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The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, created by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, lays out their demands for Black freedom, justice, and community empowerment. It addresses key issues like police violence, education, housing, and economic fairness. I chose this document because it clearly explains the Party’s core goals and shows how their ideas evolved to include a wider struggle against global capitalism.

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Roland Martin Roland Martin is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.

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Black Panther Ten-Point Program | Definition, Black Panther Party, Black Nationalism, Intercommunalism, & Facts

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Black Panther Ten-Point Program, document first published on May 15, 1967, in the second issue of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the militant Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Composed in October 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the cofounders of the Black Panther Party, the

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This article explores Malcolm X’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” where he urges Black Americans to use their vote wisely or face the consequences of continued injustice. It highlights his effort to unite the Black community beyond religion and region, contrasting his Black nationalist views with Martin Luther King Jr.’s integrationist approach. I chose this resource because it clearly explains Malcolm’s powerful message and strategy.

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» “The Ballot or the Bullet”: Malcolm X’s Ultimatum for America Angles / 2021

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This article relates to week 4's topic by highlighting how DU Bois's Black Reconstruction redefined Black Americans as key figures in the fight for democracy. I chose this article because it depicts the lasting impact of Black reconstruction and why it still matters in present day

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On February 23, 1968, less than three months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr rose to speak at New York's Carnegie Hall about the life and legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. His address - delivered as part of a celebration of Du Bois on what would have been his one-hundredth birthday - focused on the contributions of this "intellectual giant" and his efforts to "teach us something about our tasks of emancipation."

Among the elements of Du Bois's life that King felt merited special attention was the book Black Reconstruction in America, which Du Bois had written in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression and, by 1968, was slowly gaining more attention and influence among radical historians. Black Reconstruction mattered for King because it was Du Bois's attempt to "demolish the lie about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history." According to the dominant telling, depicted in popular works like Birth of a Nation and scholarly works by white historians, Reconstruction had been an ignominious failure - proof that blacks couldn't be trusted to participate in American democracy.

King knew the importance of historical narrative in giving people something to believe in. "The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans," King argued, "but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles."

Since its release, Black Reconstruction has influenced and galvanized radical activists in the United States. Written during an era when assumptions about race and capitalism were being questioned as never before, Black Reconstruction's Marxist framework pushed it to the center of growing debates on the Left about the past, present, and future of American political economy. More than that, however, the lessons of Black Reconstruction - that forging a radical democracy requires combating both racism and the degradations of capitalism - have informed the Left's understanding of the Reconstruction era, and of the present, too.

Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction just as his politics were beginning to take a sharp left turn. The horrors of the Great Depression, as well as the national turn to the right in the 1920s, had radicalized Du Bois and pushed him to probe the connections between race and class in American society.

Black Reconstruction reflected that radicalization. Written in lyrical, often soaring prose, Du Bois described how black and white workers in the South possessed, for a brief moment, a common economic and political project before it was undone by white Democratic regimes in the South and a federal government reluctant to further intervene in the South's violent politics. Du Bois believed, as more American radicals during the Depression came around to see, that forging a unity across the color line was the only way to build a genuinely free American society. He described the movement against slavery as "abolition democracy" and showed how the fracturing of the working class had redounded to the benefit of oligarchy. Such ideas were critical to an American left dealing not only with segregation at home, but the rise of fascism around the world.

Du Bois opened Black Reconstruction by describing the racially inflected class system of Southern society (the white worker, the black worker, the white planter) before turning to a central argument of the book: that the Civil War had been won thanks to a "general strike" of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Simply by stopping work, they could threaten the Confederacy by starvation. By walking in to the Federal camps, they showed to doubting Northerners the easy possibility of using them as works and as servants, as farmers, and as spies, and finally, as fighting soldiers. . . . It was the fugitive slave who made the slaveholders face the alternative of surrendering to the North, or to the Negroes.

The Union victory in the Civil War represented an enormous advance in American democracy. But what would come next, and how would it be enforced? The Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency set up to assist millions of emancipated slaves and poor whites, was the Radical Republican answer to that question:

In the Freedmen's Bureau, the United States started upon a dictatorship by which the landowner and the capitalist were to be openly and deliberately curbed and which directed its efforts in the interest of a black and white labor class. . . . The Freedmen's Bureau was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted. It had to do, not simply with emancipated slaves and poor whites, but also with the property of South planters. It was a government guardianship for the relief and guidance of white and black labor from a feudal agrarianism to modern farming and industry.

The rudiments of a welfare state were constructed (hospitals, schools, housing), educational attainment was promoted, and for the first time, black men were guaranteed the right to vote. The Radical Republican fervor for reshaping Southern society was matched on the ground by newly freed, newly empowered African Americans. Du Bois wrote of the fertile promise of Reconstruction in South Carolina, noting with approval the attempts to turn the hotbed of secessionist ideology into a radically democratic state by 1869. His chapters "The Black Proletariat in South Carolina" and "The Black Proletariat in Mississippi and Alabama" examined the tumult of Reconstruction through the lens of labor, race, and democracy.

The rollback of Reconstruction torpedoed African-American political and economic power. But it also hindered the broader labor movement: "Labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor." In scholarship that would inspire later historians like Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and Lerone Bennett, Du Bois made it clear that the Reconstruction of the South, and the labor movement of the North, were far more linked than most historians wanted to admit in the 1930s.

The book's most memorable chapter may have been its last. Entitled "The Propaganda of History," it found Du Bois thundering against the "Lost Cause" ideology that informed so much of the Dunning School of Reconstruction history - which cast the white South as a victim and ignored the destruction of black political and economic freedom. As Du Bois argued, Reconstruction and the history of slavery in the United States had been shaped by "one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings" through the use of public education and public memory.

Black Reconstruction had an immense impact on radicals, particularly in the South. When Du Bois was invited by the Southern Negro Youth Congress to speak at its annual conference in Columbia, South Carolina in 1946, the theme of biracial democracy during Reconstruction dominated the convention proceedings. The chill of the Second Red Scare was beginning to set in, and the young activists were holding out hope of a better tomorrow. This hope was sustained partially by looking to the past, to the Reconstruction era. "Slowly but surely," Du Bois told the assembled crowd, "the working people of the South, white and black, must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation."

Two decades later, in 1968, the Black Panthers included Black Reconstruction on their reading list alongside such titles as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts, and Michael Harrington's The Other America. For the Panthers, being widely read about the history of race and class in America was an essential part of radical organizing and strategizing. So recommending Black Reconstruction made perfect sense.

The plaudits weren't limited to American radicals. Ferrucio Gambino, an Italian leftist, wrote that Black Reconstruction helped him make sense of the radical uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s. He also praised Du Bois for pushing back against the framing of African Americans and labor as separate issues in American history. Black Reconstruction, in his estimation, "was a milestone of historiography for all those whose history had been denied or stolen."

The premise of Black Reconstruction was as simple as it was rare: African Americans are living, breathing historical actors. As Du Bois explained in his prefatory note, "I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience."

The prevailing view among historians at the time was that the period after 1876 was one of "Redemption" - of saving Southern governments from Republican rule. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, in rebutting this narrative, revealed all that had been lost when Reconstruction fell. And he reminded readers that history is about interpretation of the past - interpretation often tied to events in the present.

Today, as activists like William Barber press for a Third Reconstruction - to finish the work begun by the First in the 1860s and the Second of the civil rights era of the 1960s - we can continue to take valuable lessons from Du Bois's tome. Working across racial, gender, and sexual-orientation lines is the only way such a vision can be realized.

A Third Reconstruction would combine the radical democratic dreams of the previous two Reconstructions: the fight for land and political rights from the first one, which evolved into a push for guaranteed jobs and universal health care as part of the Freedom Budget of 1966. It would take the demand for education among recently freed African Americans from the 1860s with the continued struggle for decent public schools in the 1960s.

A Third Reconstruction would be, in other words, the culmination of what America has always claimed to be: a just, free, and fair nation for all. If the Third Reconstruction does not succeed - if, like the previous two, it is destroyed by an elite backlash, severe repression, and political demobilization - we may not have a chance at a fourth one. Du Bois, Bennett, and so many others realized just how fragile American democracy was. Today, the struggle for a Third Reconstruction shows how fragile it still is.

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W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America thrust African Americans into the role of historical actors and showed that the black freedom struggle has always been one for radical democracy.

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This article connects to week 4's topic by showing how Du Bois’s ideas in Black Reconstruction still influence today’s struggle for racial justice, described as a “Third Reconstruction.” I chose it because it explains how the fight for Black freedom and equality is ongoing in modern America.

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Peniel E. Joseph, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. 277; $27.00 (Hardcover)

Peniel E. Joseph's The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century is one of the most poignant books of our contemporary historical moment. Unfolding political battles over citizenship, voting rights restrictions, educational censorship, and violence across the United States, in the last year, gives profound clarity and credence to his central argument that the nation is in its third Reconstruction period. Joseph's book is a thoughtful and well written re-examination of some of the most difficult episodes in U.S. American history. Traversing more than one hundred years of Black liberation struggles to realize the full potential of democracy in the United States, the book emphasizes an underlying fissure in the remaking of the nation after the Civil War- "a dual identity reflecting warring ideas about citizenship, freedom, and democracy" (10).

Joseph argues that the post-Civil War period augmented the country's duality and fundamentally shaped each of its major subsequent periods of renewal. As he explains it, U.S. national duplexity manifests itself in the sustenance of "reconstructionist" and "redemptionist" ideals (p.10). Reconstructionists, he asserts, have worked since the Civil War to reimagine the possibilities of the United States through active advocacy for racial democracy. These efforts, Joseph explains, come in direct conflict with the actions and efforts of redemptionists, who labored to recover the legacies of a nation that prospered and expanded through the system of slavery. Consequently, understanding the politics and history that define the Third Reconstruction Joseph describes necessitates reconsideration of the historical forces that have shaped it. Equally important in The Third Reconstruction is Joseph's contention that the competing visions of reconstructionists and redemptionists in the United States during the post-Civil War period remain impactful on public memory about national history.

The Third Reconstruction fits squarely within larger scholarly discussions about public memory and the looming presence of Civil War history in contemporary debates on race, citizenship, freedom, and democracy. Indeed, the book is reminiscent of David Blight's Beyond the Battlefield and Race and Reunion in its focus on memory and historical narrative. The Third Reconstruction also expands on arguments made by historian Edmund S. Morgan in his 1972 book Slavery and Freedom: An American Paradox, though it does not offer much discussion about the ways in which redemptionist and reconstructionist ideals were forged during the colonial period. Joseph's book resists the distance of traditional academic narrative in favor of a semi-autobiographical style-making it a more accessible and compelling read. Each of the book's four major chapters is framed by evocative memories of the historian's personal journey towards professional scholarship and, specifically, the study of Black history in the United States. As he notes in the acknowledgements section, his work in The Third Reconstruction aims to offer the reader a better sense of the historical context that shaped recent calls for Black dignity and the protection of Black citizenship in the third Reconstruction period.

Joseph's mother, Germaine Joseph, figures prominently in each chapter as a scaffold for his lifelong thinking about the thematic lenses that drive the book-citizenship, dignity, backlash, leadership, and freedom. In addition to his mother, Joseph features historical actors, public intellectuals, activists, teachers, and, most prominently, former President Barak Obama. The book marks the presidential election of Obama in 2008 as the beginning of the Third Reconstruction. It proceeds from there to explore the former president's legacy in a nation still marred by racial tension and violence. Joseph argues that the former president exemplified the possibilities of a racial democracy through appeals to American exceptionalism and a Black politics of respectability. He illustrates the potency of these strategies by pointing to key figures in the First and Second Reconstruction periods, such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. who also employed them. Yet, Joseph notes that Obama's use of these powerful ideals ultimately fell short as redemptionists publicly questioned his citizenship and leaders of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement challenged his use of respectability politics as a viable strategy for achieving racial justice in the twenty-first century.

Joseph's exploration of the BLM's insistence on dignity as the foundation of Black citizenship and leadership dominates much of his discussion on the blueprint for feasible hope in U.S. American democracy, as well as it does form the basis of his most persistent critique of former president Obama. Despite broad support, Joseph contends that the former president was still unable to avoid backlash against his legitimacy as a citizen and certainly as president. His third chapter emphasizes the failures of Obama as a symbol of racial progress by pointing to the heightened occurrences of anti-Black violence, the rise of former president Donald Trump, racial scapegoating, and voter suppression in the subsequent elections. Joseph points to these developments to highlight the "dual and dueling traditions of reconstruction and redemption within the national body politic" (136). This chapter also lays the groundwork for his emphasis on the BLM as a vital part of achieving racial justice in the United States. Specifically, he points to the movement's call for national recognition and protection of Black dignity as critical in the larger effort toward racial progress.

