As cars flew down N McDonough Street, a group of Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS) students leaned over the curb to take in a fading, multicolor letter “S” painted on the asphalt. The street art, reading “Black Lives Matter,” commemorated the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and was the first stop on Jan. 25’s “Decatur Art and ‘Empathy’ Walk.”
Led by ECAS Senior Director of Inclusivity Ed Lee III and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Arts Kevin Karnes, the tour guided students through downtown Decatur, Ga. on Jan. 25, stopping to take in the sights of public art decorating the city. Lee and Karnes, inspired by the trove of street art in downtown Decatur, partnered with Emory’s College Communities Project to create and host the event.
The tour’s stops included a junction box mural, a historical marker, art hanging from lampposts and two sculptures — all the art intertwining with Decatur’s local civil rights history. Earlier in the week on Jan. 20, Emory and communities across the United States celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Lee noted how the event drew inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and as a way to “honor” him.
“What we are interested in is an extended conversation, starting here at the high school … about how empathy shows up in the work, the community, the ways in which expression takes place, the conditions that produced it,” Lee said. “And maybe it’s a lack of empathy.”
With the themes of community, social justice, empathy and art in mind, Lee and Karnes led a small group of students up and down the streets of Decatur, stopping to point out works of art frequently overlooked in daily life.
From the BLM ground mural, the group moved to the next tour stop by simply looking up: Lee and Karnes directed the group’s gaze toward the lampposts ornamenting the road. A metal plate featuring artwork by high school students and community members adorns each lamppost down N McDonough Street. Each plate includes art stylized around themes of the 2020 BLM movement. Yulia Gu (25C) viewed the tour as an opportunity to connect with the greater Atlanta area and step out of the Emory bubble.
“The presence of art, and especially from students or community members, is a way to humanize the people in the community,” Gu said. “[Public art] reminds you that there’s people, actual people, in your community.”
Further down the road, Lee and Karnes paused the group to take a step into the past. Fastened onto the exterior wall of a Decatur building, a series of four signs tell the history of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1960 imprisonment at DeKalb County Jail. Here, the guides asked students to reflect on the purpose of the historical marker, particularly regarding the intersection between civil rights, history and art. For Maahi Sethi (27C), the markers prompted questions about the roots of community in Atlanta.
“For me, it’s a question of our roots,” Sethi said. “We always talk about belonging and community and justice — such big terms — but I think it’s important to know how those things have come about to be such big parts of our lives.”
Along with reflecting on past civil rights and social justice movements, the group also learned about modern social justice advocates’ attempts to grapple with community, space and justice issues.
As the group walked down the lively N. McDonough Street, Lee shared the local history of Beacon Hill, one of the original Black communities in Decatur, which was destroyed due to industrialization in the greater Atlanta area.
“Over the last couple of decades has been the revitalization of the Beacon Hill Black Alliance, and they have been doing amazing work, agitating the city and the city commission to own that particular history [of Beacon Hill],” Lee said. “But not just own it, but to do so in very meaningful and material ways.”
Throughout the tour, each art piece resonated with this deeper theme, the idea of a community wrestling with its own history while identifying paths of resistance and remembrance.
After making several other stops across Decatur, the tour ended in the middle of Decatur Square, where students gazed up at the newest addition to the downtown public art scene: A 16-foot-tall statue of John Lewis, former Georgia congressman and civil rights activist, entitled “Empathy.” Installed last August, the statue was commissioned by DeKalb County and created by sculptor Basil Watson. It replaced an obelisk erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908, which was removed amid BLM protests in 2020.
Casting a shadow in the late afternoon, Lewis’ statue stands over Decatur Square, his eyes closed and his hands folded over his heart. With the leadership of Lee and Karnes, the group of students pondered on artistic resistance and understanding, especially lingering on the theme of empathy — the statue’s namesake.
Pausing in front of the final artwork of the tour, Lee asked the group where they found empathy in the piece.
“For me, with the closed eyes and the face upturned, there's an imagined dream,” Karnes said. “It’s inviting us to always be dreaming, always imagining the future, the present and the world that we want to create. [Lewis] dedicated his life to this, and [the statue] invites us to join him.”
While absorbing the context of Lewis’ lifelong fight for civil rights, the group considered the current political atmosphere and how empathy and art speak to those tensions.
“I am thinking about our current political moment where I have been waking up with a lot of anxiety, a lot of dread,” Olivia Hwang (25C) said. “I think empathy, regardless, in this moment, is really important.”
Gu, Sethi and Hwang all agreed that the tour was immensely educational, reflective and perspective-changing. At the end of the tour, Sethi reflected on the temporality of street art — especially at the first stop, the fading BLM mural across N McDonough St.
“I learned that sometimes art is intentionally made with the idea that it will be worn down,” Sethi said. “Its resilience in itself is a very powerful statement and almost a testimony to the intentionality behind it.”
Ellie Fivas (she/her) (26C) is from Cleveland, Tenn., and is majoring in political science and history on the pre-law track. She manages the Wheel’s opinion section and the Editorial Board. When she is not writing for her political column Electoral Ellie, she works in prison education, leads a human rights club and works at the Emory Writing Center. In her free time, you can find her reading trashy romances and The New York Times, basking on the Quadrangle and doing crossword puzzles.
