Black Heroes of the Wild West (TOON Graphics)

Black Heroes of the Wild West (TOON Graphics) — page 1 — Bronco busters saddling wood engraving The Gilcrease Museum Tulsa Oklahoma I was FOR A NEW AMERICAN HISTORY Introduction by Kadir Nelson In his 1889 painting A Dash for the Timber renowned painter of the West Frederic S Remington shows cowboys as a group of white men In fact a large number were Mexican or Native American and as many as one-third were African American Photography outside the studio wasn't widespread in the 19th century so much of the pictorial record of the cowboys lives was provided by artists such as Remington During the 1880s Remington traveled through the Dakotas Montana Texas and the Arizona Territory to record the vanishing wilderness in sculpture paintings and drawings When Fifteen my mother took me to the Los Angeles Coliseum to see Nelson Mandela speak When he appeared the crowd cheered for what felt like an eternity They wouldn't stop everyone was so excited so jubilant It made me want to paint images of the people who inspired me Nelson Mandela of course Martin Luther King Malcolm X and so many more I hadn't especially liked history in school because it seemed to be all about memorization But when I realized that history is a string of stories I was hooked I was introduced to the history of African Americans in the Old West as an art student at Pratt Institute in the early 1990s At the time I was working on a series of paintings that celebrated African Americans who had settled west of the Mississippi River during and after the American Civil War As I delved into my research I pored over the sparse 6

Black Heroes of the Wild West (TOON Graphics) — page 2 — From the Undefeated by Kwame Alexander illustrated by Kadir Selson Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Courtesy Kadir Nelson studio documentation chronicling the lives of black pioneers cowboys and homesteaders on the Great Plains and I was excited to discover enthralling figures like Bill Pickett Nat Love and Mary Fields Before then most of my knowledge of the Old West had been limited to books movies and paintings that featured cowboys and homesteaders of a much lighter hue As I conducted research for my picture book Heart and Soul The Story of America and African Americans which was also partly set during this time period I was surprised to learn that in some areas of the Old West up to a third of the settler population was African American This is why I’m so pleased to see a volume that celebrates this very fact Black Heroes of the Wild West is a brilliant and entertaining offering from James Otis Smith Through sharp and evocative storytelling in the exciting medium of comics lesser-known African American historical figures will be introduced to new generations of readers Smith’s humor and wit shine throughout and his masterful graphic design works hand in hand with the storytelling the panel sequences are sometimes silent while at other times they progress through dialogue or captions Fascinating people like Mary Fields Bass Reeves and Bob Lemmons are given new life and the endnotes are full of informative facts and images that testify to the essential role of African Americans Native Americans and Hispanic vaqueros in the Old West Smith’s début offers an extraordinary introduction into this facet of America’s rich history It’s time that we hear every American’s story from every background and creed we’ve all worked together to weave the grand tapestry of America 7 Not all picture-making needs to be reportorial and historically accurate Art can also be a legitimate way for artists to portray what they'd like to see and to let their imagination run free Above in an image called High Noon Kadir Nelson depicts a group of black men as the central figures of a typical showdown in the Wild West Red White and Weary Blues is one of Nelson's illustrations for The Undefeated written by Kwame Alexander The authors wanted to honor the spirit of the nearly 200,000 newly liberated slaves who joined the Union Army after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation

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