"Radical Black dignity" as Joseph argues, underscored the anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the grassroots movements of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the larger Black Power Movement (BPM) of the 1960s and 70s (130). Linking this emphasis on dignity to the longer civil rights struggles of Black people throughout the United States, he positions the BLM as an heir to these movements and its leadership as a critical vanguard in calls for racial equality. "By insisting that the most oppressed people within the Black community are worthy of dignity and citizenship," he writes, "BLM argued that we all remain unfree until liberation comes to those faces at the bottom of the well of Blackness" (129). Hence, Joseph notes, the BLM movement remains vital in public dialog about a more just democratic society in the United States, and an important example of the ways in which Black Power traditions have evolved. This last point is laid out beautifully in Joseph's fourth chapter discussion on the leadership model of the BLM, one that foregrounds queer Black feminist thought and leadership, while championing the most marginalized communities within Black America.

In its final section, The Third Reconstruction leaves readers with a call to action. Joseph reminds us that the work of reconstruction is on-going and that this period of renewal requires all Americans to make conscious choices about the type of future they envision for their nation. The book ends in the same way it begins, with an invitation for readers to take the journey with its narrating scholar. Indeed, his concluding suggestion to "choose hope" despite the disheartening events of our current socio-political and economic times is an homage to the persistence of Black liberation struggles in each of the Reconstruction periods before this one. Joseph's book offers a compelling argument that is well grounded in historical scholarship which has also explored the complex legacies of the post-Civil War era. The book is also very accessible for broad audiences and provides a good amount historical synthesis for its audience. Even so, the broad range of historical periods Joseph ties together throughout the book may find some readers confused or needing/wanting to know more. In all, The Third Reconstruction makes a solid case for understanding the events from 2008 through 2020 as a period of reconstruction in the United States. The continuity of socio-economic and political discourse Joseph outlines from the 19 th century through the early 21 st century undergirds the book's powerful assessment of our national story. No doubt, The Third Reconstruction has made room for a host of new scholars to continue unpacking the relevance of the U.S. American Civil War and the long civil rights movement.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Black Reconstruction in the Twenty-First Century

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Peniel E. Joseph, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. 277; $27.00 (Hardcover) Peniel E. Joseph's The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century is one of the most

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This article connects to Week 5 theme exploring Toni Morrison’s impact as a writer and editor who centered Black voices and challenged the white gaze in literature. I chose it as an additional resource because it offers valuable context about her life, career, and lasting influence.

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Toni Morrison: The Life of a Literary Giant

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Howard University alumna and professor Toni Morrison’s novels continue to be a subject of richly complex scholarship, contemporary relevance, and attempted censorship.

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This piece connects to Week 7’s topic by exploring Toni Morrison’s editorial work with Angela Davis and how their partnership helped redefine political autobiography. I picked it because it shows Morrison’s impact outside of her novels and how she and Davis used storytelling to challenge traditional publishing norms and amplify radical voices.

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In June 1972, Toni Morrison flew to California to meet with Angela Davis, the Black Power activist, philosopher, and Communist Party member, who had been released from prison only weeks earlier. Davis had been indicted in connection to Jonathan Jackson's armed attempt to free his older brother George Jackson from San Quentin State Prison, but all charges against her were dropped. Morrison planned to pitch Davis on writing an autobiography for Random House, where Morrison had edited Black biographies and essay collections by Lucille Clifton, Stokely Carmichael, and Muhammad Ali. But Davis had already left on a speaking tour by the time Morrison arrived. Though they ultimately did work together, the editor would get used to the feeling of racing to catch up with the charismatic radical.

Published in 1974 by Random House and recently reprinted by Haymarket, Angela Davis: An Autobiography offers one of the most remarkable political testimonials of the late 20th century. It took Morrison's optimism to win over the skeptical Davis, who was busy traveling to the front lines of the US racial struggle in Detroit, Chicago, and New York, where she sometimes addressed crowds from the protection of a bulletproof glass box. As Morrison later said, "Angela is the fiercest woman I have ever met and I come from a long line of fierce women. And I mean fierce literally not academically. Her hatreds are monumental and she has no sense of danger. Sometimes I think she cannot perceive it. She is also incredibly, phenomenally disciplined."

Yet these qualities also made Davis a reluctant memoirist. For her, memoir stank of the regime of "neoliberal individualism," the remedy for which could only be to "engage in relentless critique of our centering of the individual." Could autobiography be anything but bildung, the story of development and education that had been an anchor of colonial literary culture for centuries and historically denied to Black American authors? The prefatory essays Davis wrote over the next 50 years (all three of which are included in the new Haymarket edition) offer a mini archive of her thoughts on the staying power of the text, as well as her changing perspective on some of its claims. The 1988 preface reflects on leaving the Communist Party, while the 2021 preface criticizes the gender essentialism and ableist language of the original text. But each preface, over the decades, recounts the pivotal back-and-forth discussion with Morrison about whether the genre of memoir could be politically redeemed.

Publishing archives rarely document the genesis of a book. Editorial files sometimes preserve pitches sent in by agents or, less often, by authors. Origin stories compiled later are like the memories of first dates: the ragged edges smoothed out; the spark inferred from early drafts and chance encounters, then reconstructed in the negotiations of partnership, revised contracts, interoffice memos, and correspondence with publicists and lawyers before culminating in the inevitable proposal or rejection.

The papers documenting Morrison's editorial work at Random House are held at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The archives showcase not just Morrison discussing with Davis the meaning of memoir, alongside edits of single phrases, but also Morrison advocating for Davis within the publishing company. Indeed, the archives make clear that Morrison ushered Davis's story into print by exerting her own force of will, confident that the Autobiography revealed "what it was like to be caught in the arms of American 'justice.'" Ultimately, the book became a platform for Davis: in Morrison's papers are dozens of schedules for book talks, publicity tours, and speaking engagements.

The Autobiography was an important success for Random House, in spite of some misgivings among higher-ups about the book's combative tone, not to mention its political radicalism. These editorial skirmishes came to a head after Davis delivered the full manuscript. At that point, Random House's partner publisher, Bantam, offered reviews of the Morrison-edited manuscript that were highly critical. The archive at Columbia does not contain precisely what they wrote about the Davis draft, but the reviewers' suggestions can be surmised from Morrison's fiery, point-by-point rebuttal.

To the reviewers who complain about "the absence of a real (meaning human and vulnerable) person," Morrison writes that "like most people this reporter wants to use Angela's life for some personal reasons." It is curious, Morrison notes, that a reviewer who would prefer that Davis's manuscript offer ways to "strengthen myself" would also like her story to be more personal and less political. Moreover, these readers who want more of a self-help book than a political diagnosis of American racism fundamentally misunderstand Davis. According to Morrison, the publishers' readers see Davis's polished self-presentation and her "good and pleasant manners" as proof that she is different than the manuscript presents her: more relatable and less serious, more human and less political.

But as the archives make clear, Morrison assures the publisher that they are profoundly mistaken. If they questioned the larger integrity of Davis's manuscript, Morrison warned, they'd have to find another editor. "How nice it would be," she added sarcastically, in a comment that reaches across the decades into today, "if Angela were really Jane Fonda and not Jean [ sic] d'Arc."

About five years into her tenure at Random House, Morrison had earned a reputation as a tireless fighter for the authors she represented. In 1977, when poet June Jordan published Things that I do in the Dark: Selected Poems, the acknowledgment included Morrison, "my editor, [who] kept on believing this book into print."

Morrison's editing career began in 1965 when she spotted an ad in the New York Review of Books for a position at the textbook company L. W. Singer in Syracuse. Living at the time in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison had recently divorced Harold Morrison, an architect she met while teaching at her alma mater, Howard University. She got the job at Singer, purchased soon thereafter by Random House. After relocating to New York, Morrison wrote and published The Bluest Eye (1970) and worked on Sula during the year she collaborated with Davis. In 1980, a couple of years before leaving Random House to write full time, she received a letter from Toni Cade Bambara describing her progress on what would become The Salt Eaters. Bambara wrote: "I more fully appreciate a comment you made/often make about you and writing and time, etc. The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. It's devastating. How the hell do you do it, Lady? Stunning. (You are, I mean).".]

At Random House, a hallmark of Morrison's editorial paper trail was her "Queries." Usually a stack of loose-leaf paper with handwritten comments paired with manuscript page numbers, these offer tantalizing hints of passages cut from the final manuscript. Morrison suggests expanding upon the brief mentions of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, that Davis "speak of them in more intimate tones i.e., 'Harriet Tubman whose great, sad eyes were like balm to the hundreds she . . .'" Neither Davis's original brief description nor Morrison's suggested expansions made it into the final manuscript.

The queries can have a challenging tone-in one, Morrison asks why, near the beginning of the book, Davis writes that she is "ashamed" about being afraid, elaborating: "It seems inhuman not to be afraid + childish to regard fear as a defect. Submitting to it is." Davis's final text reads:

Outside in the open, entangled in my grief and anger was also fear. A plain and simple fear so overwhelming, and so elemental that the only thing I could compare it to was that sense of engulfment I used to feel as a child when I was left alone in the dark. That indescribable, monstrous thing would be at my back, never quite touching me, but always there ready to attack. When my mother and father asked me what it was that made me so afraid, the words I used to describe this thing sounded ridiculous and stupid. Now with each step, I could feel a presence that I could describe easily. Images of attack kept flashing into my mind, but they were not abstract-they were clear pictures of machine guns breaking out of the darkness, surrounding Helen and me, unleashing fire.

Morrison's editorial suggestions came in a few different forms: broad comments often embedded in correspondence, pages and pages of "queries" (often requests for additions), and copyedited manuscripts in which Morrison primarily focused on deletions. Among her overall comments for Davis was a list of "overused adjectives," namely, "strange/strangely, struggle, thoroughly, tremendous, incredible, experience, horror/horrifying, utter." On the same sheet, covered in Morrison's elongated cursive, she offers some general stylistic advice, pointing out how often Davis falls into the passive voice ("I found myself" or "I received a shock"). The lists were likely tools for Morrison as well as Davis as they worked together to express the scale and scope of the story without falling into linguistic repetitiveness.

In her work with Gayl Jones on her breakout novel, Corregidora, Morrison said that she admired how the novel aimed at "a large idea," the history of slavery, and then "brought it down small, and at home, which gives it a universality and a particularity which makes it extraordinary." Morrison focused on achieving a consistent style, even amid the complexity of Jones's multivoiced prose, textured with songs and snatches of overheard conversation. She asked Jones to "first of all, get Ursa's language range defined. She moves from things like 'I seen the way' and 'Ima walk out' to 'we've too much anger for each other' and 'what have I engendered?'"

Both Morrison and Jones, who was a PhD student at the time, wanted to clear out the overtly literary language-or even worse, the language of literary criticism-to make room for the characters' voices. Even after rounds of edits, Morrison didn't fully trust herself to catch the tics of the highly educated. So in a note to the copyeditor clipped to the final manuscript, she asked them to look out for "lapses into 'literary' language."

But language wasn't the first concern for the Autobiography; Davis remembers her early drafts as "primarily writing about philosophical issues." Working with Morrison helped her "learn about how to write something that would produce images in people's minds that would draw them into a story." Davis calls this a "cinematic strategy," though Morrison's editorial suggestions ask for more detail and less distance. Rounds of marked-up Autobiography manuscripts are heavy with Morrison's green-penciled efforts to slim down the philosophical assessments and retrospective conclusions.

For example, Morrison eliminates entirely Davis's assessment of the Birmingham middle school history textbooks (crossing out "I decided that it was going to be difficult to believe anything that was written in those books which were clearly written in accordance with the dictates of racism") but preserves Davis's disbelief, as a 12-year-old, at hearing a teacher interpret gospel music as praise for slavery. The deletions chip away at Davis's analytic defense of communism, allowing the youthful shock of recognition when she encounters Marx as a high school student to come through. Morrison's edits cluster around critical moments in Davis's political formation: her move from Birmingham to New York to attend high school at the experimental Little Red School House; her first, transformative encounter with The Communist Manifesto; her arrival in California after studying in Germany; cruising the streets of San Diego in a 1958 Buick, trying to figure out her way into the West Coast movement.

The final text achieves a sense of forward propulsion that feels tailored to the indefatigable Davis: "I was like an explorer who returns to his homeland after many years, with precious bounty and no one to give it to. I believed my energy, my commitment, my convictions were the treasure I had accumulated, and I looked high and low for a way to spend it. I roamed the campus, examined the bulletin boards, read the newspapers, talked to everyone who might know: Where are my people?"

Morrison ushered Davis's story into print by exerting her own force of will, confident that the "Autobiography" revealed "what it was like to be caught in the arms of American 'justice.'"

