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Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance
From the Ignatz and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Ben Passmore comes a whirlwind graphic history of Black life, taken by force
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.
It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”
So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.
What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.
224 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
16 people are currently reading
3042 people want to read
About the author
Ben Passmore
20 books159 followersBen lives in Philly. His comics are about crime, monsters, anarchism, sexual dysfunction, police brutality, art theory, and his feels. Author of DAYGLOAYHOLE, Goodbye, and Your Black Friend.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
December 1, 2025
This is an excellent, thought-provoking graphic novel about the ways in which the African American community has been oppressed by police and government agencies, ways they have resisted, and ways the state has struck back. It offers no easy answers, but it also does not romanticize or glamorize violence of any type.
October 26, 2025
The first thing you hear is the city. Sirens braided into helicopter rotors, glass dust sifting down like a second weather system, a chorus of feet against pavement keeping time with a chant that changes every block but means the same thing everywhere. The first thing you see is hesitation, domestic and private: a kitchen light, a spine bent over a phone screen, a window that knows more than it’s willing to tell. The first thing you feel is the old tremor—fear misnamed as prudence, fatigue misnamed as balance—right before the knock. The door opens and history walks in carrying a stack of books like a bundle of flares. Someone who loves you hands you the matches.
That’s the ignition of "Black Arms to Hold You Up": a frame made of family, a demand disguised as a conversation, a lineage pressed into your palms while the streets outside explain, with perfect clarity, why lineage matters. The book is not a survey; it is an ultimatum staged as a comic. It keeps the panels crowded and the sentences honest. It refuses the clean thesis statement in favor of a method: touch the live wire of now; jump back a century to show we’ve always been here; return to the live wire; repeat, until the rhetoric around “exception” and “incident” gets stripped for parts.
You can read it as a chronicle of Black militant resistance. You can read it as an argument about custodianship—who tells the story, who erases the story, who survives the erasure. You can also read it as a father shoving language across the table to a son who would rather scroll, and a son deciding whether he’s willing to inherit something that is not safe to hold. The genius of the book is how it keeps all three readings alive at once.
Form first. The pages swing from tight-framed close-ups—hands loaded, eyes scanning, a jaw set the way a lock sets—to wide, map-like grids where corner names replace chapter titles. The line is elastic, veering from slashing caricature to bruised tenderness without losing fidelity to either. Sound is lettered like weather: the drone of news anchors, the bright scrape of crowd chants, the brutal monosyllables of “Move,” “Don’t,” “Back,” “Down.” Collage enters as counter-caption; clippings and facsimiles hover like official ghosts, and then the drawings contradict them. It’s a pedagogy: the state statement arrives in a box; the next panel proves the box a lie. Repeat until the reader stops being fooled by typography.
The narrative spine is intergenerational. A father, Ronnie, does what school boards and camera crews will not: he hands over a counter-archive and insists on its use. That move is as old as the violence it answers. You can call it kitchen-table pedagogy; you can call it survival. The book calls it love without sedation.
From that frame the time machine kicks. New Orleans, 1900: Robert Charles is harassed by police and refuses the choreography of submission. Shots, panic, a manhunt that metastasizes into organized white terror parading as “order.” The city becomes a theater of punishment; the corpse becomes a press conference; the press becomes the record. The book draws this with claustrophobic heat rather than sepia. No civics-textbook distance. No obedient cardboard villains. Instead, the nauseous tempo of escalation and the notation—crucial to everything that follows—that the state claims both the monopoly on force and the monopoly on narration. This is how a myth is manufactured: do the killing, print the headline, archive the headline as truth.
Jump. Midcentury South: shotgun porches and nighttime patrols that rarely make it into commemorative documentaries. Men and women who have already learned that the polite version of history—the one that loves high noon marches but edits out midnight self-defense—cannot keep a household alive. The book respects their contradictions. It refuses iconography even as it honors courage. It is allergic to sainting. It’s more interested in the choreography of risk: who stood watch, who drove behind the Klan caravan at a legal distance knowing the law was not theirs, who walked a scared neighbor home and did not write about it later because survival does not ask for bylines.
Jump. Los Angeles, 1992: videotape as a mirror with a cracked frame. The jury reads from the script we keep pretending isn’t scripted. The city answers in smoke and logistics. This book insists on the logic of logistics. It draws the milk and water as attentively as it draws the flames, because it understands that a rebellion is partly an organ of care. The image that mainstream memory preserved—men on rooftops with rifles—reappears here without meme-gloss, returned to its context of abandonment: the state preserving property by vacating people, and then returning with an army to preserve the emptied storefronts. The captions on the television say “restore”; the faces on the sidewalk say “survive.”
Jump. Katrina’s waterline. The same city as 1900, the same certainty disguised as emergency management. Abandonment followed by occupation is not a glitch; it’s a workflow. The book resists the urge to romanticize the ad hoc networks that saved lives, but it refuses to diminish them, either. Instead it names them correctly: defense. A neighbor with insulin is more effective than a press conference with a podium. A grandmother moved upstairs is a strategic victory. Armed men on porches are not role-playing antiterrorism; they are negotiating which body makes it to dawn. The comic honors the unphotographed hours: heat, rot, the calculus of whether opening your door is an invitation to help or harm.
Jump. The summer where the streets memorized the names. The posture of police on day one is the same posture on day thirty, dressed in a different excuse: costume-change theatrics between “solidarity” kneels and nightfall batons. The book draws the pivot with contempt and precision. The chant is lettered big; the policy is lettered small and softened with bureaucratic verbs. Defund is rendered without the fortune-cookie; it is a ledger argument. If an institution manufactures harm, stop financing its expansion and fund life. That the demand was contorted into a seminar on tone is part of the book’s grief. That the demand survives the seminar is part of the book’s hope.
Under all of this runs the subject the book refuses to prettify: consequence. Cameras help and cameras mark you. Paper trails keep you safe and paper trails bury you. This is not the allegory of a hero’s journey; it’s the accounting of what the state knows how to do to dissidents and what it has already done. Files have teeth. The past is not past; it’s a stack on a desk with your name in the tab.
So what is the book doing, as a book, besides bearing witness? It is training the eye. It is reminding the reader that captions are a technology of power; that a photo without a counter-caption will serve the nearest uniform; that you can teach someone how to look simply by insisting on what must be placed next to what. In panel language, that insistence is pacing and adjacency. In ethical language, that insistence is responsibility.
Craft notes are not ornamental here, because the craft is the argument. The limited palette—red insisting, black swallowing, white struggling to stay clean—turns the page into a moral diagram without becoming a poster. The satire is not a release valve; it’s a scalpel. Laughter arrives and makes room for the next blow. The page turns are rhetorical, designed to let a joke and a wound share the same edge. Faces are drawn at the angle of disclosure—the moment before someone decides whether to speak or to survive. The lettering carries more than speech; it carries air. I cannot remember the last time word balloons felt so much like lungs under pressure.
What about failure? The book says the word out loud, not as a confession but as a condition. Movements contradict themselves. Leaders become myths and then become men again. The thirst for purity is exposed as a policing instinct with better branding. This refusal to codex-ify struggle into tourist-safe lessons is perhaps the most radical fidelity the comic offers. It says: here are people, not archangels. Here are costs, not metaphors. Here is the only consolation that doesn’t curdle—care as praxis.
If there is a drag in the reading experience, it comes from the virtue that makes the work essential: density. The time machine is merciless; the cuts ask the reader to carry more connective tissue than some will want to carry. A couple of sequences could breathe an extra panel; one or two argumentative leaps come so quickly the less-initiated may miss the seam that holds them. But the book is not trying to pass a bipartisan subcommittee. It is trying to keep a long, endangered memory alive without embalming it. The rigor that can feel like abrasion is also the guarantee that you are not being sold a museum audio guide. The comic wants you awake, not aligned.
The beating heart of the thing remains that kitchen table. The door, the stack of books, the injunction that comes phrased as a dare. The choice to place the public crisis inside a private room—inside a relationship that knows exactly how to wound and exactly how to warn—prevents the book from floating into saintly abstraction. It is hard to lie to a father who has seen what the country does to sons. It is hard to lie to a son who can list the names of friends still awake at 3 a.m., acid beneath their skin, because the sirens do not end at the panel border. The comic understands that conscience rarely arrives in history’s voice; it arrives in a voice we already love.
One of the quietest, sharpest moves in the book is how it defines militancy. There are rifles, yes, and barricaded rooms, and the physics of return fire. But militancy in these pages is just as often a hand with a plastic bottle, a spreadsheet of arrestees, a porch light left on until morning for the kid who ran. The book’s thesis—if it can stand a word as dull as thesis—is that defense is a grammar with many verbs and the first person plural. If power is a choreography of abandonment and force, then resistance is a choreography of attention and stubborn presence. Feed. Name. Lift. Record. Walk. Watch. Stay.
And memory—memory is treated not as nostalgia but as a weapon that does not miss. The scenes from 1900 are not there to soothe the reader with distance; they are there to set up a mirror that can’t be dodged. The joke of so much American discourse is its allergy to lineage. We prefer the shock of “unprecedented,” because unprecedented asks nothing but personal feelings. This book rescinds that privilege. It says: you’ve seen this before, and before, and before. If you call it new, you are serving the people who profit from your amnesia.
There is, at the end, a bend toward care that keeps the work from nihilism. The relentless documentation of harm does not resolve into policy recommendations—as if the correct bullet point could cauterize a century. It resolves into an ethic simple enough to be lived tomorrow: no one gets left alone with the state. The comic does not sanctify the people who failed to live that ethic in the past; it mourns them and points to the ledger of what woke them too late. It also refuses to flatter the reader by pretending that reading is the same as showing up. The book honors documentation by making it responsible, not sufficient.
As a piece of graphic art, it is virtuosic without vanity, intensely composed but never precious, a collage that keeps its glue out of sight. As an intervention in public memory, it is rude in the ways politeness requires—interrupting, contradicting, refusing euphemism, naming what uniformed language tries to launder. As a testament to the obligations bound up in love, it is bracing and strangely gentle, because what could be more tender than an honest inventory of danger given to someone you want to keep?
Does it change anything? Books do not cuff wrists, but they can keep a hand from letting go. They can teach a reader to mistrust the caption, to hear the siren behind the sentence, to read the budget like a map of intent. They can hand you the names of people who refused to die politely and ask you to carry them without turning those names into excuses. They can make you harder to manage. They can make you more precise in the dark.
What the work leaves in me is not relief and not despair. It is clarity’s particular ache—an ache that lives in your neck and your notebooks—and a cleaner sense of what “up” means in the title’s promise. It does not promise rescue. It promises a grip. Black arms carrying one another up and out, not toward a fantasy plateau, but toward another day with more of us still accounted for. The book believes that is victory enough to keep choosing, which is another way of saying: it knows the difference between a slogan and a practice.
The door closes at the end the way it opened at the start, not as an erasure of the street but as a seal on the handoff. Someone you love is telling you the truth in a tone that makes lying to yourself impossible. The stack of books is lighter now; some of it lives where your reflexes live. You are still tired. You are still afraid. But you are out of excuses, and that is a kind of freedom. In that space, somewhere between panic and precision, this book keeps its promise. It will not leave you alone with the state.
My rating: 93 out of 100.
That’s the ignition of "Black Arms to Hold You Up": a frame made of family, a demand disguised as a conversation, a lineage pressed into your palms while the streets outside explain, with perfect clarity, why lineage matters. The book is not a survey; it is an ultimatum staged as a comic. It keeps the panels crowded and the sentences honest. It refuses the clean thesis statement in favor of a method: touch the live wire of now; jump back a century to show we’ve always been here; return to the live wire; repeat, until the rhetoric around “exception” and “incident” gets stripped for parts.
You can read it as a chronicle of Black militant resistance. You can read it as an argument about custodianship—who tells the story, who erases the story, who survives the erasure. You can also read it as a father shoving language across the table to a son who would rather scroll, and a son deciding whether he’s willing to inherit something that is not safe to hold. The genius of the book is how it keeps all three readings alive at once.
