After a 12-year journey, “The Black Family” statue will soon resume its place in one of San Diego’s oldest parks — and in the city’s arts world.A new version of the statue will replace the 52-year-old original that was removed due to years of decay, at its old home at the front of Neal Petties Mountain View Community Park, formerly known as Mountain View Community Park. It will be unveiled on June 13 as part of the annual Juneteenth celebration.
The stainless steel statue, like the original made from painted redwood, will continue to honor late artist Rossie Wade’s image of Black values and community pride, as it did when it was dedicated in the southeastern San Diego park in 1974.
The new statue in a work in progress. (Photo Courtesy of Mike Bradbury/ Educational Cultural Complex)Wade’s concept was inspired by an abstract painting he created in the 1950s of a Black family of four. The new statue is intended to reflect the earlier work’s message of hope, depicting a Black family of four including a father, mother, son and daughter reaching for the sky.
The original “The Black Family” statue, anchored in a brick and mortar base, deteriorated over time from both weather and neglect. In its place for years has been only the brick and mortar base and a weathered plaque. Nothing else remains of the original work. In 2023, following years of community demands, the state dedicated $195,000 to restore the piece.
But the June 13 unveiling is not just the resurrection of a beloved artwork in a neglected community. It is also the culmination of a 10-year journey by community members who navigated city bureaucracy and built an unlikely coalition to ensure the neighborhood’s history didn’t decay like the original statue.
The original statue’s base and plaque (Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Hayes)One photo and one long memory
In 2023, the city renamed the park after Petties, a former NFL and SDSU football player who was later the park’s recreation center director and an inspiration to a generation of Black youth in the community.
Local resident Jeffrey Hayes led the renaming effort. He again led the charge to replace “The Black Family” statue.
Hayes said the missing statue had served as a reminder of times past — both good and bad — for older residents.And the park has a long history as a gathering place for the Mountain View community. It was the center of the community’s universe when Hayes was growing up in the 1960s.
His roots are in Mountain View, where many Black families relocated in the 20th century. His grandmother helped found the church at Oceanview Boulevard and 32nd Street. His grandfather worked in the shipyards. Both were originally from Mississippi.
The park is where families got together for celebrations, where they held car shows, joined sports leagues or watched bands play free shows. Hayes fought to get the park — first dedicated by the city in 1914 — considered for national or at least regional recognition. That failed, and he shifted his goal to resurrecting and honoring “The Black Family” statue.
Hayes started by asking for support from the Mountain View Community Recreation Group, but it did not go well.
Little Kesha in front of “The Black Family” (Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Hayes)“They didn’t understand the importance of what was once there,” he said. The group didn’t know the artist, his statue or his other works.
At the second group meeting he attended, Hayes showed the board his one piece of visual evidence, a picture of his wife, Kesha, as a young girl standing in front of the statue.
“They were too young to know what had happened years ago in the park,” he said.That was over ten years ago. The group now includes several members who joined Hayes early in his mission, and Hayes is the group’s chairman.
A forgotten artist
As the effort progressed, the San Diego History Center located a photo in its collection of the dedication of the original statue. It shows Wade alongside C.J. Johnson, the mason who created the brick base for the artwork.
Wade & Johnson at the statue’s dedication (Photo courtesy of the San Diego History Center)The two historic photos played an important role in the rebirth of the piece, said Mike Bradbury, a resident artist at the San Diego College of Continuing Education’s Educational Cultural Complex.Bradbury has been a welder for over 40 years, thanks to training from Grossmont High. He’s now a welding teacher — and a volunteer in Hayes’ effort to honor the statue.
Wade, too, had been a resident artist at the ECC, but no one seemed to remember him, Bradbury said. That is, until Hayes began his quest.
The school complex had a set of Wade’s smaller wood statues — these representing students — but without the artist’s name attached.“No one knew who created them,” Bradbury said. “There’s a red, a yellow, a black, white and a brown, depicting all the different groups of people that are represented at ECC.”
Lynn Brown and Carole Wade Boyce are Wade’s daughters, and both are enthusiastic and passionate about their father’s work. They’ve pushed his adopted city to recognize his contributions.
Boyce described her father as an army veteran who served in World War II, attended the John Herron School of Art and Design and then taught art at Florida A&M . Both sisters originally came to San Diego with their parents in 1957, when their father set up an art studio. At the time, his work was literal. “A naturalist,” Brown said.
“He could noodle the daylights out of tree branches and he would go back in after he did a watercolor with a quill pen and just noodle away at the branches,” Boyce said. “So he was very realistic in all of his work.”
They both recall how he continually looked for new ways to express himself.
“He started out with oil and went to watercolor and then went to collage work, then pen,” Brown said. “The concept for his first statue work was an oil painting that he did a long, long time ago of a family unit. And it’s an abstract picture.”
