Individualism In African Americans

America is apple pie and baseball is the mantra that has been told about America for generations. That the American narrative is the story of rugged individuals, and the ideals of those freedom fighters rising up to create a better society. Better than the British society that they saw as oppressive. They wanted a more perfect union where all men are created equal. However, that same society those same freedom fighters deposited their ideas (god and bad) into a society that has created damaging, and disparate factions that continues to pay dividends today. This us verses them narrative has been skulking in the background (and recently the foreground) of American society, politics, and culture. Nowhere will you find those divides greater

Mainstream scholars, until recently, largely ignored the trials and tribulations of those people who were separate, and not even considered equal. In the justifications for the ideals of American Exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism the people who fought the hardest, and worked the longest for freedom were lost in the history that they were integral in creating. Black people in America have the longest ongoing immigration story. We are still considered by some to be the exotic other, although , a vast majority can trace their beginnings back to the first immigrants to the New World. My works looks at those people who history tends to forget and bring them into the light. At its core my works seeks to illuminate those stories of black people forgotten and lost to history, and connect them to the larger context of American History for all those people who love learning about lost

I worked to create a book that simply told the forgotten stories as if that was enough, but my work has isolated from larger themes. In my research since then I have made connections and I am learning that the stories have to be part of the larger narrative; that blackness is American, and the stories of people like Henry Box Brown and Marshall Major Taylor are pure examples of Rugged Individualism, Amercian Exceptionalism. And what it means to be American.

In Strange Fruit vol II : Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History: I intend to connect the stories of people like Cathay Williams the only know female buffalo soldier and Mary Elizabeth Bowser a slaved turned spy for the Union Army and many others to the American story. I can and will be tapping into a shared cultural language by using comics an illustration as a