A Monument to Blackness: Murals and Black Liberation, from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter
Hannah Jeffery
University of Georgia Press
A Monument to Blackness offers an in-depth look at Black murals across the United States, from interior murals in the South to street murals predominantly in the North and West. It shows us how Black murals were—and remain—an integral but commonly overlooked artistic expression in the movement for Black liberation across the country.
Showcasing Black life, Black love, Black Power, and Black history and painting it onto buildings in the streets, muralists creatively transformed walls of isolated Black neighborhoods into spaces of education, ritual, performance, and commemoration. By tracing the genealogy of Black muralism throughout the movement for Black liberation, A Monument to Blackness uncovers how, why, and when murals became catalysts for inspiring community interaction, and it unearths a largely unwritten narrative of Black visual protest in the fight for twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black liberation.