Portrait of Leopold Sedar Senghor
Title: Léopold Sédar Senghor
Series: “If All Black Men Were Pacifist”
Size 24 x 36 inches
Medium: Screen print on paper using red, green, yellow, and black ink; portrait rendered in black archival Micron pen and white charcoal.
 
Peace as Political Power
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) led Senegal to independence not through violent revolution, but through poetry, philosophy, and policy. A founder of the Négritude movement, he redefined peace as an active, intentional resistance to colonial power. His vision challenges us to ask: Can culture itself be a weapon of liberation?
Senghor’s quiet revolution shows that peace is not passivity, it is political strategy. His legacy parallels the post-Civil War era in the United States, where Black Americans also fought to define freedom beyond survival, toward self-expression, leadership, and dignity.
 
 
“Culture is the sum total of the ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”
—Léopold Sédar Senghor