Form first. The pages swing from tight-framed close-ups—hands loaded, eyes scanning, a jaw set the way a lock sets—to wide, map-like grids where corner names replace chapter titles. The line is elastic, veering from slashing caricature to bruised tenderness without losing fidelity to either. Sound is lettered like weather: the drone of news anchors, the bright scrape of crowd chants, the brutal monosyllables of “Move,” “Don’t,” “Back,” “Down.” Collage enters as counter-caption; clippings and facsimiles hover like official ghosts, and then the drawings contradict them. It’s a pedagogy: the state statement arrives in a box; the next panel proves the box a lie. Repeat until the reader stops being fooled by typography.
The narrative spine is intergenerational. A father, Ronnie, does what school boards and camera crews will not: he hands over a counter-archive and insists on its use. That move is as old as the violence it answers. You can call it kitchen-table pedagogy; you can call it survival. The book calls it love without sedation.
From that frame the time machine kicks. New Orleans, 1900: Robert Charles is harassed by police and refuses the choreography of submission. Shots, panic, a manhunt that metastasizes into organized white terror parading as “order.” The city becomes a theater of punishment; the corpse becomes a press conference; the press becomes the record. The book draws this with claustrophobic heat rather than sepia. No civics-textbook distance. No obedient cardboard villains. Instead, the nauseous tempo of escalation and the notation—crucial to everything that follows—that the state claims both the monopoly on force and the monopoly on narration. This is how a myth is manufactured: do the killing, print the headline, archive the headline as truth.
Jump. Midcentury South: shotgun porches and nighttime patrols that rarely make it into commemorative documentaries. Men and women who have already learned that the polite version of history—the one that loves high noon marches but edits out midnight self-defense—cannot keep a household alive. The book respects their contradictions. It refuses iconography even as it honors courage. It is allergic to sainting. It’s more interested in the choreography of risk: who stood watch, who drove behind the Klan caravan at a legal distance knowing the law was not theirs, who walked a scared neighbor home and did not write about it later because survival does not ask for bylines.
Jump. Los Angeles, 1992: videotape as a mirror with a cracked frame. The jury reads from the script we keep pretending isn’t scripted. The city answers in smoke and logistics. This book insists on the logic of logistics. It draws the milk and water as attentively as it draws the flames, because it understands that a rebellion is partly an organ of care. The image that mainstream memory preserved—men on rooftops with rifles—reappears here without meme-gloss, returned to its context of abandonment: the state preserving property by vacating people, and then returning with an army to preserve the emptied storefronts. The captions on the television say “restore”; the faces on the sidewalk say “survive.”
Jump. Katrina’s waterline. The same city as 1900, the same certainty disguised as emergency management. Abandonment followed by occupation is not a glitch; it’s a workflow. The book resists the urge to romanticize the ad hoc networks that saved lives, but it refuses to diminish them, either. Instead it names them correctly: defense. A neighbor with insulin is more effective than a press conference with a podium. A grandmother moved upstairs is a strategic victory. Armed men on porches are not role-playing antiterrorism; they are negotiating which body makes it to dawn. The comic honors the unphotographed hours: heat, rot, the calculus of whether opening your door is an invitation to help or harm.
Jump. The summer where the streets memorized the names. The posture of police on day one is the same posture on day thirty, dressed in a different excuse: costume-change theatrics between “solidarity” kneels and nightfall batons. The book draws the pivot with contempt and precision. The chant is lettered big; the policy is lettered small and softened with bureaucratic verbs. Defund is rendered without the fortune-cookie; it is a ledger argument. If an institution manufactures harm, stop financing its expansion and fund life. That the demand was contorted into a seminar on tone is part of the book’s grief. That the demand survives the seminar is part of the book’s hope.
Under all of this runs the subject the book refuses to prettify: consequence. Cameras help and cameras mark you. Paper trails keep you safe and paper trails bury you. This is not the allegory of a hero’s journey; it’s the accounting of what the state knows how to do to dissidents and what it has already done. Files have teeth. The past is not past; it’s a stack on a desk with your name in the tab.
So what is the book doing, as a book, besides bearing witness? It is training the eye. It is reminding the reader that captions are a technology of power; that a photo without a counter-caption will serve the nearest uniform; that you can teach someone how to look simply by insisting on what must be placed next to what. In panel language, that insistence is pacing and adjacency. In ethical language, that insistence is responsibility.
Craft notes are not ornamental here, because the craft is the argument. The limited palette—red insisting, black swallowing, white struggling to stay clean—turns the page into a moral diagram without becoming a poster. The satire is not a release valve; it’s a scalpel. Laughter arrives and makes room for the next blow. The page turns are rhetorical, designed to let a joke and a wound share the same edge. Faces are drawn at the angle of disclosure—the moment before someone decides whether to speak or to survive. The lettering carries more than speech; it carries air. I cannot remember the last time word balloons felt so much like lungs under pressure.
What about failure? The book says the word out loud, not as a confession but as a condition. Movements contradict themselves. Leaders become myths and then become men again. The thirst for purity is exposed as a policing instinct with better branding. This refusal to codex-ify struggle into tourist-safe lessons is perhaps the most radical fidelity the comic offers. It says: here are people, not archangels. Here are costs, not metaphors. Here is the only consolation that doesn’t curdle—care as praxis.
If there is a drag in the reading experience, it comes from the virtue that makes the work essential: density. The time machine is merciless; the cuts ask the reader to carry more connective tissue than some will want to carry. A couple of sequences could breathe an extra panel; one or two argumentative leaps come so quickly the less-initiated may miss the seam that holds them. But the book is not trying to pass a bipartisan subcommittee. It is trying to keep a long, endangered memory alive without embalming it. The rigor that can feel like abrasion is also the guarantee that you are not being sold a museum audio guide. The comic wants you awake, not aligned.
