Kwame Brathwaite

Kwame Brathwaite was born Gilbert Ronald Brathwaite on the first of January 1938 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Cecil Brathwaite and Margaret (Maloney) Brathwaite, immigrants who had come from Barbados and met in New York. Raised in the South Bronx, he was a young man when the 1955 images of Emmett Till, published in Jet magazine, awakened in him and his brother Elombe Brath a lasting commitment to art and to the Pan-Africanist ideals of Marcus Garvey.

In 1956, Brathwaite picked up a camera for the first time in the dim light of a Harlem club and never set it down. That same year, with Elombe, he co-founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, musicians, dancers, and designers devoted to Black cultural pride and self-determination.

In 1962 the brothers founded the Grandassa Models and staged the Naturally pageants, presenting Black women in natural hair and African-inspired dress and helping to carry the phrase "Black Is Beautiful" into the wider world. In his Harlem darkroom Brathwaite perfected a printing technique that let dark skin glow with depth and dignity. Over the decades his lens shaped the public image of Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, James Brown, Muhammad Ali, and countless others, and documented landmark gatherings across the African diaspora.

His first major retrospective opened in 2019 and toured the nation, and he died on the first of April 2023 in Manhattan at the age of 85. He taught a people to see their own beauty, and that vision endures wherever Black pride is honored.