Book Review: Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore

 reviewed by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Associate Professor and Director of Comics Studies, Department of English, University of Oregon

  Ben Passmore. 2025. Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance. New York: Pantheon Books. 224 pages. US $22.00 (Paperback). ISBN 9780593316122. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671968/black-arms-to-hold-you-up-by-ben-passmore/

 

The 2020 sale of Black Arms to Hold You Up at auction was a cause célèbre in graphic novel publishing spheres. Ultimately, Pantheon won out over the many other bidders, securing the contract for Ben Passmore’s history of Black armed-resistance fighters and movements in the United States. Five years later, Passmore’s eagerly awaited book at once delivers its promised historical account and offers something far more visually and narratively complex. For readers familiar with Passmore’s work in Daygloayhole, Your Black Friend and Other Strangers, and Sports is Hell, as well as The Nib, and The New York Times, many elements of Black Arms will feel familiar. The book uses humor and is, like much of Passmore’s work for The Nib, filtered through an on-page avatar, Ben, who leads the reader to different pivotal moments in the struggle for Black survival against racist and genocidal groups including the Klan, police, and the CIA. Yet what Black Arms also offers, unexpectedly, is one of the most personal of Passmore’s comics. Ben’s father, Ronnie, incites Ben’s historical odyssey (hitting him with a copy of Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900) and provides voice-over along the way, filling in details regarding the context for events such as Emmett Till’s memorial and the founding of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).

If Black Arms casts Ben as a Joe Sacco-esque figure, feeling his way through events as he goes, Ronnie functions more like Dante’s Virgil, a narrative device who forces Ben to witness history and to understand himself as a Black man in America. Ultimately, the book leads to a reckoning for both men and for the reader, who is compelled to question not only what they know about Ben and Ronnie, but also what they know or can know about African American history as it is obscured under white supremacy.

            Passmore’s audacious gambit, using unreliable narrators to explore the unreliability of documenting African American life, leads to a tour de force of comics composition, wherein race, history, and media are inextricably bound together in a country founded on inequality and the erasure of stories from official records and archives. A reader may try to learn more about some of the characters and events, only to be surprised at the paltry or biased results of an internet search. Luckily, Passmore provides a reading list in the back of Black Arms, but the narration gestures toward the difficulty of tracking down stories of Black resistance that are not colored by white supremacy.

The book is loosely broken into sections, but these flow and weave into each other: “Anarchistic Negro Desperado Robert Charles” segues from the 1900 New Orleans race riot to the funeral of Emmett Till in “If We Must Die, Let Us Nobly Die,” which itself gives way to the story of “The Negro Robert Williams: The Gun n You.” Williams is the conduit into “Welcome to the Republic of New Afrika,” a well-populated intermezzo section which brings together many notable figures—Imari and Gaidi Obadele, Betty Shabazz, Herman Ferguson, Audley Moore, H. Rap Brown, Joan Franklin, Ron Karenga, Safiya Bukhari, Mae Mallory, et al.—frames the most visually audacious story, “This is Assata,” and presents a truncated history of the RNA until the return of Williams, its president-in-exile. Various members of the RNA narrate the story of Assata Shakur, and each shift in narrator is accompanied by a shift in style, representing Shakur’s different meanings for different people as well as the ambiguity of her story. Who she was, Passmore suggests, depends on the narrator through whose eyes we see her. These hopeful sections give way to the story of the firebombing of MOVE (“MOVE This is America!”) and a profile of Crips-member turned New Afrikan acolyte, Sanyika Shakur (“Making Tha Monster”). Then things get weird.

Black Arms plies the verbal-visual tension of the comics medium to great effect, reminding readers that the stability of divisions between truth and fiction, or the literal and the figurative, are never as stable as they seem. The book concludes with a reflexive turn in which Ben and Ronnie are cast as guests on a talk show hosted by Kuwasi Balagoon, “Whose Black Arms Hold You Up?,” and called to task for leaving out many relevant figures–especially queer, trans, and non-binary activists–from the very book they are creating. Yet the show also mirrors a Maury Povich-esque, “you are not the father,” set-up and leads to Ben’s revelation of the true impetus for Black Arms and his own struggle for self-knowledge. The book concludes by paralleling Ben’s journey with that of Micah Xavier Johnson (“The Alone Gunman”). Johnson’s shooting spree is depicted as a road not taken, one that, as Ronnie says, ignores what, “Black liberation is really about. It’s about LIFE, and loving it so much you want to fight for it” (Passmore, 2025: 204). Black Arms, for all of the oppression and injustice it depicts, functions as a powerful weapon documenting Passmore’s love for Black life.

Rebecca Wanzo’s The Content of Our Caricature contends that many African American cartoonists use comics, despite its legacy of Black dehumanization, as a critique of the white gaze: “They do it to comment on the fact that white people literally and figuratively create black subjects that are left out of the nation…And they do it to show how the body that whites might read as undesirable can be embraced as the ideal body for revolution” (Wanzo, 2020: 218-219). Passmore’s remarkable book manages to make these uses of comics feel new and radical. His shifting styles attest to the instability of a historical archive designed for Black erasure; and yet, in the face of such attempts to deny African American self-knowledge and self-determination, Black Arms is a testament to the undeniable legacy of Black armed resistance. His cartoons galvanize dehumanizing caricatures and stylistically revise them to show the humanity deferred by such stereotypes. “Free the land. Free our stories from the revisionism of white supremacy. Free the homies,” Passmore declares in his acknowledgements page. Black Arms further declares that the revolution will not be televised, it will be drawn. 

 Works Cited

Wanzo, Rebecca. 2020. The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. New York: New York University Press.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 27-2