The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel

A stunning graphic history of how enslaved Africans on board the Amistad rebelled and captured the slave ship in 1839, challenging a whitewashed version of history and putting the Africans back at the center of their own freedom story From the trio of Rediker, Lester, and Buhle comes another graphic "history from below" about the Amistad rebellion of 1839 when 53 enslaved Africans on the slave ship Amistad slipped out of their restraints and overpowered their enslavers and ship's crew. Sold into slavery in their homeland of Sierra Leone and later bound for Puerto Principe, Cuba, from Havana, these Africans, led by the charismatic warrior Cinque, forced the ship's remaining crew to sail homeward. Divided into 3 parts, The Black Schooner begins with the intense night of the uprising and takes readers on a reconstructed journey- from sailing on the open ocean to a New Haven, Connecticut, jail, where the captured Africans awaited trial for mutiny and murder; to the Supreme courtroom that found that the rebels had been illegally enslaved and would now be free to return to their native land. Through it all, artist David Lester chronicles their story using striking imagery, showing how they achieved an unexpected and powerful international victory for the abolitionist movement and forced some of the most powerful people in the world to confront the issue of human bondage. Based on Rediker's book The Amistad Rebellion- An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, The Black Schooner challenges a whitewashed history and instead, puts the Africans back at the center of their own freedom story-where they belong.

Table of Contents:
Foreword:
Why We Need Stories of Successful Resistance
by Marcus Rediker

Historical Characters

Part One: War

Part Two: Trials

Part Three: Freedom

Epilogue

Afterword:
Revolutionary Struggles Against the Slave Trade:
The role of popular art and comics
by Paul Buhle

About the Author :
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 Peoples 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.

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 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)