Bloody Sundays

The content of this painting came to my attention as far back as 1965 while a student at Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the vision of unarmed black people, women and children, being confronted with overwhelming force. I was weighing Mahatma Ghandi and Reverend Martin Luther King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance against Black Nationalist armed resistance doctrine. At that time, I painted bucolic landscape wall murals after the European Masters, as I had been taught in art school. As the number of Sundays of fires, blood and flames increased over the past decades, landscapes appeared useless. It was then that Sundays, the day of rest paintings, materialized. The Selma Alabama Pettus Bridge, as a symbol of where black self-determination met overwhelming radicalized force, and the ensuing struggles, seemed the perfect starting point to create a work of art. even though they turned what would have been a tragedy into a worldwide global victory, inspiring others to confront the same.

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