Pontella Mason is one of Baltimore’s unsung visual artists. He has created murals for the Anacostia Community Museum, former President Jimmy Carter, and several other public organisations. His murals depict African American life and the diaspora. In 1999, he created the extensive mural Ancestral Roots, which depicts the antislavery heroes Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, Shirley Chisholm, and Marcus Garvey.

I Dare To Dream is a Chicago mural painted in 1995 by artist Paul Thomas Minnihan. Drawing heavily upon local history, the mural includes locals such as the Chicago Bulls player Michael Jordan, astronaut and first African American woman to travel into space, Mae C. Jemison, and Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago. Alongside the Chicago figures are the faces of Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. The west side mural was situated opposite the Douglass Branch of the Chicago Public Library, but no longer exists.

In 2011, Chicago-based muralist Lavernon Spivey painted a mural with Howard University students at the Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago’s southside. The mural depicts African American heroes both local and national, past and present, including the antislavery figures Frederick Douglass Harriet Tubman, and also Mae C. Jemison, Barack Obama, Harold Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jackson, Michelle Obama, Rosa Parks and Shirley Chisholm. The mural also includes a passage form John 14:27 that reads, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you not as the world giveth, give I unto you, let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”