The Black Schooner

“A necessary and unique, expectation-shattering chronicle.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“Lester’s well-suited illustrations are sketchy, heavily shadowed and roughly crosshatched, and add a heightened sense of emotional tension and inescapable immediacy that resonates across the centuries of racial reckoning to come. An evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The graphic novel, deliberately choosing history over cinema, tells much of the story through contemporary interviews as well as journal entries of the rebels. The choice of a graphic novel is deliberate, since most of the published interviews were accompanied by portraits … The Black Schooner tells [an] important story, in a way that’s both accessible and engaging.”
—Freedom Press (UK)

“In his third graphic novel covering American history ‘from the bottom up,’ Vancouver artist David Lester has pushed his black and white graphic talents to a new intensity.”
—The BC Review

“Lester’s artwork is sharply inscribed, his black and white portraits of the rebels’ representative of their resolute and righteous struggle … It’s a history told through art and from the perspective of the many, not the few; the oppressed, not the oppressor.”
—Counterpunch

“The Black Schooner is a vivid and graphic depiction of the 1839 Amistad rebellion… . Lester’s powerful black-and-white art depicts their story, from the uprising on the ship to their subsequent imprisonment in the US and concluding with their return to Africa.”
—Gord Hill, author-artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book

Paul Buhle, David Lester, and Marcus Rediker have collaborated on three previous graphic novels, all published by Beacon Press: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (2021); Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic (2023); and Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741 (2024).

Paul Buhle, retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University, is the authorized biographer of Pan African giant C.L.R. James and radical historian William Appleman Williams. Since 2005 he has edited more than a dozen nonfiction graphic novels, including Studs Terkel’s Working (an adaptation of the totemic oral history), A People’s History of the American Empire (an adaptation of Zinn), The Beats, and Red Rosa (Luxemburg). He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

David Lester illustrated the award-winning 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike (published in English, German and French editions). His poster of anti-war protester Malachi Ritscher was exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Forthcoming in 2025, Lester has a chapter in the anthology Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-fascist Resistance (Between The Lines), edited by Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books that have been translated into nineteen languages worldwide. He worked with director Tony Buba to make the documentary film Ghosts of Amistad, about the memory of the Amistad Rebellion of 1839 in Sierra Leone. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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