A thesis Presented to
Pacific Northwest College of Art
Echoes of American Apartheid
In Partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Master of Fine Arts Degree
Program:
MFA Print Media
Ebony Frison
May 9th, 2025
Echoes and Entries
Precise
Prologue 1
Introduction 4
Forgotten Frontlines Archive 7
Framing the Context 11
Poem: Neverending Underground Railroad 13
Somatic Memory in Photogravure: The Body as an Archive 19
Entry: Sacred Loop 24
The Significance of Water 25
Photogravure as Embodied Witnessing:
Materializing Memory and Historical Echoes 27
Painting as Embodied Testimony: Materializing Memory Through Visual Narratives 29
Entry: Site of Witnessing 32
Prose as Testimony: Bearing Witness Through Language 33
Histories Coinciding with Memories 35
Entry: And Still, We Are Here 37
Echoes of Persistence: Reclaiming Memory Through Print and Prose 45
Final Thoughts 50
Entry: An Echo Is a Memory You Can Trace 55
List of Images 56
Bibliography 71
Precis
Echoes of American Apartheid is a multidisciplinary thesis that weaves personal memory with historical archive to examine the enduring impact of racial segregation and systemic violence in the United States. Central to this project are my own lived experiences—as a Black woman, veteran, and artist—and the Forgotten Frontlines archive, a collection of over 1,000 rarely seen photographs taken by Newton Carroll, an African American army photographer during World War II. Through photogravure, painting, and prose, this work bears witness to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual residue of American apartheid.
By confronting the visual and emotional dissonance of Black life—between visibility and erasure, service and betrayal, memory and myth—the project offers both a reckoning and a reverence. It creates space for ancestral presence, collective grieving, and reimagined belonging. Influenced by thinkers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, Echoes of American Apartheid is at once altar and archive, resistance and remembrance—a gesture toward healing through radical seeing.
Prologue
Freedom. It's how I came to art. It's what makes me stay. This metaphysical striving. this opaque and sometimes sublime longing. I hear it in the corners and alcoves of American music and poetry-sometimes in far-flung and estranged places. some of these far-flung and estranged freedom's calling to each other.
—Roger Reeves, On Ecstasy: Dark Days
I’ve found a ritual in printmaking, a full-body immersion in process, precision, and patience. The weight of the press, the resistance of the paper, the tactile memory of ink worked into a plate—every movement is a negotiation between intention and material.
100% cotton BFK paper in its entirety is a surface; it is a body. It breathes, it holds, it absorbs. The way it takes ink is different from wood pulp or synthetics—it has a softness that belies its resilience, a historical weight that echoes the labor of hands that once picked, spun, and wove. There is something deeply personal about working with it, pressing an image into fibers that, like skin, remember the touch.
When I am working with cotton, I imagine that the fibers resting between my fingers were picked by my ancestors commanding a familial relationship with the materials and with time. Printmaking is never immediate. The etching bath is slow. The plate preparation is meticulous. The inking and wiping, a practice in patience, and failure a known quantity. A misplaced fingerprint, an over-wiped plate, paper too damp or too dry—something often resisting perfection. Each misstep teaches me how to move differently, how to listen to the materials, how to yield.
The first proof moving throughout the press, moment of suspended breath. The pull of the blankets, the resistance of the roller—the weight of process made tangible. And then, the reveal. Lifting the paper from the plate is like revealing a true thing, something that has always existed but needed the right conditions to emerge. There is something intimate in that first sight, the way the ink settles onto the fibers, the way the shadows hold their depth, the way touch has translated to image.
How memories echo.
If “painting is a supreme fiction,” then printmaking—especially photogravure—is a supreme science.[^1] It’s the physics of pressure, the chemistry of acid and metal, the mathematics of exposure and calibration. It is an alchemy of light and touch, where the image is not just made but transferred, embedded, transformed. There is no room for improvisation, only adaptation. An unforgivable process with a story to tell.
Printmaking is to engage in conversation with time and material trusting that what is unseen—the press bed, the matrix beneath the blankets, the ink within the paper—holds something true. And when the final reveal comes, fibers holding a memory, it is a moment of recognition. An echo. The body knows it before the mind does. A print, once made, cannot be unmade. It exists. It is.
Introduction
The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.
—Arthur Schomburg
My thesis, Echoes of American Apartheid, is an interdisciplinary exploration of historical memory, racialized trauma, and the ways in which the American past continues to reverberate in the present. Through painting, print media, and prose, I employ the photogravure technique to interrogate the visual and psychological echoes of segregation, systemic violence, and the erasure of Black agency.
Photogravure, a 19th-century intaglio printmaking technique, serves as both a medium and a methodology in Echoes of American Apartheid, transforming historical documentation into a tactile, embodied experience.
Rooted in archival research and personal narrative, my work engages with images from my personal family archive as well as the Forgotten Frontlines Archive—a collection I own, of over 1,000 photo negatives taken by an African American army photographer during World War II, many of which have never been seen, documentingsegregated units during the European tour, offering a rare visual record of Black soldiers’ experiences in the military structure that both relied on and marginalized them. These images function as historical artifacts, spectral presences, and testimonies to both resilience and erasure.
My engagement with photogravure is an aesthetic choice as well as a conceptual strategy. Photogravure allows for a deep materiality that speaks to the fragility and endurance of memory. The labor-intensive nature of the process mirrors the painstaking excavation of history, requiring an engagement with layers of ink and texture that echo the sedimentation of time and forgetting. Through these prints, I seek to destabilize the authority of the photographic image as a static document and instead present it as a site of haunting, where the past refuses to remain buried.
Furthermore, my work conceptually incorporates Little Black Sambo, a fraught cultural object that has existed in various iterations since its first publication in 1899. By engaging with and recontextualizing this figure, I examine the ways in which racial caricature, minstrelsy, and visual stereotypes have been insidiously woven into the fabric of American consciousness. Rather than simply reproducing these images, I manipulate, fragment, and obscure them through drawing, painting and collage, demanding that the viewer reckon with their implications (Fig. 1). This intervention is a form of visual-cognitive dissonance, forcing a confrontation with both historical and contemporary biases.
