Atlantic (New Futures), Todd Gray

This work speaks to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and to Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that centers Black life and combines activism, imagination, and technology to reclaim the past and present for an empowered future. The term Afrofuturism was coined in 1993, the same year that author Octavia Butler published Parable of the Sower, in which she writes that our human destiny is “to take root among the stars.” “If you continue to call out their names, they are never lost. In the song ‘Breaths’ by Sweet Honey in the Rock, we remember, ‘Those who have died have never, never left, the dead are not under the earth.’”—Njeri Shomari, Life Member of the Lawrence Branch of the NAACP