In the days following September 11, 2001, the best way to find out what Pomona students were feeling was to keep an eye on Walker Wall. The evening of day one, it was covered with a uniform layer of black, as if it were going into mourning. The second evening, a painting appeared depicting a New York skyline with the Twin Towers restored, along with the enormous words, "You're in our Hearts." Then as time wore on, the growing debates on campus -- and around the country -- began to emerge on other segments of the wall: "Justice is blind," one message declared. Then someone crossed out the word "Justice" and wrote above it a quote from Gandhi: "An eye for an eye soon makes the whole world blind."
 

Built as a flood break in 1956, to deflect the torrential rains that occasionally poured down the nearby San Gabriel Mountains in those days to cover the campus with mud and debris, this five-foot wall made of cinder blocks curves for more than 200 feet between the northern edge of the North Campus lawn known as Walker Beach and the sidewalk along College Way. Facing the Walker and Clark residence halls, it is clearly visible to students entering Frary Dining Hall, where at least half of Pomona's students eat each day.

The Wall remained unadorned until the spring of 1975, when several students painted "Free Angela" on its inner surface, referring to the imprisonment of Black Panther and Communist Party activist Angela Davis after her conviction on murder conspiracy charges. After some debate, college administrators decided not to paint out the slogan, and over the next year or two, students gradually painted other political statements and art on the Wall, establishing it as a highly visible forum for free public expression.

Since then, each succeeding generation of Pomona students has taken charge of the Wall, turning it into a lively, freewheeling public forum, a place where ideas are presented openly and artistic expressions are offered for public viewing. As a forum, the Wall embodies both the small daily details and the greatest aspirations of campus life. In many of the frequently changing portions of the Wall, students paint birthday greetings, advertise parties, or scrawl humorous reflections. More ambitious postings create something with real meaning, wisdom or beauty, commenting broadly on our times or on issues of importance. Messages, therefore, range from the profound to the trivial, from the personal to the political, from the poetic to the utterly cryptic.

And like free speech itself, the Wall has on occasion sparked controversy -- particularly on those occasions when it has been used as a vehicle for hate messages. Spurred by one such event, in 1996 a campus task force examined the issues surrounding Walker Wall. "Virtually everyone we talked with agreed that negative messages on the Wall are best understood as symptoms of problems on the campus, rather than as isolated problems in and of themselves," the group reported. In the end they endorsed the continued use of the Wall as a free public forum while calling on the students themselves to take the lion's share of responsibility for maintaining its integrity.