(jazz music) - Six murals, same scale, six different locations around the city, all unfolding at the same time, all sending the same message.

- We have to recognize the systemic racism.

We have to recognize where people are being brutally murdered and mistreated because of the color of their skin in America, in Kansas City.

- We are representing the people that are not able to be here to show up for themselves.

The names of the people who have already been killed by police brutality, we can't do them an injustice.

We have to get it right.

- If we can get on one accord, the accord that Black lives do matter.

If we can come together for this, what are all the ways that we can come together?

(somber music) - You know the sad thing is, is that, it takes usually some major situation to happen before we realize just how interconnected we are.

- [Crowd] Hands up, don't shoot!

Hands up, don't shoot!

Hands up, don't shoot!

- After the murder of George Floyd, there were cities all over the country who were really moved and really upset and angry and just tired of waiting for justice, waiting for change.

- Throughout the year, watching lives lost and mothers crying and fighting, not just for their children that they lost but for other people's children, for our future.

- [Chrissy] We were in the midst of having a lot of protests here in Kansas city.

And it was really hard at first, you know, there was a lot of arrests that were made.

There was a lot of contention.

There was fear and violence.

Things were really difficult.

And I know that our protestors were just so dedicated but at some time, you know, you get fatigued, you get tired.

You get emotionally tired, you get physically tired.

It takes a lot out of a community to really address social injustice and to be out there protesting and to be out there with all your feelings and all your emotions and all of your hurt and your anger and your frustration day after day after day.

These art pieces are something that would stand when we were tired.

You know, it would be something that would stand and would be there and would have that message and would speak when no one was there making noise.

They don't need to sleep.

You know, they don't need to eat.

They don't need to go home and take care of their families.

They're always there.

And so I think that that was something that felt kind of permanent to live throughout all of these things that we're fighting for right now.

We weren't the first people to think we want a black lives matter mural on our streets.

You know, we were inspired by people who were doing this elsewhere and we want to participate.

We want to bring the community together and have some expression around this.

How can we do this big, where it's spread across multiple communities?

It very quickly grew to six murals.

- It was really exciting, initially.

When she said, no, you get your own block, then it was like terror for me (laughter) initially.

I was like a deer in headlights at first.

(driving bassline) I didn't even know what street it was going to be.

But any city block by myself just felt like, what?

I mean that creative freedom, you could either see it as, yes, that's a beautiful thing.

I get to create whatever I want.

Or it's like, crap.

Now I have all of this choice.

How do I make it impactful?

It definitely was pressure.

My biggest goal is for people to understand the statement is real.

It's about real humans.

It's about real lives.

It's about real dads, brothers, uncles, cousins, mothers, daughters, aunts, it's about real people.

You can feel however you wanna feel about the organization.

That's not my place to argue.

But this is about real humans.

And if you do not believe that these real humans matter that is where the problem is.

That is where the problem needs to be solved.

Is you not believing that these people are real and that they absolutely matter.

- It was a monumental job.

I represent myself.

I represent my family.

You know, my mother was, she died a year and a half ago.

Everything I do, I represent who she is and what she left in the earth.

I have sons.

I wanted to be their voice.

I have daughters.

I wanted to be their voice.

I have students that I love I wanted to represent their voice.

And so I was able to do what I was trying to get my students to do.

So of course, yeah, you can't back down, cause I'm trying to teach them, how do you change the world whatever your platform is?

Mine is art.

How can I use that to create an anti-racist equal tolerance space in a community?

I can't back down.

We used our platform through these murals to express what it was we felt needed to be expressed in the murals.

Avrion's is very African patterns and colors.

So you get culture.

In her piece, Vivian has a tribute piece to everyone that has been murdered.

She has the little girl with the large puffs and it's totally relevant for outside that school.

But our skin is a protest and kids are involved.

Period.

Every day we wake up, we wear our protest, we wear our fight.

- Sometimes the realness of how we have to raise our children is not always nice and fluffy Sometimes we do have to have the hard conversations of why George Floyd was suffocated to death in the middle of the street and nothing happened?

Why was Breonna Taylor asleep in her bed, and she was murdered?

Why did that happen?

That's not a fluffy conversation.

And those conversations we have to have with our children, and people need to understand that.

We have to have those conversations with our kids.

So I'm going to show you what that looks like.

(indistinct chatter) - We're going to do this.

- So it's actually going to be-- - Yeah.

