A Monument to Blackness: Murals and Black Liberation, from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter Hannah Jeffery 9780820375229

A Monument to Blackness offers an in-depth excavation of 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. Focusing on works from 1930 to the present day, Hannah E. Jeffery illuminates the elusive connection between Black politics, public art, memory, and space to reveal how murals created unprecedented interactive sites of Black imagination and empowerment within Black communities. 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 excavates 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.

Jeffery calls on original artist testimony, extensive archival research, and the fi elds of Black, visual, and American studies to underscore how walls in racially isolated Black communities became inspirational, imaginative, and subversive spaces for residents to protest against social, racial, and political oppression; contest geographical confinement; celebrate Blackness; and commemorate a Black history. Not only does A Monument to Blackness help deepen our understanding of the movement for Black liberation by uncovering an overlooked expression of Black community art, but it arrives at a moment in America's history when understanding the deeper roots of this powerful mural movement will help contextualize the current wave of murals sweeping across the nation in this age of Black Lives Matter.

HANNAH E. JEFFERY is a senior researcher at a social policy research institute in Glasgow, Scotland. She recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She has been the recipient of a Baird Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, and she recently won a BA/Leverhulme Small Grants award to create a digital archive to preserve Black Lives Matter murals around the world, titled Say Their Names: The Murals of Black Lives Matter. She also contributed to an exhibition of Frederick Douglass murals on display at the Boston Museum of African American History titled, Picturing Frederick Douglass: The Most Photographed American of the 19th Century.

A Monument to Blackness is a monument dedicated to remembering the revolutionary artistry, radical activism, trailblazing histories, transformative stories, and living legacies of the Black mural movement over the centuries. Hannah E. Jeffery's brilliantly researched and beautifully written book does powerful justice to this world-leading movement as a movement dedicated to Black resistance, Black radicalism, Black revolution, and Black liberation in the Black Freedom Movement: past, present, and future.

Hannah E. Jeffery marshals an impressive and expansive range of primary and secondary sources to both back up her arguments on the significance of murals in the ongoing Black liberation movement from the 1920s-30s to the 1960s-70s to today as well as on the artistic significance of African American mural art in general. I laud her scholarship on Black murals of the Harlem Renaissance and of the New Deal era.