Franciscan Order and was moved by their legacy of humble service.
In 2011, I was transformed anew by the story of William and Ellen Craft, who escaped from slavery on the Central of Georgia Railway. In that depot space, now the SCAD Museum of Art, we installed a medallion to commemorate their perilous journey.
Every building has lessons to teach.
Every square of earth is sacred.
Today, in 2016, the building that was once Levy Brothers department store is now the Jen Library of SCAD, an award-winning university library housing more than 200,000 print volumes, 335,000 slides, and more than 28,000 digital images, in addition to hundreds of thousands of digitized volumes and databases. This 85,000-square-foot facility also houses the most priceless learning resource of all: History.
The Azalea Room is now SCAD's Gutstein Gallery, featuring inclusive exhibitions of work from around the world, where all are welcome.
When I learned, not long ago, of the desire to place a historic marker at the entrance to Jen Library, commemorating the fearlessness and love of Carolyn, Joan, and Ernest, I knew it must be done. Sometimes, history needs our help.
Ernest Robinson, Joan Tyson, and Carolyn Quilloin, the three students and members of the NAACP Youth Council who, led by W.W. Law, staged the sit-in at the Azalea Room.
And so, SCAD began planning an event honoring the Visionary Voices of these three students and the host of community members whose nonviolent protests remade and redeemed the city of Savannah, including my dear friend, long departed but never forgotten, W.W. Law.
As the celebration approached, my thoughts turned to Mr. Law, one of my first friends in Savannah. I pulled out the box of letters we exchanged over the years, before his death in 2002. Oh, how I treasure these letters! I still swoon over his penmanship. This dear man could write a letter.
As I read and reread our letters to one another, I observed something rather unusual, something I'd never really noticed before: Mr. Law ended most questions, not with a question mark, but with a period.
For instance, after SCAD acquired the Beach Institute, an African-American cultural center, to donate to the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation — which was founded by Mr. Law — I received a letter from him thanking SCAD for the purchase.
"Is it possible," he wrote, "for you to start your work crew on this building within the next week or ten days."
Period.
No question mark. Just a solitary, expectant period.
In my heart, I believe that my dear friend never used question marks because, like Carolyn, Joan, Ernest and others in Savannah and across the country, he'd spent his whole life asking and asking — and had run out of question marks.
The questions were many, and urgent.
Is it possible to give all schoolchildren an equal education. Period.
Is it possible to resist inequality without violence. Period.
Is it possible to preserve the legacy of African Americans. Period.
His use of a period, I think, was a calligraphic expression of the urgency those who fight injustice feel. He was weary of asking certain questions. It was this same urgent desire for justice that led three students to demand integration, fairness, on March 16, 1960. They no longer asked for the right to eat at a lunch counter. They transformed their questions into a statement of freedom, of liberty, of rights, initiating an unstoppable, righteous wave of transformation that swept our city, the South, and our nation. The power of their act echoes across history.
On September 23, 2016, more than 56 years after the Azalea Room sit-in, SCAD — in conjunction with Georgia Historical Society, Georgia Department of Economic Development, and Hodge Foundation — placed a historic marker at SCAD's Jen Library commemorating the Savannah protest movement and the three valorous souls arrested during its auspicious beginning. That ceremony reunited the two living protestors, Carolyn Quilloin Coleman and Joan Tyson. As well, the late Ernest Robinson's family attended, along with former Savannah mayors Edna Jackson and Otis Johnson, who both were vital to the events of that day.
SCAD alumni George Lovett (B.F.A., performing arts, 2011) and Kiki Richards (B.F.A., performing arts, 2013) performed “People Get Ready” at SCAD Honors Visionary Voices in Trustees Theater, just across the street from where the sit-in took place in 1960.
Students and visitors to SCAD and Savannah see this historic marker upon entering SCAD's Jen Library on Broughton Street, once the entrance to Levy Brothers department store.
Each of us is called to courage of a kind. Some at lunch counters, others at their writing tables, in their studios. All of us are given stories to tell, and the means to tell them. Some of us tell our stories in words, others in deeds. Some tell our stories through the adaptive reuse of historic architecture, others in letters, in demands of justice and love.
During the Civil Rights historic marker dedication last month, I saw truth to light in the stories SCAD has been privileged to tell, stories bound up in the histories of the university's buildings, not only in Savannah but around the world.
When I first came to Savannah forty years ago, I had much to learn. I am grateful that friends like Mr. Law took time to share their stories with me, and I am heartened that SCAD can help ensure those important stories are never forgotten.
"Artists have used Goodness," Du Bois said. And artists use it still.