Mural honors civil rights activist Jibreel Khazan

How to tell the story of a man in one simple portrait? Easy: make it three. 

Ahead of Jibreel Khazan’s 85th birthday, Sen. Mark Montigny’s Children’s Fund commissioned a three-paneled mural celebrating the New Bedford resident’s life and legacy on a wall in the courtyard of the New Bedford Community Health center on Purchase Street. The project recognizes his role in one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement while also honoring the decades he spent teaching, mentoring, and serving the community he has called home since 1965.

“He’s finally getting his flowers,” artist Eden Soares said.

As a college student in North Carolina in 1960, Khazan was a leader in the Greensboro sit-ins, which sought to integrate a lunch counter and led to similar protests across the South.  

While the sit-ins had made him nationally recognized, they also made it difficult for him to find work in his hometown. A position with Job Corps brought him to southeastern Massachusetts, where he expected to stay temporarily. Instead, Khazan, who turns 85 in October, found a community that would become home for the next six decades. 

In interviews over the years, Khazan has described feeling drawn to New Bedford’s history, particularly its connection to Frederick Douglass, who rebuilt his life in the city after escaping slavery. A chance conversation with a woman who had known Douglass as a child convinced him to stay. “That’s when I said ‘I ain’t leaving this place,’” he recalled in an interview with New Bedford’s Whaling Museum. 

The Greensboro 4 sit-ins

Before he arrived in New Bedford, Khazan had already secured his place in American history. 

He grew up during the Jim Crow era in Greensboro, North Carolina, as Ezell Blair Jr. A graduate of Dudley High School, he enrolled at North Carolina A&T State University, where he became active in student government, the campus chapter of the NAACP, and the Greensboro Congress of Racial Equality.

Black Americans could shop in department stores like Woolworth’s, but they were not allowed to sit at the lunch counters inside them.

On Feb. 1, 1960, Khazan and three fellow freshmen, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, walked into the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro and took seats at the lunch counter reserved for white customers. They politely asked to be served and were refused. Rather than leaving, they remained seated until the store closed.

The following day, they returned with more students. Within weeks, sit-ins started happening around North Carolina and across the South. It was a defining campaign of the Civil Rights Movement. 

The artists’ process behind their panels

Eden Soares, Alison Wells and David Guadalupe each designed a canvas-sized painting that later turned into this mural project. Soares designed the first panel of the mural. “Initially, when we met back in 2019, we all had a topic to focus on. Mine was a political side. Alison was on spiritual side, and David was handling the educational side of his personality,” Soares said. 

Soares said, “I wanted to put an emphasis on his face, showing his seniority, [that he’d] been through so much in history. The fact that he even chose to be in New Bedford is still mind-blowing.”

While designing their panels, Ron Barboza, a local photographer, sat down with the artists and shared his photos of Khazan. 

For Soares’ design, he said, “I tried to keep it simple, emphasizing on his face, so you can really see who he is, because I want him to be respected in New Bedford.”

Jeff Henriquez, full-time artist, painted both of Soares’ and Wells’ designs on to the wall. Guadalupe painted his own.

“Honoring a man like Dr. Khazan was a big indicator of what the community itself holds dear to its identity,” Henriquez said. “A three-panel project, no less, is a huge statement.”

When coming up with the design for his canvas, Guadalupe said he looked into Khazan’s educational background. “When I thought about his academic life, I thought of him as a philosopher,” Guadalupe said. 

Commissioning the mural

The mural was commissioned by Sen. Mark Montigny’s Children’s Fund. According to Audra Riding, general counsel and legislative director at Montigny’s office, the senator secured $50,000 for the project. 

Riding recalls when Montigny first turned to her with the idea for the mural. “He looks at me, and he lights up, and he goes, ‘We’re going to honor Jibreel,’” Riding recalled. “He really felt strongly that Jibreel’s story has not been told despite that he’s lived in the city for many, many years.” 

This has also been true of other important New Bedford figures, like Frederick Douglass, whose years in the city have received greater recognition in recent decades through the work of local historians and organizations. Riding says Montigny’s office hopes Khazan’s story can become similarly embedded in New Bedford history. 

“We’re hoping that by elevating Jibreel and his story,” Riding said, “he’ll be talked about in the same way, and… the younger generations will know of this man and what he did.” 

Montigny said he wants the mural to spark curiosity and conversation in the community and with the younger generations. “They should see the great fights of history that fade over time,” he said. 

“He wasn’t born here,” Montigny said, “and we must have given him something really unique — because New Bedford is really a unique place — and that made him feel loved and welcome, and it made him want to stay.”  

Riding said the senator’s office considered a statue before settling on a mural, because of New Bedford’s growing collection of public art and its community of artists. 

Keeping the work local was important to Montigny. The senator’s grandfather was a scrimshaw artist whose work is represented in the Whaling Museum. 

Khazan’s family was involved in how the mural would turn out. Riding said his wife, Lorraine, and his daughter, Kamile, worked closely with the senator’s office. 

“You just want to get things right,” Riding said. “You really want to celebrate his legacy and do it well.”

Khazan’s connections with the New Bedford community

Dennis Halls met Khazan through their Masonic lodge, where he came to know Khazan through ordinary conversations and community events. For months, Halls had no idea the man sitting beside him was one of the Greensboro Four.

“He never led with that,” Halls said.

Instead, Halls recalls someone who preferred asking questions to giving speeches. Someone who listened carefully before offering advice. Someone who seemed to know nearly everyone in New Bedford.

“He always kept his ear to the street,” Halls said. That curiosity made him a natural teacher.”

Guadalupe grew up seeing Khazan around New Bedford through family connections. As a child, he didn’t yet understand Khazan’s place in American history, but he remembered being fascinated by him.

“He just exuded a presence,” Guadalupe said. “He stood out in the crowd.”

Later, as an adult, those brief encounters turned into longer conversations. “When you bumped into Jibreel, you better have a half–hour on your hands,” Guadalupe said with a laugh. “My boy is going to give you a lecture.”

In 2020, students at Gomes Elementary School learned about Khazan through the school’s after-school program. Irma Valerius, a teacher at Gomes, invited Khazan to the Gomes School’s Black History Month Assembly. 

The students learned how to create a proclamation and a special day for someone. They decided they wanted to hold a Dr. Khazan Recognition Day. 

“It was really cool how this small idea turned into this huge project,” said Ellyn Gallant-Bland the principal of Gomes at the time. “It morphed into this beautiful recognition of this man who I don’t think gets enough recognition, and not everyone knows that he is this living legend right here in our city.”

On Feb. 1, 2020, the 60th anniversary of the first sit-in, the whole school attended the assembly where the proclamation was given.

Gallant said it was important to “plant that seed in them at a young age, and to see the awe on their faces that anything is possible… that standing up for something you believe in, and doing it gracefully and humbly — you don’t have to be big and showy. You just have to do what you think is right and follow your heart.”

Liv Hunt and Anna Brenner are summer interns with the New Bedford Light, as part of the South Coast Internship designed for local students. Email Liv Hunt at lhunt@newbedfordlight.org and Anna Brenner at abrenner@newbedfordlight.org.