The beating heart of the thing remains that kitchen table. The door, the stack of books, the injunction that comes phrased as a dare. The choice to place the public crisis inside a private room—inside a relationship that knows exactly how to wound and exactly how to warn—prevents the book from floating into saintly abstraction. It is hard to lie to a father who has seen what the country does to sons. It is hard to lie to a son who can list the names of friends still awake at 3 a.m., acid beneath their skin, because the sirens do not end at the panel border. The comic understands that conscience rarely arrives in history’s voice; it arrives in a voice we already love.
One of the quietest, sharpest moves in the book is how it defines militancy. There are rifles, yes, and barricaded rooms, and the physics of return fire. But militancy in these pages is just as often a hand with a plastic bottle, a spreadsheet of arrestees, a porch light left on until morning for the kid who ran. The book’s thesis—if it can stand a word as dull as thesis—is that defense is a grammar with many verbs and the first person plural. If power is a choreography of abandonment and force, then resistance is a choreography of attention and stubborn presence. Feed. Name. Lift. Record. Walk. Watch. Stay.
And memory—memory is treated not as nostalgia but as a weapon that does not miss. The scenes from 1900 are not there to soothe the reader with distance; they are there to set up a mirror that can’t be dodged. The joke of so much American discourse is its allergy to lineage. We prefer the shock of “unprecedented,” because unprecedented asks nothing but personal feelings. This book rescinds that privilege. It says: you’ve seen this before, and before, and before. If you call it new, you are serving the people who profit from your amnesia.
There is, at the end, a bend toward care that keeps the work from nihilism. The relentless documentation of harm does not resolve into policy recommendations—as if the correct bullet point could cauterize a century. It resolves into an ethic simple enough to be lived tomorrow: no one gets left alone with the state. The comic does not sanctify the people who failed to live that ethic in the past; it mourns them and points to the ledger of what woke them too late. It also refuses to flatter the reader by pretending that reading is the same as showing up. The book honors documentation by making it responsible, not sufficient.
As a piece of graphic art, it is virtuosic without vanity, intensely composed but never precious, a collage that keeps its glue out of sight. As an intervention in public memory, it is rude in the ways politeness requires—interrupting, contradicting, refusing euphemism, naming what uniformed language tries to launder. As a testament to the obligations bound up in love, it is bracing and strangely gentle, because what could be more tender than an honest inventory of danger given to someone you want to keep?
Does it change anything? Books do not cuff wrists, but they can keep a hand from letting go. They can teach a reader to mistrust the caption, to hear the siren behind the sentence, to read the budget like a map of intent. They can hand you the names of people who refused to die politely and ask you to carry them without turning those names into excuses. They can make you harder to manage. They can make you more precise in the dark.
What the work leaves in me is not relief and not despair. It is clarity’s particular ache—an ache that lives in your neck and your notebooks—and a cleaner sense of what “up” means in the title’s promise. It does not promise rescue. It promises a grip. Black arms carrying one another up and out, not toward a fantasy plateau, but toward another day with more of us still accounted for. The book believes that is victory enough to keep choosing, which is another way of saying: it knows the difference between a slogan and a practice.
The door closes at the end the way it opened at the start, not as an erasure of the street but as a seal on the handoff. Someone you love is telling you the truth in a tone that makes lying to yourself impossible. The stack of books is lighter now; some of it lives where your reflexes live. You are still tired. You are still afraid. But you are out of excuses, and that is a kind of freedom. In that space, somewhere between panic and precision, this book keeps its promise. It will not leave you alone with the state.
My rating: 93 out of 100.
April 7, 2025
In 2020, Ben goes time-hopping a la Quantum Leap—guided by his old-school Black activist dad—through a history that runs alongside/counter to what most people learn about the Civil Rights movement. In the America Ben visits, nonviolent protest is not enough, but those who want to demand liberation at gunpoint are sometimes met with hostility from their own communities. Tracing a path from Marcus Garvey through the life of Robert F. Williams (author of Negroes With Guns), the Black Power movement, Sanyika Shakur, and BLM, the book is irreverent—both in tone and in its willingness to question sacred figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. Personally I believe that progress requires people who work within the system and outside of it, sometimes far outside of it. It makes sense that today we find MAGA types quoting MLK (selectively) while burying anything that incites true liberation. I'm glad such a worthy artist as Passmore is uplifting the latter.
November 14, 2025
A brave, confounding book about the history of Black resistance, troubling, funny, and self-conflicted, but also wholly committed. Passmore’s trademark sarcasm and talent for compounded ironies come through, and his satire is as sharp as ever, but in the home stretch this book rises to a fierce crescendo and ends with a stunning few pages that reframe everything. Wow. And it’s all brilliantly cartooned.
Far and away the most ambitious and the best book by this great cartoonist.
Far and away the most ambitious and the best book by this great cartoonist.
November 15, 2025
Essential, essential reading.
January 9, 2026
He hit that shit hard
September 27, 2025
Not My Cup of Tea
I haven’t read many graphic novels, but this one grabbed my attention. Both the title and cover art appealed to me. I didn’t dislike the format, but I struggled with the satire. I appreciated the historical lessons that were presented. I learned a lot. The subject matter was too heavy for the cheap jokes. Parts of it were just too silly for me. I would still encourage people to read this despite my personal biases. I’d love to have a physical copy for my coffee table. This book is a guaranteed conversation starter.
Thank you to NetGalley, Pantheon Books, and Ben Passmore for the advanced copy for me to review.
#BlackArmstoHoldYouUp #NetGalley
I haven’t read many graphic novels, but this one grabbed my attention. Both the title and cover art appealed to me. I didn’t dislike the format, but I struggled with the satire. I appreciated the historical lessons that were presented. I learned a lot. The subject matter was too heavy for the cheap jokes. Parts of it were just too silly for me. I would still encourage people to read this despite my personal biases. I’d love to have a physical copy for my coffee table. This book is a guaranteed conversation starter.
Thank you to NetGalley, Pantheon Books, and Ben Passmore for the advanced copy for me to review.