Alongside the imagery, I integrate prose and fragments of text drawn from my own writing. These texts function as counterpoints, amplifications, and disruptions, challenging the imposed narratives of history. In doing so, I aim to create a space where Black voices, often sidelined or silenced, assert their presence and agency.
This thesis ultimately seeks to create a visual and conceptual terrain where the personal and the historical, the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten, all exist in chaos. It is a reckoning with the visual legacies of American apartheid, an offering for both mourning and transformation.
Figure 1: Anxious Eyes 40” x 60” charcoal, oil crayon, oil paint photogravure and collage on canvas.
I am most anxious when white biases are displayed, anticipating harm.
I am most anxious when internalized racism spills out of your vessel, causing mass confusion.
I am most anxious when you don’t understand, a refusal to hear me.
Forgotten Frontlines Archive
Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating - taking something for one’s own use - need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
—bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
I first encountered the Forgotten Frontlines archive while searching for images that could serve as a bridge between my military memory and history. The archive, filled with over a thousand black-and-white photographs taken by Newton Caroll, an African American army photographer, offered something that mainstream WWII narratives rarely do—an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of Black soldiers. Looking at these images, I saw more than just uniforms and military formations. I saw myself. I recognized familiar emotions, and I saw men navigating two wars: the one overseas against fascism and the one at home against racism. These photographs are more than historical records; they are evidence of resilience, disillusionment, and an unfinished fight for recognition.
Before delving into what these images reveal, it’s important to acknowledge the military structure that shaped them. The U.S. military during World War II was an extension of Jim Crow, a rigid system that dictated every aspect of Black soldiers’ service. They were largely assigned to labor battalions, supply units, or other non-combat roles—positions that, while essential to the war effort, reinforced the idea that they were unfit for leadership or direct engagement. [^2]
Yet, despite the systemic barriers, many Black soldiers fought their way into combat units, defying expectations and proving their worth. The 92nd Infantry Division in Italy, the 761st Tank Battalion, and the famed Tuskegee Airmen rewrote the rules of engagement. Their struggle for recognition echoes in the Forgotten Frontlines archive, where images capture moments of brotherhood and defiance amid the contradictions of their service.
As I studied the archive, I noticed a recurring theme: Black soldiers interacting with European civilians, moments of ease and warmth not often seen in images taken stateside (Fig. 2). In France, Belgium, and parts of the UK, many Black soldiers found themselves treated as equals—or at least as something closer to it. [^3] Unlike in the United States, where segregation was the law, some European communities welcomed them with curiosity rather than contempt. They could walk into cafés without being refused service, attend dances where white women weren’t forced to look away, and, for a brief moment, imagine a different kind of freedom.
This contrast wasn’t lost on the soldiers themselves. Many spoke of how, for the first time, they felt like men—not just Black men, but men. The archive preserves these fleeting moments, freezing in time the quiet dignity of soldiers who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, weren’t defined by their race alone.
War and trauma have a way of distorting time. What felt like progress overseas dissolved the moment these soldiers returned home. The same uniforms that earned them respect in Europe became targets in the American South. Some were lynched in those uniforms, their service doing nothing to protect them from white rage. The same military police who once upheld segregation on foreign soil returned home to enforce it with equal fervor—now policing Black veterans, not as comrades-in-arms, but as threats to the racial order. Medgar Evers, a decorated World War II veteran turned civil rights leader, stood as a searing example: having fought tyranny abroad, he was gunned down in his own driveway by Byron De La Beckwith, a former military policeman. [^4]
The Forgotten Frontlines archive doesn’t capture this homecoming, but its absence speaks volumes. These men were photographed in moments of duty, camaraderie, and fleeting joy, yet history tells us what came next. Their service didn’t translate into equal treatment. It didn’t stop the attacks, the housing discrimination, or the refusal of the GI Bill’s full benefits to Black veterans.
I return to these images, not as historical artifacts but as acts of resistance. They disrupt the dominant narrative that often erases or flattens Black soldiers’ experiences. The photographs in the Forgotten Frontlines archive challenge us to look, to remember, and to acknowledge that history isn’t just about battles fought on foreign soil. It’s also about the battles fought at home—the ones that are still ongoing.
By preserving these images, I am looking at history, embodying history and demanding that it be seen. These soldiers deserve more than a footnote in the story of World War II. They deserve the freedom they fought for. The Forgotten Frontlines Archive ensures that, at the very least, they will not be forgotten.
Figure 2: In The Wake 4” x 11” photogravure Chine-Colle´.
Segregated Black Army members swimming in a lake in Europe with white women.
Framing the Context
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
—Toni Morrison, Peril: The Source of Self-regard
The term "American Apartheid" refers to the systemic racial segregation and oppression that persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery. While the Jim Crow era (1877–1965) legally codified racial discrimination in the South, segregation and structural racism existed nationwide, affecting housing, education, employment, and political representation. Key events such as the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which upheld "separate but equal" policies, and the Great Migration, during which millions of Black Americans, my family included, fled the South to escape racial violence, shaped the landscape of racial inequality. The Civil Rights Movement (1950s–1970s) sought to dismantle these oppressive structures, yet systemic disparities remain embedded in contemporary society.
The lingering effects of American apartheid are palpable in mass incarceration, economic disenfranchisement, and intergenerational trauma, phenomena that align with the framework of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), as theorized by Dr. Joy DeGruy.
Dr. DeGruy states that “American Chattel Slavery Represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequences to any other incidence of human enslavement.”[^5] PTSS suggests that the cumulative effects of slavery, segregation, and racial terror manifest in chronic psychological and social patterns passed down through generations. This historical backdrop is essential for understanding how Echoes of American Apartheid seeks to visualize these deep-seated wounds and their ongoing repercussions.
My thesis is something I live every day. I am actively living the inherited echoes of apartheid, not as a distant history but as a present, embodied experience. The remnants of segregation are not theoretical; they are woven into the fabric of my daily existence, shaping space, movement, and belonging.
Entry: Never-ending Underground Railroad
You shouldn’t have to do that.
Making sure you know your neighbors.
Talking to everyone.
Making sure you know whose door you can knock on in an emergency.
Knowing whose door might lead to your death.
