In nine illustrated chapters, cartoonist and historian Joel Christian Gill recovers African Americans whose achievements were left out of standard history books. His subjects include Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped slavery by having himself mailed to Philadelphia in a crate; lawman Bass Reeves, among the most successful deputies in the Old West; Marshall "Major" Taylor, the Black Cyclone, a world champion cyclist; stage magician Richard Potter; chess master Theophilus Thompson; and the community of Malaga Island, Maine, whose mixed-race residents were evicted by the state in 1912. Gill takes the title from the anti-lynching song made famous by Billie Holiday, using it to frame success achieved under the shadow of racial terror. The art is direct and expressive, mixing humour and visual metaphor with documented fact, and each narrative is followed by historical and cultural commentary that separates the record from legend. First published as collected mini-comics expanded into book form, the volume became the opening instalment of a continuing series and a widely used classroom text, valued for showing Black excellence and defiance alongside oppression rather than as an afterthought to it.
Author: Joel Christian Gill (written and illustrated by) · Original publisher: Fulcrum Publishing (Golden, Colorado), 2014
