Freedom Corner Memorial’s creator wants protesters to come
Carlos Peterson, 18, and other protesters tiptoed over broken glass and waded through a sea of shoe boxes, looking for their sizes and matching shoes. The slain black man that brought them to this shattered storefront was momentarily forgotten, but not the rage his killing provoked.
“I didn’t sense hate for white people. The whole affair seemed like a freedom festival,” he wrote later.
“For have-nots, the frenzied free-for-all was a carnival, venting of pent-up anger incited by tragedy, economic stagnation and pitiable conditions.”
It was April 5, 1968. The spark then for riots in the Hill District, and all over the country, was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Today’s riots are fueled by the May 25 death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman. Carlos, now 70 and living in Avalon, felt the same helpless horror at watching both men die, and at imagining the final moments of Jonny Gammage, who was beaten and crushed beneath five South Hills police officers in 1995.
“There was no video of Jonny Gamage, but Floyd’s death was right in my face. I didn’t have to imagine it. That was hard to take,” Carlos said Monday, swallowing and staring at the ground.
At his feet and surrounding the artist and retired draftsman was his response to centuries of senseless deaths and the pain and rage they have caused: the Freedom Corner Memorial in the Hill District.
In the late 1990s, Carlos proposed this memorial to then-Mayor Sophie Masloff and discovered that Sala Udin and Jake Milliones had the same idea. Carlos joined forces with architect Howard Graves and repurposed artwork he had created years earlier, of a rising figure with arms extended and of a black man tormented by three white figures in uniform.
“I called it ‘CURRENT (the Jonny Gammage Incident),’ ” Carlos said Monday as he showed his original drawing to a reporter and two photographers. He noted that the hands of two officers are around Jonny’s throat and that Jonny’s hand is open to show he was unarmed. The officer’s hand on his wrist looks like manacles.
The Gammage image and others depicting a bombed church, a police dog attacking a man and black-on-black violence are carved into pavers in a “negative ring” that surrounds the memorial.
“It’s rather faint because that’s what I wanted,” Carlos said. “I wanted to keep this negative part of the journey in the background.”
Closer to the center of the memorial is a “positive ring” filled with black figures supporting each other. Inscribed upon the stone is a 1963 quote from King and 70 names of local civil rights activists. At the center is a “stone of origin” made from Zimbabwe granite.
The memorial’s bestknown image is the bronze “spirit form” on its back wall. Carlos said it started as a lily and then morphed into a human figure. Some visitors see a dancer, others a butterfly. I see someone trying to fly.
“It has a sense of hope and freedom,” said its creator. “It came from my experience growing up on the Hill and overcoming my feelings about what happened.”
Carlos chronicled his life in an unpublished memoir — “Once Upon a Hill” — and asked me to edit it four years ago. I worked on it for many months, sometimes putting it aside for weeks because it was so sad, frank and raw. His large family moved often, sometimes because they were evicted, and were haunted by a family secret that Carlos didn’t discover until late in life. He said he wrote the memoir so his son and grandson would know him better. I hope one day it’s published so everyone can.
Carlos says writing the memoir and designing the Freedom Corner Memorial have been healing for him. It’s the same sense of release he felt 50 years ago when he and his brother, Paul, took part in MLK protests near his home in the Hill District. A week after the riots, someone burned their back porch and firefighters left a gaping hole in the kitchen wall. The house was condemned, and he moved across the street.
Carlos thought about taking part in the recent protests that stopped at the Freedom Corner Memorial, “but not at my age.”
“You’ve got to have that anger, that release . ... There’s a feeling of racism that you carry as a black person, like a veil of anger.
“It’s necessary sometimes to disrupt. … Otherwise, you’re just passed over.”
He’s proud of the memorial he envisioned at this spot where his mother once lived and where local residents finally stood up to developers in the early 1960s. “No Development Beyond This Point,” read the billboard they placed at the corner of Centre Avenue and Crawford Street.
“I wanted it to be that place where people gathered . ... They need to have a place when they are angry, when they’re hurting.
“I feel a part of it even though I’m not here,” he said of the protests. “It feels like home.”