Tales from The b.a.SKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover

By D. Amari Jackson

This week, we reach into the b.a.SKET and pull out the extraordinary 19^th century event that shook the world…

Sure, today, we can scan the 21^st century Marvelverse to identify numerous examples of Black superheroes.

But, throughout history, real ones have never been that far away.

Sometime in the early 1740s, on a sugar plantation on the French island-colony of Hispaniola, Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery. He was emancipated as an adult and, as they say, the rest is history. During the last decade of the 19^th century, as summed up in a December 2020 article in The New Yorker, the middle-aged Louverture galvanized the most important revolt of enslaved Africans in history, “effectively forcing France to abolish slavery in 1794.

Next, he united the island’s Black and mixed-race populations under his military command; outmaneuvered three successive French commissioners; defeated the British; overpowered the Spanish; and, in 1801—despite having been wounded seventeen times in battle and having lost most of his front teeth to a cannonball explosion—authored a new abolitionist constitution for Saint-Domingue, asserting that ‘here, all men are born, live, and die free and French.”

In 1802, France’s leading political figure and military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, sent 20,000 men to overthrow the rebel leader and restore slavery in the embattled French colony. In response, Louverture ordered his military comrade, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to set fire to the capital city of Saint-Domingue, “so that those who come to re-enslave us always have before their eyes the image of hell they deserve.” Unfortunately, Louverture was captured and deported to France, dying in prison soon after. But less than two years after his death, his inspired rebels defeated Bonaparte’s army and established the independent, free nation of Haiti with Dessalines as its first ruler.

These extraordinary acts by Louverture, who scholar Sudhir Hazareesingh once labeled “the first black superhero of the modern age,” not only prompted the Louisiana Purchase in the new American nation but has since inspired generations of Black people across the globe.

One of those people was Harlem Renaissance sculptor, Richmond Barthé. In 1948, the renowned artist was commissioned by the Haitian government to mark the country’s independence celebrations with a series of sculptures produced over a seven-year period, his most prominent being a 40-foot Toussaint L’Ouverture statue and stone monument unveiled in 1950 near the National Palace. Barthe’s stunning work also included a 40-foot equestrian bronze of Jean Jacques Dessalines.

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Amari Jackson is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.

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