(indistinct chatter) - My task for that day was to get my core group in place get the supplies located, greet the people assign them a location, and periodically come back and visit each and every one and make sure that they know that they're doing a good job, and that the thing that they're doing is worthy.

Worthy of being put forward to the community as a message, a positive message.

So as an artist, it becomes your responsibility to make that experience memorable and peaceful.

You know, my goal is always to make it a peaceful experience and make it an experience that everyone can partake in.

A communion that we can all share.

Thanks for coming and helping out today.

I appreciate y'all.

When I was young, about 12 years old my mother and father broke up.

My mother took us and we moved up on 31st and Paseo, which is right on the backside of that area.

And we would go up on 31st and Troost from time to time because they used to have the ISIS theater up there, on the corner, and we'd go up there and see some of the old black exploit movies like you know, "Blackula" and "Sugar Hill".

- Looking for anything special?

- It had a real significance to me, in that it was sort of like a coming home experience.

Coming back to 31st and Troost.

(Jazz piano) 31st and Troost is considered the red line.

And this is one of the places where the economic situation differ.

If you were on the East side of Troost, you did not get the support of the banking system.

In fact, it worked against you.

If you were on the West side of the red line then you would get some help, some services, some programming.

So this group of people who came today are coming from everywhere to sort of dispel that, and to show that when people work together, they can solve problems.

- Kansas city's dividing line was done by design.

Who is JC Nichols, and how did he leave his imprint here?

- He's a real estate developer, became nationally famous developed 50 blocks of houses in Kansas city.

And really started with the idea of racial covenants on houses.

- In The early 1900's, Nichols's contract said his homes could never be owned, used, or occupied by any Negro or person of African descent - One of our teachers, Dr. Jim Lacey created this curriculum, "Undesign the Redline".

And so we had spent the entire month prior to that mural just talking about systemic racism and how to fix just Kansas city.

- In racial justice.

Everyone's on a journey trying to like figure out what it means to them or what it means in reality, or just learn about it.

Maybe they don't, they're not familiar with terms or they're not familiar with what's gone on historically or currently.

Everyone's on a different, is on a different place when it comes to where they are at understanding and learning about racial justice and especially some of the really really hard things to think about.

Like, as a white person, how do I contribute to inequities?

You know, how do I contribute to systemic racism?

These are questions that when you're faced with, you know, it can be difficult.

- I think that when we're talking about art and we're talking about getting buy in and people having some part of this black resistance, black liberation resistance it's really important that we start with things that people can all participate in.

Once you have that one piece, it's like a seed that germinates and it starts growing and growing and you get more and more confidence to be able to resist the systemic racism and white supremacy culture in Kansas city.

Painting the murals raises the consciousness of people, but it's not an ending point.

I am coming straight from a tenant city hall.

This is my 10th day camping out on the city hall lawn for demands that are a part of the black liberation and black lives matter movement here in Kansas city.

And so there's still much more work.

- Oftentimes, when movements start, they are on the margin, right?

It's like, these are words, ideas concepts that no one's thought about.

No one has heard of.

"Oh, you know "women are being abused at work, "they're being sexually harassed at work?

"What is that?

"Oh, black people's lives.

"They're accosted and killed by the police.

"What is that?"

When we start as marginalized groups to say, "Hey, we need to pay attention to this.

"We need to pay attention to this."

And we say to organizations that hire African-Americans and hire women and say, "This matters, we need to talk about this.

"We need to talk about this."

Then when it happens then we say, oh, it's being commercialized.

So that is really where I disagree.

The fact that you have people scrambling to say "How do we show that we are diverse?"

Because we don't want to lose one, black dollars, right?

So we say we want action to happen.

Then when it happens, we say things like, "well, that's just "they just did that to make us happy."

Yes, I think making us happy and ending stereotypical things and having to have the discussion, "How are we going to deal with this?

"How do we hire a diversity inclusion "and equity person to help us "in our business," is progress.

To me they have to understand we still live in a capitalistic society.

So everything is going to be driven by profit and by popularity.

That is how capitalism works.

But if we're engaging in the conversations, right, you remember just years ago, Kaepernick took a knee.

And then this year we had black players locked while "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was sung.

So, you can say what you want about commercialism.

In that instance, that's growth.

They didn't lose their job that day when they all locked arms together.

Why?

Because people are starting to learn and see, "wait a minute, we actually have to look at this."

