An excerpt from NY Times Style Magazine -
The Black Artists Leaving America
Building on the legacy of luminaries such as James Baldwin and Josephine Baker, many Black creatives are seeking out new possibilities abroad.
By Emily Lordi Photographs by Manuel Obadia-Wills
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The poet and rapper Mike Ladd,
photographed at his studio in St. Denis, France,
on July 1, 2021.Credit...Manuel Obadia-Wills |
“STEAL AWAY,” goes the traditional slave spiritual, a song that enshrouds a call to escape the plantation with an appeal to the afterlife; and Black Americans have responded to the original theft of the slave trade by stealing themselves back and away from the United States in myriad ways — to places beyond America, and to autonomous worlds within it that are defined by region and family rather than the nation-state. In the antebellum period, enslaved people who escaped joined Indigenous people to form secret maroon colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean, and white supremacist agencies found some free Blacks eager to join the cause to repatriate them to Africa. When Reconstruction policies aimed at social reform sparked violent backlashes and an increase in lynchings, thousands of Black Americans left for Liberia, a free nation with an elected Black government. Decades later, the Jamaican-born leader Marcus Garvey claimed to have inspired millions of adherents to his Universal Negro Improvement Association, a global benevolent association with its own dreams of African return. And throughout the 20th century, Black American artists and intellectuals including the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, the performers Paul Robeson and Nina Simone, the visual artists Augusta Savage and Romare Bearden and the writers Jessie Fauset, Richard Wright and James Baldwin traveled to Europe, the Caribbean and Africa seeking political alliances, creative opportunities and personal safety and sanity. Even when, in the 1960s, leaders like Malcolm X reconceived racial separatism in domestic rather than international terms — demanding that the U.S. government cede some states to Black citizens as reparations — activists like Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis sought refuge and revolutionary education in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, while writers like Julian Mayfield and Maya Angelou moved to newly independent Ghana. Many Black Americans have subsequently made new lives abroad for personal, creative and political reasons: the conceptual artist Adrian Piper in Berlin; the writer Andrea Lee in Torino, Italy; Tina Turner in Zurich; Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) in South Africa, among others. Earlier this year, Stevie Wonder announced his plans to move to Ghana, where the tourism ministry recently ramped up its decades-long outreach efforts to Black Americans by hosting a Year of Return in 2019.
