Paint?

So, quite a few years ago I was considering doing a mural in college. Or rather, a painting on a very large piece of canvas someone had mounted but chosen not to use. I got to the stage of drawing the preliminary forms on the canvas when it was ignominiously discarded in the dumpster by the maintenance folks. Lots of hours, wasted.

But now that I have a classroom of my own, I'm considering the idea anew. Time and again I've made lists of various people I consider inspirational, but here I wanted to narrow the focus to Americans, and, perhaps selfishly, make them the ones I agree with. So, although Ronald Reagan is in inspiration to many, he wouldn't show up in my painting.

I grouped the people into rough categories, and came up with the following:

Great Americans – Personal list

Civil Rights Leaders, Humanitarians, and Labor Leaders

1.      WEB Du Bois

2.      Frederick Douglass

3.      Dolores Huerta

4.      Saul Alinsky

5.      Harry Bridges

6.      Fred Korematsu

7.      Martin Luther King Jr.

8.      Henry David Thoreau

9.      Alice Paul

10.  Harriet Tubman

11.  Helen Keller

12.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

13.  Susan B. Anthony

14.  Ida B. Wells

15.  Margaret Sanger

16.  Harvey Milk

17.  Cesar Chavez

18.  Jane Addams

19.  John Brown

20.  Gene Sharp

Politicians and Legal Figures

21.  Robert Ingersoll

22.  Bernie Sanders

23.  Eugene Debs

24.  Norton I

25.  Woodrow Wilson

26.  Lyndon B. Johnson

27.  John F., Robert, and Ted Kennedy

28.  Theodore Roosevelt

29.  Eleanor Roosevelt

30.  Franklin D. Roosevelt

31.  Dwight Eisenhower

32.  Abraham Lincoln

33.  George Marshall

34.  Elizabeth Warren

35.  Barack Obama

36.  Earl Warren

37.  Robert Reich

38.  Jerry Brown

39.  Rut Bader Ginsburg

40.  Al Gore

41.  Hillary Clinton

42.  Clarence Darrow

Authors and Journalists

43.  Mark Twain

44.  Edward R. Murrow

45.  Flannery O’Connor

46.  Willa Cather

47.  Herman Melville

48.  Walt Whitman

49.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

50.  Nellie Bly

51.  James Baldwin

52.  Allen Ginsberg

53.  Joan Didion

54.  Ernest Hemingway

55.  Howard Zinn

56.  Langston Hughes

57.  Jane Mayer

58.  Hunter S. Thompson

59.  Toni Morrison

Artists

60.  Mary Blair

61.  Louis Comfort Tiffany

62.  Julia Morgan

63.  Maxfield Parrish

64.  Frank Lloyd Wright

65.  Ansel Adams

66.  Dorothea Lange

67.  Bill Watterson

68.  Gary Larson

69.  Aaron McGruder

70.  Winsor McKay

71.  Dr. Seuss

72.  Roy Lichtenstein

73.  Buckminster Fuller

74.  Philip Johnson

75.  Thomas Nast

76.  Will Eisner

77.  Art Spiegelman

78.  Edward Gorey

79.  Keith Haring

Performers and Entertainers

80.  Duke Ellington

81.  Miles Davis

82.  Martha Graham

83.  Jim Henson

84.  Aaron Copland

85.  Louis Armstrong

86.  George Carlin

87.  Lin-Manuel Miranda

88.  Bob Dylan

89.  Pete Seeger

90.  Phil Ochs

91.  Joan Baez

92.  Michael Moore

93.  Stanley Kubrick

94.  Aaron Sorkin

95.  Rod Serling

96.  Jon Stewart

97.  Harry Houdini

98.  Penn and Teller

99.  Orson Welles

100.                      Francis Ford Coppola

101.                      Robert Johnson

102.                      George Gershwin

103.                      Don Hertzfeldt

104.                      Bob Newhart

105.                      Taylor Mac

106.                      Matt Groening

Educators and Academics

107.                      Booker T. Washington

108.                      Horace Mann

109.                      John Dewey

110.                      Carl Sagan

111.                      Jared Diamond

112.                      Amory Lovins

113.                      Paul Krugman

114.                      Clark Kerr

115.                      Ken Burns

116.                      Daniel Quinn

Founders

117.                      George Washington

118.                      Thomas Jefferson

119.                      John Adams

120.                      Benjamin Franklin

121.                      Thomas Paine

122.                      James Madison

Scientists and Naturalists

123.                      John Muir

124.                      Rachel Carson

125.                      Frederick Law Olmsted

126.                      Stephen Mather

127.                      Wright Brothers

128.                      Nikola Tesla

129.                      Thomas Edison

130.                      Willard Libby

131.                      Claire Patterson

132.                      EO Wilson

133.                      Carl Akeley

134.                      Thomas Hunt Morgan

135.                      Jonas Salk

136.                      Grace Hopper

137.                      Diane Fossey

138.                      Richard Feynman

139.                      Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason

Native Peoples

140.                      Geronimo

141.                      Tecumseh

142.                      Ishi

143.                      Zitkala-Sa

144.                      Sitting Bull

145.                      John Ross

Maybe I will make the painting - maybe not. The choice, after all, is not entirely mine. But just to be on the safe side, I took the first step and started cartooning it out, to get an idea of layout and particular juxtapositions / contrasts I would want: