1001 Black Men–#72

I had to commute to San Francisco two days this week, and a young brother I saw on my Thursday morning BART ride made me stop and think about diaspora, Blackness, and difference. I think it was the way that he seemed — like so many African Americans — to wear on his very skin the complex historical relationship between nations and races and belief systems that has shaped what Black folks have become. So many identities and experiences and histories comprise how each of us comes to Blackness; and yet we are all more similar than we are different. It is our shared history of celebration and survival in the face of subjugation and displacement than brings us together worldwide. The things that divide us as people of the African diaspora are so very fleeting; under the sun, they are a insignificant as a speck of dirt.

8-Rock

1001 Black Men–#66

A few years ago I started a series of drawings of incarcerated Black men. For each individual prison identification number, I chose a year from African American history in which a history-changing event took place. My thinking was that each Black man (or woman) who finds himself (or herself) under the watchful eye of the prison industrial complex is a walking representation of the tragedies and struggles that have marked our history as a people.

The numbers worn by the men in this drawing mark the following dates:

1845: In this, the year that Frederick Douglass first published his famous narrative, he gave a speech titled “My Slave Experience in Maryland” in which he detailed the physical and spiritual brutality of his years in bondage.

1764 (partially obscured by the left arm of the center figure in this drawing): In this year Brown University was founded. Several members of the Brown family either owned or were involved in the slave trade.

1919: This year marked the “Red Summer” in which bloody race riots took place across the nation, from Arkansas to New York. Many African Americans were killed in this epidemic of anti-Black violence, and even more were displaced from their homes, their places of work often destroyed.

8-Rock

1001 Black Men–#63

When I made this drawing, I was thinking about a trip to South Carolina that I made long ago. My roots in that state run deep; and even though I’ve only ever been a visitor there–to visit my grandmother, uncle, and cousins–it still feels like home. I heard that my family’s old neighborhood has changed a lot since I was last there, but I cherish my memories of this unique place where history coexists with the present.

8-Rock

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