The Black Schooner

“A necessary and unique, expectation-shattering chronicle.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“Lester’s well-suited illustrations are sketchy, heavily shadowed and roughly crosshatched, and add a heightened sense of emotional tension and inescapable immediacy that resonates across the centuries of racial reckoning to come. An evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[This] comic returns control over the story to those it happened to. Lester’s artwork does not shy away from the violence of the slave trade or the necessary violence of resistance, and numerous close-up drawings ensure the reader feels this history in a way that words alone could never convey.”
—Booklist

“The graphic novel, deliberately choosing history over cinema, tells much of the story through contemporary interviews as well as journal entries of the rebels. The choice of a graphic novel is deliberate, since most of the published interviews were accompanied by portraits … The Black Schooner tells [an] important story, in a way that’s both accessible and engaging.”
—Freedom Press (UK)

“In his third graphic novel covering American history ‘from the bottom up,’ Vancouver artist David Lester has pushed his black and white graphic talents to a new intensity.”
—The BC Review

“Lester’s artwork is sharply inscribed, his black and white portraits of the rebels’ representative of their resolute and righteous struggle … It’s a history told through art and from the perspective of the many, not the few; the oppressed, not the oppressor.”
—Counterpunch

“The Black Schooner is a vivid and graphic depiction of the 1839 Amistad rebellion… . Lester’s powerful black-and-white art depicts their story, from the uprising on the ship to their subsequent imprisonment in the US and concluding with their return to Africa.”
—Gord Hill, author-artist of The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book

Paul Buhle is a retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University. He is the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James and William Appleman Williams. Since 2005, he has edited more than a dozen nonfiction graphic novels, including Studs Terkel’s Working, A Peoples History of the American Empire, The Beats, and Red Rosa. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

David Lester illustrated the award-winning 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike. His poster of anti-war protester Malachi Ritscher was exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Forthcoming in 2025, Lester has a chapter in the anthology Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-fascist Resistance, edited by Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books translated into nineteen languages worldwide. He worked with director Tony Buba to make the documentary film Ghosts of Amistad. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Buhle, Lester, and Rediker have collaborated on three previous graphic novels, all published by Beacon Press: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (2021); Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic (2023); and Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741 (2024).

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