This piece depicts and is dedicated to Darryl George, a young man in Texas who was given in-school suspension for the 2023–24 school year because of the way he wore his hair. All but one of his claims of discrimination were denied by a U.S. District Court judge, but his family continues to pursue justice in court. For me, this artwork is about something deeper than the case — it’s about DNA, identity, and how we define ourselves. No one should be excluded from society for how they choose to express who they are — whether it’s their look, their style, their sexuality, or any other aspect of their identity. That’s what this piece is speaking to.

The squares you see around him represent the spirits of the ancestors. I always believe that our ancestors are there to protect us, inspire us, and uplift us. That’s their role, and that’s why they’re present in this piece — to be with Darryl and all of us who fight to stand in our truth. This work is acrylic on canvas, a medium I use a lot because it allows me to blend texture with emotion.

I want to acknowledge young African Americans who are going through similar challenges. This system still is not just. It wasn’t just for Darryl, just as it wasn’t just for George Stinney Jr. — a fourteen-year-old boy from South Carolina who in 1944 was falsely accused of double murder and became the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the twentieth century; he was posthumously exonerated in  2014. And it wasn’t just for Kalief Browder, a young man who spent three years on Rikers Island (2010–2013), nearly two years of which were in solitary confinement, for a crime he didn’t commit. Browder was never tried after being arrested for robbery but suffered such trauma from his incarceration that he eventually died by suicide in 2015. These stories fuel my work. They remind me that we’ve got to keep creating and keep speaking up because their stories need to be told.

This piece is for Darryl George, and it’s for all the young Black kids out there who are facing these injustices. We’ve got to keep holding space for them.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.