SNCC Cartoons as Counter-Mapping Black Futures: On Creative Cartographies of the Civil Rights Movement

In the mid-1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) created a series of educational comics. We argue these comics represent the melding of artistic geographies with an early form of GIScience, and thus push geography to include an expanded set of activities within its understanding of what constitutes GIScience. We argue these comics are a form of radical placemaking and represent how Black geographies are at the center of broad struggles for justice. By incorporating the knowledge of Black geographies within GIScience, we can extend our understanding of geography more broadly. This impacts our understanding of how political geography can center and be responsive to Black liberation struggles.