Street banners have appeared in Philadelphia’s Washington Square West neighborhood, centered around 13th and Locust streets, honoring Philly’s early historic Black entrepreneurs.
Commissioned from artist Xenobia Bailey by the Association for Public Art, as part of the 200th anniversary of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the banners represents a society of late 18th- and early 19th-century Black residents who built a self-sustaining community within the greater Philadelphia metropolis.
The banner, “The Radical Black Elite,” features an historic photograph of a well-dressed Black man circa 1840, to whom Bailey added a sash of Pan-African colors — red, black and green — framed in an oval of crocheted gold.
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