The Walls Remember: Murals And The Unyielding Story Of Black America

By Stacy M. Brown Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

You can try to bury people. You can rewrite their history books, close their schools, and burn their libraries. You can pass laws that punish truth-tellers and silence teachers who dare speak the name of freedom. But you cannot silence color. You cannot silence the wall. Across this country, in cities both proud and scarred, the story of Black America refuses to die. It is written not in the ink of permission, but in the paint of defiance. It rises on concrete, brick, and steel. The murals speak where the history books fall silent.

Philadelphia, the so-called birthplace of America, has become a vast open-air scripture of the Black experience. On its walls, the dead rise again, the forgotten are called by name, and the childr