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Signage Enlivens the Civil-Rights Story

Traditional and new-school signage and graphics commemorate the struggle.

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When my wife and I toured various Montessori schools to decide where to send our daughter, many touted the diversity of their student body. One teacher, who taught six-to-nine-year olds, commented, “When we were covering history lessons about the civil-rights movement, two boys in the class cried when faced with the idea that, not so long ago, they couldn’t have been friends simply because of the color of their skin.”

It’s comforting to think that the youngest among us view the venomous prejudice, which caused wide-spread riots and bloodshed just two generations ago, as incomprehensible. However, as the saying states, those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. Museums and various institutions and historical societies exist to remind younger generations of the atrocities that have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and could occur again if they’re downplayed or ignored.

Signage and exhibit graphics play a key role in chronicling or capturing pivotal events in the struggle for all Americans to be regarded as equal citizens with equal rights. I connected with a company that specializes in historical markers – many of which denote key sites in the civil-rights movement – and the designers and fabricators that produced exhibit graphics for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), which chronicles that city and the state of Alabama’s numerous, transformative events in the civil-rights era – which, hopefully, is a suitable tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, and January’s holiday observance of his birthday.

Sewah Studios
In 1927, E.M. Hawes founded a Marietta, OH-based company that manufactures cast-aluminum memorial markers. He cleverly provided a distinctive name by inverting his last name and christening the company Sewah Studios. Today, Bradford Smith runs the company, but it still fabricates its monuments in virtually the same manner as they were made more than 80 years ago.

“There are a few states that operate competitive bids for memorial markers, but we have exclusive-source agreements in many places,” he said. “We specialize in this business, and our reputation has helped us become the leading provider in this niche market.”

Sewah’s process begins with receiving approved copy and a state seal or logo from the organization (some are public departments of state government; others come from private organizations, such as churches and civic groups) in charge of the display. Then, Sewah’s design team selects the marker’s typeface and glues the template letters by hand to the marker’s design pattern. Before casting patterns, they spell- and fact-check copy for errors.

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Whether the patterns are identical or different on either side of the two-sided plaques, Smith said the goal is to create a marker that’s less than 1 in. thick, 4 ft. wide and 4 ft. tall. To do this, the shop creates two sand molds – these employ sand as the base material, which is mixed with clay and moistened to create a strong mold that leaves a void where the letters’ impressions were made. Then, aluminum is heated to 1,350° F, where it reaches a molten state, and is poured into the mold cavity.

After casting, the markers cool back to room temperature in approximately one hour. Next, a metal grinder fine-tunes the letters’ shapes, and the face is cleaned with a degreaser before it’s painted. Then, Sewah decorates the markers with two coats of baked-on enamel for the background color, a handpainted state seal and 22k goldleaf on the letters.

Sewah fabricated the marker to identify the site where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and launched the Montgomery, AL, bus boycott. The plaque, which Smith said weighs approximately 90 lbs., measures 44 x 48 in.

“By using the same process and materials, we guarantee consistent quality,” he said. “With markers that identify key sites in the civil-rights movement, we make it a point to make sure nothing offends, while still being authentic in relaying the event. The subject matter certainly isn’t pretty at times, but it’s part of the collective experience that molds us together as Americans.”

During the past year, Sewah Studios also began creating markers for Mississippi’s Civil Rights Trail, which Gov. Haley Barbour instituted to identify key sites in the movement. The first was unveiled in May at Bryant’s Grocery Store in Money, MS, to mark where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old, African-American boy, was murdered in 1955 for reportedly whistling at a white woman.

To fabricate the two-sided marker, Sewah Studios created one side with its traditional, cast-aluminum method. For the other, the shop produced inkjet-printed, vinyl inserts that include photos, text and artwork to enhance the marker’s storytelling.

