After four years photographing in Europe on the advice of his mentor, fellow Chicago photographer Robert Earl Wilson (Adeoshun Ifalade), Darryl Cowherd returned to his hometown in 1964. He stayed in Chicago until 1972, becoming part of a cohort who documented in and around the South Side, independently and on assignment.

In 1967, Cowherd became a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which conceived the Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural located at 43rd and Langley. Completed in 1967 and destroyed in 1971, the site became a center of cultural activity and a touchstone for artists in the decades that followed. It featured black heroes and heroines categorized into seven sections. Cowherd’s contribution to the Wall of Respect’s Literature section was this image of poet and author LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) delivering an address at Dunbar High School in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. In notes taken during an OBAC meeting to discuss the figures that would be represented on the Wall, Jones—an outspoken poet of the Black Arts Movement whom many regarded as divisive—was described as “that bad cat from Newark.”