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Still I Rise: A Graphic
History of African-Americans
by Roland Laird with Taneshia Nash Laird
Illustrated by Elihu “Adofo” Bay
Foreword by Charles Johnson
Book Review by Kam Williams
|
One of the invaluable
features of
Still I Rise,
the first cartoon history of
black America, is the wealth
of information it provides
about the marginalized—and
often suppressed— political,
economic and cultural
contributions black people
have made on this continent
since the 17th C . . . Using
pictures, it transports us
back through time, enabling
us to see how dependent
American colonists were on
the agricultural
sophistication of African
slaves and indentured
servants; how blacks fought
and died for freedom during
the Revolutionary and Civil
Wars; and how, in ways both
small and large, black
genius shaped the evolution
of democracy, the arts and
sciences, and the English
language in America, despite
staggering racial and social
obstacles.
As a contribution to
illustrated history from a
black point of view, Still I
Rise is a unique
achievement, one that will
be valued by students,
educators, collectors and
general readers for a long
time to come.
Excerpted
from the Foreword (page
viii) |
One of
the challenges of raising a child for
African-American parents is that most
history books are written from a
Eurocentric perspective, and there isn’t
enough time during Black History Month
to undo the damage inflicted upon
impressionable young minds the rest of
the year. And it is easy to
underestimate the cumulative toll
exacted by semester after semester of
syllabus suggesting that Africans were
uncivilized heathens and thus deserving
of their lot first as slaves and later
as second-class citizens.
A
People’s History of the United States
by Howard Zinn is an excellent
alternative to that conventional
claptrap. However, Zinn’s
politically-correct encyclopedia is
almost 800 pages in length and thus not
exactly easy reading. Another viable
option is
Still I Rise: A Graphic History of
African-Americans by Roland and
Taneshia Laird. Originally published by
the couple a dozen years ago, the text
has been updated to include recent
developments, including the election of
Barack Obama.
The book,
which borrows its title from Maya
Angelou’s most famous poem of the same
name, covers a surprising amount of
ground despite the copious
illustrations. Warning, don’t deceive
yourself into thinking it’s just for
kids because of all the cartoons. To the
contrary, it might actually be more for
adults, given the subtlety of the humor
and the sophistication of the salient
points it endeavors to drive home.
Arranged
in chronological order, the entries
start with the Jamestown settlement and
winds its way to the present, cleverly
touching on everything from Nat Turner’s
slave revolt to the Civil War and
Emancipation to lynching and Jim Crow
segregation to the Civil Rights
Movement, the Million Man March and the
Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency. An
engaging, moving and informative means
of unlearning and rectifying
miseducating wrongs while being
thoroughly entertained and even
occasionally laughing out loud.
*
* * *
*
Other Reviews
Still I
Rise
is a critically acclaimed work with an
impressive scope: the entire history of
Black America, told in an accessible
graphic-novel form. Updated from its
original version—which ended with the
Million Man March—it now extends from
the early days of colonial slavery right
through to Barack Obama’s groundbreaking
presidential campaign. Compared by many
to Art Spiegelman’s
Maus,
Still I
Rise
is a breathtaking achievement that
celebrates the collective
African-American memory, imagination,
and spirit.
*
* * *
*
"As a
contribution to illustrated history from
a black point of view," writes National
Book Award-winning author Charles
Johnson in the foreword of this book, "Still
I Rise
is a unique achievement, one that will
be valued—like
Art Spiegelman's
Maus: A Survivor's
Tale and Larry Gonick's
A Cartoon
History of the Universe—by
students, educators, collectors, and
general readers for a long time to
come." Newly available in an updated
edition, the compelling and irreverent
graphic history that recounts the entire
scope of the African-American
experience, now concludes with Barack
Obama's groundbreaking 2008 presidential
candidacy.
Still I
Rise
traces the epic struggles and victories
of African-Americans in the face of
racist obstacles and unfathomable
hardships over the course of four
decades. It follows the rise of slavery;
the Nat Turner Rebellion; the military
contributions of African Americans; the
influence of the Memphis Free Speech
newspaper written by crusader Ida B.
Wells; the Great Depression of 1929; the
birth of modern integration; Freedom
Summer; the emergence of a new
philosophy called Black Power; the
Million Man March; and the disaster of
Hurricane Katrina. Cultural milestones
can also be found in these pages: from
the Harlem Renaissance and the
publication of Invisible Man to
heritage festivals and contemporary
artists who illuminate the complexity of
African-American life.
Heroic
notables and visionaries are introduced:
Frederick Douglass; Sojourner Truth;
Madame C. J. Walker; Malcolm X; Martin
Luther King Jr.; and many more. Lesser
known luminaries are also featured,
including Carter G. Woodson, who became
the father of Black Studies in 1915 by
starting the Association for the Study
of Negro Life and History, and Deadria
Farmer-Paellmann, who started a
one-woman campaign in 2000 demanding
restitution from modern companies that
played a direct role in enslaving
African Americans.