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“This was an effective way to bridge traditional fabrication methods of the past with modern, computer-aided design and fabrication,” Smith said.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
In 1992, the BCRI opened to both commemorate key events in the Southern civil-rights movement and connect them with the worldwide struggle for human rights. In 2007, the museum earned a National Award for Museum Services from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

However, as a museum-renewal plan advanced, BCRI leaders also recognized the need to bring the stories it tells up to date through contemporary, interactive tech-nologies. Amaze Design (Boston) and Southern Custom Exhibits (Anniston, AL) collaborated on a design-build for the BCRI’s $2 million modernization and 4,000-sq.-ft addition.

Scott Rabiet, an Amaze Design principal who served as lead designer for the BCRI design, said “One of the key components of the new human-rights gallery is a display that features the tank that [then-Birmingham Police Chief] Bull Connor used to police civil-rights demonstrations in the 1960s. It makes what the protestors were facing that much more real to BCRI visitors.”

He continued, “The new exhibits also bring some cultural context into the museum with an exhibit that’s devoted to protest music, and an interactive exhibit that polls visitors on their feelings about current, hot-button topics. Both bring the subject of human rights out of the past and into the present.”

BCRI is a private facility; Amaze has also done work for such large public entities as the National Parks Service and the Smithsonian Institution. Amaze does gain several projects through referrals, but most are earned through competitive requests for proposals (RFPs).

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Southern Custom Exhibits has been in business since 1989, when Elvin Morrow founded the company. His son, Greg, now runs the shop. Its portfolio includes exhibits and interpretive graphics for the Grand Canyon National Park; Washington, D.C.’s Jefferson Memorial; and the 2004 Winter Olympic Games, which took place in Salt Lake City.
“In the approximately 30 years that I’ve been building exhibits, there have been two enormous changes,” Greg said. “First, digital printing, CNC routers and other automated equipment have mostly replaced handcarved, handpainted signage. Being able to inkjet-print graphics instead of screenprinting has reduced production and labor costs tremendously [versus when we produced the BCRI’s original graphics].”
He continued, “Second, the expectation now is that exhibit graphics are interactive. Instead of just describing an artifact, graphics have to be larger, and usually engage with audio and video. We have a couple of projects on the board that have called for iPads and smartphone-scannable QR codes. It’s a changing market, and you have to adapt.”

Southern Custom went to great pains to produce the Bull Connor tank. BCRI officials were alerted that one of the old tanks was rusting in a city dump. Southern Custom retrieved it, hauled it back to its facilities, carefully sawed it in half with steel cutters, welded a custom support frame, and stripped the old paint, primed it and painted it to replicate when it was used. To enhance the tank’s impact, Southern Custom inkjet-printed a mural, which depicts the tank spraying protestors with fierce jets of water, on the shop’s HP DesignJet 9000s solvent-ink printer with vinyl wallpaper. It also developed a series of interpretive panels that describe the event by printing vinyl panels and affixing them to an aluminum backdrop.

Other key elements include:

• A series of 5 x 8-ft., freestanding panels that convey text and images related to various, global human-rights conflicts, such as 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre. The panels are framed in extruded aluminum, edgelit with LEDs and covered with inkjet-printed, paper faces. LCD videoscreens embedded inside display news footage from pivotal events in the human-rights struggle;

• Numerous inkjet-printed, wall graphics that are bonded to smooth wall surfaces using wallpaper adhesive;

• And, a room that allows visitors to log onto one of several computers to leave comments about human rights or the museum. Southern Customs bedecked the room with a series of plotter-cut, inkjet-printed graphics that features a series of questions and statements that encourage feedback, as well as painted-aluminum letters CNC-routed on the shop’s MultiCam 3000 CNC router and installed above the room’s entrance that ask, “What’s your story?”

Southern Customs also executed a complete design-build for the African-American Military History Museum, which is located in Hattiesburg, MS. The building is located in one of the few preserved USO clubs that catered only to “colored” soldiers during the Jim Crow era. It features a series of inkjet-printed murals and interpretive panels that recount stories from such storied groups as the Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen, as well as such pioneers as Jesse Brown, the first African-American Naval aviator.
 

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