#BlackArmstoHoldYouUp #NetGalley
Read
January 9, 2026My opinion on “history as entertainment” is complicated, especially regarding comics. Stories set in the past have become increasingly prominent in U.S. pop culture (see “Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon” by Alexander Manshel). On one hand, I’m excited by the opportunity to broaden historical awareness. History shouldn’t be relegated to dusty university libraries, especially because most academic prose is dull and jargon-laden. On the other hand, the most commercially successful historical pop culture is often the least rigorous, typically produced by people with a shallow sense of histography and research. Moreover, the written word can better capture nuance and historical ambiguity than comics or moving pictures that necessarily rely on concrete images.
The first chapter of “Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance” by Ben Passmore alleviates some of my concerns with a well-researched, clever overview of Black activism in the U.S. from the Reconstruction to the 1950s. Passmore’s portrayal of Marcus Garvey and the broader back-to-Africa movement is nuanced and critical. He finds innovative ways to visualize these events, such as in a sequence that cycles through a few different versions of a historical figure’s face to underscore uncertainty around his appearance.
In the following chapter, Passmore unfortunately loses the thread. Given his focus on Black self-defense, the cartoonist has less interest in exploring the nonviolent tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The low number of sources cited in the bibliography for this section (relative to other sections) reflects this disinterest. Beyond a few anecdotes about Black activists who nevertheless armed themselves and a goofy riff on Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington speech, Passmore sidesteps a substantive discussion of nonviolent protest in the 1950s and 1960s.
This omission hurts the book’s narrative in a few ways. First, by assuming that audiences are already familiar with the “classical” era of the Civil Rights Movement – and also providing little context on Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, or the Black Panthers – Passmore makes his work less accessible. This represents a major shortcoming given that a large appeal of exploring these ideas in the comic medium is the ability to reach a wider audience. While these events may seem like common knowledge, right-wing state governments have worked to remove this Black history from school curricula. Second, Passmore weakens his argument for the importance of Black self-defense by dodging a meaningful exploration of the alternative.
Third, and most importantly, Passmore misses a chance to challenge the popular narrative (which he later critiques) that Martin Luther King Jr. used “acceptable” tactics and effectively ended racism in the 1960s. This narrative is ridiculous for several reasons: as Passmore highlights, the “classical” era of the Civil Rights Movement left substantial work unfinished. Further, this framing smooths away the hard edges of even mainstream Black activism during this era. As frustration with the slow pace of social change mounted in the late-1960s, MLK himself articulated economic ideas that partly echoed Black nationalism. (See his 1967 speech “The Other America,” in which he argues that “there is a great deal that the Negro can do to develop self-respect … [and] amass political and economic power within his own community and by using his own resources.”) Black nationalism gained popular traction in part from the groups involved in this “classical” era – Kwame Ture was a leader of SNCC before turning to Black nationalism in the late-60s, like many other members of SNCC. By engaging shallowly with this period of Black resistance, Passmore implicitly reinforces the one-dimensional version of the history that prevails.
From this point on, the graphic novel jumps around in time, offering a series of anecdotes about various figures and events. Though engaging in isolation, these chapters fall short as a coherent history, providing little context or connective tissue. Effective accounts of recent history craft a narrative with clear themes and takeaways out of a mass of information. Despite thorough research, Passmore often appears overwhelmed by his source material, presenting ideas without sufficient focus or depth. For instance, in surveying the achievements and shortcomings of various Black activists, he raises the question of whether a movement is greater than any one individual. While this gestures toward a critique of the “Great Man” theory of history, the book never comes to a coherent conclusion. Rather, it unintentionally reinforces the “Great Man” theory by privileging details of individuals or small groups over broader social forces and movements. The book’s middle section slows to a crawl as Passmore introduces a large cast of historical figures without adequately situating them in their social or historical context. This reflects a broader challenge in “comics as history”: artists can more easily visualize individuals and discrete events than wider social forces, an acute limitation to histories in which systemic dynamics are central.
By the end, Passmore’s narrative feels less like a cohesive history than an accumulation of senseless, random events, an approach that might suit postmodern farce but here reads largely as disorganization. Passmore attempts to clarify his intent in the final chapter, explaining that he sought to foreground lesser-known figures in Black resistance, but this explanation comes far too late, like a high school essay that saves its thesis statement for the end. Passmore likewise tries to tie up his framing device in the final chapter. Throughout the book, a fictionalized version of Passmore narrates events and traces a journey from apathy to activism. While occasionally amusing, this device is more often grating with forced humor and tonal mismatch. I was particularly frustrated by a sequence in which Passmore’s stand-in repeatedly cracks jokes during Emmett Till’s funeral. A subplot involving an invented (?) version of Passmore’s absent father runs through the book as well, but here too he waits too long to meaningfully explain its purpose.
Ultimately, while well-intentioned, I hesitate to recommend Black Arms. To his credit, Passmore calls it “a” history of Black resistance rather than “the.” Still, I feel like a better history is buried in here that could have emerged with a tighter focus, fleshed-out context, and stronger connective tissue. Passmore is a clever cartoonist with strong visual instincts; a firmer editorial presence or collaboration with an experienced historian might have helped the book reach its potential.
The first chapter of “Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance” by Ben Passmore alleviates some of my concerns with a well-researched, clever overview of Black activism in the U.S. from the Reconstruction to the 1950s. Passmore’s portrayal of Marcus Garvey and the broader back-to-Africa movement is nuanced and critical. He finds innovative ways to visualize these events, such as in a sequence that cycles through a few different versions of a historical figure’s face to underscore uncertainty around his appearance.
In the following chapter, Passmore unfortunately loses the thread. Given his focus on Black self-defense, the cartoonist has less interest in exploring the nonviolent tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The low number of sources cited in the bibliography for this section (relative to other sections) reflects this disinterest. Beyond a few anecdotes about Black activists who nevertheless armed themselves and a goofy riff on Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington speech, Passmore sidesteps a substantive discussion of nonviolent protest in the 1950s and 1960s.