You shouldn’t have to know who’s safe.
You shouldn’t have to do that.
Constantly on alert.
Mapping out the safe houses on the never-ending underground railroad.
To engage with apartheid is to recognize how it lingers—
not only in policy,
but in land,
in memory,
in exclusion,
in resistance.
I am in conversation with it,
coexisting with its specters
while simultaneously living the dream of my ancestors—
pushing against erasure,
creating,
reclaiming.
Existing.
My creative practice, my teaching, my art—
a response to the call.
An act of
Conviction,
Continuity,
and Survival.
I am imprinting history onto the present, much like ink pressed into paper,
ensuring that what was stolen, forgotten, and buried is unearthed, seen and felt.
As they say in the vernacular.
We’s built fa dis.
As I say in the vernacular,
I’s built fa dis.
Living the thesis isn’t an academic exercise—
this here, is real life.
I am actively living the inherited echoes of apartheid,
carrying the weight and wisdom of those who came before me.
I coexist with its remnants, not by choice but by design,
moving through spaces still shaped by exclusion,
while carving out new ones of my own.
All at once, I am a dream deferred.
An ancestral dream—
a contradiction,
a paradox,
a proof of resilience.
My art, my teaching, my presence is a response to the song.
As they say in the vernacular,
A closed mouth don’ get fed.
I speak,
I create,
I print,
I move.
Because the ink ain’ dry, and the story ain’ over.
As they say in the vernacular,
We’s ain’ for evry-one.
As I say in the vernacular,
I’s ain’ for evry-one.
Living the thesis means carrying the weight of history in my body,
in my work,
in my every step.
Ebony.
What’s in a name?
Is a rose a rose?
Is a spade a spade?
Is Ebony Black?
Ebony.
“That’s so literal.”
It means actively engaging with echoes,
not as a distant past but as a present, lived reality.
Some look away.
Some pretend it’s over.
But I don’t have that luxury—
I move through spaces still shaped by its residue,
while creating new ones of my own.
Simultaneously living their dream,
walking a path laid brick by brick,
breath by breath.
It’s a contradiction.
It’s a burden.
It’s a blessing.
It’s resistance.
It’s survival.
It’s creativity as somatic intelligence,
as memory,
as matrix,
as proof.
As they say in the vernacular,
Cant’ evry-body hold dis.
Not evry-body wants ta.
But we’s do.
As I say in the vernacular,
Cant’ evry-body hold dis,
Not evry-body wants ta.
But I’s do.
Somatic Memory in Photogravure:
The Body as an Archive
Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.
—Percival Everett, James
Photogravure, as a printmaking process is a bodily practice, a conduit for memory held within my soul, my breath, and my touch. The act of engraving, inking, and pressing echoes the gestures of remembering—each step an embodied ritual that translates history into matter. The technique’s ability to capture fine tonal gradations and rich textures mirrors the ephemeral traces of lived experiences, rendering them tactile, visceral, and present.
In Echoes of American Apartheid, photogravure becomes a somatic invocation, a materialized echo of past injustices that are not only seen but felt. The weight of systemic violence, displacement, and segregation is embedded within each impression—transferred through physical labor, through the pressure of the press, through the absorption of ink into cotton paper. The body, both of myself and the viewer, engages with these prints not just through vision but through sensation, through the subtle vibrations of touch and texture.
Photogravure mirrors the work and labor of the enslaved—the relentless toil, the "hurry up and wait," the waiting, and waiting still. Through this process, I honor their sacrifice, their hard work, their resilience. I echo their patience, their hope that the outcome might be glorious.
The result offers lightness where there has been only dark. Lightness in the shadows. Lightness where depth is so dense, light struggles to penetrate. Light where darkness has long resided.
The process demands a choreography of patience and precision, a disciplined negotiation between chemistry, light, and pressure. The following steps outline this embodied practice:
The process begins with image preparation. I select original photographs—some from the archive, some from personal memory—and digitally process them in Photoshop. Here, I adjust contrast, expand tonal range, sharpen shadows and highlights. Through this process I honor what memory chooses to hold onto. It isn’t about editing—I’m sharpening the imprint of lives lived, moments nearly lost, the residue of stories once pushed to the margins.
From there, the image becomes a photo positive, transferred onto a sheet of translucent film. This fragile layer feels like spirit work—an ephemeral threshold between past and present. It floats, suspended in time. For me, it mirrors the in-between space where memory and forgetting co-exist, where my ancestors’ stories—some recorded, some erased—begin to whisper.
Next is the plate preparation. Under ultraviolet light, the photo positive is exposed onto a light sensitive gelatin resist called gravure tissue. Next, I cloak a copper plate with the tissue. What emerges is a ghost of the original. This ghost feels familiar. It reminds me of what it means to live in a body shaped by history, by generational labor, by inherited resilience. The plate, now inscribed with memory’s trace, waits in silence.
Then comes the etching. Acid eats into the plate’s surface, carving tonal shifts into valleys and ridges. Each dip and rise corresponds to shadow and light, presence and absence. As the acid works, I think about the physical toll of labor—the etching as a metaphor for how oppression leaves marks not just on bodies, but on time, on land, on lineage. I let the acid speak, cutting into the copper like time cuts into memory.
In the next stage—inking and wiping—I coat the plate in deep, pigment-rich Bone Black ink. The color feels like mourning, like soil, like depth. Then, by hand, I wipe the surface. Slowly. Carefully. This is a ritual of unveiling—an act of respect, of revealing what still wants to be seen. It is a quiet gesture of care: uncovering the image, but never fully erasing the labor it took to get here.
Finally, in printing on paper, the plate meets dampened cotton paper under the heavy wheel of the intaglio press. The pressure is immense—deliberate. It forces a union between ink and fiber, image and vessel. The result is more than an impression. It’s a memory re-embodied. A new archive. A whisper pulled forward into the light.
This entire process is slow, deliberate, and deeply physical. It mirrors the lived reality of my ancestors—especially those whose names were lost to the fields, the waiting, the labor. Through photogravure, I honor them. I bear witness. I carry the patience they were forced to cultivate. I wait, and I work, and I wait some more—for an image that, in the end, brings light to where it’s been dark for too long (Fig. 3).