The
insightful text is sometimes acerbic,
other times perceptively humorous, and
always powerfully honest. Authors Roland
Laird and Taneshia Nash Laird have
supplemented their first-rate
scholarship with a healthy dose of
attitude. And illustrator Elihu "Adofo"
Bey's artwork is both energetic and
uncompromising.
Taking
its title from a Maya Angelou poem,
Still I Rise is a moving and
inspirational account of the rich
history of African Americans.
*
* * *
*
Still I
Rise
is an amazingly condensed cartoon
chronicle of African Americans . . .
brings to life the struggles and
triumphs of blacks in America . . . the
Lairds have packed an epic quantity of
information into this engaging,
well-written volume.—Entertainment
Weekly
Still I
Rise
is a quick way to satisfy the hunger we
have about who we are. I gave my young
son Nyere a copy of
Still I
Rise. He came back with a
head filled with history."—E.
Ethelbert Miller, Howard University
This
graphic history is funny, intelligent,
deeply researched, and, well, graphic.
Brilliantly so. It's not just the
history of African-Americans; it's the
African-American history of all
Americans.—Russell
Banks, author of Rule of the Bone
*
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*
About the
Author
Roland Laird,
noted African-American entrepreneur, is CEO of Posro Media,
a Trenton, New Jersey-based convergent
entertainment company specializing in
African American culture. One of the
country's first black-owned independent
comic book companies in the early 1990s,
Posro published the hip hop-infused
comic book series MC Squared: A Man
With a Serious Game Plan and
syndicated a comic strip called The
Griots. A native New Yorker whose
high school English teacher was Pulitzer
Prize-winner Frank McCourt, Roland has
degrees from Brown University and the
New York Institute of Technology.
Taneshia Nash Laird, co-founder of
Posro Media, is an urban revitalization
professional. In 2006, the Network
Journal magazine honored her as one
of "Forty Under 40" for her achievements
in business and outstanding community
service. Two years later, New Jersey
Governor Jon Corzine appointed Taneshia
to the Urban Enterprise Zone Authority.
Elihu
"Adofo" Bey is a freelance
commercial and comic-book artist based
in Atlanta. In addition to drawing
The Griots strip and the debut issue
of MC Squared, Adofo has illustrated
album covers and CD booklets for
top-selling recording artists.
* * * * *
|
Arson and Cold Grace,
or How I Yearn to Burn Baby, Burn
By Worth Long
We have found you out, four face
Americas, we have found you out.
We have found you out, false faced
farmers, we have found you out.
The sparks of suspicion are melting
your waters
And waters can’t drown them, the
fires are burning
And firemen can’t calm them with
falsely appeasing
And preachers can’t pray with
hopes for deceiving
Nor leaders deliver a lecture on
losing
Nor teachers inform them the chosen
are choosing
For now is the fire and fires
won’t answer
To logical reason and hopefully
seeming
Hot flames must devour the kneeling
and feeling
And torture the masters whose idiot
pleading
Get lost in the echoes of dancing
and bleeding.
We have found you out, four faced
farmers, we have found you out.
We have found you out, four faced America, we have found you
out. |
Source:
To Free a Generation: The
Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper. London: Collier
Books, 1969. * * * *
*
|
Stokely Speaks; Black Power Back
to Pan-Africanism
By Stokely Carmichael
Stokely
Standiford Churchill Carmichael—(June 29, 1941 -
November 15, 1998), also known as Kwame Ture,
was a Trinidadian-American black activist active
in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He
rose to prominence first as a leader of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC,
pronounced "Snick") and later as the "Honorary
Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party.
Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later
became affiliated with black nationalist and
Pan-Africanist movements. He popularized the
term "Black Power."
In 1965, working as an SNCC activist in Lowndes
County, Alabama, Carmichael helped to increase
the number of registered black voters from 70 to
2,60 — 300 more than the number of registered
white voters. |
 |
Black residents and
voters organized and widely supported the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization, a party that had the black panther as
its mascot, over the white dominated local Democratic Party,
whose mascot was a white rooster. Although black residents
and voters outnumber whites in Lowndes, they lost the county
wide election of 1965.
Carmichael became chairman of SNCC later in 1966, taking
over from John Lewis. A few weeks after Carmichael took
office, James Meredith was attacked with a shotgun during
his solitary "March Against Fear". Carmichael joined Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers,
and others to continue Meredith's march. He was arrested
once again during the march and, upon his release, he gave
his first "Black Power" speech, using the phrase to urge
black pride and socio-economic independence:
"It is a call for black
people in this country to unite, to recognize their
heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for
black people to define their own goals, to lead their own
organizations."
While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's speech
brought it into the spotlight and it became a rallying cry
for young African Americans across the country. According to
Stokely Carmichael : "Black Power meant black people coming
together to form a political force and either electing
representatives or forcing their representatives to speak
their needs [rather than relying on established parties].
Heavily influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon and his
landmark book Wretched of the Earth, along with
others such as Malcolm X, under Carmichael's leadership SNCC
gradually became more radical and focused on Black Power as
its core goal and ideology. This became most evident during
the controversial Atlanta Project in 1966.
