There is arguably no ignominy that the Black world has not suffered: slavery, dehumanization, the denial of its identity, the deliberate erasure of its history. It is against this erasure that LAKAY publishes this series of portraits.

Twenty-seven women and men. Revolutionaries, thinkers, state-builders, civil rights activists. Each left a mark that official history has long undermined or silenced. These texts are published annually as part of Black History Month, but they can be read in any season.

The Haitian Revolution and its heirs

The first independent black republic in modern history was not born of a concession: it was seized.

• Dutty Boukman — the priest of liberty, spark of the 1791 insurrection
• Toussaint Louverture — the former slave turned strategist who shook empires
• Jean-Jacques Dessalines — the founder of black freedom
• Victoria Montou, also known as Toya — the Dahomey warrior who trained Dessalines
• Antenor Firmin — the one who refuted scientific racism as early as 1885
• Jean Price-Mars — the father of Haitian cultural identity
• Jacques Roumain — the poetic voice of Haiti and its people

Pan-Africanism and African Independence

Those who conceived and led the escape from colonial rule, and paid a heavy price.

• Kwame Nkrumah — Ghana, the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to be liberated
• Patrice Lumumba — a flame for black freedom
• Thomas Sankara — the president of the righteous
• Amílcar Cabral — the strategist of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde
• Jomo Kenyatta — the father of the Kenyan nation
• Julius Nyerere — Mwalimu, the teacher from Tanzania
• Haile Selassie I — the Emperor of Ethiopia, symbol of sovereignty
• Steve Biko — the pioneer of Black Consciousness in the face of apartheid
• Nelson Mandela — 27 years in prison, then the refusal of revenge
• Mansa Moussa — the emperor of Mali in the 14th century

Civil rights and the anti-racist struggle in North America

• Harriet Tubman — the Moses of African Americans
• Rosa Parks — the refusal that set a country in motion
• Martin Luther King — non-violence as a political weapon
• Malcolm X — the unyielding voice of black pride
• Marcus Garvey — the call for unity and self-determination

Canadian figures

• Viola Desmond — the challenge to segregation in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia
• The Honourable Jean Augustine — first Black woman elected to the House of Commons, founder of Black History Month in Canada

Thinkers and guardians of memory

• Frantz Fanon — the doctor of the colonized soul
• Cheikh Anta Diop — to restore history, to liberate consciences
• Nioussérê Kalala Omotunde — the guardian of Afro-descendant memory

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Read the introduction to the series · See all portraits

LAKAY is a non-profit organization in Repentigny that fights against racism and racial profiling in Lanaudière. Learn more about our mission.