And he lived there for a number of years with a number of different tribes, learning the languages, learning the customs, and then he joined a group of irregulars in the Union Army, and he fought in the Union Army. And Bass beat his master up and ran to Indian Territory at the time.
And they got into an argument over a card game. He would travel with him to the Civil War, where was a colonel. (Because his master didn't want to teach him to read, but he would teach him how to shoot, which is counterproductive in my opinion.) On Bass Reeves, the black marshal who caught over 4,000 criminalsīass Reeves was a slave, and his master taught him how to shoot. Gill tells Rath about the stories that inspire him, how he uses comics to communicate history and why he created the hashtag #28daysarenotenough. DuBois' idea that a "talented tenth" of the African-American population could lead the rest to social change. He's the subject of the first installment of Gill's Tales of the Talented Tenth - a reference to W.E.B. marshal named Bass Reeves warrants his own book. Nine stories are collected in his graphic anthology Strange Fruit, Volume 1: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History - named after the Abel Meeropol poem and Billie Holiday song " Strange Fruit." The book opens with a drawing of a crowd, holding up a lynching rope with the noose cut off - a visual metaphor, Gill says, that shows how far black Americans have come, while living with the reminder of the struggle. As he tells NPR's Arun Rath, he's made uncovering and sharing these stories into his life's work.
Gill, who teaches at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, has a dozen more tales at the ready. There's the one about Box Brown, a slave who escaped to freedom by mailing himself in a box, then became an abolitionist speaker.Īnd then there's the story of the first American stage magician, a black man from New Hampshire named Richard Potter.Īnd of course there's Spottswood Rice, a slave who escaped and then wrote two impassioned letters: a heartfelt message to his children still in slavery, and a threat to his former slavemaster. Illustrator and historian Joel Christian Gill is full of stories.
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