research post 2025-08-18

A quick visual archive of Black joy against enclosure

Occupations be damned. The beat goes on….

Young Negroes form a conga line as they parade around "sleep-out" demonstrators preparing to spend a second night bedded down on a Selma street late March 11th .(1965) Library of Congress

Illustrations of Negro life in Washington, D.C.: The Colored band (1887) / Library of Congress

Negro wench dancing, Maverly, in white muslin (c. 1808) / Library of Congress

Dance, Lynchburg, Virginia, 1853 / Slavery Images

The day of Jubelo / E. B. Bensell, pinxt ; photo. and pub. by Phil. Pho. Co., 730 Chestnut St. / Library of Congress

Dirk Valkenburg, The Slave-Dance, ca 1707, o/d 58 x 46 Kopenhagen Statens Museum for Kunst / from Esther Schreuder, “Looking Back at the Painting The Slave-Dance 1707 by Dirk Valkenburg,” Esther Schreuder, May 15, 2021, https://estherschreuder.wordpress.com/2021/05/15/looking-back-at-the-painting-the-slave-dance-1707-by-dirk-valkenburg/.

Negro Life at the South, Eastman Johnson (1876) / High Museum of Art

, François-Auguste Biard, La Fuite des esclaves (The Flight of the Slaves), 1859. Oil on panel. Collection Sergio Fadel, Rio de Janeiro. Artwork in the public domain

Market Folks, Benjamin Latrobe (1819) / MD History

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Reads

• Edward Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears,” History, U.S. History, , Articles, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968/.

• Jennifer Van Horn, “‘The Dark Iconoclast’: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2017.1327777.

• Sophie White, “Marguerite 1764,” OI Reader, n.d., accessed August 18, 2025, https://oireader.wm.edu/open_oi/voices-of-the-enslaved/marguerite-1764/.

• “Lawrence Van Alstyne’s Diary of an Enlisted Man, 1862-1864 (Part 3, 2013: ‘Make Way for Liberty!’) NUCMC and the Documentary Heritage of the Civil War (National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), Library of Congress),” accessed August 18, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/2013CivilWar/08_Alstyne'sDiaryofanEnlistedMan.html.

• Esther Schreuder, “Looking Back at the Painting The Slave-Dance 1707 by Dirk Valkenburg,” Esther Schreuder, May 15, 2021, https://estherschreuder.wordpress.com/2021/05/15/looking-back-at-the-painting-the-slave-dance-1707-by-dirk-valkenburg/.

• Mark Stryker, “Dance Party USA at the DIA Explores Art That Cuts a Rug,” Detroit Free Press, March 16, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/03/16/dia-dance-american-art/81771056/.

• Tracy L. Barnett, “Juneteenth,” Civil War Monitor, May 2025, https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/article/juneteenth/.

• Baptiste Henriot, “François-Auguste Biard, Bust-Length Study of a Man, ca. 1848,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 22, no. 2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2023.22.2.7.