This method’s haptic quality is integral to the work’s conceptual framework. The pooling of ink, the unpredictable impressions, the residual marks of touch all contribute to an aesthetic of haunting presence, a somatic engagement with the uneven, obscured, and often painful recollections of racialized trauma. Each print carries not only the history it depicts but also the gestures of its making—the weight of hands pressing, the breath held in concentration, the slow revelation of an image emerging from darkness. In this way, photogravure becomes a form of embodied witnessing, an invitation to feel history, to hold its echoes within the body.
Photogravure becomes a practice of Echo Horology—a timekeeping of trauma and survival through shutter echoes.[^6] Every press of the camera captures not only light but memory. Every plate is a reverberation. Every print, a reckoning with time’s residue.
Each image an imprint of time reverberating across generations.
Through the gravure process, I amplify that echo—etching memory into copper and paper—as if to make the ghosts of the moment audible through texture and shadow.
They are more than photographs; they are sonic-visual residues of Black witnessing,
vibrating with what was seen, what was felt, and what was withheld.
Figure 3: The Weight of a Choice 8” x 10” photogravure Chine-Colle´.
The weight of my childhood led me to choose the Airforce.
A Weight that would nearly drag me under.
Entry: Sacred Loop
Alchemy of existence.
The unseen exchange.
The sacred loop.
The Significance of Water
I've known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
—Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Water has always felt like an archive to me—a place where memories settle, shift, and resurface. A place where ancestors live. It holds history the way photogravure holds an image, layering time in sediment and ink. I think about Langston Hughes’ poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers and how he traced Black existence through water, from the Euphrates to the Mississippi, each river carrying the weight of history. His words remind me that memory isn’t static—it moves, like water, sometimes gentle, sometimes violent, always in motion.
Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend lingers in my mind as well. The main character Annis moves through a world where rivers are both passage and burden, much like the waters that carried enslaved people across the Atlantic. Her journey reminds me that water can be a witness, holding the weight of sorrow and survival, but also a site of transformation. I think of the spirits in her novel, whispering across the current, refusing to be lost. That refusal feels familiar.
Photogravure, in its own way, mimics this process of submersion and resurfacing. The image isn’t simply printed; it’s etched, bathed, and pulled from the plate, revealing itself slowly, like something long buried rising to the surface. When I work with photogravure, I feel like I’m immersed into history itself, watching shadows form in ink. The Forgotten Frontlines archive, with its unseen photographs, becomes a river of its own—deep, layered, full of stories waiting to be unearthed.
Water does not simply reflect history; it holds it. And when I make prints, I feel like I am reaching into that vast, shifting current, pulling fragments of the past into view.
Photogravure as Embodied Witnessing: Materializing Memory and Historical Echoes
Your scars are like stars in the night sky. It echoes the pain from your darkest moments, and makes your strength a feat worth emulating.
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia
Photogravure is a process, known for its ability to capture the finest tonal gradations, does more than reproduce images—it resurrects them. It brings forth the spectral traces of history, reactivating narratives of racial trauma, resilience, and erasure.
The labor-intensive nature of photogravure parallels the endurance of those who have lived through the structures of American apartheid. Each step—the meticulous preparation of the plate, the chemical bath etching away at the metal, the inking, the wiping, the forceful pressure of the press—mirrors the ways in which history is inscribed upon the body, upon landscapes, upon collective memory. The ghostly presence of the final print is not just an aesthetic choice but an invocation, a calling forth of what has been systematically buried yet refuses to disappear (Fig. 4).
The choice of BFK Rives paper further deepens the material and historical significance of this work. Derived from cotton, this paper carries an undeniable connection to the forced labor of enslaved Black people—a legacy of extraction and exploitation that underpins American history. By printing images of Black life, resistance, and remembrance onto this surface, Echoes of American Apartheid enacts a material reckoning, weaving together past and present through the fibers of the very paper itself.
Beyond its technical precision, photogravure allows for intentional distortions, symbolic fading, and layered compositions that evoke the fractured nature of memory—how trauma lingers, shifts, and resurfaces. These prints do not present history as fixed but as something continuously unfolding, demanding recognition and response. In this way, photogravure functions as a bridge between historical documentation and contemporary intervention, transforming the archive into an active site of witnessing.
Figure 4: Boxed Inn 8” x 10” photogravure Chine-Colle´.
The things we hold onto.
Painting as Embodied Testimony: Materializing Memory Through Visual Narratives
The uses of time, the choices we make with respect to what to think and write about, are part of visual politics… As we think and write about visual art, as we make spaces for dialogue across boundaries, we engage in a process of cultural transformation that will ultimately create a revolution in vision.
― bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
Painting functions as an act of witnessing, a means of reanimating both personal and collective histories entangled in American apartheid. Through layered imagery, fragmented compositions, and spectral figures, this project’s paintings do not merely depict the past—they insist upon its presence. Referencing archival photographs, oral histories, and intergenerational memory, each painting operates as both a historical record and a psychological landscape, holding space for the unresolved tensions of racial segregation, displacement, and resilience. The process of layering, obscuring, and revealing mirrors the ways Black history has been both recorded and erased, remembered and forgotten.
The material choices in these paintings carry deep symbolic weight. The color palette—dominated by reds and blues, contrasted starkly with black and white—evokes the violent ruptures and enduring resistance embedded in Black history. Red, the color of blood, urgency, and ancestral ties, speaks to the generational wounds of racial violence and the life force of survival. Blue, associated with sorrow, reflection, and spiritual transcendence, mirrors the depth of collective grief and the resilience found within it. Iconographic elements such as cotton fields, shackles, and spectral silhouettes serve as mnemonic devices, linking past forced labor economies to present-day structures of racialized oppression. Abstract gestures, distortions, and layered washes evoke the dissonance of racial trauma, forming a visual language that disrupts linear narratives and invites a more tactile, affective engagement with history.