The tension between vernacular realism and "literary" style drove the collaboration of Black author and Black editor, a process whose autonomy was encumbered by the environment of 1970s commercial publishing. The proposed outline of Davis's book sketched a chronological order for the narrative, beginning with her childhood in Birmingham and charting her schooling and activism across various settings: New York, Brandeis, international youth trips, graduate school, and the Communist Party in California. That structure would prove to be a challenge. Morrison later reminded her boss, Jim Silberman, that "when the manuscript first arrived I said it would be difficult to work with an author who has no vanity and who is completely uninterested in herself," before adding wryly, "I gather we are to develop this vanity some."

The final manuscript of the Autobiography is more like a novel but also less like the chronology of personal formation than was proposed. It begins with Davis going underground and "making myself unavailable to the FBI," and recounts her flight from California and life as a fugitive prior to her arrest. The opening chapters-a section of the Autobiography called "Nets"-foreground the law, the prison, and Davis's efforts to connect with other prisoners. She smuggles in copies of George Jackson's book of letters, Soledad Brother, for the prison library; scrambles to organize a legal team; participates in street protests outside on Sixth Avenue; and fights solitary confinement (instituted to prevent Communist contamination of the other inmates). Only midway into the book does the narrative return to her childhood in Birmingham.

Reorganizing the story in this way met Davis's demands to write a political autobiography, an emphasis that sparked dissatisfaction among the larger publishing team. The Autobiography was jointly published by Random House and Bantam Books. Bantam, best known for its classic reprints, paperbacks, and genre fiction, was also venturing into political titles, publishing Protest: Man Against Society, an anthology of protest literature, and Jackson's Soledad Brother, a landmark work of radical criticism for which Greg Armstrong held a champagne publishing party at the gates of San Quentin prison. The joint contract specified that costs and profit would be split down the middle, but Random House would take on editorial responsibilities, which occasionally put Morrison in a tough position between an author who wanted a decisively political autobiography and editorial staff who preferred a more personal, "human" memoir. (If Davis had published a second book, Bantam would have taken the editorial lead.)

It was Bantam's review process that produced such harsh critiques of the early manuscripts, which, though absent from the archives, we can surmise from the fierce defense Morrison offered. This showcased her editorial skill as not just a reader but also an advocate. In notes to Bantam, Morrison portrays Davis as an unyielding political combatant, someone possessed of a degree of courage that Morrison admires and finds alarming.

When she tells Silberman, "I would like to describe to you the ways in which she has risked not only her life but mine as well," Morrison seems surprised about Davis's willingness to put herself on the line and to assume others wanted to do so, without asking. Morrison goes on to recount how she was transported to the front lines of the fight against everyday racism simply by moving through space with Davis:

I was in a brawl with her at an airport just a few weeks ago-a political brawl with a white man who spoke unkindly to a black woman Angela didn't even know. She walked some distance to get into the battle before I could bat an eye. The brawl stopped not when the police were called but when the white man ran away. She risks her life easily-athletically she moves always toward feats that could end in death.

Morrison can't explain Davis, nor would she want to-that is part of what incenses her about the Bantam readers' report-but she does understand that the author's readiness to risk bodily harm and social stigma is unusual. Davis, Morrison wrote, is an "almost totally political person" who does not "tuck her politics away. Never. Not even in her dreams. Not in the bathtub. Not on the toilet. Not anywhere."

The decision for a reader, Morrison admits, is difficult. This uncompromising character is either inimitably heroic or simply unbelievable. This book was the kind of text Morrison had envisioned since the beginning.

In a neatly typed letter from June 1972, Morrison pitched to Davis the kind of book she planned for the activist to write. Morrison envisions "a non-book in the truest sense-that is to say-it would never be confined to its covers." "The book, like its author," she wrote to Davis, "would be both the theory and the thing, the idea and its manifestation. It would be so powerful-it boggles the mind."

Having promised this to Davis, at publication, Morrison drew on her social and professional networks to make the launch a cultural and literary event. Morrison's editorial papers preserve a letter she drafted to send to dozens of Black professional organizations (one of the surviving copies is addressed to the president of a medical association), asking them to promote the book, host a reading group, or purchase copies.

The partnership with Bantam facilitated overseas distribution, and Davis went on packed tours of Scandinavia, France, and the UK. Making the text available to a Russian audience was important to her, so Bantam had the text translated into Russian (to check the translation, Random House had the text partly translated back into English and approved by Davis and Morrison). The guest list for the release party covers nearly a dozen sheets of lined notebook paper. Morrison rented Automation House, an art gallery on the east side of Central Park, and in the run-up to the launch, left herself handwritten notes to call Chinua Achebe and double check June Jordan's RSVP.

In 2010, Morrison and Davis reunited at the New York Public Library, where they had been invited to talk about the importance of libraries to American society. Together they traded stories about banned books. Davis recounted how she smuggled Soledad Brother into the House of D; Morrison recalled the moment she learned that Paradise had been struck from the Texas prison libraries. Both spoke frequently about the joy of working on the Autobiography together, though rarely of the more difficult aspects of the process: the Bantam review, the heavy publicity demands put on Davis during the US and international book tours, and the heavy labor of editing.

Watching a recording of the event recently on YouTube, I was reminded of something Arjun Appadurai once wrote: "The archive is ... a tool for the work of collective memory." Davis and Morrison, each at the height of their imaginative powers, came together during a period of censorship and cultural erasure and left behind an astonishing archive of memory making and collaborative literary practice. They reimagined the revolutionary tract through the lens of Morrison's prodigious novelistic consciousness. And they practiced a form of cultural labor in which art and politics refine and sharpen each other, rather than dimly approximating each other's complexity. As Morrison foretold in her 1972 letter pitching the book to Davis, "Working together would be fantastic, I'm sure, and the end result glorious."

Featured image: Angela Davis, half-length portrait, with "x" markings that indicate the photographer's or editor's selection of a photo for printing (1974). Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd / Library of Congress

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Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography

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Don't question Angela Davis' manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not "Jane Fonda" but, rather, "Jean d'Arc."

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This article relates to week 6’s topic by examining Malcolm X’s lasting influence on the civil rights movement and Black empowerment. I chose this article because it highlights why Malcolm X’s ideas and legacy continue to inspire and impact the fight for racial justice today.

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Malcolm X was a legendary civil rights activist and leader who fought for the rights of the African American community in the mid-twentieth century. He was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, and became one of the most influential figures of the Civil Rights Movement. His message of black nationalism, self-reliance, and human dignity inspired countless people, both in the United States and around the world. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while giving a speech at the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in New York City. The assassination shocked the nation and sparked widespread outrage and grief. He was only 39 years old at the time. However, his impact on the Civil Rights Movement and the African American community is immeasurable. He had become one of the most prominent and outspoken leaders in the fight for equal rights, and his death was a devastating blow to the African American community. However, his legacy lived on, and his message of self-reliance and human dignity has continued inspiring generations.

Malcolm X was a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement, and one of his most notable contributions was his emphasis on Black Nationalism. He believed that African Americans needed to take control of their own lives and destinies and should not rely on the larger American society for their well-being. This emphasis on self-determination departed from the mainstream civil rights movement's approach, which focused on integration and assimilation into American society. Malcolm X's advocacy for Black Nationalism was rooted in his belief that African Americans had been systematically oppressed and marginalized in American society and that this oppression was perpetuated by institutional racism. He argued that African Americans needed to create their own institutions, businesses, and communities to be truly self-reliant and thrive as a people. This approach, he believed, would enable African Americans to control their own destinies and to resist the systemic oppression that had held them back for centuries.

Malcolm X, as the leading proponent of Black Nationalism in the United States, presented a sharp contrast to the nonviolent, multiracial approach of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their differences in ideology and tactics contributed to the ideological and tactical conflicts that characterized the black freedom struggle in the 1960s. Malcolm X was highly critical of King and advocated racial separatism, which made it unsurprising that King did not respond to Malcolm's occasional overtures. He disagreed with the idea of integration and referred to mainstream civil-rights leaders as " Uncle Toms," indicating that they were fools for thinking white America would ever willingly give them equality. When Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech during the 1963 March on Washington, Malcolm called it the " Farce on Washington." "Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing 'We Shall Overcome'... while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against?" he wrote in his autobiography. However, after Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, King expressed his admiration for Malcolm in a letter to his widow, Betty Shabazz. Despite their differences in methods, King recognised Malcolm's ability to identify and address the root causes of racial inequality in the United States. King wrote, "While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem." The relationship between King and Malcolm X highlights the diversity of approaches within the black freedom struggle. Their differing tactics and ideologies represented competing visions for the future of African Americans in the United States. However, King's letter to Betty Shabazz demonstrates his recognition of Malcolm's contributions to the struggle, despite their disagreements. This acknowledgement also highlights the complexity and diversity of the black freedom struggle in the 1960s.

The current issue facing the black community is the ongoing struggle for equality and justice. Despite significant progress toward racial equality in the United States, African Americans are disproportionately affected by various social and economic issues. One of the most pressing issues facing the black community is the inequities and biases within the criminal justice system. African Americans are more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by law enforcement officials and are more likely to receive harsher sentences than their white counterparts. Additionally, police violence against black people remains a pervasive and ongoing problem, with a disproportionate number of black individuals killed by law enforcement officers. Another significant challenge facing the black community is the persistent wealth gap between white and black families. Black families have fewer resources to access education, healthcare, and other essential services. This lack of access to resources perpetuates a cycle of poverty that has persisted for generations, making it difficult for black individuals and families to achieve economic stability and upward mobility.

Malcolm X was a visionary leader who devoted his life to the fight for civil rights. His message of black pride and self-reliance resonated with many, and his influence on the struggle for racial equality in the United States is immeasurable. His assassination on February 21, 1965, was a tragic loss not only to the African American community but to the nation as a whole. Despite the controversies surrounding his advocacy of black nationalism and separatism, Malcolm X's legacy endures, and his impact on American society continues to be felt today. His message of empowerment and self-determination inspires new generations, and his ideas continue to be studied and debated in academic circles. Malcolm X's life and work remind us of the importance of standing up for what we believe in and fighting for justice, even in the face of adversity. His uncompromising dedication to the cause of civil rights serves as a powerful example of the power of individual action and collective struggle to effect social change. In conclusion, Malcolm X's life and legacy represent an essential chapter in the ongoing struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States. His ideas and message continue to inspire and challenge us to work toward a more just and equitable society, and his impact will be felt for generations to come.

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Malcolm X: The Legacy of a Civil Rights Leader

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Malcolm X was a legendary civil rights activist and leader who fought for the rights of the African American community in the mid-twentieth century. He was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska,...

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This article connects to Week 7’s material since James Baldwin is a central author we focused on, and the excerpts provide diverse insights into his life, work, and impact. I picked this article because it helped me gain a deeper appreciation of Baldwin’s complex experiences and enduring relevance, showing how his ideas still speak to people now.

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100 years ago, on August 2, 1924 James Baldwin, né James Arthur Jones, was born in New York City. Needless to say, he would grow to become one of America’s most important and beloved writers,…

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This article connects to Week 7 because Nikki Giovanni was one of the writers we read, and it talks about how her poetry and voice helped shape Black identity and inspired a whole generation. I chose it because it shows how real and powerful her influence was, not just in her time but even now. Reading it made me appreciate her work on a deeper level.

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How Nikki Giovanni’s Black American consciousness changed the world

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One of the foremost poets of the Black arts movement died on Monday but continues to inspire her literary children

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The article looks at how Nikki Giovanni’s poetry and presence inspired people across generations, especially young Black writers like Aisha Durham. I picked this article because it doesn’t just talk about her accomplishments—it shows how her words made people feel seen and valued. This ties into Week 7, where we talked about Black art being a form of strength and resistance. Giovanni’s work is a clear example of that.

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Reflecting on life, legacy of Nikki Giovanni

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The late poet, writer, and activist Nikki Giovanni had a profound influence on art, culture, and society and a very personal impact on USF Professor of Communication Aisha Durham

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In class, we talked about music and fashion, and this article about Playboi Carti really ties into that. It breaks down how his music and his wild fashion sense came from the Atlanta underground scene and helped him blow up. The piece shows how his style and sound influence each other and the culture around him. It connects well to what we discussed in Week 8 about how artists use both music and fashion to express themselves.

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His mumbled lyrics and ghoulish approach to fashion have made him an elusive object of hip-hop obsession. With a much-hyped album and a new Givenchy campaign on the way, he reflects on the underground Atlanta scene that birthed his unusual-and very undead-style.

When he was a student at North Springs Charter High, Jordan Terrell Carter started going to house parties hosted by an older rapper he knew, a fixture on the Atlanta scene known as Key. Carter was already in the orbit of Awful Records, the lo-fi collective of self-described "weirdos" that would later sign him, and the crew would often make their way to Key's parties, on Moreland Avenue in East Atlanta, which were as legendary for the stars they launched-it's where Future filmed his "Trap Niggas" video-as for their chaos. Over time Carter began performing at the parties, and on one particularly rowdy New Year's Eve, he got all three floors of guests going so hard that the house itself buckled. "We broke the fucking floor," he recalls.

