Episode 4: Justice For All
Peek into episode four of The Exhibit
Justice/Injustice
Episode 4 is about Justice or Injustice - and the idea behind my piece, The Hearse Driver, came from a chapter in Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns . In her book, Wilkerson recounts the brave and perilous ways black people escaped the south during the height of Jim Crow and the Great Migration from 1910-1970. Reading such a book in my adulthood made me realize how little I was taught about Black history when I was in school.
For all my academic life, I was one of only a handful of Black students in the schools I attended. Black history lessons were sparse, but when they were taught, I felt different - and sometimes, out of place. That feeling would come up again in interactions with some of my classmates; I remember one kid asking me if my toes were “dirty” because he had never actually seen a black person’s feet before.
As I grew older and started learning some things on my own, it became clear that the curriculum did all of us a disservice by not incorporating more black history lessons. Black history is not simply my history; it is American history, it is world history - and we all need to know it. The Warmth of Other Suns is packed with true horror stories of the violence and hate black people have endured - but there are also some wonderfully heroic anecdotes throughout the book that lifted my spirit and brought me to tears. One of those anecdotes inspired me to paint The Hearse Driver.
Once slavery was abolished, the oppressors created other ways to enslave black people - Jim Crow, prisons, violence, and withheld pay to name a few. During the Great Migration, black people were led to believe that they didn't have to live in fear if they moved north. They soon discovered it wasn’t exactly as they expected, but it was far better than they had experienced down south. When the southern white farmers realized they were losing their workers by the thousands, they started to make it more dangerous for blacks to flee. Many people had to escape into the darkness to survive. Much like the underground railroad, there was a highly complex and secret operation of funeral homes that would move black people across state lines in coffins.
30” x 40” Oil on canvas. Available for purchase.
For me, the injustice is twofold. First, the fact that this happened so far into the 20th century is appalling. Second, I should have learned about this in school. Learning about this history for the first time now as an adult feels like a personal injustice; knowing more history like this at a young age would have given me so much more confidence. It’s important that history is approachable, so I made this painting look like a comic strip or cartoon storyboard that will appeal to young minds and introduce them to an intricate history often left out of our textbooks.
The Hearse Driver is what I want to tell my nieces and nephews about when they are old enough to learn where they come from. I want them to know they descended from some of the strongest, bravest, most cunning people on earth. And that it took white and black people working together to free their ancestors. For now, they have my dad, who fled the south in 1969, and his stories of trauma and triumph.
As cool as it would have been to win this commission, my goal with this piece was to tell this story because it's so amazing, and I doubt most people have heard it. My hope is that learning about The Hearse Driver will lift the spirits of many people across the country and around the world.