Celebrate Juneteenth With These Recent Graphic Novels That Center Black History

As America marks Juneteenth in 2024, the discourse around racism has taken a sharp right turn since the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020. Conservative legislators are taking aim at anything that reminds Americans of the central role that slavery, Jim Crow and institutional racism has played in the country’s history, economy and culture, and seeking to reinstate discredited narratives that excuse white racist behavior in the past and present.

Graphic novels can be a potent antidote to these trends by making anti-racist and Afrocentric perspectives on history more accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds, which is one reason thet are so often in the censors’ crosshairs. The last few years have seen a number of uncompromising non-fiction works in this genre that make excellent use of the comics medium, with several more on the horizon. Here’s a roundup of some notable titles currently on bookshelves.

Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America (Ten Speed Graphic/PRH, 2023) is an adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s prose bestseller by visual storyteller Joel Christian Gill, which just came out in a paperback edition on June 4. Like the source material, the graphic novel Stamped is a retelling of American history from the Colonial days to the present, highlighting how racist ideology infiltrated the economy, society and politics of the country.

Stamped shows how America used the idea of race and racial hierarchies to justify centuries of oppression, and how this ideology undermined even well-meaning attempts at addressing inequality by both Blacks and whites at different points in American history. According to Kendi, the only authentic solution is for society to reject racist ideology itself as false, a position he calls “anti-racism.” Stamped became one of the central texts of the BLM movement, and has therefore been tarred with the brush of anti-“woke” backlash, a development that Kendi’s reading of American history probably sees as unsurprising.

Gill, chair of the MFA Visual Narrative department as Boston University, where Kendi is a professor of humanities, unpacks the dense and sometimes didactic original with great cartooning and humor. There is still a lot of text on the page, but the graphic storytelling establishes its own tone and pacing that accompanies the flow of ideas.

One of Gill’s signature creative touches is having “bystander” characters react to various historical expressions of racist ideology in caustic one-line asides. These are not just there for comic effect; they also underscore the very important point that there was always dissent, always voices of common sense talking back to the racist propagandists, even if those voices got drowned out in the “official version” of history. As we live through another moment when anti-racist ideology is being contested by backlash, it’s a good reminder that the people who do not buy into racist framing have always existed, even if they only rarely, temporarily prevailed.

Another storytelling motif employed in Stamped is using a few key figures from American history as lenses through which to view developments in the culture and politics. One of these is activist, author and educator Angela Davis (b. 1944), who rose to prominence in the early 1970s for her role in the Soledad prison uprising. Davis was the subject of a recent graphic biography, Ms Davis (French, 2020; English language edition from Fantagraphics, 2023), by the French creative team of writer Sybille Titeux de la Croix and artist Amazing Ameziane, translated by Jenna Allen.

Ms Davis departs from the conventions of graphic biography by offering snippets of Davis’s life out of chronological order, often with fictional embellishments to serve a greater narrative purpose. Amazing Ameziane deploys different artistic styles and approaches for different scenes, sometimes presenting stories in the form of newspaper comic strips, others calling to mind the iconic design look of Milton Glazer, and some in the style of 19^th century book illustration. While the book gestures at the full arc of Davis’s life and career, it keeps its focus primarily on the Soledad incident and its aftermath, which saw Davis acquitted of murder and conspiracy charges.

The Eisner Award winning graphic history The Black Panther Party (PRH, 2021) by David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson provides further historical context for this late 60s and early 70s era of radical activism. It does so using a straightforward chronological history approach that captures the founding of the party by radicals disenchanted with the slow assimilationist approach of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, to its demise amid police violence and internal discord.

While The Black Panther Party is a good, concise overview of the history, it is not the best showcase for the distinctive storytelling styles of either collaborator. For that, we will need to wait for the duo’s forthcoming magnum opus, Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined (Ten Speed Graphic/PRH), one of the most profound, ambitious and emotionally hard-hitting graphic novels ever attempted. Look for a full review closer to the release date in October.

Activists like Davis and the Panthers understood the importance of culture as a vehicle for changing consciousness. The Graphic History of Hip Hop (The Graphic History Company, 2024) by Walter Greason and Tim Fielder, clearly traces the roots of the popular musical style in the history and sociology of post-Civil Rights-era Black communities, particularly in New York City, and tying the artistic qualities of hip hop to the ideologies of Pan-Africanism and Afrofuturism.

Originally conceived as an educational comic for the New York Public School System’s Civics for All series, The Graphic History of Hip Hop calls out key artists and trends from the birth of scratching and sampling in the 1970s through to the early 2000s, typically offering a short quote of key lyrics. These are accompanied by Fielder’s illustrative paintings, which do an excellent job capturing likenesses and iconic moments without looking like redrawn stock photos. Contextualizing hip hop within African-American and diaspora experiences elevates this project from being a dry recitation of the style’s “greatest hits.”

Fielder’s next project is an adaptation of The Comet, a short story by the great Black scholar and historian W.E.B. Dubois (who also features prominently in Stamped from the Beginning), due out in January, 2025. DuBois’s pioneering work The Souls of Black Folk was recently adapted in graphic format as W.E.B. Dubois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation (2023, Rutgers University Press) by artist Paul Peart-Smith, edited by Paul Buhle and Herb Boyd. Peart-Smith uses an easy-to-read but highly polished, painterly style and hand lettering to bring DuBois’s prescient 1903 classic to life for a contemporary audience. This is another book that features a lot of text, but really benefits from a thoughtful approach to graphic storytelling.

There are of course dozens of other worthwhile graphic novels from the past several years that elevate African-American voices and stories. These particular titles, however, are engaged in a more specific and urgent project: recapturing and reframing historical narratives that are currently under systematic cultural assault. What better way to honor Juneteenth than recognizing the truth and validity of these voices?