Carti's not playing house parties anymore-the 24-year-old has become the face of the sputtered ad-libs and slurred vibe that pervade hip-hop today. "Bought a crib for my mama off that mumblin' shit. Made a mil off that mumblin' shit," he brags on his 2018 Die Lit cut "R.I.P." But even as Carti has graduated into mainstream stardom-running around SXSW with future mentor A$AP Rocky, collaborating with Solange, walking the runways for Virgil Abloh-he's maintained the eccentric energy of his underground days. Cultivating a kind of vampire-punk look, Carti has grown calculating about how and when he pops up in public-he has mostly retreated from social media as anticipation for his second album continues to build. The more elusive he becomes, the larger his legend grows.

When we meet in October, Carti looks downright gothic: a sheer black long-sleeve shirt, black skinny jeans, black slides, and black nail polish; cross earrings dangling from his ears and his bright red hair freshly twisted tightly against his scalp. It's ten o'clock on a Sunday night in a dimly lit studio just north of downtown Atlanta, one of the stone walls illuminated by a lurid red glow. His manager watches the Lakers secure the NBA Championship on a TV in the background. "You ready?" Carti asks me as he takes a sip of "lean"-Sprite and cough syrup-from two stacked Styrofoam cups.

An introvert who prefers to move in silence, Carti finds quarantine to be his natural state. "I'm always at home by myself," he says. "I don't really go out like that at all, unless I have to. Studio and the house. That's it." After living in New York and Los Angeles for a spell, the rapper returned to his native Atlanta in 2018, moving into the upscale Buckhead neighborhood with fellow rapper Iggy Azalea, with whom he had a baby boy in the spring before they split up this fall. If Carti is notoriously mum about his personal life, he's even more secretive about his sophomore studio album, Whole Lotta Red, which is set to be released by A$AP Rocky's label, AWGE, and has been two years in the making. Carti is evasive about the reason for the delays but reports that new music-which he describes as "alternative" and "psyched out"-will be coming this year. As far as whether fans can expect him to release the full album in 2020, Carti simply says, "We'll see."

Taking another sip of his dirty Sprite, Carti prefers to ruminate on what it was like to come up in the Atlanta orbit of Awful Records and its offbeat stars, including Ethereal and Father. He'd been a good student and a standout basketball player, but once he got serious about music, he found he had little time for anything else. "As I got older, I started smoking weed and I was just like, 'Fuck school.' I didn't want no more basketball, none of that. But I always used to freestyle and shit," he says. Carti rarely talked about his songs with classmates, but they eventually discovered his music on SoundCloud, and it was their validation that kept him going. "People saying they fuck with my music-that shit put a battery in my back," he says.

Among these early supporters, the aforementioned Key was particularly helpful, taking on the young rapper as something of a protégé, certain that Carti would soon be a star. "You could tell he was just sitting around observing," Key says. "He called us 'big bro' all the time and was watching what we were doing. He would try to impress us, too, sometimes. We had to kind of tell him not to do little stuff. But we already knew where he was going." Shortly after graduating from high school, Carti moved to New York City, living with family in the Bronx and then eventually connecting with A$AP Rocky, who'd become a friend and mentor. Key says that time away from Carti's hometown was critical. "When he really got alone, I really think he opened up and found himself," he says.

Carti broke through as a star almost instantly with his 2017 self-titled mixtape, which peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard 200 and featured such hits as "Magnolia" and "Woke Up Like This." And though he's still tending to his early rush of fame, he's begun looking to cultivate and support other rising talents, much like Awful and A$AP Mob did for him in his younger years. "If I got a young nigga with me, I'm probably trying to sign or manage him," Carti says, noting that he's currently working with producers, photographers, and artists.

He's still looking to expand his career outside of music and aims to one day design his own clothes. His distinctive features-a searing gaze, a chiseled jawline, an oval-shaped birthmark on his left cheek-have already landed him on runways for Kanye's Yeezy line and in ads for Nike, and earlier this year, the rapper's signature voice was featured in a campaign for Givenchy, the first under new creative director Matthew Williams. "It's big for me," Carti says. "I've waited all my life for shit like this."

His foray into fashion and his work with the storied Paris label conjured memories for Carti of his bygone days working in fashion in a much different capacity: folding clothes at H&M. Lighting a blunt, the rapper recalls the afternoon when he first got the motivation he needed to take rap seriously. "I remember one day a guy walks in and he's like, 'Yo, you're Playboi Carti,' " he says. "I'm in school. I'm broke. I'm at work. Retail. And the dude said, 'I fuck with your music.' I think I quit H&M like two days later."

Jewel Wicker is an Atlanta-based freelance writer. She wrote about Lil Baby in the October issue.
A version of this story originally appears in the December/January 2021 issue with the title "Leader of the Lost Boys." PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Irina Rozovsky
Styled by Jon Tietz
Barber, Jalen Kearse
Hairstylist, Rhonda Palmer
Makeup, Omar Sfreddo
Manicure, Sharnise McMichael
Producer, Virginia Ridgers

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How Playboi Carti Emerged from the Atlanta Underground

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With a hyped new album and Givenchy campaign on the way, the rapper reflects on the Atlanta scene that birthed his unusual style.

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One of the overview links was the good kid, m.A.A.d city short film, and I picked this article because it breaks down how the album made a major impact on rap. It explains how Kendrick’s storytelling and style helped shift the direction of the genre. This connects to the short film because both show what life was like for him growing up and how that influenced his message and music.

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7 Ways Kendrick Lamar’s “good Kid, m.A.A.d. City” Has Cha...

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Kendrick Lamar’s album transformed rap within a year, inf…

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In the article Arthur Jafa’s Radical Alienation, the author breaks down how Jafa wanted to create “Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music.” The film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is made up of real clips of Black life, edited together in a way that matches the energy of Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam.” I picked this article because it shows how Jafa is trying to push visual art to express the same depth that Black music already does, which connects to how we’ve been looking at the cultural impact of music in class.

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The filmmaker left an art world he found too white; years later, he made a triumphant return with "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death."

The most spellbinding art work of the past decade is a seven-and-a-half-minute film called "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death," by the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. Word spread quickly after its New York première, in November, 2016, at Gavin Brown's gallery. People crowded the gallery to see it, but nothing they had heard prepared them for the rapid-fire sequence of a hundred and fifty film clips of Black people in the maelstrom of American life: a teen-age girl being thrown to the ground by a white police officer, burning cars and hip-hop dancers, Martin Luther King, Jr., in an open car, a man being beaten by several uniformed policemen, LeBron James soaring in for a gorgeous dunk, Barack Obama singing "Amazing Grace" at a memorial service in Charleston, a woman saying, "What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?" Most of the images are found footage, taken from YouTube. Their emotional impact comes from the way Jafa has put them together, shifting and editing and choreographing to create a flow of deeply resonant juxtapositions, over a soundtrack of Kanye West's ecstatic "Ultralight Beam."

For Jafa (pronounced Jay-fa), who turned sixty in November, the film's reception was startling. A dozen major museums in this country and in Europe acquired copies of "Love Is the Message," and many more borrowed it for special screenings. As Jafa's friend John Akomfrah, the British artist and filmmaker, said to me, it was ironic that "this figure who was heralded for a long time as a kind of prophet in the world of cinema would turn out to be the savior of the art world." Jafa had a lively interest in contemporary art, and from 1999 to 2005 he had shown sculptures and other works in art galleries here and abroad, but cinema had been his primary focus since the seventies, when he was an undergraduate at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Howard had an excellent film department, and in Jafa's third year there his interest had shifted from architecture to film studies. Incorrigibly curious and hugely ambitious, A.J., as everyone called him, identified his goal very early: "To make Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music." Jafa was not the first to stake this claim, but, as Akomfrah said, "somebody needed to articulate it for our generation, and A.J. was that figure."

Jafa's thinking was based on a concept that he calls "Black visual intonation." "Something I've pointed out a million times is that, if you look at Black folk and our visual expressivity, it's very, very undeveloped in comparison to what we've been able to achieve in music," he told me, one day this summer. "It's undeveloped despite the fact that we come from a visual tradition that's just as rich as the musical one. There is no contemporary art without African descent. Cubism is Picasso trying to understand African artifacts." Africans brought music with them on the slave ships, he said, and the music changed and developed in response to the new context, and this led to "everything from Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix to Motown, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk-you can go on and on." But nothing comparable had happened in African-American visual expression, and when Jafa's teachers in the film department at Howard introduced him to the idea of cinema devoted to Black lives, he said, "I was very excited. It sort of fired my imagination."

"Love Is the Message" is the closest he has come to realizing the goal he set for himself forty years ago. "I think what the film captures is the Black struggle to live," the writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman, who has known Jafa for many years, said to me. "It's a series of iconic images that show the brilliant virtuosity of the Black thinkers, artists, and athletes that ordinary Black folk have given to the world, alongside some of the forces that have negated Black life. You don't have to know the exact reference for each image to feel the work's density and power." The poet Fred Moten, another friend of Jafa's, talked to me about the "entanglement of absolute joy and absolute pain" that is fundamental to Black art and Black music. " 'Love Is the Message' has all of that, and you know it immediately," he said. "It's in every moment. There is no break, and this is why it's good that it lasts only seven minutes, because that's as much as anyone can take."

Two of Jafa's teachers at Howard, Haile Gerima and Ben Caldwell, were recognized independent filmmakers. Gerima, who was born in Ethiopia, had been a leader of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of cinema students at U.C.L.A. in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, whose rebellion, in Gerima's words, was against "the white supremacist vocabulary" of mainstream Hollywood. Gerima was Jafa's mentor and role model. His films ("Bush Mama," "Ashes and Embers," "Sankofa"), along with those of Caldwell, Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, and other pioneers of L.A.'s Black film movement, opened Jafa's eyes to the boundless possibilities of cinema, but he gradually came to feel that something was missing in their approach. "It seemed to me early on that it wasn't enough to say a Black person made the film," he said. "It had to be something more. And, in trying to think about what I consider fundamental Black aesthetic values, one of the things that came up was rhythm. Most people will say Black people have rhythm-they seem able to do things with time. So I became interested in how cinema could be inscribed with a more idiomatic sense of timing."

Jafa had been an omnivorous reader since he was seven or eight. In the Howard library, where he spent much of his free time, he discovered a citation, in a musicology book, about a missionary who had listened to the music in African villages and had tried to transcribe it. "One of the things I remember is the missionary saying that the difficulty in studying the music of the Negroes is their tendency to worry the note." He paused, and rubbed the graying thatch of beard on his chin. "Worry the note," he repeated. "Basically, what he means is that, in most African music, and in fact many musics of the non-Western world, the thing you call a note, which in Western music is a pure sound that vibrates in a measurable fashion, is neither pure nor measurable. A B-flat has a very specific tonal vibration. But what you hear in a lot of African and non-Western music-certainly in Black music-is a vibrational frequency that fluctuates. So when this guy tried to notate their music, he'd say, 'That sounds like a B-flat to me,' but in fact it was never only a B-flat. There is a certain quiver in a Black person's playing. Even M.L.K.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech is a combination of the words and the thing he's doing with his voice." Jazz historians and other musicologists may well dispute aspects of Jafa's analysis, but it gave him the insight he needed. "What I realized," he concluded, "is that there must be techniques, ways to get visual movement in cinema that has something of what Black vocal intonation does in Black music."

Gerima remembers Jafa as a "very noticeable" student, "brilliant, energetic, and full of imagination." Jafa says he gave Gerima and his other teachers a lot of trouble. "I argued a lot," he told me. "It bothered Haile that I was swinging my Super 8 camera around and just burning film-I was being Jackson Pollock." His talent was unmistakable, though, and in the summer of 1980 Gerima sent him to Los Angeles to work with Charles Burnett on his new film, "My Brother's Wedding." Jafa thought Burnett's previous film, "Killer of Sheep," a deeply evocative study of working-class people in Los Angeles, was the best movie yet made by a Black director. "My Brother's Wedding," about a quiet young man and his reckless best friend, received a poor review in the Times, because the producer had shown the film before Burnett had finished editing it. But Jafa learned a great deal about cinematography from Burnett, who shot his own films, and he fell in love with the film's assistant director, a dazzlingly gifted woman named Julie Dash.