- Despite the overwhelming plea for change there has been no action.

So our focus today can not be on basketball.

- Black lives matter was birthed out of Ferguson.

And Ferguson, those waves were felt all over the world.

In Palestine, they were talking about it with the struggle in Brazil they were talking about it in Europe.

Everyone was inspired by this group of people that just refuse to give up.

As a result of Ferguson, one year of 14 days to the day that Michael Brown died they enacted Senate bill five, which fundamentally changed the criminalization of traffic tickets in Missouri.

It may not seem like a lot, but a lot of black people a lot of working class and poor people would get pulled over for a ticket, couldn't afford to pay it, and then it would go warrant, it would suspend their license and they'd get pulled over again for an enhanced crime.

Traffic tickets used to be the gateway, it still is but it was a bigger gateway to the criminal justice system until they had that Senate bill five reform.

And that directly came about because of Ferguson.

It's really important that when we're talking about the power of change, it all starts with an idea.

(distant music playing) (indistinct chatter) - Now for 18th and Vine, this is like our cultural hub.

We have Juke House, we have the Negro leagues, we have the jazz museum, we have lot of good eateries down here.

So it's a draw for a lot of African-American people especially our young adults to have this in the middle of the street.

One, I hope it inspires them to fight for what's right.

I hope it also, they also feel celebrated by it.

I have two sons.

I have two daughters.

I want them to be able to go out into the world and return home and not have to worry about their safety.

I want to be able to send them into the world and not have to worry about their safety.

So if this is what I have to do, if I have to use the talents and the gifts that are bestowed upon me to bring a message, to bring attention to the fact that I love my kids, just like you do.

I want them to come home safely, just like you do, then that's what I'll do.

Love and unity.

That's what you feel on this block right now I've met so many people that I probably would not have met, had I not been here.

They're all types of walks of life, all genders, all religious backgrounds, and everybody has come up for a common purpose.

That's to be unified, to work together, to show love to stand up for what's right.

So if nothing else, it's bringing people together.

- A lot of the times art seems to be a thing that's an aesthetic that is not usually created by a hundred or more people.

I mean, it's usually something that is specific to an artist, but when you look at public art it should benefit the public.

You know, there should also be opportunity for the public to participate, not only in the creation but also in the experience and then the benefit afterward.

And when you looked at every single street, you know, and all the people who came out, it was a representation of every, of all our different neighborhoods.

You know, you had people of every race, age, socioeconomic status, like that didn't matter that day.

What mattered is that we all knew that this was an important thing and that we all wanted to be a part of it.

We were short on paint a few times but there was just no shortage of people who all, who felt like we did.

That this was something that was important, that was going to be positive, that was a way to just move through and, you know express all that's going on in a way that's, it's using art.

- A lot of the work is in the orchestration of the moment in the flow of humanity and how you manage that flow because everybody's there for a reason, they want to contribute to something positive that uplifts the community's ability to understand the problem that exists.

That day, rather than being a painter, I was an orchestrator.

I was a person who was there for the main purpose of making sure that your experience was a good one.

I like to say that the experience of doing a creative place making project, the experience of the day is the masterpiece.

It's not the outcome.

The outcome is great.

You know, it's there as a resonant to the rest of the community of what can happen when people come together.

But the real masterpiece was those people coming together and working on a common goal.

And when you think about it, if art has the ability to move people, then you had six works of art, moving people in six different locations, all at the same time, also being covered by the media, so it was resonating even beyond that.

It was magical.

Still is really.

- Good morning, everybody.

So I am here back out here this morning on 63rd and Brookside.

And what I would really like to see is I would like to see you guys bring your kids down here.

I would really like to see their faces when they see this mural in person.

I think that seeing it in pictures and seeing it online is one thing, but when you are up close and you are allowed to see the colors and you're allowed to see how big this is it's really gonna make a difference with those kids.

- It was super impactful.

And my daughter was with me the whole time just to see all of the different people coming together.

It was beautiful to see, like, this can work.

You can still be white.

I can still be black and we can come together and say all human beings deserve to live.

And that's what was happening.

And when we create that type of energy it lingers in the air.

When we create an energy of love and unity, that lingers.

So it's not passive or commercial or "This is just to make white people feel good."

No, that's not what it is, it is about creating the vibe and the culture that we want.

And art is always what leads a society.

Always.

If you want to learn about the history of people you look at the art, you look at the food you look at the family, that's what you look at.

