Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 02/15/2024 This sweeping, powerful rhymed historical panorama is delivered, in Walthall’s mix of colored and monochrome scenes, as an artless but passionate poem declaimed to an audience of modern, young mural painters, beginning in an idealized Africa—“I heard the people, Black and free, / community abounds, / thus living all in harmony / with sky, with sea, with ground”—but quickly taking a tragic turn to the Middle Passage, and then speeding past “Moses,” Reconstruction, and “strange fruit” (the nooses in the picture are empty, but crosses burn in the background), to “HBCU football games, / and D9 org formation.” From there, it’s on to sit-ins and “Panthers standing proud,” Black Lives Matter, the rise of a Black president and the fall of a “gentle giant” (George Floyd), and finally a new presence on the Supreme Court: “Black and brilliant, wise and short. / They call her JUSTICE Jackson.” So keep marching, the author urges, and “be proud to be Black!” An unusually concentrated summary of the struggle, as replete with discussion topics as it is with allusions to horrors and highlights. - Copyright 2024 Booklist.