Eight years older than Jafa and a graduate student at the U.C.L.A. film school, Dash had already made three films of her own, and she was working on a series of shorts about Black women in America at the turn of the century. When their time on the Burnett film came to an end, Jafa moved in with Dash. (Although he went back to Howard a few times after that and took classes, he never graduated.) "A.J. admired my independent spirit," Dash told me. "When we first met, he thought I was gay. Why? I don't know. We'd have conversations that went long into the night, so long I'd sometimes go to sleep. We wore each other's clothes. Everybody we knew wore surplus Army khakis, and we were actually the same size." Jafa urged her to put aside the series of short films so that they could concentrate on one of them, about Black people in an isolated Gullah community on an island off the coast of South Carolina. Dash was persuaded-her father's people had come from this region. The result, eleven years later, was "Daughters of the Dust," one of the enduring classics of independent cinema.

The script for "Daughters" called for a large cast-three or four generations-and required serious funding. Dash had managed to raise about thirty thousand dollars, enough to start putting together a production team. Jafa was the cinematographer, and he brought in Kerry James Marshall, a young artist he had never met, to be their production designer.

"I'd just had a show in Los Angeles, and A.J. read an interview with me in the paper and called out of the blue," Marshall recalled. "We were on the phone for a couple of hours. I said, 'Why don't you come by?,' and a few days later he came and we stood near the door talking for another two hours before we sat down. He is a talker. One of the things that really got us together was my deep interest in Mississippi Delta blues. I was always trying to paint a visual equivalent to things like the Robert Johnson songs 'Cross Road Blues' or 'Devil Got My Woman,' and when I read Julie's script that's what it sounded like to me. I hadn't had any experience at all in making a film, but, as it turned out, I had the combination of skills they needed to help that happen." Marshall became an essential third figure in the collaboration, and his wife, the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, played the role of Viola Peazant.

Dash and Jafa married in 1983, and their daughter, N'Zinga (named for an Angolan queen), was born a year later. They moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta in 1986, to be closer to where "Daughters of the Dust" would be filmed. Jafa's parents, who had recently moved there, were delighted to look after N'Zinga-they called her Zing-while Jafa and Dash scouted locations. They were still far short of their funding goal, which was eight hundred thousand dollars, but in the fall of 1987 they assembled a small team and went to the island of St. Helena, South Carolina. They managed to shoot a trailer and some of the film that fall. Soon afterward, Lindsay Law, the executive producer of PBS's "American Playhouse," saw the trailer and loved it. He arranged for "American Playhouse" to give Dash and Jafa eight hundred thousand dollars, which allowed them to go back to St. Helena in 1989 and reshoot the film from scratch, with new costumes and equipment.

Jafa rented two 35-mm. movie cameras, and a computer that allowed him to weave together normal-motion and slow-motion footage. "He wanted the camera to move through space like Michael Jordan driving through the lane," Marshall said. Jafa also had specific ideas about lighting that would bring out the subtle variations in Black skin. He made his own reflectors-instead of using the usual large aluminum sheets, he cut out small, handheld ones that threw light on the actor's face. When they finished shooting, though, the money was gone, and there was nothing left for the editing. "We went back to 'American Playhouse,' " Jafa said. "They gave us the money to edit, but in return we had to give up most of our financial interests in the film."

"Daughters of the Dust" premièred in 1991 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, and Arthur Jafa won the award for Excellence in Cinematography. But the film's nonlinear narrative structure and the fact that some of its dialogue was in the Gullah language made distributors nervous, and none of them would go near it. Jafa eventually negotiated an agreement with Film Forum, the art-house theatre in Greenwich Village, which showed "Daughters" in 1992. Dash went on the "Today" show, and when the film started drawing sellout crowds the run was extended. "Daughters of the Dust" was the first film by an African-American woman to get a theatrical release.

"That was a weird time," Jafa said. " 'Daughters' was the toast of the New York film community, but we'd given away a large part of our financial interests, and knew we weren't going to make any money on it. Plus, Julie's and my relationship at that point was not in the best place." By 1991, they had separated. "I was struggling with some personal stuff, psychological stuff, and Julie, what with the child and the movie, couldn't help me," he said. "I was just very immature." He also said, "I didn't want to become Mr. Dash."

Talking on Skype, as Jafa and I were obliged to do because of the pandemic, has unexpected limitations. I was on the East Coast, and Jafa was in Los Angeles, and it took me three sessions to realize that Jafa's brother Boston was sitting across the desk from him, working quietly while we talked. I finally "met" him when he got up and walked into view and waved. The brothers don't look alike, but they sound very much like brothers, with Deep South accents. A.J., who is interested in clothes and gets invited to openings at Gucci, wears a small diamond stud on his right eyebrow, and another one just under his lower lip. "I've had the studs for more than twenty years," he told me. "People used to think the one below my lip was a crumb-before Covid, they'd try to brush it off."

Jafa usually sat with his back to a window, so on bright days he was in shadow, and only gradually did I become aware of his tattoos. They were more or less everywhere: a black panther on his neck; a drawing of an early work by Zaha Hadid, "The Peak," which was never built, on his left arm; " FRODO," from "The Lord of the Rings," in capital letters and also on his left arm; Krazy Kat on the back of one hand. There were a lot more of them, he said, and a story to go with each. So, Krazy Kat? "People have pointed out to me that it's ironic, because I don't like cats," Jafa said. "They don't respect your personal space. But Krazy Kat at one point was the biggest thing in American popular culture, and the artist who drew him, George Herriman, is such an interesting figure to me-his own kids never knew their father was Black."

When Jafa tells stories, the words come slowly at first, in a baritone drawl, but as he gets going the pitch rises and the tempo accelerates. "The cat loves the mouse, the mouse hates the cat," he said. "The dog, Officer Pupp, loves the cat, but the cat can't see him because the cat loves the mouse. And what makes it worse is that the mouse keeps throwing a brick at Krazy Kat's head, which is an act of violence, but the cat sees the violence as an act of love, and so the circle continues. The absurdity of it strikes me as being as good a model of Black love and hate in white society as we've ever seen, a profound and absurd meditation on the thin line between love and hate."

Jafa was born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. "My mom was born in Tupelo, and so were my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents grew up there," Jafa told me. His aunt Nettie has served on the Tupelo City Council since 2001. Jafa's full name is Arthur Jafa Fielder; he dropped Fielder (as his grandfather, another Arthur Jafa, had done) when he was in his early twenties, but his family ties have never weakened. Arthur and Rowena, his parents, were teachers, and his siblings-three younger brothers-have all found arts-related careers: Boston, the second oldest, is a musician and a filmmaker. (Named for their father's cousin, Ralph Boston, he was called Ralph until he got to high school, where everyone started calling him Boston.) Jim teaches film production in New York City high schools, and his twin brother, Tim, writes graphic novels.

Jafa's school integrated the year he entered first grade, and he was one of a handful of African-Americans in his class. Two years earlier, the family had moved to Russellville, Alabama, but Jafa was sent back to Tupelo to live with his grandparents so that he could go to school there. When the Ku Klux Klan burned down their house in Russellville (Arthur had been named football coach of the recently combined white and Black high schools), they returned to Tupelo. The whole family moved again, less than a year later, to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Arthur and Rowena had been offered positions at Coahoma Junior College, an innovative school for Black students. Arthur taught physical education and coached football and basketball; Rowena, who taught business administration, became the school's financial director.

Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta, which Jafa describes as a Black Jurassic Park. "I grew up in a region where some of the more horrific acts in the century occurred," Jafa said. "Emmett Till was killed, the three civil-rights workers were killed, people were tortured and murdered and nobody was brought to trial." Unlike Tupelo, Clarksdale had held on to hard-core segregation long after it became illegal. And yet, growing up in a supportive family and on a college campus, the Fielder children felt protected and encouraged. For the first few years, the family lived on the campus in a blue-and-white trailer with three bedrooms. "Art and I shared a room," Boston recalled. "It was filled with Marvel and DC comic books, and boxes of the magazines that Art cut pictures out of and pasted in notebooks. He slept in the top bunk, and I was on the bottom. We'd tell each other stories and make drawings-he'd draw something and hand it down to me, and I'd hand one up to him."

"The move from Tupelo to Clarksdale was mainly a change in soundtrack," Jafa said. "In Tupelo, the radio was dominated by Elvis Presley. I remember my grandmother telling stories about Elvis. They knew him in the Black part of town-that's how poor he was. When Elvis was a kid, he would sit on the porch of a nearby house and play guitar." Jafa was never a Presley fan. In Clarksdale, where the soundtrack was Memphis soul, all four Fielder boys went to Catholic school, because their non-Catholic parents thought they would get a better education that way. (Their father eventually converted to Catholicism.) Jafa was an altar boy and a straight-A student, and in high school he became a National Merit Scholar. "I was just elated to know that I had one student, just one, who could have gotten into M.I.T.," Olenza McBride, his social-studies teacher, recalled.

Jafa read all the time-first comics, then science fiction, the World Book (his parents bought the series, and later they added the Encyclopædia Britannica), history, sociology, and world literature. "Our neighbor was head librarian at the college," he said. "She would let me stay there after hours-I'd fall asleep in the stacks, and my dad would come to pick me up at two in the morning." Jafa and Boston saw every movie they could get to. One Saturday afternoon, when Jafa was ten, their parents dropped them off at the white people's theatre on the other side of town to see Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." The theatre was empty except for a few white couples, who left before the intermission. "The lights go down, the movie begins, and it's like being buried alive," Jafa wrote, in a 2015 essay called "My Black Death." "Even now, I'm still searching for an art experience capable of matching the effect this film had on me." When it ended, he and Boston walked out in a daze to the empty lobby, where the white theatre manager sat in the ticket booth reading a newspaper. "At this point in my life I didn't have un-chaperoned interactions with white people, young or old," Jafa wrote. "He was sitting in the ticket booth with the door open, so I walked over to him and said, 'Excuse me, sir, I've just come out of the movie, could you tell me what it was about?' He looked at me over his paper, paused a moment, and said, 'Son, I've been looking at it all week and I haven't got a clue.' "

There was a coda to the experience. In the mid-nineties, when Jafa was working as a cinematographer, Kubrick hired him to be a second-unit cameraman for "Eyes Wide Shut." Kubrick shot most of the film in England, but it was set in New York, and Jafa spent a lot of time filming locations there. "We were constantly shooting things over and over, because Kubrick kept sending notes saying would we try it again three degrees to the left, or three degrees to the right," Jafa recalled. "He called many times a day, and occasionally the assistant director would say, 'Stanley's on the phone, he wants to say hi,' and I would say, 'Not now, I'm shooting.' " In 1999, returning from Europe to attend the film's New York première, Jafa saw a newspaper headline: " STANLEY KUBRICK DIES AT 70." "Stanley Kubrick was one of my heroes," he said. "There was so much I wanted to say to him, and I'd had this fantasy that when we finished shooting we'd be able to have a proper conversation. I went to the première and got very depressed, trying to figure out why I had never spoken to him."

Shooting other people's films was always, for Jafa, a stepping stone to shooting his own. "I love cinematography, but once I'd mastered the craft it was never fulfilling on its own," he told me. "Daughters of the Dust" had brought no directing offers, though, and until recently neither Dash nor Jafa could get funding for a second feature. Hollywood producers had financed and profited from nineteen-seventies blaxploitation films, some of which had Black directors, but the first Black filmmaker of Jafa's generation to break into the Hollywood system and establish a career on his own terms was Spike Lee. Lee went to a screening of "Daughters" and as he was leaving the theatre he introduced himself and asked if Jafa would like to work on a film about Malcolm X. Jafa said yes, and his skill as a cameraman on the movie led to his becoming the cinematographer for Lee's next feature, "Crooklyn." "Spike changed my life," Jafa said. "He put me on the path to being a legitimate entity in the film universe." The two of them didn't get along, though, and they haven't worked together since. Lee had no interest in Jafa's urge to experiment on "Crooklyn" with lenses and film speeds, cinematic rhythms, and nonlinear storytelling. "We had a rocky collaboration, but we've finally reached a rapprochement, and I want to keep it that way," Jafa told me.

I asked him to name the filmmakers he most admired. "I like films more than filmmakers," he said. "But, anything Andrei Tarkovsky ever did, especially 'The Mirror' and 'The Sacrifice,' his last. Tarkovsky's films are philosophical meditations on life, time, aging, things like that." Yasujirō Ozu, he said, was "right up there, not quite as high as Tarkovsky. Ozu will sit with things." The Italians? "I love Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni. Antonioni is a great filmmaker, but to me that really does come down to 'L'Avventura,' the film where he plays with dimensions of dramatic time and space. There's a scene with Monica Vitti in a hotel corridor. She walks into the frame, and then out of the frame, and in a Hollywood film you would cut, but the camera just stays on that long, empty hallway."