This omission hurts the book’s narrative in a few ways. First, by assuming that audiences are already familiar with the “classical” era of the Civil Rights Movement – and also providing little context on Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, or the Black Panthers – Passmore makes his work less accessible. This represents a major shortcoming given that a large appeal of exploring these ideas in the comic medium is the ability to reach a wider audience. While these events may seem like common knowledge, right-wing state governments have worked to remove this Black history from school curricula. Second, Passmore weakens his argument for the importance of Black self-defense by dodging a meaningful exploration of the alternative.
Third, and most importantly, Passmore misses a chance to challenge the popular narrative (which he later critiques) that Martin Luther King Jr. used “acceptable” tactics and effectively ended racism in the 1960s. This narrative is ridiculous for several reasons: as Passmore highlights, the “classical” era of the Civil Rights Movement left substantial work unfinished. Further, this framing smooths away the hard edges of even mainstream Black activism during this era. As frustration with the slow pace of social change mounted in the late-1960s, MLK himself articulated economic ideas that partly echoed Black nationalism. (See his 1967 speech “The Other America,” in which he argues that “there is a great deal that the Negro can do to develop self-respect … [and] amass political and economic power within his own community and by using his own resources.”) Black nationalism gained popular traction in part from the groups involved in this “classical” era – Kwame Ture was a leader of SNCC before turning to Black nationalism in the late-60s, like many other members of SNCC. By engaging shallowly with this period of Black resistance, Passmore implicitly reinforces the one-dimensional version of the history that prevails.
From this point on, the graphic novel jumps around in time, offering a series of anecdotes about various figures and events. Though engaging in isolation, these chapters fall short as a coherent history, providing little context or connective tissue. Effective accounts of recent history craft a narrative with clear themes and takeaways out of a mass of information. Despite thorough research, Passmore often appears overwhelmed by his source material, presenting ideas without sufficient focus or depth. For instance, in surveying the achievements and shortcomings of various Black activists, he raises the question of whether a movement is greater than any one individual. While this gestures toward a critique of the “Great Man” theory of history, the book never comes to a coherent conclusion. Rather, it unintentionally reinforces the “Great Man” theory by privileging details of individuals or small groups over broader social forces and movements. The book’s middle section slows to a crawl as Passmore introduces a large cast of historical figures without adequately situating them in their social or historical context. This reflects a broader challenge in “comics as history”: artists can more easily visualize individuals and discrete events than wider social forces, an acute limitation to histories in which systemic dynamics are central.
By the end, Passmore’s narrative feels less like a cohesive history than an accumulation of senseless, random events, an approach that might suit postmodern farce but here reads largely as disorganization. Passmore attempts to clarify his intent in the final chapter, explaining that he sought to foreground lesser-known figures in Black resistance, but this explanation comes far too late, like a high school essay that saves its thesis statement for the end. Passmore likewise tries to tie up his framing device in the final chapter. Throughout the book, a fictionalized version of Passmore narrates events and traces a journey from apathy to activism. While occasionally amusing, this device is more often grating with forced humor and tonal mismatch. I was particularly frustrated by a sequence in which Passmore’s stand-in repeatedly cracks jokes during Emmett Till’s funeral. A subplot involving an invented (?) version of Passmore’s absent father runs through the book as well, but here too he waits too long to meaningfully explain its purpose.
Ultimately, while well-intentioned, I hesitate to recommend Black Arms. To his credit, Passmore calls it “a” history of Black resistance rather than “the.” Still, I feel like a better history is buried in here that could have emerged with a tighter focus, fleshed-out context, and stronger connective tissue. Passmore is a clever cartoonist with strong visual instincts; a firmer editorial presence or collaboration with an experienced historian might have helped the book reach its potential.
December 18, 2025
“The Government has broken the back of Black liberation with violence, drugs, and prison. Hour heroes are dead or in exile or somewhere in between. That our dreams were unrealistic, our aspirations unpatriotic and very racist. Meanwhile they feed us the lie that ur leaders were too simple or too violent to lead.” (P.159)
It seems too early in Ben Passmore’s career to declare Black Arms to Hold You Up his magnum opus, but this bold, graphically stunning, and surprisingly nuanced graphic novel will be hard to top. The book works on two levels. First, it provides a history of African American resistance to dominant white culture in the United States by chronicling some of the lesser-known advocates of that resistance. As Passmore notes at the novel’s end, he learned history largely from a white perspective; even radicals like Malcolm X were often quoted selectively, made to fit a dominant narrative. Here, Passmore portrays radicals that history has pushed aside —figures focused on empowerment, separatism, and, at times, violence—with seriousness and respect, situating them within a culture designed to preserve the status quo. He does not deify these activists. He respects many, admires some, and portrays others as dangerous or cranks when that description fits.
The book is also a history of Passmore’s own evolving relationship to Black history and the relationship with his mostly absent father. He is honest about his discomfort with violence and separatism, about how many people such movements can injure, even as he recognizes how philosophies of pacifism can be used as tools of repression. He admits to his own reluctance to fully confront these movements and pushes the reader to join him in a more realistic take on the Black experience. And his reconning with black history is also a reconning with his father involvement in radicalism and how that provided an excuse for his absence.
Visually, the novel is striking. Passmore moves away from the smaller pages of his short stories and opens the work up. The book’s large format allows the graphics to breathe. Using a muted palette of black and gray, punctuated by splashes of red, and taking full advantage of the space the larger pages afford, promotes the boldness of his ideas and the subtlety of his observations.
In less capable hands, the novel could have become didactic, simplistic, or self-congratulatory. And while it contains elements of all three, they feel largely earned rather than imposed. Black Arms to Hold You Up is a tour de force—one that, as a white, upper-class reader, forced me to think carefully about my own position and about Black history, without ever feeling attacked.
It seems too early in Ben Passmore’s career to declare Black Arms to Hold You Up his magnum opus, but this bold, graphically stunning, and surprisingly nuanced graphic novel will be hard to top. The book works on two levels. First, it provides a history of African American resistance to dominant white culture in the United States by chronicling some of the lesser-known advocates of that resistance. As Passmore notes at the novel’s end, he learned history largely from a white perspective; even radicals like Malcolm X were often quoted selectively, made to fit a dominant narrative. Here, Passmore portrays radicals that history has pushed aside —figures focused on empowerment, separatism, and, at times, violence—with seriousness and respect, situating them within a culture designed to preserve the status quo. He does not deify these activists. He respects many, admires some, and portrays others as dangerous or cranks when that description fits.
