The 1960s: A Generation on Fire

The 1960s: A Generation on Fire is the latest iteration and work in progress of the Great Wall of Los Angeles. The first half-mile of the Great Wall mural is located in the Tujunga Wash, a tributary of the Los Angeles River. The Great Wall began in 1974 when the Army Corps of Engineers approached Judith F. Baca SPARC’s co-founder and current Artistic Director to beautify the concretized wash. Baca, with memories of the Los Angeles River before it was concretized, came to see the Great Wall mural as a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran. This tattoo could transform the invisibility of the river, youth, and their communities who had virtually been left out of the history books.

The extension of the Great Wall picks up where the first half mile left off featuring 1960s activism, a Generation on Fire. Tom Hayden, an anti-war and civil rights activist inspired the title for this panel and provides an overarching metaphor for the energy of this generation of movement builders captured in these 1960s panels.

The rest of the 1960s panels will be under production through the run of this show as they transform from a blueprint to coloration, to full-scale mural painting. Reverend James Lawson’s non-violent resistance training, an essential strategy during the lunch counter sit-ins and essential to the gains made by the civil rights movement, are etched on a blackboard.

Famed singer Nina Simone sings “Mississipi Goddam” while next to her Malcolm X and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., symbolize two different strategies of the civil rights movement. The March on Washington brought together 250,000 people to Washington D.C. in 1963 who not only witnessed Kings’ now famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but who were there to fight for economic and racial freedom which ultimately successfully pressured the Kennedy Administration into passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Student and civil rights activists also challenged the Vietnam War that drafted an entire generation of men. Working class and men of color were disproportionately sent to the front lines. Students refused to stay quiet. Student Mario de Salvo speaks to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop…”

The Great Wall seeks to connect past to present and inspire the next generation. What can we learn from this Generation on Fire to continue to fight against the social injustices of today and of our time?