Jafa respects Ingmar Bergman, but, he said, "I don't know if his films have aged so well, even 'Persona,' which is clearly a great film." He likes Godard more than Truffaut, and, he said, "Bresson is above anybody we've mentioned, except Tarkovsky-Bresson is the Beethoven and Bach of cinema." He also paid homage to Oscar Micheaux, whom he called "the godfather of Black American cinema." I asked him about Andy Warhol. "Neck and neck with Bresson," he said, to my surprise. "Every moment in a Warhol film is an extended moment. You think of Miles Davis, the speed at which he improvises. His notes sit in the air like they're unfurling in slow motion. They always feel introspective, considered, not in the moment." Jafa puts "The Godfather: Part II" in his top ten films, "but Coppola is not in my top ten directors."

From the early nineties to 2000, living in New York, Jafa shot documentaries (on Audre Lorde and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others), music videos, and television commercials. "The early nineties was when you started to see more Blacks in Hollywood movies," he said. "I wanted to direct music videos, and I was very unsuccessful. I could never crack it. I guess I could have moved to Hollywood and done what everybody else does, but I didn't see that." Ideas for films proliferated in his head. The schoolboy notebooks in which he'd pasted images from comic books and magazines when he was ten had been succeeded by three-ring binders filled with movie stills, advertisements, news photographs, and reproductions from art books and countless other sources-images that he liked to show to people. He often had binders with him. "A.J. was always a great storyteller of his own film ideas," the writer and critic Greg Tate recalled. "He would act out all the parts." Tate and Jafa connected when they were both returning books to the Founders Library at Howard. They talked for six hours on the library steps, and the conversation has been going on ever since.

Jafa also spent time in art galleries and museums, and immersed himself in art history and theory. His fascination with Marcel Duchamp kept surfacing in our conversations. "My whole understanding of Duchamp has to do with African artifacts, aesthetic artifacts, and their profound effect on Western art," Jafa said. Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other artists in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century had discovered African sculpture at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and it had changed the way they saw the world. "All those people used African artifacts to make paintings, because they had certain spatial and formal implications, and the massing of those implications produced Cubism," Jafa said. "Duchamp made paintings in that modality-'Nude Descending a Staircase,' where you see the figure multiple times at the same moment and from different vantage points. But Duchamp was smarter than anybody around. I think he realized that a lot of the energy produced by African objects came not from their formal and spatial qualities but from their being what I would call radically alienated. It was contextual. An African artifact in a white museum space, with all this baggage of ideas about painting and contemplation, was deeply alien."

Jafa believes that Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain," a porcelain urinal from a plumbing-supply store, turned upside down and signed "R. Mutt," was directly influenced by African sculpture and drew its undeniable power from the same sort of radical alienation. "What Duchamp did better than any other artist was to take something that existed and turn it into another thing," Jafa said. "He didn't make it-he turned it into something else. It's like what I say about Black people and basketball. We didn't invent basketball, but we created it. One of the more telling things about Black people is that we do things that don't make our job easier. Why do a three-sixty before you land a basketball? You don't get more points-it just raises your level of difficulty. What is that about?" (His voice went up about an octave.) "Folks argue that it's entertainment, but it's central to who we are. It's refusing the structures that want to turn the game into a business. We know it's a business-winning-but we refuse to acquiesce in the elimination of play. And I don't think it's a big leap to say that's central to Duchamp's entire practice. For all the intellectualism around Duchamp, what did he always insist on? That it was playful. His tongue was definitely in his cheek."

So was Jafa's when he revealed his "secret theory" that Jeff Koons is "a very light-skinned Black guy passing for white." He argued, "Look at the works that made his reputation. The vacuum cleaners refer to Black women, domestic workers. The two basketballs floating in vitrines, I insist, are testicles, connoting everything from castration to Black sexual prowess. The bunny rabbit, which most people say is his masterpiece, is clearly Brer Rabbit." Jafa went on in this vein for quite a while before returning to Duchamp.

In 1999, Jafa decided to quit the film world. He wasn't getting any closer to directing his own films, and it seemed to him that the art world offered more opportunities to realize the ideas swarming in his head. He'd been interested in art since his second year at Howard, when one of his architecture teachers sent the class to see I. M. Pei's new East Building, at the National Gallery of Art. "There was an exhibition of Mark Rothko, eight brownish paintings that all looked the same to my untrained eye, and they infuriated me," Jafa recalled. "I told the instructor it was bullshit. I was irate. I went back to that show ten times, kept going back, couldn't get it out of my mind. I was obsessed. He's still my favorite painter."

"He is one of the non-musicians I would put in the company of John Coltrane and Miles Davis," he said. "There were occasionally white people at our family reunions, in-laws and white friends of my parents. Duchamp is one of the people we will always reserve a seat for."

Twenty years later, when Jafa decided to do "this art thing," success came almost immediately. A group of his short videos appeared in the 2000 Whitney Biennial-one of the curators, Valerie Cassel Oliver, described them in ARTnews as "very subtle, very poetic." Jafa's "Tree" was included in the Whitney's "BitStreams" exhibition a year later; it's an eight-minute video of a blurry, constantly moving tree that looks like it's escaped from a Monet painting and gone off on its own. Other art works by Jafa appeared in group shows in this country and abroad: a metal bench he had found on a visit to Bamako, Mali; a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, resting on a frame that gave it the appearance of floating; a video of a man in a yellow jacket lying on a sidewalk with people walking past. By 2005, though, the overbearing whiteness of the art world had driven him back to filmmaking. "I was invited to parties where I was the only Black person," he recalled. "It just didn't feel right, so I walked away from the art world."

In 2002, at a New Year's Eve party in New York, he met Suné Woods, a young woman on her way to becoming an artist. "It was almost like a force turned me around, and I said to Greg Tate, 'Hey, man, who is that? I'm going to marry her.' " Woods and Jafa never married, but in 2004 they had a son, Ayler. "Then we just fell apart," Jafa said. "Suné said she was going to graduate school in San Francisco and taking Ayler with her, and that was terrifying to me, because I'd had the same experience when I split up with Julie." Jafa commuted between New York and San Francisco for two years, before moving to Los Angeles in 2010. He wanted to be closer to Ayler, and also to N'Zinga, who was living with her mother in L.A. Dash had built an impressive reputation as a director of film biographies (she's currently doing one on Angela Davis), and she and Jafa had never been out of touch. ("We're still best friends," Dash told me recently. Their first grandchild, Adrian Julian Arana, born to N'Zinga in 2017, brought them even closer.) When Jafa moved to Los Angeles, his self-confidence was at a low ebb. The film industry seemed less and less interested in hiring him. He was approaching fifty, and he felt as though he hadn't achieved any of his goals. His friends were worried. "He was like a falling star," John Akomfrah said. "He'd always been a figure of such promise. All of us expected something great to happen, and as the years went by some people were thinking maybe it wasn't going to come."

In 2011, he hit rock bottom. Depressed and suicidal, he went to stay with his parents, in Atlanta. ("You can always come home," they had told their children.) After the breakup with Dash, Jafa had dealt with his depression by going into therapy. This time, the film world intervened. Sitting in his parents' living room, wondering what to do with his broken life, he got a telephone call from Paul Garnes, a Hollywood producer who worked with the showrunner Salim Akil. "Paul said I was like a mythical beast, because everybody out there had heard of me but nobody knew me," Jafa told me. He had called to see if Jafa was available to shoot the pilot for a new TV series, a comedy-drama like "Entourage," about Black people, that Akil was directing. "Available? I was broke and out of work. The producers must have liked the pilot, because they asked me to shoot the series-for a shitful of money. I thought, Well, maybe just grow the fuck up and take the money."

Jafa used the forty-five thousand dollars he'd been paid for the pilot to buy a new Prius and to rent a small apartment in L.A. The series wasn't picked up, though, and he had to find something to do right away-he was determined not to sink back into despair. Kahlil Joseph, a filmmaker and a close friend, called to say that ZDF, a German public-television network, had commissioned him to make a documentary about the March on Washington, whose fiftieth anniversary was coming up in 2013. Joseph had scheduling conflicts. Would Jafa be interested in directing it? Jafa said he would-and he had ideas about how. "I wasn't interested in looking back," Jafa told me. "I was interested in where Black people are now. I wrote a really insane, crazy treatment that had very little to do with the March on Washington, and they gave me the money and I went off and did it. And that was the beginning of the work I'm doing now."

Jafa's film, called "Dreams Are Colder Than Death," is a fifty-two-minute collage of brief and not so brief interviews with African-American artists, writers, filmmakers, academics, and friends, alternating or coinciding with images of houses and back yards, waves breaking over rocks, Civil War photographs, extreme closeups of eyes, mouths, and faces, photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin. The speakers pull no punches, and what comes through is an orchestrated assault of incendiary thinking about racism. There were financial disagreements with a producer, and "Dreams" wasn't televised in the U.S. But it was shown in 2014 at the BlackStar Film Festival, in Philadelphia, and at the New York Film Festival. By then, Jafa had started working on a project that he called " APEX."

Close to eight hundred separate images flash by in " APEX" 's eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, against a pounding techno beat: a man's deeply scarred back, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, the fiery surface of the sun, a cartoon shark, lynchings, Sojourner Truth, Aretha Franklin, a cross-legged monk on fire, movie stills of white actors in blackface, Black people being fire-hosed, a 1920 Harlem street parade beneath a sign that reads "The New Negro Has No Fear." Jafa worked on " Apex " for four years, off and on, without knowing what it was. "I didn't understand it as a film, or as art," he told me. "I assumed it was an internal document that I showed to my friends."

Early in 2016, working again as a cinematographer and staying in a New York hotel room between jobs, Jafa put together the basic elements of "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death." There was no concept and no script. "It was a response to the influx of footage of Black people being assaulted, which I had just been throwing in a file." A week later, he heard Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam" performed on "Saturday Night Live" and decided to use it as the soundtrack-without notifying West or getting permission. (West's reaction, when he and Jafa met, in 2020, was to say that Jafa's film had brought him "back to life," and to hire him to direct a music video for the song "Wash Us in the Blood.") Jafa showed an early version of "Love Is the Message" to Greg Tate, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, the cinematographer Bradford Young, and other friends. Tate said, "There's something about the construction of it, the flow and the velocity, that's very much the way young people experience the Internet. It resonates with this generation's hip-hop culture."

Jafa wanted to post the film on YouTube, but Kahlil Joseph urged him not to give it away. Joseph screened it several times on film nights at the Underground Museum, in Los Angeles, as an unannounced opener for the main feature. Soon afterward, in June, Joseph showed it to a small, private audience in Switzerland during Art Basel, the international art fair. Gavin Brown, a British-born artist who had become a New York art dealer, and who had a long history of finding and nurturing new talent, saw it there. "I remember being stuck to my chair, eyes wide, trying to keep up with it, and then as it ended I felt the air being expelled from my body," he said.

Brown had never heard of Jafa. When he got back to New York, he tracked down a number and called him. Jafa was in Los Angeles, driving Ayler to school. Brown started to introduce himself, but Jafa broke in and said, "I know who you are. I'm coming to New York next week-we should meet." They met at Brown's gallery in Harlem, and walked to Maison Harlem for a four-hour lunch. "It was like being in a storm," Brown recalled. "Toward the end, he said, 'What are we doing here? Why are we meeting?' I told him I would love to show his film. He said, 'Nah, I don't want that,' but then we talked some more, and he asked, 'When would you want to do this?' I said, 'In a couple of weeks.' He said that was crazy, and then he left, and the next day we talked and he said, 'Let's do it.' "

"Love Is the Message" opened at Gavin Brown's gallery on November 12th, four days after Donald Trump was elected President. "Everybody was stunned by what had happened to this country, or by what this country really is," Brown said. Projected onto a large wall in an empty, darkened gallery, the images of "Love Is the Message" were larger than life, and the sound was enveloping. Several viewers wept openly. Jafa hadn't expected this response, and, later, when he kept hearing about the film making people cry, he felt uneasy. "Why are tears the metric of having a critical or productive engagement with it?" he wondered. "I don't know if I completely understand." That his success had come in the art world, which he'd given up on more than a decade earlier, made it even more unexpected. The art world had changed since 2005, and many more Black artists were being shown-Jafa among them. The Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, had exhibited sixty-three of Jafa's three-ring binders in its 2016 "Made in L.A." show.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the director of London's Serpentine Galleries, saw the Hammer show and gave Jafa a large solo exhibition in 2017; it was a retrospective, although many of the works in it were new. In June, " Apex" made a sensational début at Art Basel. Jafa had his second show at Gavin Brown's gallery a year later. It occupied three floors, and included a sculpture of two eight-foot-high truck tires wrapped in heavy chains; a mural-size montage of the eight hundred images he had used to make " Apex "; and a new, two-hour-long film called "akingdoncomethas," which was devoted largely to footage of preachers and gospel singers. When asked by a young woman in a lecture audience whether he had now chosen the art world over the film world, Jafa laughed and said, "I didn't choose the art world, the art world chose me. I thought I was done with it."