The book is also a history of Passmore’s own evolving relationship to Black history and the relationship with his mostly absent father. He is honest about his discomfort with violence and separatism, about how many people such movements can injure, even as he recognizes how philosophies of pacifism can be used as tools of repression. He admits to his own reluctance to fully confront these movements and pushes the reader to join him in a more realistic take on the Black experience. And his reconning with black history is also a reconning with his father involvement in radicalism and how that provided an excuse for his absence.
Visually, the novel is striking. Passmore moves away from the smaller pages of his short stories and opens the work up. The book’s large format allows the graphics to breathe. Using a muted palette of black and gray, punctuated by splashes of red, and taking full advantage of the space the larger pages afford, promotes the boldness of his ideas and the subtlety of his observations.
In less capable hands, the novel could have become didactic, simplistic, or self-congratulatory. And while it contains elements of all three, they feel largely earned rather than imposed. Black Arms to Hold You Up is a tour de force—one that, as a white, upper-class reader, forced me to think carefully about my own position and about Black history, without ever feeling attacked.
November 27, 2025
I received a copy of this book for free in a Goodreads giveaway.
Well-researched and detailed graphic novel about lesser-known figures and events in the history of Black resistance. Despite the heavy subject matter, there's a fair amount of humor injected into the narrative, though at times the narrative structure can be distracting.
The author puts himself in the story, where his father confronts him about his ambivalence towards Black history and takes him on a journey through various important moments from the past. The book does a good job of highlighting some of the lesser-known moments that we (or at least I) didn't learn about in school, about Robert Charles, Assata Shakur, MOVE, and others. It covers a lot of the more violent, militant forms of resistance in Black history that we tend not to look at, instead of the peaceful, nonviolent parts that we mostly learn in school, and I appreciated that. The book covers a lot of ground and manages to also present it in a digestible way, and I'm sure the graphic novel format really helps in this.
The insertion of Ben the author as a character in his own story is at times distracting, though. Near the beginning of the book, Ben comments on how one of the characters that appeared was just dropped from the story, which only serves to highlight that that is indeed what happened. In this kind of work where you have to cover various points throughout history, there's necessarily going to be transitions between moments in time, but having the author himself as a character in the story comment on these transitions only serves to highlight the abruptness of them. The author also comments on his own light skin and what that has meant for various figures in history, but only briefly, and I wished that if he were going to mention this about himself repeatedly, that he also would go into more depth about how that has affected his life.
There's a large amount of information presented here, and certainly way too much for me to absorb in one sitting. I appreciate that the book highlights these more forgotten moments of history, rather than the more peaceful, sanitized events we learned in school, and that it's done in an entertaining, engaging way. I don't know if the author inserting himself into the narrative is that effective, though, as it is at times distracting, and I also kept wishing he'd go more into his personal history rather than briefly mention parts of it.
Well-researched and detailed graphic novel about lesser-known figures and events in the history of Black resistance. Despite the heavy subject matter, there's a fair amount of humor injected into the narrative, though at times the narrative structure can be distracting.
The author puts himself in the story, where his father confronts him about his ambivalence towards Black history and takes him on a journey through various important moments from the past. The book does a good job of highlighting some of the lesser-known moments that we (or at least I) didn't learn about in school, about Robert Charles, Assata Shakur, MOVE, and others. It covers a lot of the more violent, militant forms of resistance in Black history that we tend not to look at, instead of the peaceful, nonviolent parts that we mostly learn in school, and I appreciated that. The book covers a lot of ground and manages to also present it in a digestible way, and I'm sure the graphic novel format really helps in this.
The insertion of Ben the author as a character in his own story is at times distracting, though. Near the beginning of the book, Ben comments on how one of the characters that appeared was just dropped from the story, which only serves to highlight that that is indeed what happened. In this kind of work where you have to cover various points throughout history, there's necessarily going to be transitions between moments in time, but having the author himself as a character in the story comment on these transitions only serves to highlight the abruptness of them. The author also comments on his own light skin and what that has meant for various figures in history, but only briefly, and I wished that if he were going to mention this about himself repeatedly, that he also would go into more depth about how that has affected his life.
There's a large amount of information presented here, and certainly way too much for me to absorb in one sitting. I appreciate that the book highlights these more forgotten moments of history, rather than the more peaceful, sanitized events we learned in school, and that it's done in an entertaining, engaging way. I don't know if the author inserting himself into the narrative is that effective, though, as it is at times distracting, and I also kept wishing he'd go more into his personal history rather than briefly mention parts of it.
September 27, 2025
I like graphic novels, and the cover of this one immediately caught my attention. The artwork was good, but I couldn't tell the author's intentions for why some images were red other than when highlighting the Black resistance leaders. Initially, it seemed like the goal was to highlight only resistance, but there were times when gun violence and the words of the white oppressors were also in red, so I'm not sure. Maybe I'm just overthinking the color choice/placement. I think Passmore did a good job of representing historical figures and events demonstrating Black resistance with a militant approach. Considering that most only associate Black resistance with the Civil Rights Movement, which predominantly had a non-militant approach, I thought it was good that the author offered a different historical perspective. For me, the humor didn't land as intended and only served to take away from the story than to add to it. It was my least favoeite part of this graphic novel.
I disliked the author's decision to have Ben comment on the lack of external acceptance by the Black community because of having a lighter skin tone and his father minimizing that by saying none of that matters because Ben is Black and he's going to make sure Ben knows what that means. That scene made light of a historical issue within Black history and culture. I'm not sure if the author intended this scene to be satire, but it just presented as a minimization of an ongoing historical issue that was designed by white oppressors to sow division within the Black community. This scene also included a terrible joke about Blackness being associated with "high blood pressure and the electric slide." 🙄😒 That whole scene should have been excluded since the overarching point is Black unity in resistance, but this scene perpetuates division and stereotypes.
