WILMINGTON, N.C. — If you’ve driven through Wilmington in the past three years, chances are you’ve seen the Black Lives Do Matter sign downtown. It was installed during the racial injustice marches in 2020.
Three years later, the sign was taken down, but now it has a new home.
Black Lives Matter is a message we’re all familiar with — and one that artist Schala Harper is happy to help spread.
“This sign is just a message to not only the city of Wilmington, but a message to everybody,” Harper said. “We do matter, that we’re important, and that we just want to have more civility and be treated as equals.”
Harper said she’s been an artist for about as long as she could hold a pencil.
She says her work with the second letter “A” in the sign is some of her most impactful yet.
“I really feel so great to be a part of something so enlightening, important and powerful,” Harper said.
It was a project done in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd sparked racial injustice marches across the country.
At the end of last year, Wilmington’s city council voted to remove the sign from downtown Wilmington, but the Cameron Art Museum is giving the sign more time to reach more people — something Harper believes shows how far the city has come since events like the 1898 Wilmington Coup.
“Knowing Wilmington’s history, I mean gosh, some of the tainted soils and red seas that we have had here in the past,” Harper said. “It speaks volumes of our community to be able to step up and say we don’t want this to go in a warehouse, we want this to still be seen.”
“It is not a scary statement, Black lives do matter,” said Greyson Davis, the director of the project. “It is not a question, equality matters, but equality don’t matter until Black lives matter, until Hispanic lives matter, until every marginalized community matters.”
And three years after its creation, he says that conversation is still just as important.
Harper says she hopes the sign will become not just a conversation, but a call to action to anyone who sees it.
“I just really want people to look at this and ask themselves what can I do to help,” Harper said. “What can I do to make opportunities available, what can I do to support and make people feel included or needed, what can I do to break down a stereotype or a myth or a barrier, what can I do to educate myself and learn about another culture or another group of people, what can I do?”
Wilmington’s Black Lives Do Matter sign will be on display at the CAM through the end of May.