Jafa's next film, "The White Album," won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 2019 Venice Biennale. As a political document, it overpowers "Love Is the Message." A fat, middle-aged white man delivers an anguished mea culpa on white supremacy: "We're scared of Black vengeance. We're scared shitless, and we always have been. Since Day One, we've put our hands on Black people, grabbed 'em, snatched 'em up, put 'em on a boat, and made 'em our own friggin' personal slaves and assistants for no pay. We did all that. You're goddam right we're scared. . . . So we got a lot of fuckin' fear, man." A blond Valley Girl type, echoing Trump, tells us that she is "the farthest person from being racist," and complains that "white people have the hardest time nowadays because we try so hard. . . . Have some respect for white people, O.K.?" Nearly all the speakers are white. At one point, we're airborne, watching bombs explode on the ground and people flee machine-gun fire from a helicopter. In another sequence, a handcuffed white man sits on a curb yelling "Niggah, niggah, niggah" and "Fuck you" at an impassive Black policewoman. The film, to which Jafa keeps adding, also offers brief glimpses of Gavin Brown and other white people Jafa loves and respects. "Like many of my best ideas, 'The White Album' started as a joke," he said. "Echoing the Beatles' title was super-intentional. But a very thoughtful friend of mine said, 'Man, this is something huge. White folks are going to love it.' "

The horrifying death of George Floyd, in May, has had lasting repercussions. "I was tremendously moved the first time I saw images of the protest marches in Paris and London and other places," Jafa said recently. "I was moved, but I was also very reticent to unblock my heart. We've been living with this for so long." A week later, his thinking had shifted: "This is such a complex moment. I don't know if we've had a moment like this, where we have a pandemic and on top of that an insurrection. George Floyd's murder is as close to a straight-up lynching as anybody has seen. So many of my friends have parsed and dissected over and over why this particular instance of something that Black people have been complaining about from time immemorial-what is it about this instance that triggered people? One of the things I've heard, and that I think is true, is the unflinching nature of George Floyd and the cop looking at the camera. It's that rare instance of white America looking into a mirror and being frightened by what it sees staring back. Cornel West says there are certain things that Black people cannot not know in America. We know these things, even though they are fearsome, horrible things. And I've hardened my heart, because I don't want to be debilitated by the lack of empathy for Black people. But I think maybe people are starting to realize that the way we have been treated for the last couple of hundred years doesn't just diminish the collective lives of Black people-it diminishes the living force of everybody. I think they are starting to get that."

There is no longer a separation in Jafa's work between filmmaking and art. A large Jafa retrospective is scheduled to open in January at the Louisiana Museum, in Denmark. Many of his recent films will be on view, and the show has given him the chance to fabricate new works that he's been thinking about for years. A film made with computer technology alone (no camera was used) conjures up what looks like black, turbulent water endlessly plunging and crashing in on itself. A series of long, wall-mounted sculptures that resemble railroad tracks, in varying lengths, relate to something Jafa talked about with David Bowie thirty years ago: "The idea of taking things that don't have any value, that are detritus, and making something magnificent of them. They feel like found objects, readymades, but they are imagined and generated."

Jafa also has several full-length films in development. In 2014, he and two friends, the cinematographer Malik Sayeed and the curator Elissa Blount Moorhead, joined forces in a film production company called TNEG, but it never quite got off the ground. "I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Walt Disney or Mickey Mouse," Jafa joked. The attention paid to "Love Is the Message" wasn't lost on potential backers, though, and early in 2020 Jafa, Gavin Brown, the Hollywood producer Melinda Nugent, whom Jafa has known for twenty-five years, and the Swiss collector and entrepreneur Maja Hoffmann started a company called SunHaus to support Jafa's projects and also to develop film work by other artists. "Our funding is coming from the art world, and we're confident that we will be able to control the process," Nugent told me. An investor has pledged enough money to keep them running for three years.

Jafa had planned to start work this past spring on "Cudhial," a narrative film, set in the Mississippi Delta, about a love affair between a seventeen-year-old high-school student and his teacher. (The pandemic intervened; he will try again next spring.) This is the kind of film that Haile Gerima has always wanted Jafa to make: personal, relational, and deeply felt. "Daughters of the Dust" had been a "promissory note" for both Jafa and Dash, according to Gerima-a preview of the storytelling talent they shared in such abundance. Jafa read the "Cudhial" script to Gerima thirty years ago, on the phone; it took hours. "The first script was lost," Jafa said. "I moved so many times over the years." He is rewriting it, with help from Boston. "A lot of my feelings about Julie Dash are bound up in 'Cudhial,' " he said. "She was the most beautiful, the most sophisticated . . ." His voice trailed off. "She taught me so many things."

"Cudhial" (pronounced "Cu-jul") is a word Jafa made up. He does this now and then, if the language seems to need it. "I used to have a tight grasp of what 'Cudhial' meant, but now it's just a feeling, a kind of nostalgia-not longing for a moment as much as ambivalence about a moment," he said. "I think it's about my personal notion of Black being. It's like saying, 'That painful experience I went through made me who I am. I wouldn't want to relive it, but I constantly return to it, and I luxuriate in it in a certain way. But the parts that were amazing, the parts that were pleasurable, are strictly bound up with the parts that were painful.' "

In a remark that was widely misunderstood, Jafa once said that he wasn't addressing white people in his work. "I never said I don't care what white people think about it," he told me. "I'm super-pleased when white people like my work, or are interested in it, or provoked by it. But I'm talking to Black people, not to everybody. I'm certainly not trying to talk to white people, and I don't think it serves white people to be spoken to. It makes them feel like they're the center of the universe, in a way that is profoundly problematic. In Eric Clapton's 'Layla,' which I think is the greatest hard-rock love song ever, he's not singing to everybody. He's singing to Pattie Boyd. He fell in love with his best friend's wife, and he's singing to her. And everybody else is listening in." ♦

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The filmmaker left an art world he found too white; years later, he made a triumphant return with "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death." The most spellbinding art work of the past decade is a seven-and-a-half-minute film called "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death," by the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

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In Week 9, we looked at Afro-surrealism and how Black artists use weird, dream-like visuals to show how confusing and unfair life can be in a racist society. The article From Beyoncé to Sorry to Bother You talks about how movies, shows, and music videos use this style—like Get Out, Atlanta, and Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. These pieces mix beauty and pain to say something real about what it’s like to be Black. I chose this article because it explains how Afro-surrealism isn’t just about being artistic—it’s a response to the world Black people are forced to live in.

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There he was, dangling into the void. Sinking, arms outstretched, helplessly clawing at the air. Jordan Peele's satirical horror Get Out introduced us to the " sunken place", a purgatory where Daniel Kaluuya's character is trapped by body-snatching white liberals. As otherworldly as the Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, it was the scene that planted Afro-surrealism firmly in the mainstream.

It also symbolised the revival of a genre in which strangeness and blackness not only co-exist but are impossible to separate. In recent years we've had Atlanta, a show its creator Donald Glover proudly called a "black Twin Peaks", and a host of film-makers including Kahlil Joseph, Arthur Jafa and Jenn Nkiru, who have given a hallucinatory edge to the music of Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington and Beyoncé. Joseph's video to Flying Lotus's Until the Quiet Comes reimagines Watts in Los Angeles as a phantasmagoric playground where a murdered black man's body dances, bullet-ridden and bloodied, through the projects. Jafa's video installation Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is a collage of images; athletes and artists from LeBron James to Drake are interspersed with footage of police beating black people and civil-rights unrest, while a huge psychedelic sun burns in the background - coming in and out of the mix like a harbinger of impeding doom.

Earlier this year in the United States, writer and director Terence Nance's sketch show Random Acts of Flyness sent up police violence, white saviour syndrome and everyday racism in a style described by the New York Times as " kaleidoscopic, nearly unclassifiable". And this week sees the UK release of Boots Riley's satire Sorry to Bother You, which uses surrealism to comment on race, sexuality and capitalism.

So why is the Afro-surrealist revival happening now? And is escaping into the strange and fantastical simply a natural response to living in a world bound by structural racism?

According to Terri Francis, director of the Black Film Center/Archive at the University of Indiana, it's no wonder our pop cultural landscape is turning Afro-surreal at a time when society is wrestling with racial violence, bias and inequality. "I think their work is very realistic in representing the absurdity of black life," says Francis. "[In America] the ideals are there and you're aware of what should be going on ... but that's not the reality."

This is far from the first time black artists have turned to the weird and dreamlike to explain and examine their circumstances. "We've forgotten the history of surrealism," says Francis. "Initially, it included African and African-Caribbean artists; André Breton was very close to Aimé Césaire. Their sense of surrealism was not segregated. A lot of that work that we celebrate as being surrealist is drawing its inspiration from African art and African American music."

Culture for Senegal ... Léopold Sédar Senghor. Photograph: Peter Johns/The Guardian

Césaire, a poet from Martinique, was part of the Négritude movement in 1930s France, a collective of African artists from former French colonies who created a new vision of modern Africa from French culture, pan-African thinking and surrealism. Emerging a decade after the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude produced perhaps the most remarkable early Afro-surrealist: Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and socialist who would become the country's first president in 1960. He believed art could power his country's economy in a postcolonial world; at one point his government was pumping 25% of the state's budget into its ministry of culture.

At the same time, American writer Henry Dumas was producing work that would see him dubbed an "Afro-surreal expressionist" by the US intellectual Amiri Baraka, who first coined the term. Dumas was born in Arkansas in 1934. After a stint in the US air force, he began a writing career that would marry the bizarre with ideas of black identity and power. In short stories, poetry and more experimental projects (Dumas created accompaniments to the work of the Afro-futurist figurehead and jazz musician Sun Ra), Dumas used surrealism to question the social strife of African Americans and the negligent attitude of the white ruling class. "When a Negro boy is shot and killed by policemen who do not check the situation before pulling their guns, the people get angry. It is a simple law of nature," he wrote in his short story Riot or Revolt. In a tragic, ironic twist, Dumas was shot and killed by a transit cop in a New York City subway station in 1968.

Baraka wrote that Dumas's work was made up of magical "morality tales" that were "constructed in weirdness". Some of his work, such as the story of a group of right-on white jazz fans who demand entry to a black jazz club but die because their bodies can't physically handle the potency of the music, could easily have come from the mind of Riley or Nance today. So is that same frustration with everyday racism the reason a new generation of black film-makers and artists reaching for the surreal again? For Francis, the only way to explain the reality of life for black people in America is through the extraordinary.

Extra real ... Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You Photograph: Annapurna Pictures

"I've always thought about Afro-surrealism as something that is not wild and crazy," she says. "It's like Random Acts of Flyness or Sorry To Bother You, they're extra real. They are about moments and what is going on in the now, and it's that revelation about a once hidden or lesser known reality that makes the work have that impact."

In Random Acts of Flyness, Nance creates vignettes that examine the absurdity of race relations in America. In one sketch, he hires a white friend who appears to vouch for him whenever he's stopped by a police officer. Another, White Angel, focuses on a narcissistic director who uses a friend's adopted Malawian child as a muse for a grotesque white saviour film, playing with ideas of Hollywood's self-satisfaction, exploitation of black suffering and virtue signalling.

In Atlanta's second season, the episode Woods sees the rapper Paper Boi flee into a forest after being mugged. There, time and reality shifts as he's chased by a mystical junkie who taunts him for not making more of his life. Just as David Lynch's warped vision of smalltown America revealed the darkness that lingered underneath, the Afro-surreal cohort are expressing the sheer bizarreness of having to cope with a racist society.

Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man - along with Toni Morrison's Beloved - is arguably the most famous Afro-surrealist work of literature, dug the fantastical foundations for Man Booker prize winner Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Colston Whitehead's Pulitzer triumph The Underground Railroad. Ellison told an interviewer he "was just being true to reality". Today's artists are sometimes loth to embrace the surrealist tag fully as well. "We certainly don't approach episodes and say, 'Hey guys, let's make sure this script is surreal!'" explains Stefani Robinson, one of the lead writers on Atlanta. "We're a very specific group of individuals who are probably more drawn to the unusual, the strange, and the otherworldly. It's just personal taste, not a verbalised mandate."

Drawn to the unusual ... Donald Glover in Atlanta. Photograph: 2018 FX Productions

Similarly, Kevin Jerome Everson - the experimental artist whose films about working-class black life point at what Francis calls "the blues at the core of Afro-surrealism" - is conscious of his work being completely misread by the art world's predominantly white gatekeepers. He was weary of certain institutions that wanted to screen his film Tonsler Park, which captures life inside a voting station in Charlottesville, Virginia during the 2016 US election. "They wanted to show it during the election and they said it was anti-Trump," he explains. "It didn't have anything to do with that. The white ruling class thinks because there are black people in it, they can only see us as a political entity. You are still in the service society, so you're still serving them. I'm not down with that."

Francis believes one of the core tenets of Afro-surrealism is its introspective nature, where metaphors like the sunken place are used to explore painful truths. "The journey of Afro-surrealism is inward," says Francis. "It's about imagining how your interior world works and staying in that place to reckon with your everyday." In that sense you can include the work of Michaela Coel's Chewing Gum and Issa Rae's Insecure, which both delve into the rarely explored (in mainstream culture, anyway) interior world of black women.

Everson believes younger artists see the liberating potential of the genre. "I think everyone was used to seeing things as 'real' in African American culture," he says. "Once people looked back at Funkadelic they realised, 'Oh wow, people used their imagination.'" George Clinton's group would descend on stage from the P-Funk Mothership, a 1,200-pound aluminum stage prop that fit in with the group's intergalactic self-mythologising, developed after Clinton and bass player Bootsy Collins claimed to have encountered a UFO. "Black people have always used their imagination," adds Everson. "And I think the young people freaked out because in popular culture there seemed to be no avenue to use their imagination."

The Parliament-Funkadelic mothership lands in Los Angeles, 1977. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

Now, surrealism is spreading. The New Negress Film Society is a collective of film-makers, including Ja'Tovia Gary, who use dreamlike elements, and which supports black female directors and artists. Young directors from the African diaspora including Adoma Owusu, Cecile Emeke, Chinonye Chukwu and Frances Bodomo (who directed four episodes of Random Acts of Flyness) have all experimented with the surreal in their films. In June, Jenn Nkiru worked on the Afro-surreal video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Apeshit, which cut between images of staid old masters in the Louvre and black America's biggest power couple. As an art form, Afro-surrealism has taken root.

"Just about any black person is an Afro-surrealist because you have to be able to imagine something more than what is right in front of you," explains Francis. "You need to have that sixth sense to be able to understand white people and where you're safe. You also have to imagine another world beyond this one, where you are just a normal person living your life."

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From Beyoncé to Sorry to Bother You: the new age of Afro-surrealism

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From psychedelic sketch shows to far-out satire, black artists are expressing the absurdity of life in a racist society by embracing the disturbing and bizarre

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For Week 9, we looked at the topic of Afrofuturism. The article I picked was “Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present” from UCLA Magazine. I chose this article because it explains how Afrofuturism is about imagining better futures for Black people through music, film, writing, and technology. It highlights creators like Octavia Butler, Kamasi Washington, and Sun Ra, and shows how their work blends African culture, sci-fi, and activism. The article stood out to me because it connected Afrofuturism to real-world struggles and how artists use it to talk about freedom, identity, and what a just future could look like.

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"Little did we know at the beginning of this term that Afrofuturism would become now, as we've been forced to adapt to new uses of technology - not just to complete the school term, but just to go about our daily lives."

- Tananarive Due, lecturer on Afrofuturism in UCLA's Department of African American Studies, speaking at the department's virtual commencement on June 12

Professor Due continued by paraphrasing Angela Davis, one of UCLA's most famous faculty members: "In order to work toward a better future, we need to believe that future is possible." For many, Afrofuturism is exploring those possibilities.
An Array of Expanding Definitions
What is Afrofuturism? It's the story of musicians, artists, writers, philosophers, fashion icons, filmmakers, costume and set designers, actors, activists and academics who have believed in a better future for Black people - and for all people.

Afrofuturism, more concretely, can be understood as a wide-ranging social, political and artistic movement that dares to imagine a world where African-descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in the creation of that world.

Witness the sci-fi novels of one-time UCLA Extension student Octavia E. Butler. The saxophone epics spawned by former UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music student Kamasi Washington. Marvel's blockbuster Black Panther and the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, executive-produced and co-directed, respectively, by Bruins. Or Jay-Z and Beyonce's "Family Feud" music video, set in 2444 and directed by UCLA's own Ava DuVernay.

These are all examples of Afrofuturism, a term coined in the 1990s to describe a decadeslong cultural wave that's now being recognized as a powerful creative force. Not only are these captivating, provocative works being brought forth by Bruin creators, but an entire body of UCLA scholarship also offers perspective on and gives shape to this multidisciplinary movement.

Many of its aesthetic tropes - a rich color palette, African iconography and a fascination with technoculture - were laid down by cosmic philosopher and jazz giant Sun Ra, starting in the 1950s. According to Shana Redmond, professor of musicology and global jazz studies in the School of Music and professor of African American studies, the Afrofuturist movement is evidence that Black music has often operated as protest strategy as well as a portal for developing ideas about new futures for African-descended peoples. Today, during a health pandemic that has disproportionately impacted Black communities, combined with a renewed focus on systemic racial injustice, Afrofuturism's power to imagine a more just society is increasingly relevant.

"Being in Los Angeles offers unique possibilities for the theorizing and practice of Afrofuturism, because there's such incredible talent in this space and people are constantly colliding through formal institutions such as UCLA," she says. "The creative magnetism of Los Angeles is naturally going to feed into all of the rivulets of a formation that might be called Afrofuturism."
Sheer Boldness
Dalena Hunter

One of the movement's inspirational figures is Octavia E. Butler, an Afrofuturist writer and thinker long before critic Mark Dery coined the term in his 1993 essay "Black to the Future."

Butler was born in Pasadena in 1947. A self-described hermit, she would venture to the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library in pursuit of her passion for storytelling. At the library, she wrote her first book, Patternmaster, published in 1976.

In 2019, the Central Library opened the Octavia Lab, a do-it-yourself studio space named in Butler's honor. This past summer, the Octavia Lab used 3D printers - the kind of technology that Afrofuturism celebrates - to produce personal protective equipment for health care workers.

Against the odds, Butler blazed a trail through the white male-dominated world of science fiction. She told the New York Times in a 2000 interview: "When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. ... I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."

One of her fans is Dalena Hunter, a librarian and archivist for Los Angeles Communities and Cultures at UCLA Library's Special Collections. In 2018, Hunter and Kelly Besser, archivist for UCLA Library's Special Collections, participated in a San Diego Comic-Con panel called "Beyond Wakanda: Intersectional Afrofuturism." Hunter says, "With Afrofuturism, the point is to challenge what it means for Black people to be free on our own terms. Liberation is a very important part of the genre."

Besser notes that the Octavia E. Butler Collection - the most-requested papers at the Huntington Library in 2019 - offers an intensely personal window into Butler's writing life. "When she was struggling to become who she became, she created these large posters that had inspirational themes on them: 'Act Courageous. Act Confident. Act Quietly Intelligent.' And 'Take the offensive against your fears ... conquer them by sheer boldness,'" Besser says. "It has a real goosebumps effect."

When Besser taught Butler's 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, to high school students in South L.A., the teenagers saw parallels with the 1965 Watts riots and 1992 L.A. riots. "The kids responded to the idea of shaping the future. There were people [in the novel] - of all races, genders and sexual orientations - struggling to survive. It looked like L.A. to my students."

Amazon Studios is adapting Butler's books Dawn and Wild Seed for TV, the former in partnership with DuVernay's ARRAY Filmworks. Another indication we're living in an Afrofuturist present? Parable of the Sower takes place in a fictional Los Angeles, set in the 2020s, that's dominated by corporate greed, wealth inequality and ecological disaster - themes that are all too familiar today.
A World of Sci-fi Black Champions
Music, too, is a critical element of the landscape. Dexter Story M.A. '19 is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer and producer who grew up in the View Park section of L.A., bordering Inglewood. He has produced and music-directed several concerts for downtown L.A.'s Grand Performances summer series - "Mothership Landing: Funk and the Afrofuturist Universe of '77" in July 2017, among them. A Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow working toward his ethnomusicology Ph.D. at UCLA, he tells the story of Afrofuturism from the perspective of a musician, an academic and a fan.

"I entered the world of Afrofuturism through comic books, the Black Panther - when T'Challa meets the Fantastic Four," he says. "My start was in art. My mom was very encouraging of music but thought I should be involved more in fine art. What pulled me into Afrofuturist music were the [album] covers of Parliament-Funkadelic.

Story was hooked on the funk collective's two bands throughout the '70s. "Concurrent with me going into this Afrofuturist world with [Parliament-Funkadelic members] Bootsy [Collins], Bernie [Worrell] and [George] Clinton, I also had the artwork on the vinyl that spoke to sci-fi movies and soundtracks."

When Story saw Parliament-Funkadelic band leader George Clinton and the Mothership on stage in 1979, he realized "it wasn't just that it was symbolic of Afrofuturism - [Clinton] dared to go there and turn his narrative into an embodied experience for people - a spaceship that flies over my head and blows pyrotechnics, then he exits, and I'm transported to a world of sci-fi Black champions. So it's that, too - it's daring to create one's relationship to this present and push the boundaries of what's possible."
Top Brass
Saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington embodies Afrofuturism's potential in the current moment, without being defined by it. He credits his time as an ethnomusicology student at the School of Music, from 1999 to 2004, with widening his worldview. He says he relates to the science-fiction and surrealist aspects of the Afrofuturist movement.

"I've always had that storyteller imagination, and I would drift off into my own little world," he says. "Even before I knew the term Afrofuturism, once I found out there's a whole movement of people that are like that, it was like, 'Oh, cool!'

"It shaped who I am, musically and aesthetically, how I think and how I exist." To Washington, "Afrofuturism is the creative expression of the wonder and marvel of what the future may hold."

Washington's music comes out of the jazz tradition but is constantly seeking to go beyond. Washington, saxophone player and producer Terrace Martin, producer 9th Wonder, and piano and keyboard virtuoso Robert Glasper make up the recently formed supergroup Dinner Party (their eponymous album was released in July). The group's animated music video for "Sleepless Nights" is decidedly Afrofuturistic. Washington is also working on a graphic novel that draws from this aesthetic.

For Washington, music works as protest because it profoundly impacts the mind of the listener.

"Sound is the one sense that we can't turn off," he says. "[Music] is a great tool for creating empathy and for learning. Ultimately, the world is what the people who live in it make it. As we shape the minds of the people that live in the world, we help shape what that world will be at the same time."

Reflecting on the current social justice movement, Washington says: "The most powerful thing I've seen is the notion that everyone needs to help push this rock up the hill. This global system that we're all in is not meant for equality. If we're going to keep the same system, then that just means we're going to put somebody else in a state of inequality. That means we have to change systems."
Black Panther, Green Light
Nate Moore '00 had his own Afrofuturist awakening in the early '90s through Marvel's Black Panther comics, not knowing that one day he would be a steward of the billion-dollar Marvel film franchise. "I was a fan of the comic Black Panther: World of Wakanda through the years - the character's introduction by Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four, then Don McGregor embraced African culture and tech and combined the two," says Moore, who executive produced the 2018 hit film. "There were the possibilities for an Afrofuturistic aesthetic with these characters." Chief among them was King T'Challa, gracefully portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman, who died Aug. 28 after a four-year battle with colon cancer.

Moore says Black Panther 's production designer, Hannah Beachler, and costume designer, Ruth E. Carter, worked in concert - inspired by Afrofuturism - to fully realize Wakanda on the big screen.

"Hannah put together a Wakanda bible that would pull from the technological cutting edge and from various cultures in Africa," he says. "It was a love letter to as many cultures as we could include, without breaking the reality of the world or crossing over into appropriation. Hannah focused on: What does the future look like? How do you steep that in Afrofuturism?"

Moore adds: "How Black Panther embraces Afrofuturism is why we wanted to make the movie in the first place. Without Octavia Butler and others laying the groundwork, it would have been harder to pull off. We owe them."

Following the movie's breakout success, Moore has started to process what Black Panther 's legacy could mean. "Unfortunately, in America especially, visions of Africa are always of people in need of saving," he says. "Saviors can come from Africa. That seemed revolutionary."
A Future Without Limits
So what's next? Or rather, what's now?

Story believes the coronavirus and current racial tensions - related to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery - are accelerating our collective journey into Afrofuturism: "[Video gaming platform] Twitch is the new home of Afrofuturism, if you follow people like [hip-hop DJ collective] the Beat Junkies, activist Tanya DePass, BlackGirlGamers and The Roots. The pandemic has dropped us into a wormhole of the cyberculture."

Hunter looks to the Afrofuturist movies that younger Black people are being exposed to, such as Spider-Verse, which was co-directed by former UCLA fine arts student Peter Ramsey. "I appreciated how they incorporated [Miles Morales'] African American heritage into his identity as Spider-Man," she says. "He's not trying to fit in, but finding his place in this new school and flourishing. You get to watch him mature."

And Redmond is optimistic for what's next. "There's been a whole recentering of the scholastic enterprise of Afrofuturism through the route of fiction and of music making," she says. "We understand how much value we [as African-descended peoples] hold as a creative force in the world. If we can begin to take that seriously and train toward something different, then the alternative world will follow."

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Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present

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"Little did we know at the beginning of this term that Afrofuturism would become now, as we've been forced to adapt to new uses of technology - not just to complete the school term, but just to go about our daily lives."