That's what you learn about culture.

I want people to think about the power of art in their everyday lives and the beauty and how essential art really is to society.

It's not a game.

It is a way of being and it is a political, a personal, and an educational impact.

- I was very happy that people that were actually there for one agenda that day actually came and was like "I love what's going on here.

"How can I help?"

We had people that were going just for coffee at the corner and ended up painting on that street.

So it made me feel overjoyed and to actually be there with them while they painted.

I didn't never say that I was the one for that location.

So when they found out it was like, "Wait you're right here with me?"

And I'm like, "yes, we're all in this together, "because we all are here for one mission."

- What I think was interesting, you know for the white volunteers that were there is what it feels like to be led by black people.

And a lot of white people don't get a chance to experience the cultural difference in how black people lead versus the way particularly in a white male patriarchal society, how maybe white men or white women lead.

You know the lead artists wasn't walking around, like, "Yes, "it is I.

"Paint it there, do that."

They were there sweating and hot.

And you know what I mean, dehydrated and, you know worried and picking up paint and brushes.

That is a huge part of the African-American community.

We're all here to work for this greater thing - Sitting here in my art room, and I have to be very, very honest with you guys.

I'm starting to get really, really sad.

Tomorrow morning, the barricades will be moved.

All of our murals will be subject to traffic again and people are going to start driving on top of these murals.

- Some people just see it as it be a, you know it's just paint on the street.

And to some people, that is what it is, it's just paint on the street.

But to artists, it's a lot more than that.

You do get attached.

And I told myself, I wouldn't, I'm not going to get attached to this design because someone can easily vandalize it, someone can easily ruin it, and then I'm going to take it personal, but you can't help but get attached to it.

You can't because it's a part of, it's a part of your innards.

(laughs) It's a part of who you are inwardly, you know?

Your design is that.

- A bright message of "Black Lives Matter" is tarnished.

Someone dropped white paint, then others burned rubber over the entire mural.

- I feel like the murals exposed a lot of people.

And if you watch, like the news feeds, when they spoke on the one on Briarcliff by Harold, that was destroyed.

If you just read the comments, you can see the people's names and you can see their faces.

And these are our peers and our coworkers and people that we live beside.

If it did nothing else, it just kind of shed a huge light, a magnifying glass, just into, like how large this problem is.

- If it makes you angry, you can question yourself and say, "well, why am I angry about this?"

And maybe do some searching within yourself and figure out why, why this will be a problem, why saying black lives matter is a problem.

Why bringing attention to the abuse and the murdering of the innocent black lives, why is that a problem?

So if nothing else for Kansas city, it's a conversation, it's an in your face, loud, and six location conversation that is going to be had.

And it has to be had in order for change to happen.

- We did our part.

We put our blood, our sweat our tears our thoughts, our anxiety, our frustrations.

For those that want to learn and grow, that is the next question.

Why am I offended by what I see?

- We have a long way to go.

And the murals are a great, are a great way for us to start.

It's a feel good moment, and we need black joy.

We need community joy in the face of all of this traumatic violence that, this terrorism that is visited upon us by the police.

We need that moment of joy, but now that we've had it now we have some more work to do.

- The whole purpose of my mural is to impact these children.

We need laws changed.

And obviously these grown folks ain't about it.

Hopefully these children are moved.

Hopefully these children want to change laws when they become the lawmakers.

- Right now, we are allowing ourselves to live a huge lie.

And because we're living a lie, we're paying for it.

The COVID-19 virus is the litmus test for the truth.

Because you can lie through your teeth, you can deny that it exists, you can pretend it doesn't matter, but it's going to kick your behind.

Because the truth is still the truth.

And so if we want to be able to benefit from all of the beauty that we possess, collectively, we have to embrace each other, we have to take care of each other, we have to look out for each other, because I think when it's all finally comes full circle we're got to realize that all we really have, it's not going to be the cars and the trucks and the houses and the fancy clothes and all that.

It's going to be all we have is each other.

That's all we have - I know we need some up high for those tire marks.

- Uh-huh.

- That very next day that very next weekend, they got back out there with paint brushes.

That shows the tenacity of people.

And then once you stand up once, you can keep standing up over and over and over.

(uplifting music) - Love, peace.

- Yeah!

Love, peace, and soul.

- My art, It may not stay on that street forever, but my memory of being there and those people being there at that place in time will forever live.

(uplifting music)