IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

In the mid to late 1960s, civil rights protests mobilized African American communities, revealing insights about interdisciplinary relationships with signs, architecture, and urbanism. The first of two protests to be presented occurred in 1965 calling for desegregation at Girard College, an all-white boarding school for orphaned boys in Philadelphia. The Greek Revival campus was enclosed by a 10-foot-high stone wall angled against the city grid. As an “evil” symbol of segregation, the formidable wall shaped the seven-month long protest by community members led by NAACP leaders and featured a speech by activist, Martin Luther King, Jr. The second protest, in 1968, aimed to block a proposed Crosstown Expressway that would obliterate communities of color at the city’s edge, defined by the South Street commercial corridor. On March 22, 1968, South Philadelphia residents gathered at the city center to protest at City Hall, a Second Empire design. The Citizen’s Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community retained architect & planner, Denise Scott Brown to study the preservation of the street and of everyday urbanism. This paper examines how protests are a mark of livable cities through the study of archival documents and selected urban theories. I consider not only the physical but immaterial aspects of protests as well as the interplay of counter cultural forces and media representation in the forms of protest signs, posters, and murals. Civil Rights activists enunciated graphically and created urban choreographies that embodied freedom of speech through protest.