Beautiful and Terrible Things

After emancipation and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, violence against Black communities maintained the racial hierarchy. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,700 racial lynchings occurred in the United States. Lynchings were public events tolerated and frequently aided by law enforcement and directed at Black individuals for any infraction. Black journalists, activists, politicians, and community leaders tracked extra-judicial murders, but demands for recognition of those killed and justice for perpetrators were often ignored. This racialized violence served as a catalyst for an estimated six million Black people to move out of the Southern United States to urban centers in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. They took their skill, labor, education, and ambitions with them. The Great Migration remains one of the most significant sustained mobilizations of internal migration in response to violence. Today, few public monuments commemorate the victims of lynchings, and many states ignore the history.

Richard Hunt completed Hero’s Head (1956) less than a year after the killing of fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was accused of flirting with a white woman while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. The Hunt family lived a few blocks from Till’s home and shared a similar lineage. Both families were part of a generation of migrants who fled racial terror in the South and made their way to Chicago as a part of the Great Migration. Both families sent their children back South to visit relatives left behind, in Hunt’s case, visits with relatives in Georgia. The Hunt family was among the thousands of mourners who attended Till’s open casket funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side on September 6, 1955. Photojournalist Simeon Booker’s image of Till’s mutilated head circulated widely in the Black press. The murder outraged Black communities, and the image galvanized a new generation of civil rights movement leaders. Already an ambitious artist at nineteen, Hunt kept a studio in the basement of his father’s barbershop, where he taught himself to weld—training that was not available at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was enrolled. In his basement studio, Hunt created his first welded sculpture in response to American racial terror.

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