I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr.īy Arthur Flowers. Inspired by White’s experiences, Johnson tells the similar story of Harlem journalist Zane Pinchback, whose own eyewitness reports of lynchings are regularly written up in a New York periodical under the byline Incognegro. In 1919, White used his own pale skin to pass for a white and investigate lynchings in the Deep South. Vertigo, $19.99 (978-1401210984).Īs a light-skinned African American growing up in a predominantly dark-skinned neighborhood, Johnson was electrified when he learned about the early exploits of Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, 1931–1955.

“They would rather see white Germans,” says one soldier, “instead of black Americans march in triumph up Fifth Avenue.” White’s appropriately cluttered art has the horrific shock value of EC Comics classics like Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales.īy Mat Johnson. We follow our diverse bunch from enlistment to training to the hell of France, where they fight through inhumane conditions with the utmost valor, and for what? Prejudice and humiliation at every turn. Broadway, paper, $16.95 (9780307464972).īrooks ( World War Z, 2006) makes a U-turn from zombies with this fictionalized account of the famous all-black 369th Infantry. The graphic-novel format Weaver chose for this memoir is fitting and absorbing, with soft pencil images that show her changing perceptions of race and visual evidence of the violence that her father was not permitted to record.īy Max Brooks. Perry County, Alabama, was a hotbed of segregationist strength into the early 1960s, and after Weaver’s Argentine family settled there, her father took his camera to the street and captured scenes from protest marches. For Adults: Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and Whiteīy Lila Quintero Weaver. Need to refresh your Black History Month offerings? Here are some graphic novels, both fiction and nonfiction, that address Black History in dynamic, engaging ways.

Incognegro by Mat Johnson