It would be one thing if Shallal were merely playing with a crunchy little cafe serving utopia tea. “I’m an activist, and I happen to be in business.” “I don't see myself as a businessman at all,” he says.
BUSBOY AND POETS 5TH AND K SERIES
Shallal doesn’t fit the business mold, either.Īny given business owner might, say, get arrested in front of the White House to stop an oil pipeline or serve breakfasts and dinners to protesters occupying Freedom Plaza or host a series of searingly honest conversations on race or write checks for thousands of dollars to liberal causes or pop over to Cairo to teach free expression through murals to post-revolutionary artists.įew would do all of the above within a typical four-week period, as Shallal did this fall. And, as it turned out, the owner of Busboys was not an African American steeped in the culture and history that inspired Hughes, but a naturalized Iraqi American who had encountered the Harlem Renaissance poet in his summer school English class as a child. In the restaurant’s Langston Room, Shallal created his “Peace and Struggle” mural collage, topping it with the words of a Hughes poem.Ī restaurant themed around a literary figure was already bracingly different. Hughes had been a busboy in a Washington hotel in the 1920s when he famously slipped a sheaf of poems to a white guest, poet Vachel Lindsay, who hailed the young man’s talent. People didn’t know what to make of this unexpectedly bustling homage to Langston Hughes, just off Washington’s old Black Broadway, the U Street corridor, on the ground floor of a gentrifying condo project called the Langston Lofts. 7, 2005, the day the first Busboys opened at 14th and V streets NW, to almost immediate acclaim, profits and lines out the door. One of the most improbable business models in restaurant history was greeted with a question.
Or it could be the essential piece of the collage that is Andy Shallal.
To remind ourselves that we are not alone in this never-ending quest.” We have gathered all of you, our peace community, to share, to inspire, to entertain and to feed. Finally, the festivities are edged with outrage over the approaching execution of Troy Davis, set for later this night in Georgia.ĭrawing on words Shallal typed at the bar, he says to the group: “Tonight is our practical act of peace. The work is a collage, Shallal’s signature style, composed of famous dissenters and their words entwined with the four rivers of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”Īnd it’s the International Day of Peace, so Shallal has everyone fill out postcards with peace messages to President Obama. It’s also the dedication of the restaurant’s Zinn Room, with its huge mural by Shallal. It’s a fundraiser for the Zinn Education Project, based on the work of the late Howard Zinn, a mentor of Shallal’s, whose “A People’s History of the United States” is a touchstone of progressive pedagogy. The purpose of this evening in early autumn is fourfold and high-minded to within an inch of its life, as most Shallal productions are. “At the end of the day, he brings together Thai dipping sauce and radical politics.” “Isn’t that Andy’s genius?” author and emcee David Zirin asks the crowd. They’ve come for a heaping helping of cross-racial progressive reaffirmation, marinated in that ineffable Busboys recipe of communal tables and couches, groovy music, quirky slide projections, p olitically inspired art and a not- too-politically-correct menu. “I’m not nervous anymore,” Shallal says, though he’s still watchful as folks fill the hipster warehouse-style establishment.
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