The most glaring disparity in America’s search for equality has been and continues to be slavery and its legacy. In this chapter, we discuss the history of slavery, its purported elimination at the time of the Civil War and through the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, then its reemergence through Jim Crow laws. The unfortunate reality is that the fight for equality is ever present. John Lewis, the long-serving member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, is emblematic of the importance and continuing nature of that fight. As a young man, he was nearly killed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the March on Selma. He continued to fight for racial equality throughout his life to the point of penning an op-ed published posthumously in the New York Times just days after his death. The federal government played an essential role in trying to advance the fight for racial equality, primarily through cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Markets did not eliminate racial discrimination; they perpetuated and profited from it.

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

Charlie Parker is the focus of this account of Dizzy Gillespie's band in California in 1945-6. Shipton talks to survivors of the sextet – Milt Jackson, Sten Levey and Ray Brown, as well as those who heard the band there such as Clora Bryant, Teddy Edwards and Roy Porter. He traces the development of bebop back to New York, discussing this music with pianist Sir Charles Thompson, a lifelong friend of Buck Clayton who brought Buck, Parker and Dexter Gordon together for a record in 1945. Bassist Jimmy Woode recalls working with Parker in Boston, and Teddy Edwards brings the Los Angeles scene to life.

Chaney investigates the "changing same" of visual self-presentation in African American autobiography, history, biography, and fiction, paying attention to two forms: frontispieces and illustrations of the nineteenth-century ex-fugitive and comics from twenty-first-century African American artists and writers. The bridge between these two zones of history is not to be erected or traversed in the name of a naïve comparison, nor is it to be drawn from the coincidence of similarity arising from the fact that all the texts involved are partly visual. Rather, the gulf separating Frederick Douglass and Matt Johnson, for example, and their time periods is itself an assumption that the graphic works discussed in this chapter all seek to dismantle. Insofar as the traumatic Black subject is nearly always also a historical one in contemporary entertainments, African American graphic novels reclaim the past in the name of the present: through a style, voice, or look that is unavoidably "presentist" in its approach — since even a comic designed to resemble antebellum illustrations always does so in a manner that contrarily flaunts what is more contemporary than historical about the text.