Join us in March to discuss Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore. (Please note, the dollar fee associated with this event is a suggested contribution to offset Meetup fees and will be discussed at the event. No need to worry about it before then.)
Where to Get It
Borrow from the library:
Buy from a local bookstore:
Check for availability at a Brooklyn comic shop:
Order the print book:
Buy the ebook:
From the publisher:
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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.
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