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In the days following September 11, 2001, the best way to
find out what Pomona students were feeling was to keep an
eye on Walker Wall. The evening of day one, it was covered
with a uniform layer of black, as if it were going into
mourning. The second evening, a painting appeared depicting
a New York skyline with the Twin Towers restored, along with
the enormous words, "You're in our Hearts." Then as time
wore on, the growing debates on campus -- and around the
country -- began to emerge on other segments of the wall:
"Justice is blind," one message declared. Then someone
crossed out the word "Justice" and wrote above it a quote
from Gandhi: "An eye for an eye soon makes the whole world
blind."
Built as a flood break in 1956, to deflect the torrential
rains that occasionally poured down the nearby San Gabriel
Mountains in those days to cover the campus with mud and
debris, this five-foot wall made of cinder blocks curves for
more than 200 feet between the northern edge of the North
Campus lawn known as Walker Beach and the sidewalk along
College Way. Facing the Walker and Clark residence halls, it
is clearly visible to students entering Frary Dining Hall,
where at least half of Pomona's students eat each day.
The Wall remained unadorned until the spring of 1975, when
several students painted "Free Angela" on its inner surface,
referring to the imprisonment of Black Panther and Communist
Party activist Angela Davis after her conviction on murder
conspiracy charges. After some debate, college
administrators decided not to paint out the slogan, and over
the next year or two, students gradually painted other
political statements and art on the Wall, establishing it as
a highly visible forum for free public expression.
Since then, each succeeding generation of Pomona students
has taken charge of the Wall, turning it into a lively,
freewheeling public forum, a place where ideas are presented
openly and artistic expressions are offered for public
viewing. As a forum, the Wall embodies both the small daily
details and the greatest aspirations of campus life. In many
of the frequently changing portions of the Wall, students
paint birthday greetings, advertise parties, or scrawl
humorous reflections. More ambitious postings create
something with real meaning, wisdom or beauty, commenting
broadly on our times or on issues of importance. Messages,
therefore, range from the profound to the trivial, from the
personal to the political, from the poetic to the utterly
cryptic.
And like free speech itself, the Wall has on occasion
sparked controversy -- particularly on those occasions when
it has been used as a vehicle for hate messages. Spurred by
one such event, in 1996 a campus task force examined the
issues surrounding Walker Wall. "Virtually everyone we
talked with agreed that negative messages on the Wall are
best understood as symptoms of problems on the campus,
rather than as isolated problems in and of themselves," the
group reported. In the end they endorsed the continued use
of the Wall as a free public forum while calling on the
students themselves to take the lion's share of
responsibility for maintaining its integrity.
Learn About Other Pomona Traditions.
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