A curved, sculpted brick frieze encircles the Black Cultural Center just below the roofline. The sculpture chronicles the journey of African Americans by including representations of historical and contemporary figures such as Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Armstrong, Alex Haley, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and Stokely Carmichael. It also features scenes such as civil rights marchers blasted with a fire hose, protestors carrying signs saying “I AM A MAN,” and rows of slaves packed into a ship.
The elements for the frieze were established by a UT committee and sketched by Knoxville portrait artist Alan Jones. The frieze was sculpted by Sue Landerman, a rock carver from Portsmouth, Virginia, who had begun doing sculpted brick work some 10 years before. Landerman divided the artwork into six panels of 326 sculpted bricks each—each unbaked brick weighing about eight pounds. When she completed a panel, she numbered the bricks, disassembled it for shipping, and sent it from the General Shale plant in Webster, Virginia, to Tennessee for baking. Following the numbered bricks, masons reconstructed the frieze using mortar that matched the color of the bricks, and Landerman then sculpted the mortar joints to complete the picture. The frieze was completed in 2002.