The Black Artists Leaving America (Published 2021)

The broken oasis is a motif in the post-emancipation South. Wilmington is but one example. Others include Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. And Little Hayti, not the one in Miami but the long-lost Black town near Durham, named after the first Black republic and birthplace to Vogue’s André Leon Talley. And Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville, Flor

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“When I started out, they didn’t know what to do with me in the US,” he admits. “My music was rooted in rock’n’roll and that wasn’t what was happening with black artists at that time. Everyone was into categories and putting people in boxes. I looked how I looked and I dressed the way I dressed and so they sent me to Europe – the Europeans will dea... See more

For some reason, folks want to act as though Black power started in New York and Oakland, even though the Black Panther logo came from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, and even though Huey Newton was born in Louisiana, and Sundiata Acoli in Texas, and Eldridge Cleaver in Arkansas, and Kathleen Cleaver in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Gi

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After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die her... See more