Black Arms to Hold You Up TP A History of Black Resistance

From the Ignatz and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Ben Passmore comes a whirlwind graphic history of Black life, taken by force

It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”

So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.

What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.

"In the western cannon, the political cartoons that came before merely interpreted the world in various ways; it is clear that with Black Arms to Hold You Up, Ben intends to change it."
--Ronald Wimberly, cartoonist

"[Passmore] offers a rollicking survey course in a history that has often been reduced to slogans or erased altogether."
--Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Ben Passmore's loving, instructive, and abrasive book educates about Black resistance against racist state violence and Black compradors. . . . As we awkwardly hold ourselves together, we can lean into Passmore's call to arms--of various types--to scrutinize history and heal our communities."
--Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition, Contextualizing Angela Davis, and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

"A mordant and highly original graphic novel that has readers reconsider Black resistance."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Virtuosic . . . refreshing . . . Every element seems packed with meaning: When guns fire and bombs explode, they do so with a DAYUM, and when police helicopters fly overhead, they go 'whip whip.'"
--The New York Times