Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen

Graphic designer McCalman expands on his project to paint one “Black history pioneer” every day for a month in this vibrant and stylish portrait collection. The book’s 145 subjects include basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, poet Maya Angelou, and essayist James Baldwin, as well as lesser-known figures like abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who refused to give up her seat in the “colored” section of a Philadelphia trolley car in 1858; James Hemings, who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and became the “first American to be trained as a chef in France”; and Baby Esther Jones, the Harlem jazz singer whose “boop-boop-a-doop” was appropriated for the cartoon character Betty Boop. Each pioneer gets a full-page illustration and an accompanying biographical sketch highlighting their achievements; civil rights attorney Eva Jefferson Paterson, for example, “deftly summarized the violent history of American politics” in a televised debate with Vice President Spiro Agnew when she was student government president of Northwestern University. There are also essays from James Beard Award winner Bryant Terry, journalist Patrice Peck, and others about their influences. The portraits, which range from brisk line drawings to saturated watercolors, complement the diversity and unruliness of the people profiled. This vivid survey of Black history leaps off the page. (Sept.)