The transition from painting to photogravure is a crucial alchemical process within this project, reinforcing the material and conceptual ties between history and its contemporary reverberations. Selected paintings undergo a transformation into photogravure prints, a shift that intensifies their spectral presence through the medium’s rich tonal subtleties and textural depth. The act of printing itself—etching, inking, pressing—becomes a ritual of inscription, mirroring the ways historical narratives are embedded into bodies, landscapes, and collective consciousness. This process does not merely reproduce imagery; it extends the dialogue between painting and printmaking, between materiality and memory, ensuring that the echoes of American apartheid remain seen, felt, and witnessed.
While Printmaking is akin to a military formation—a uniquely structured group of individuals moving to the same cadence. Painting is the opposite. It’s the freedom to engage on my own terms, to move between my own rhythm and that of my ancestors. At any moment, I have the liberty to change my mind, to take a break, or to charge forward with full force.
In painting, I am my own commanding officer—guided by intuition, history, and spirit. There’s no uniformity demanded, only presence. No fixed mission—just the unfolding of my inner world, brushstroke by brushstroke.
But printmaking is a disciplined dance. Each layer, each press, each alignment must be exact. Like a unit moving as one, the materials demand cohesion, timing, structure. It’s where craft meets command, where repetition becomes ritual.
Together, they hold my duality: the regimented rhythm of survival and the fluid grace of becoming.
Figure 4: The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper.
Entry: Site of Witnessing
Visual Narratives
Render echoes.
Symbolism is the medium.
Material traces of
Trauma
and
Resistance
Bride painting and Printmaking.
Transforming the Archive.
An active site of witnessing.
Prose as Testimony: Bearing Witness Through Language
The playfulness in Black speech is the pleasure of getting free while cakewalking the master's discourse.
—Roger Reeves, A Little Brown Liquor: Dark Days
Prose is both my testimony and my translation, a way of articulating the lived experiences that shape Echoes of American Apartheid. Just as photogravure materializes memory through texture and tone, my words give voice to the histories that linger in silence—the unspoken, the buried, the deliberately erased. My prints and paintings serve as visual meditations on racial apartheid, but prose allows me to expand upon those images, to contextualize and interpret them through my own lived experience. Storytelling is an act of survival, a way to bridge history with the present, ensuring that what has been forgotten or ignored is remembered and felt.
Writing, for me, is a way of bearing witness to generational trauma and survival. My own family’s history is woven into the fabric of this project—stories of displacement, forced labor, and systemic violence, alongside stories of love, resilience, and creative resistance. These narratives have often existed in fragments, preserved in oral histories, faded photographs, and the quiet details passed down through generations. My essays, vignettes, and poetic reflections are acts of excavation, uncovering these histories while making space for my own voice within them. I write because these stories refuse to stay buried. I write because I, too, am shaped by them.
Through writing, I seek to amplify voices that have long been silenced, including my own. I have spent years unlearning the erasures imposed by dominant narratives—learning to trust my own memories, my own interpretations, my own grief. The weight of racial trauma is something I carry in my body, something that surfaces in unexpected moments. The act of putting it into words is both painful and necessary. My prose is about retelling history and reclaiming it. It is about challenging the way history has been told, centering the perspectives of those who have been ignored, and asserting that these stories are not relics of the past but forces that continue to shape my truth.
Beyond documentation, writing allows me to construct a layered and embodied narrative—one that moves fluidly between the historical and the personal, between politics and poetry. My essays are conversations with my own memories, my prose an extension of the imagery I create in my paintings and prints. These words do not simply explain my work; they exist alongside it, in dialogue with it, deepening the emotional and intellectual weight of Echoes of American Apartheid. The stories I tell are not neat, and they do not resolve. They resist singular interpretation, just as trauma, survival, and resilience refuse to fit into a linear framework.
Prose is an act of resistance. It is a refusal to forget. It is an insistence that history is not something that happened “so long ago” but something that continues to reverberate now. Through my writing, I affirm that storytelling is both a political act and a form of healing. These words are my offering, my echo, my way of ensuring that the weight of history is remembered and carried forward.
Histories Coinciding with Memories
Histories coinciding with memories acts as an introduction between two African American military service members, Newton Carroll (1918–2002) and Ebony Frison (1981–) whose lives, though separated by time, are joined through shared experience, dedication, and a will to survive. An echo reverberates across 107 years, calling forth a deeper reflection on the ultimate and ongoing fight for freedom.
Using Hiromi Asuka inkjet paper and an Epson pigment printer I was able to preserve the delicate tonal range and archival integrity of the images. The interior text is set in the Abolition typeface; the title page features Ruby. The images originate from the Forgotten Frontlines archive, photographed by Newton Carroll, whose lens captured a vital and often erased chapter of American military history (Fig 5).
What began as a personal archival reckoning has become a salvage—for Newton, for myself, and for the invisible threads of memory frayed by time. This work seeks to reclaim what has been lost, forgotten, or unacknowledged: histories buried in silence, acts of resistance preserved in photographs, and a lineage of resilience passed down through generations.
In this book are photographs drawn from three archives: my own, my family’s, and Newton’s. accompanied by the entry titled “And Still, We Are Here.” Through the creation of this drum leaf book and a series of photogravure prints, I am establishing a fourth archive—one that merges our familiar experiences as Black Americans and propels our stories into the future. This new archive is both personal and communal: a space for witnessing, remembrance, and forward motion.
It is an offering. An acknowledgement of the sacrifice, love, and unwavering support of my ancestors. Their presence endures. Their echoes speak.
This book is a reckoning and a reparation—a bridge between past and present, memory and history.
Figure 5: Histories Coinciding with Memories drum leaf book.
Entry: And Still, We are Here
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
Evidenced by the repeat mistake.
Again. And again. And again.
The same misidentification,
the same confusion,
the same flattening.
All they see is Black.
Black girl, you look like the Black girl with the...
The sentence never finishes, but I already know how it ends.
A blur of assumptions. A refusal to see detail.
A collapsing of individuality into something singular, something interchangeable.
All they see is Black.
And even then, they don’t see at all.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
When the white lady tells you she’s Jewish,
so she can’t be racist,
can’t be biased in her language.
When the white lady tells you your writing isn’t good enough.
When she lies to keep you out of academia,
out of programs that she built—
gatekeeping with a smile.
When the white lady tells you—
what she really means is, she decides.
and then again.
