The Black Schooner

“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 Black Schooner is a vivid and graphic depiction of the 1839 Amistad rebellion, when African slaves seized control of a slave ship near Cuba. While most histories focus on the work of white abolitionists in the US in defending the Africans during their subsequent trial in Connecticut, The Black Schooner shows the Africans themselves as the central figures. David 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 and The Antifa Comic Book

“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)

Paul Buhle, David Lester, and Marcus Rediker have collaborated on three previous graphic novels:

• Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (2021)
• Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic (2023)
• Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741 (2024)

Paul Buhle is a retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University and the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James and William Appleman Williams. Since 2005, he has edited more than a dozen nonfiction graphic novels, including adaptations of Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the American Empire, as well as The Beats and Red Rosa: 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 2025, he will have a chapter in the anthology Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-fascist Resistance, 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 translated into nineteen languages worldwide. He worked with director Tony Buba on the documentary film Ghosts of Amistad. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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