Residents dedicated a new, 60-foot-long mural at 621 Langston Hughes-Broadway (aka Route 66) in Joplin, Missouri, on Sunday.
According to the Joplin Globe, the mural on the side wall of a former grocery store depicts the history of the city’s historic East Town neighborhood. About 200 people, many of them East Town residents, attended the ceremony.
The mural is named “Belonging to all the hands who build,” which is a line from one of East Town’s most famous former residents, Langston Hughes. Part of the poem talks about actualizing a “community dream.”
The mural features hummingbirds and magnolias to represent grace and endurance. Near the magnolia tree, a figure sits at a pathway leading into a birds-eye view of East Town. […]
Panning left of the birds-eye view of East Town, the mural portrays Lincoln High School, a high school for black students before desegregation, with Marion Dial, its principal for many years.
The Hughes poem excerpted is “Freedom’s Plow,” published in 1943. Hughes, born in Joplin, remains best-known for his “jazz poetry” and led the Harlem Renaissance in New York City until his death in 1967 at age 65.
The East Town mural also depicts the Duke Ellington Jazz Orchestra, which performed in East Town many years ago but was prevented by segregation laws from staying in area hotels. A local schoolteacher helped the orchestra get housing.
Below is a report from the dedication by a local TV station:
FOX 14 TV Joplin and Pittsburg News Weather Sports |
Here’s more about East Town:
Joplin’s first settlement, East Town, dates to 1838. In 1873, the working-class East Town merged with Murphysburg, its sister city to the west, where landowners and financiers built huge homes. We now know it as Joplin. East Town is primarily residential, bisected by Broadway, a central cultural corridor and a part of Route 66. Ewert Park holds special significance as the community’s cultural center, as it has been the site of annual celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation since the 1920s that attract visitors, vendors, and musicians from across the region. One of Joplin’s most famous citizens, Langston Hughes, was born in East Town and in his honor Broadway is signed “Langston Hughes Blvd.”
The former East Broadway segment in Joplin remains known as part of the earliest alignment of Route 66 through town.
(Images of the almost-finished East Town mural courtesy of Route 66 Chamber of Commerce)