When the insecurity of a white man invades your space.
yelling.
“YOU ARE SO DISRESPECTFUL.”
For being.
Being.
Being.
Black.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
I am a case of rare air.
The space I exist in—thin, sharp, unforgiving.
Sometimes suffocating.
Only the wicked can survive.
Only those who have learned to breathe where others choke.
Only those who know that survival is not the same as freedom.
Rare air.
Heavy with history.
Heavy with knowing.
And still, I inhale.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
I can’t help but notice how your effect changes.
A sudden atmospheric shift.
I wonder if it’s me, suddenly realizing that it’s you.
100% you. And the biases you resist acknowledging.
My brown skin triggering something deep within you.
On a cellular level, fear seeps out and fills your vessel.
My Black body, my Black essence—
its mere presence.
Black in Portland.
A liberal city where white folk claim to know what it means to be queer,
but not what it means to be Black.
Where white folk abdicate from their job out of fear.
Where Black Lives Matter signs adorn houses once owned by the Black lives
they liberally displaced—
to comfort themselves.
Black in Portland is a never-ending advocation for self and community.
The ways of white folk still prevalent today,
disguised by intellection.
Black Lives Matter signs marking gravesites of memories.
Gravesites where memories lay—
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
Black is…
Getting your hair hot combed in the kitchen, sitting in front of the stove.
Holding your breath every time you feel the heat on your skin.
Black is like…
My return to the holding cell.
Genesis of capital,
Crucifix ushered into slavery.
It is what it is.
Lived and breathed but dead.
Dead.
A cycle, endless and unforgiving.
The body moves but the soul—
remains shackled.
Crucifixion in the name of something holy,
but it’s always been about control.
In the name of God, we die again and again.
It is what it is.
In God We Trust.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
When I think
about the body and how it stores memory,
cellular memory,
I can’t help but think about the deeper root—
the root that never forgets.
How it lives, how it breathes, how it remembers.
How the body holds what the mind can’t—or won’t—retain.
Or how we are objects, too.
Self-study.
Given something odd, yet expressive.
Not just flesh, but layers of history,
etched into each cell,
each muscle, each joint.
The body, an archive.
Each movement, a story.
Each scar, a memory not erased, but embedded.
And still, we are here—
expressing what was never meant to be forgotten.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
We
built this country.
Protected this country,
while at the same time,
we are continuously devalued for
existing.
For being seen as less than.
For giving our labor, our sweat, our blood,
only to be treated as expendable.
For being the backbone and the forgotten.
We built this country,
but we are never meant to claim it.
We are erased, marginalized,
and left to fight for space we’ve always earned.
Yet still, we endure.
We survive.
We rise.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
Even when
I’m doing nothing,
I’m still Black.
Black walking.
Black existing.
To be Black is to always be seen—
whether I’m moving or standing still.
To be Black is to be a target,
to be a threat without even trying.
Be Black and die.
Not just in the physical sense,
but in the constant erasure,
the dehumanization,
the conditioning that says
my life means less.
Even when I’m doing nothing,
I’m still Black—
and that is enough to make the world feel unsafe.
Time is not distance; the past is not past.
All they see is Black.
Echoes of Persistence: Reclaiming Memory Through Print and Prose
I want us to tell the truth about our history not because I want to punish America, I want to liberate us but we can’t get to liberation if we don’t acknowledge what we’ve done.
—Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
In this thesis the echo serves as both metaphor and method, embodying the lingering presence of historical trauma, the reverberations of systemic oppression, and the act of reclaiming silenced histories. My work—both in printmaking and prose—enacts this phenomenon through repetition, layering, and re-presentation. Each iteration deepens my engagement with memory, demanding a form of listening that extends beyond the visual. The echo is an auditory event; it is an affective force, a presence that refuses to be erased or unheard.
To understand the echo as a conceptual tool, I draw from theories of memory, trauma, and visual culture, particularly Tina Campt’s Listening to Images. Campt’s notion of "listening" insists on a deeper, embodied engagement with images, one that moves beyond the eyes to a form of attunement. [^7]My photogravures do not simply depict history; they sound it. They resonate with archival silences, with the unspoken and unseen traces of Black life under American apartheid. Campt’s work underscores how photography—particularly vernacular and underrepresented Black visual archives—functions as documentation, a site of sonic and haptic presence. The echoes in my prints and prose move through me in a similar way, insisting on the persistence of histories that dominant narratives attempt to suppress. These echoes, rather than fading, amplify the presence of Black visuality and testimony.
Theoretical frameworks of trauma and memory further shape my understanding of echoes as a mode of persistence—memories that refuse to fade, voices that continue to be heard despite attempts at erasure. My work does not engage with history as a fixed entity; it is as a reverberation that continually interacts with the present. The images I create are not passive reflections; they are active disruptions, unsettling dominant narratives and asserting the presence of Black life beyond the boundaries imposed by historical record-keeping.
Photogravure and painting materialize the echo through formal strategies that reinforce the conceptual framework of haunting, repetition, and historical residue. My process engages with these elements to evoke the persistence of memory, the traces of the past, and the spectral presence of history within the present.
Repetition and layering function as visual manifestations of echoes. In printmaking, I repeat images—each iteration slightly altered, each print carrying the weight of previous impressions. This repetition evokes the instability of memory and the fragmentation of historical truth. The images refuse to settle into singular meaning, much like the histories they represent. Overprinted textures and multi-layered compositions create a palimpsestic effect, where past and present collapse into one another, resisting erasure. [^8]
The ghost image is a defining feature of printmaking, wherein residual ink marks, tonal shifts, and faded impressions render visible the spectral qualities of history. These ghostly presences reinforce the idea that the past is never truly past—it lingers, haunts, and disrupts. The past is not past. The use of photogravure’s soft tonal range allows for these echoes to emerge in the materiality of the image itself, drawing attention to the gaps, the absences, and the spaces where voices were silenced. The portals.
Erosion and distortion operate as acts of resistance against the presumed clarity of historical documentation. By using damaged images, I introduce disruptions that mirror historical ruptures. These disruptions are not intentional however, they refuse the neatness of official narratives, insisting instead on the fractured, unstable, and often violent nature of Black history. Trauma reshapes perception, and my process embraces this instability as a way to challenge the authority of the archive. Thriving in Chaos.
