Downtown Raleigh’s history unfolds in a sprawling new mural. Who is on it?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Artist Sean Kernick's new downtown Raleigh mural honors local history.
- Mural features figures like MLK Jr., Jim Valvano, Kay Yow and Jack Johnson.
- Installation combines journalism, civil rights, sports and Raleigh symbolism.
It stretches for almost a whole block of Hargett Street: a collection of faces and artifacts from Raleigh’s history that scrolls from left to right like a column of newspaper type.
That was the idea for Sean Kernick’s latest downtown mural, which fittingly stands outside The Raleigh Times, the city’s scrappy afternoon paper turned sprawling restaurant and bar, much of it decorated with what those ink-stained ghosts left behind.
Kernick wanted to tell the story of Raleigh’s storytellers, along with the subjects of some of its best stories, and have it unspool in a spray-paint collage. It almost moves along with the cars that whiz past, passing like scenes through the window of a train.
But every history lesson needs a guide, so with Kernick’s help, working left to right, I offer this set of street-art Cliff’s Notes:
“There’s so many stories to tell,” he writes in the Instagram caption for his project, “but still never quite enough space to tell them all.”
Newsmen
Kernick’s story starts with a press worker and a news photographer, neither of them a specific person, surrounded by headlines and snapping flash bulbs.
But a few panels down comes a recreated snapshot of longtime News & Observer Publisher Frank Daniels Jr. and legendary Raleigh Times Editor A.C. Snow, both of them recently departed. Kernick paints them both clutching the morning paper hot off the press, having chronicled decades of Raleigh goings-on.
I had the honor of writing the obituary for both of these men, and if I could add to Kernick’s mural I would stencil in this quote from Snow:
“As long as I can remember,” Snow once wrote, “I’ve had a love affair with words and their wondrous power when strung together, verbally or in print. As an inept public speaker, I found my voice in writing, recording the ongoing dramas, large and small, being played out on the stage of life around me.”
King
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. appears just to Snow’s right, and his placement there is specific to a Raleigh moment.
The civil rights leader came to support students at Shaw University in 1960, just as the sit-in movement was beginning and Shaw activists were organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Six years later, King spoke to an integrated crowd of 4,000 at NC State University, on the same day the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Raleigh.
The N&O reserved far more space for the KKK news that day, and Kernick’s portrayal is meant to remind passers-by of those two largely overlooked appearances.
Hoops
The face on Kernick’s mural that needs the least explaining is easily that of Jim Valvano, famed NC State basketball coach who led the Cardiac Pack to a national championship.
But he is framed inside a rim and net along with Kay Yow, the NCSU women’s coach whose reputation has grown nearly as large since her 2009 death from cancer. Four ACC Tournament titles. A Final Four appearance. A gold medal for the 1988 US women’s team....
Her profile shows laser focus even depicted in paint, and it might as well carry this tribute from former player Sherri Pickard:
“Her legacy to me, and I practice it daily, is the belief and the commitment that you show up every day. You give it your very best every day. I was with her for hundreds, maybe thousands of practices and I never remember a single time when she had an off day.”
The fighter
Further down, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson appears both in his boxing stance and smiling underneath an old-style flat cap.
The flamboyant, cigar-chomping Johnson, first Black heavyweight champion in 1910, has a single unfortunate but important tie to Raleigh: He died here in 1946.
Back then, the only hospital treating Black patients was St. Agnes on Oakwood Avenue, a shell of which still stands next to St. Augustine’s University.
So when his car crashed in Franklinton, striking a light pole, he rode 48 miles in a hearse to the only place a Black man might receive care.
“My daddy heard it from the barbershop and came running,” said Joe Cutchins Jr., a funeral director in Franklinton, a Franklin County town. He spoke to The News & Observer for a 2017 story about Johnson. “He was the undertaker in town, and as they carried Jack away, he wrote this epitaph: He drove too far, too fast, too long.”
End of the line
There are typewriter keys scattered across Kernick’s work, and a cardinal showing off its status as state bird, but at the far right end of the sprawling mural, the artist finishes off his work with a non-serious flourish: the face of a giant squirrel, symbol of the Oak City.
“I wanted it,” Kernick said, “to have a playful finish.”
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