She Sat Down So We Could Stand Up

I chose Clara as my hero because she was a great civic right leader, schoolteacher and activist. She protested the rampant segregation issues in the United States of America and was most inspired by MLK and his Montgomery bus boycott’s. Clara isn’t as famous as Rosa Parks or MLK himself, but her story still inspires me as a person. I feel that her most defining trait is her value of education, as prior to her civil rights movement and protests that triggered city-wide sit-ins, she was a schoolteacher who inspired her students to reach for the stars, and she never let people get to her because of her race. 

My artistic vision in this work is to represent Clara’s origins and actions, I wanted to add her personal portrait along with drawn images of what occurred in her sit in protests, along with adding her famous quote as referenced above. I wanted to show Clara’s sacrifice for all people and empowering those who were otherwise powerless themselves, while at the same time showing who she was as a political activist and a person. I used watercolor pencil, and water color paints specifically to highlight her portrait.