Palimpsestic surfaces further engage the concept of the echo, layering different temporalities within a single composition (Fig. 5). Just as history is overwritten but never truly erased, my prints and paintings carry traces of previous marks—ghostly remnants that exist alongside the present. This layering speaks to the ways in which Black memory has been continuously written over, yet remains insistent, present, and undeniable.
Through these techniques, I enact the process of remembering, distorting, and reinterpreting history—an echo made tangible. The past is not static; it is active, shifting, and in conversation with the present. My work does not attempt to reconstruct history as it stands but to acknowledge its persistent reverberations, the ways it continues to shape Black life today.
While echoes often connote absence or loss, they also signify endurance and defiance. Projection and mirroring. In my work, the echo is a repetition of the past and an assertion of presence—a refusal to be erased. My engagement with the echo as resistance aligns with the broader tradition of Black cultural production, where memory is reclaimed, history is rewritten, and testimony becomes a tool for survival.
The echo functions as a refusal to forget. In a society that often seeks to erase or distort Black history, the act of re-echoing suppressed narratives through visual and textual means becomes a form of defiance. My work insists on the presence of voices that were historically marginalized, positioning them at the center rather than the periphery. The histories I engage with are not relics of the past; they are forces that continue to shape my world, and through my work, I assert their ongoing relevance.
A call and response emerge as a central structuring principle in my practice, engaging with the African American tradition of dialogue across time and space. The pieces I create respond to archival materials, beyond the static and into the living becoming breathing entities. The conversation between image and text mirrors the rhythmic exchange of call and response, where the past speaks, and I answer. Through this process, I challenge dominant historical narratives, offering new interpretations that acknowledge both the violence of erasure and the resilience of Black testimony.
The echo as a living archive reimagines history, an evolution. My project does not treat history as an object to be observed but as a force that must be reckoned with. Each brush stroke, each print, each line of prose extends the conversation, ensuring that the past continues to resonate in the present. This approach resists the finality of official archives, instead positioning my work as an evolving record—one that grows, shifts, and refuses closure.
Reclaiming the echo as an act of presence rather than absence, Echoes of American Apartheid positions art as a critical tool for historical reckoning and healing. Through printmaking, painting and prose, echoes become a force of remembrance, resistance, and ultimately, restoration. These works are about what remains, what insists, and what demands to be heard. My work is both an invocation and a response to the song—a way of ensuring that the echoes of American apartheid are not only remembered but carried forward.
Final Thoughts
I used to think to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
“There are etchings in the brick. Some letters. A shape that looks like the sun.” [^9] I think about the hands that made them, the bodies that pressed against these walls, the weight of time caught in the grooves. Jesmyn Ward’s words stay with me—"I wonder if my mother might have carved this, put her mark here since she could never write her name." [^10]
I think about mark making, about how history carves itself into surfaces, into skin, into memory. The walls of slave-holding cells in New Orleans bear witness to lives that weren’t meant to be remembered. Those etchings—letters, symbols, prayers—are acts of survival. Proof of existence. A refusal to be erased.My work in Echoes of American Apartheid is about those marks, those echoes. Photogravure, like etching, is an act of inscribing history, of pulling something from the shadows and pressing it into permanence. The photographs I work with—images from Forgotten Frontlines archive, hold the same kind of weight as those carved bricks. They are remnants, left behind by people who may never have had the chance to write their own names into history.
I think about my own hands, pressing ink into paper, scratching into plates, layering image over image. This process is physical, like the labor of those who left their marks on walls, in cotton fields, and prison cells. It is a way of reclaiming. Of saying, I was here. We were here.
Maybe my mother left marks I haven’t yet found. Maybe my ancestors carved their names into something more permanent than paper. Maybe my work is part of that lineage—a continuation of hands pressing, inscribing, remembering.
This thesis has explored the ways in which painting, prints, and prose serve as vessels for the echoes of American apartheid. Through photogravure, layers of ink capture historical residues, transforming archival images into tactile memorials that bear the weight of memory. Through prose, language functions as both witness and translator, articulating the gaps, silences, and suppressed narratives that visual representation alone cannot fully express. Through painting, material and form respond to history, distorting, reinterpreting, and reclaiming it. These mediums depict the past; they activate it, ensuring that its reverberations continue to shape our present understanding of race, memory, and resistance.
At the core of this project is the concept of the echo—a repetition that recalls, transforms, and resists erasure. Photogravure embodies this echo visually, capturing the lingering presence of historical trauma through depth, tone, and layering. The instability of memory is mirrored in the process itself, where each print carries both clarity and distortion, reinforcing the tension between presence and absence.
Prose functions as a textual echo, a conversation extending the dialogue beyond the image by translating fragmented histories into narrative form. Personal and collective memory converge in the writing, ensuring that what has been lost, suppressed, or unspoken embodied.
Painting materializes the echo through erasure, repetition, and abstraction, reconstructing history in ways that challenge the perceived authority of photographic documentation.
These three forms engage in a polyphonic remembrance, demonstrating that history is never singular it exists in layers, voices, and reverberations. The echoes of American apartheid persist not just as reflections of the past, but as active forces in contemporary struggles for racial justice and historical truth.
The creative process behind this thesis has been both a challenge and a revelation. Working with archival materials has underscored the fragility of memory, revealing how history is shaped by what is preserved, what is erased, and what is distorted. Photogravure, with its balance between clarity and obscurity, became a metaphor for this instability. Revisiting historical traumas through art required an ongoing negotiation between intellectual rigor and emotional self-care. The work demanded technical skill in addition to a deep personal reckoning with the histories it unearthed. The unpredictable nature of printmaking reinforced the idea that meaning emerges through repetition and transformation. Ink pooled in unexpected ways, images eroded over time, and each reprint revealed new interpretations of the same image, demonstrating the echo as both loss and renewal.
