When Making Art Means Leaving the United States

The art form that black Americans have relied upon for generations is no longer theirs.

most explicitly political, referencing the racial strife of the time. This move on the part of Coltrane and the force of its appeal among young black intellectuals, writers, and artists was less the expression of a whimsical adventure of happenstance or misdirection than the articulation of a very powerful yearning for black expression and dialogue

The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin ability to forgive. It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make

The Black Belt is a crescent-shaped stretch of land from Virginia through to Louisiana and Arkansas, where the head turns into a sickle. Or like the hammerhead of a shark. Because slavery was concentrated in the Black Belt—it was good land for growing cotton—the name acquired a double meaning. It grew to refer to the counties of the South with majo

Miami’s proximity to Cuba made it an attractive tourist destination for elite European-descended Cubans who also sent their children to be educated in the United States. And over the course of the twentieth century, Overtown’s demographics expanded to include the descendants of freedpeople from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti. In the late ni

saw a world of promise beyond slavery, and they returned to Black communities throughout the United States with just such news, helping to agitate and organize for change.