J usticeAid believes in justice and the power of art to bring us together in the fight for a more equitable nation and world. This year, in parallel with our fundraising for Black Voters Matter, each month we will highlight Black artists in order to uplift those whose voices have been muted, and whose visions can help us all see ourselves as we really are, and as we could be.

Music

Congratulations to Samara Joy and Robert Glasper—2023 Grammy Award winners and JusticeAid concert artists!

JusticeAid concert artist Samara Joy was crowned Best New Artist during this year’s Grammy Awards on Feb. 5. The deeply emotive singer also won Best New Jazz Vocal Album for her critically acclaimed 2022 recording, Linger Awhile. Watch “Can’t Get Out Of This Mood,” which Samara performed at the Grammy Premiere Ceremony prior to the evening telecast.

Jazz pianist-composer Robert Glasper headlined JusticeAid’s 2021 spring virtual concert, Change of Tone, taped at LA’s Miracle Theater. He just brought home his fifth Grammy—Best R&B Album for Black Radio III, the third installment to his genre-defying Black Radio album series featuring an eclectic group of collaborators including Killer Mike, Ty Dolla $ign, HER, Jennifer Hudson, Common, and others!

Watch the trailer.

Film

The passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented not the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement, but the beginning of a new, crucial chapter. Nowhere was this next battle better epitomized than in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural, impoverished county with a vicious history of racist terrorism.

Laws were just paper without power in a county that was 80 percent Black but had zero Black voters. Through first-person accounts and searing archival footage, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power tells the story of the local movement and young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers who fought not just for voting rights, but for Black Power in Lowndes County. 2023 | Directed by Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir, written by Dema Paxton Fofang, and starring Ella Baker (archive footage), Stokely Carmichael (archive footage), John Jackson, and Martin Luther King (archive footage).

Art

Charly Palmer is an American fine artist, illustrator, and graphic designer whose body of work focuses on documenting visual narratives of the African American experience. In his limited-edition work, Voting Line, he pays tribute to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the importance of voting in our community. Palmer has long dealt with themes surrounding social justice and civil rights. A resident of Atlanta, see Palmer’s portfolio and events here.

“Art should change the temperature in the room.”
—Charly Palmer
Voting Line by Charly Palmer

Suppressed Speech

Jelani Cobb: Dean, Columbia Journalism School and staff writer for The New Yorker

Photo: Oregon State Univ.,Jelani Cobb, Creative Commons

FEATURED WORKS

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations
By Jelani Cobb
Read the article in The New Yorker.

The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker
Edited by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
A collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Jelani Cobb. More.

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