This thesis reaffirms that art does not exist in isolation. Conversations with peers, mentors, and viewers have shaped its evolution, emphasizing the necessity of collective engagement in historical reckoning. Echoes gain power when they are heard by others, and this project has relied on the resonance of shared memory and communal witnessing. The persistence of these echoes speaks to the unfinished nature of history, demanding that we listen, we engage, and we respond. Through the interplay of photogravure, painting, and prose, this work asserts that the past is never truly past—it reverberates, lingers, and insists on being reckoned with.
Art has the power to remember, to resist, and to transform. This thesis contends that the legacy of American apartheid lingers like smoke from a battlefield long thought extinguished—its residue clinging in academia, courtrooms, and neighborhoods. It is the rust on the chains once broken, the dust of cotton fields still unsettled, compelling us to remember, to confront, and to act. Through photogravure, prose, and painting, this project has sought to amplify these echoes—not as passive reflections, but as urgent calls to engage, to witness, and to reimagine.
History does not exist in silence. It reverberates through us, shaping our understanding of self, community, and justice. In amplifying these echoes, art becomes more than an act of remembrance—it becomes a tool for transformation.
Entry: An echo is a memory you can trace
I wonder if those marks exist today.
Petroglyphs of the enslaved.
If I lay my hand upon your grave.
Can I feel your pain?
I wonder if the salt from your tears left marks where we stroll.
Staining the pavement with grief.
An echo is a memory you can trace.
Echo Chronometry. [^11]
Fig (6).
Figure 6: Close up picture of the upper right corner of “Anxious Eyes.”
This image shows has hash marks that represent the enslaved on a slave ship.
List of Works
Image 1: Boxed In 8” x 10” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves. From the Forgotten Frontlines Archive 2025. Page 28.
Image 2: Whispers of spring 8” x 10” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves 2025.
Image 3: Welding 8” x 10” photogravure chine-colle´ on BFK Reeves. From the Forgotten Frontlines Archive 2024.
Image 1: In The Wake 4” x 11” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves. From the Forgotten Frontlines Archive 2025. Page 10.
Image 2: The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper 2022-25. Page 31.
Image 3: The Weight of a Choice 8” x 10” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves 2025. Page 23.
Image 1: “Across Time” and Memory Diptych 10” x 12” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves. From the Forgotten Frontlines Archive 2025.
Image 2: Anxious eyes 60” x 40” charcoal, acrylic, oil pencil, oil paint, collage, photogravure on canvas 2025. Page 6
Image 3: Across Time and “Memory” Diptych 10” x 12” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves 2025.
Image 1: Close up, upper right corner Anxious eyes 60” x 40” charcoal, acrylic, oil pencil, oil paint, collage, photogravure on canvas 2025. Page 6.
Image 1: Close up Anxious eyes 60” x 40” charcoal, acrylic, oil pencil, oil paint, collage, photogravure on canvas 2025. Page 6.
Image 1: Close up, lower left corner Anxious eyes 60” x 40” charcoal, acrylic, oil pencil, oil paint, collage, photogravure on canvas 2025. Page 6.
Image 1: Close up, upper left, The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper 2022-25. Page 31.
Image 1: Close up, upper right, The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper 2022-25. Page 31.
Image 1: Close up, lower right, The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper 2022-25. Page 31.
Image 1: Close up, lower left, The Self 36” x 24” multimedia collage. Magazine clippings, acrylic paint, dry point, photogravure, shellac on canvas and Sekisui paper 2022-25. Page 31.
Image 1: Tripple T 24” x 36” photogravure on gampi and Sekisui 2025.
Image 2: Most Days 17” x 11” photogravure chine-colle´ on grey BFK Reeves 2025.
Image 1: Histories Coinciding with Memories drum leaf book printed on Hiromi Asuka inkjet paper 2025. Page 36
Bibliography
Bamford, Tyler. “Medgar Evers: US Army Veteran and Civil Rights Leader.” The National WWII Museum. Accessed May 6, 2025. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/medgar-evers-us-army-veteran-and-civil-rights-leader.
Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Disorder. YouTube video. Published by Raising Awareness, September 10, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGjSday7f_8.
Delmont, Matthew F. Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. New York: Viking, 2022.
Erased: WW2 Heroes of Color. Directed by Luis Miranda Jr. MSNBC Films. Premiered February 19, 2023. Streaming on Hulu.
Murry, Jesse. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993. Edited by Jarrett Earnest. New York: Soberscove Press, 2021.
Ward, Jesmyn. Let Us Descend. New York: Scribner, 2023.
[1] Jesse Murry, Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993, ed. Jarrett Earnest (New York: Soberscove Press, 2021), 139.
2 Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (New York: Viking, 2022), 53.
3 Erased: WW2 Heroes of Color, directed by Luis Miranda Jr., MSNBC Films, premiered February 19, 2023, on Hulu.
4 Tyler Bamford, “Medgar Evers: US Army Veteran and Civil Rights Leader,” The National WWII Museum, accessed May 6, 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/medgar-evers-us-army-veteran-and-civil-rights-leader.
5 Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Disorder, YouTube video, 43:10, published by Raising Awareness, September 10, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGjSday7f_8
6 Echo Horology is a conceptual term developed by the author to describe the cyclical and reverberative nature of historical trauma, particularly how the visual and emotional residues of American apartheid resurface across generations. It merges “echo”—as a metaphor for recurring memory or affect—with “horology,” the study of time, to frame how temporality is fractured and reconstituted through image, narrative, and archival re-engagement.
7 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.
8 Palimpsestic pal-uhmp-SESS-tick refers to something that has been altered or layered over time while still retaining traces of its original form. The term originates from ancient manuscripts that were scraped and reused yet still carried faint remnants of the original text beneath the new writing. In a broader sense, it describes surfaces, histories, or narratives that reveal multiple layers of meaning, where past and present coexist through visible traces of erasure, revision, and accumulation.
9 Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend (New York: Scribner, 2023), 118.
10 Ward, Let Us Descend, 118.
11 Echo Chronometry is a term created by the author to describe a non-linear temporal framework in which racialized trauma and historical memory do not unfold in sequential order, but instead recur in waves—through imagery, narrative, and embodied experience. Rather than following traditional linear history, echo chronometry foregrounds the haunting presence of the past in the present, particularly in relation to American apartheid, archival silence, and generational memory.
Note: Page in progress.