Cbabi Bayoc, St. Louis, MO, was selected to paint the latest downtown Fort Scott mural.
He was selected through a process, established by the Fort Scott Chamber of Commerce Downtown Division, to seek the best artist for the mural to highlight the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry historic significance in the Civil War.
To learn more about the selection process, Fort Scott Chamber Awarded Grant For History Mural on Skubitz Plaza
The mural will be facing the Fort Scott National Historic Site, which is where this infantry unit was organized for the Civil War.
Bayoc, 50, has been creating murals since 2017.
“I have about 25-30 murals in schools and businesses around the St. Louis region and several in outside locations, like the United Church of Christ corporate office in Ohio, the 1619 Freedom School in Iowa and the Family Reunification center in North Carolina,” he said in an interview with fortscott.biz.
“I have never done a military-inspired mural but have always been interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” he said.” I am also an Air Force brat, so this is special to me.”
“The only must-haves for (this) mural were three soldiers and their batallion flag,” Bayoc said. “So I designed a mural with a soldier in arms with the American flag, a soldier aiming his rifle across the design and the batallion flag as a backdrop.”
Bayoc will be in Fort Scott the second week of August for approximately a week for working on the mural, he said. At the beginning of the project he will have one or two people helping him.
About the 1st Colored Infantry
“Kansas was the first Northern state to recruit, train, and send Black soldiers into combat during the Civil War,” according to https://www.nps.gov/fosc/learn/historyculture/firsttoserve.htm. “Fort Scott served as the home base for both the 1st and 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry, with both regiments being mustered into federal service on Fort Scott’s former parade ground. The Emancipation Proclamation officially authorized the recruitment of African American soldiers for federal service (although the 1st Kansas Colored had earlier been recruited as a state unit in August 1862). This meant it was now legal for free Blacks and former slaves to fight back against the institution of slavery and seek to abolish it through armed resistance. As virtually every Southern slave code prohibited Blacks from carrying guns, the proclamation had a profound psychological impact across the region.”
Taken from the Fort Scott National Historic Site, courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society
To keep up to date on the mural creation:
https://www.facebook.com/muralsoffortscott
The mural will be dedicated during the Gordon Parks Celebration on the first Friday in October, said Rachel French, a member of the Chamber Downtown Committee and project coordinator for the mural.
The $5,250 Kansas Office of Rural Prosperity grant awarded for the mural is a matching grant.
“We are fundraising for the match,” French said. “We need to do signage and there will be recognition of donors.”
To donate: