This edition of the Graphic Novel Book Club centers the boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore.

In the past 40 years, comics have gone from an underground, alternative, and niche concern to being used as a tool for learning in primary schools across the country and critiqued in universities the world over. Many of us first experience “reading” images in the sequential format of graphic novels before ever entering a museum.

Join our quarterly book club centered around the art of the graphic novel where we’ll be discussing Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance.

It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”

So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up (Pantheon), a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’ shoot-out with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben — and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic. Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.

This casual book club and roundtable is facilitated by MASS MoCA Curatorial Exchange Initiative (CEI) Curator Terence Washington. He and Passmore will discuss the book, which is featured in the exhibition Zora J Murff: RACE/HUSTLE.

Can’t make the event? Pre-order a copy of Black Arms to Hold You Up and we’ll get your book signed for you.

BEN PASSMORE is the author of the ongoing comic book series Daygloayhole, as well as the Eisner Award-nominated and Ignatz Award-winning comic collection Your Black Friend. He also wrote and illustrated Sports Is Hell, collaborated with Ezra Claytan Daniels on BTTM FDRS, and has contributed to The Nib and The New York Times. Black Arms to Hold You Up was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2025 and a NY Public Library Best Book of 2025. He lives in Philadelphia.