Wade’s abstract painting held up be his daughter, Lynn Brown (Photo courtesy of JW August/ Special to Times of San Diego)Eventually, their San Diego backyard was peppered with statues.
“We’re all just overwhelmed that he had done something so seemingly out of his element, but so much what was important to him and just the pride, and this family is out there in the park for everyone to see,” Brown said.
Lobbying City Hall
Reaching the sisters gave Hayes’ effort a boost.
“I was told the park was city land, and I wasn’t going to be able to do it, ” he said.
Hayes then connected with activist Paul Krueger following a TV news spot Krueger did on public parks and quality of life.
He raced to North Park, where the interview was taking place, to enlist Krueger in raising the park’s profile.
“We agreed that a community effort to replace ‘The Black Family’ sculpture was the best first step towards raising the park’s public profile,” Krueger said.
A former journalist, Krueger called on his list of contacts in the city — and used his reporting skills to find Wade’s daughters.
An early Times of San Diego story on Hayes’ difficulty created momentum, and brought in new supporters.
At the park’s board meetings, Hayes met Mars Herring of Fit, Black and Educated, while she planned a 5k at the park for military members. Hayes explained his passion project, and inspired Herring to start bringing more supporters into the fold.
That included a key player, in Cybele Thompson, the former director the city’s real estate department.
In December of 2022, she wrote a detailed, photo and fact-filled memo to city leaders, outlining the park’s history and Hayes’ goals.
“Mountain View Park is the geographic and emotional heart of the Mountain View community,” she wrote, calling it an example of the “long overdue focus on equity and support for under-served San Diego communities, particularly in Southeast San Diego.”
Parks and arts officials within the city “immediately took an interest in our requests and reached out to provide advice on moving forward,” she said.
It was a game changer. The city’s bureaucratic log jam had loosened.
The group capitalized by forming the Mountain View Park Coalition, including influential figures like Rabbi Laurie Coskey, Jackie Robinson YMCA Executive Director Anna Arancibia, Bob McElroy of the Alpha Project and Makeda Cheatom from the World Beat Center.
In October of 2023, California State Sen. Akilah Weber, then in the assembly, announced a state allocation of $195,000 to rebuild the artwork.
She called it “a symbol of hope and togetherness, and a reminder of the importance of the family unit” in a place where “Black families could see themselves in public art in a positive light.”
With the money, the new statue could be built.
Rebuilding ‘The Black Family’
It was obvious to Wade’s daughters, and Hayes, who should do it once they saw the ECC’s 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. float’s centerpiece, a re-creation of the original “The Black Family” made by Bradbury and his students.The ECC decided to honor Wade as the theme for its annual Martin Luther King Jr. float, a school tradition for more than 40 years.
Bradbury and a team of 10 to 12 students worked on the float.
“When we saw the float during the Martin Luther King Jr. parade, it really brought all the emotions to the forefront to see his pictures large, to see a replication of the statues on the float, to be a part of a bigger thing was just, you know, just overwhelming,” Boyce, one of Wade’s daughters, said.
ECC’s float honoring Wade during the 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. (Photo courtesy of Mike Bradbury)“They asked us specifically, ‘we’d like you guys to be the artist to recreate our dad’s work,’” Bradbury said.
The new statue would be stainless steel to ensure it would stand for a dozen lifetimes and more.To begin, Bradbury and his students used their only visuals, the two vintage photos – one a “fuzzy, grainy photo.. Like an Instamatic picture from the 1970s” – they had of the statue.
Progress on the new statue. (Photo courtesy of Mike Bradbury)“We blew these two photos up and we had tape measures getting exact proportions,” he said. The still-existing wood statues at the complex provided some help, but they were smaller and thinner because “they were supposed to be depicting students, not a family.”“I had to actually raise and lower the different ones to make the dad look like a dad, not a fellow student,” Bradbury said.
Bradbury and his team completed the new statue in hopes that a viewer wouldn’t know it was a new piece.
“We actually worked hard to make it look like, from a distance, like it would be made out of wood,” he said. “We didn’t want it to look like a new, modern recreation. We wanted to honor Rossie’s legacy.”
Hayes, and Wade’s daughters, have been frustrated by the long-delays to get the work installed.
Jeffrey Hayes at a committee hearing (Photo courtesy of Mountain View Community Recreation Group)Bradbury believes it’s worth the wait, because along with installing the new statue they are “spending a bunch of time updating the landscaping, updating the sidewalks, updating the base lighting, memorial plaques, all this stuff is time consuming,” he said. “So yeah, it’s frustrating, but when you think about it, you know, they’ve been on this road for 10-12 years now, and to look at it go now”.
Hayes’ only regret is that Petties couldn’t see the changes.
“I was hoping that we could have done all this before he passed away,” he said, “but we did make it.”
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