I think there are people who will genuinely love everything about this graphic novel, so I'd still encourage others to read it and then look to other books to learn more about militant-based resistance.
Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
I disliked the author's decision to have Ben comment on the lack of external acceptance by the Black community because of having a lighter skin tone and his father minimizing that by saying none of that matters because Ben is Black and he's going to make sure Ben knows what that means. That scene made light of a historical issue within Black history and culture. I'm not sure if the author intended this scene to be satire, but it just presented as a minimization of an ongoing historical issue that was designed by white oppressors to sow division within the Black community. This scene also included a terrible joke about Blackness being associated with "high blood pressure and the electric slide." 🙄😒 That whole scene should have been excluded since the overarching point is Black unity in resistance, but this scene perpetuates division and stereotypes.
I think there are people who will genuinely love everything about this graphic novel, so I'd still encourage others to read it and then look to other books to learn more about militant-based resistance.
Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
December 31, 2025
Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore
Reading history:
Normally I keep this in my private notes section, but I'm moving it. Yay!
Reading history was not added on Goodreads, but was instead kept on a post-it note with the book.
Started November 17th, 2025.
Finished December 25th, 2025.
November 17th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 1-41 in physical form.
November 18th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 42-61 in physical form.
November 20th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 62-67 in physical form.
November 20th, 2025 (daytime): read pp. 68-75 in physical form.
December 21st, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 76-127 in physical form.
December 23rd, 2025: read pp. 128-149 in physical form.
December 24th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 150-179 in physical form.
December 25th, 2025: read pp. 180-end.
Reading history:
Normally I keep this in my private notes section, but I'm moving it. Yay!
Reading history was not added on Goodreads, but was instead kept on a post-it note with the book.
Started November 17th, 2025.
Finished December 25th, 2025.
November 17th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 1-41 in physical form.
November 18th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 42-61 in physical form.
November 20th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 62-67 in physical form.
November 20th, 2025 (daytime): read pp. 68-75 in physical form.
December 21st, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 76-127 in physical form.
December 23rd, 2025: read pp. 128-149 in physical form.
December 24th, 2025 (after midnight): read pp. 150-179 in physical form.
December 25th, 2025: read pp. 180-end.
October 29, 2025
I'm not much for non fiction, and while his shorts in Your Black Friend managed to keep my interest, this longer form historical essay around black resistance lost me a little along the way. The format is fun. Passmore doesn't care enough to join a BLM protest so his old man boots him back to the 1900s to relive black power history. We follow him as he stumbles through the ages and highlights a lot of lesser know players that had significant impacts. There's definitely some interesting stuff in there, and I'm sure I could've learned a lot but I know I'll barely remember any of it.. Hopefully other readers will be more curious than me, and this book will serve as a stepping stone to learn more about the seemingly immense history of resistance.
December 6, 2025
Reading 2025
Book 271: Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore
A graphic novel I bought after looking through lists for #NonfictionNovember.
Synopsis: So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore.
Review: Love NF November to explore all kinds of topics, gather new perspectives on the world, and delve into topics I only have a cursory knowledge of. The art in this book was great, and the content added to my enjoyment of the March series. My rating 4⭐️
Book 271: Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore
A graphic novel I bought after looking through lists for #NonfictionNovember.
Synopsis: So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore.
Review: Love NF November to explore all kinds of topics, gather new perspectives on the world, and delve into topics I only have a cursory knowledge of. The art in this book was great, and the content added to my enjoyment of the March series. My rating 4⭐️
November 26, 2025
This is a good trifecta with the book I read about cults and the history of racism one. I was already exposed to a lot of this but I loved reading about Assata and its inclusion of gangs and prisons as part of the collective struggle. I also liked how the writer called out several frauds in the movement and how snitching is a huge problem in organizing. Lots of good back n forth dialogue here and interesting exposure to conflict within organizing and it’s petty squabbles.
Didn’t love the ending tho… or maybe it was supposed to be ridiculous on purpose. An artist trying to use his knowledge to combat the very real violence but highlighting how impossible that task is to do alone against a militarized wannabe fascist state and its supporters. Fighting with books but not guns? I guess everyone has their own role…
Didn’t love the ending tho… or maybe it was supposed to be ridiculous on purpose. An artist trying to use his knowledge to combat the very real violence but highlighting how impossible that task is to do alone against a militarized wannabe fascist state and its supporters. Fighting with books but not guns? I guess everyone has their own role…
December 17, 2025
I like the time travelling framing device and watching Ben Passmore's self-insert meeting face-to-face with all these historical moments and individuals. I think this really does work as a comic, like I think the choices work for the medium. The limited colour pallet accents the right moments, Passmore's humour adds some splashes of fun into an otherwise dense book, it knows when to get heavy with the text and narration and when to let the art provide the necessary information.
December 31, 2025
Compelling and informative, if hard to follow; Passmore traces the history of Black political resistance and resilience from Marcus Garvey through Robert F. Williams, the Black Power movement, Sanyika Shakur, and BLM. I appreciated his honest treatment of mixed motives and internecine conflict in that history, which every tradition of social justice struggle must confront.
December 9, 2025
一本介绍美国黑人(暴力)抵抗运动历史的图像小说。作者在做了大量阅读和研究的基础上创作的，带着一种批判性的眼光去回顾从1900新奥尔良的Robert Charles枪战到近年来的BLM运动。对于不太了解美国黑人历史的读者来说，可能有太多的名字、组织和事件，特别是关于Republic of New Afrika那个chapter。因此，作者在书后还列出了阅读书单。。关于Assata Shakur 那部分，有一张她持枪射击的图让人很难不想到电影一战再战里的Perfidia Beverly Hills，毕竟Assata 就是她的原型。
December 10, 2025
Everyone NEEDS to read this.
Read
December 24, 2025Fantastic
January 6, 2026
Not an easy read, but a great counter to the mainstream narrative of black power movements.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews