Black organizing & Black liberation in the spirit of Sterling A. Brown

BYP100 activists pose after a Confederate statue is toppled in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo by Rodney Dunning)

In his seminal work, Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehesi Coates writes,

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”

In the context of this project, the work of Sterling A. Brown — and of all the artists featured on this site — is embedded in legacies of Black resistance to oppression. They created: out of nothing; out of scraps of cardboard; out of prison-shop leather, out of a willingness to stare into the sun of their own terror: Black joy, Black beauty, Black truth, and a spiritual engine for the journey to Black liberation.

Art without action is decoration; to take aesthetic pleasure from the work of these artists without continuing the struggle they dedicated themselves to, as Ta-Nehesi Coates makes plain, is to dishonor their work.

For this reason, we ask you to donate your time and money to the grassroots organizations fighting for Black lives today: