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 fields 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.