SNCC, under the local
leadership of Bill Ware, engaged in a voter drive to promote
the candidacy of Julian Bond for the Georgia State
Legislature in an Atlanta district. However, unlike previous
SNCC activities—like the 1961 Freedom Rides or the 1964
Mississippi Freedom Summer — Ware excluded Northern white
SNCC members from the drive. Initially, Carmichael opposed
this move and voted it down, but he eventually changed his
mind. When, at the urging of the Atlanta Project, the issue
of whites in SNCC came up for a vote, Carmichael ultimately
sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites,
reportedly to encourage whites to begin organizing poor
white southern communities while SNCC would continue to
focus on promoting African American self reliance through
Black Power.
Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a
principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights
leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became
critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the
integration of African Americans into existing institutions
of the middle class mainstream.
Stokely
Carmichael—Black Power Speech
* * *
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|
African Revolutions
By
Mukoma wa Ngugi
Her womb pressed against the desert to
bear the parasite
that eats her insides like termites
drill into dry wood.
He is born into an empty bowl, fist
choking umbilical cord.
She dies sighing, child son at last. He
couldn't have known,
instinct told him - always raise your
arm in defense of your
own -Strike! Strike until they are all
dead! Egg shells
in your hands milk bottle held between
your toes,
you have been anointed twice, you strong
enough to kill
at birth and survive. You will want to
name the world
after yourself but you will have no
name- a collage of dead
roots, tongues and other things. You
will point your sword
to the center of the earth, duel the
world to split into perfect
mirrors after your imperfect mutations
but you will be
too weak having latched your self onto
too many streams
straddling too many continents, pulling
patches of a self
as one does fruits from an from an
orchard, building a home
of planks with many faces. How does one
look into a mirror
with a face that washes clean every
rainy season?
He has an identity for every occasion -
here he is Lenin
there Jesus and yesterday Marx -
inflexible truths inherited
without roots. To be nothing to remain
nothing, to kill
at birth - such love can only drink from
our wrists. We
storming from our past to Jo'Burg eating
wisdom of others
building homes made of our grandparent's
bones. We
gathering momentum that eats out of our
earth, We standing
pens and bullets hurled at you, your
enemies. Comrade, there
are many ways to die. A dog dies never
having known
why it lived but a free death belongs to
a life lived in roots,
roots not afraid of growing where they
stand, roots tapped all over
the earth. Comrade,
for a tree to grow, it must first own
its earth.
Source:
Zeleza |
* * * * *
Ancient African Nations
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The Slave Ship
By Marcus Rediker
In this
groundbreaking work, historian and scholar
Rediker considers the relationships between
the slave ship captain and his crew, between
the sailors and the slaves, and among the
captives themselves as they endured the
violent, terror-filled and often deadly
journey between the coasts of Africa and
America. While he makes fresh use of those
who left their mark in written records (Olaudah
Equiano, James Field Stanfield, John
Newton), Rediker is remarkably attentive to
the experiences of the enslaved women, from
whom we have no written accounts, and of the
common seaman, who he says was a victim of
the slave trade . . . and a victimizer.
Regarding these vessels as a strange and
potent combination of war machine, mobile
prison, and factory, Rediker expands the
scholarship on how the ships not only
delivered millions of people to slavery,
[but] prepared them for it. He engages
readers in maritime detail (how ships were
made, how crews were fed) and renders the
archival (letters, logs and legal hearings)
accessible. Painful as this powerful book
often is, Rediker does not lose sight of the
humanity of even the most egregious
participants, from African traders to
English merchants.—
Publishers
Weekly |
Marcus Rediker
is professor of maritime history at the University of
Pittsburgh and the author of
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987),
The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), and
Villains of All Nations (2005), books that
explore seafaring, piracy, and the origins of
globalization. In The Slave Ship, Rediker
combines exhaustive research with an astute and highly
readable synthesis of the material, balancing
documentary snapshots with an ear for gripping
narrative. Critics compare the impact of Rediker’s
history, unique for its ship-deck perspective, to
similarly compelling fictional accounts of slavery in
Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Charles Johnson’s
Middle Passage. Even scholars who have written
on the subject defer to Rediker’s vast knowledge of the
subject. Bottom line:
The Slave Ship is sure to become a
classic of its subject.— Bookmarks
Magazine
* * *
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|
Wild Women Don’t Have the
Blues
By Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their
monkey men
About their fighting husbands and their
no good friends
These poor women sit around all day and
moan
Wondering why their wandering papas
don't come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have the blues.
Now when you've got a man, don't ever be
on the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man
right
I keep 'em working hard both day and
night
because wild women don't worry, wild
women don't have no blues.
I've got a disposition and a way of my
own
When my man starts kicking I let him
find another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the
streets all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't
act right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't
tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever
get by
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues.
Born
Ida
Prather,25 February 1896 in Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia, United
States. Died 10 November 1967 (aged 71)
Genres Jazz, Blues Instruments Vocalist. |
* * *
* *
Guarding the Flame of Life
/
Strange Fruit Lynching Report
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 31 January
2009
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