The Silence of Our Friends (review)

This powerful graphic novel, based on the experience of Long's father, a television news reporter, follows the unlikely friendship between James Long, who covers civil rights issues for a Houston station, and Larry Thomas, an African-American professor at Texas Southern University. In a fictionalized reconstruction of the events of 1967, Long is assigned to the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's frustrated efforts to organize on campus; when students attempt to force the camera-wielding white man to leave the area, Thomas comes to his aid. As the two men begin to know each other better, they agree that if they truly believe in the tolerance they espouse, they should really visit each other's homes. Thus begins a hesitant friendship between the two families, whose halting overtures are met with skepticism among the members of their own communities. Their newly established amity is sorely tested, though, when five African-American students are arrested in connection with the death of a police officer at a campus riot, and Long, who witnessed but did nothing to intervene in the melee, is called to give testimony. Powell's black-and-white artwork moves nimbly between restraint and explosion, with scenes that patiently, and often silently, explore the miasma of prejudice in the late 1960s South, and then erupt into gutter-shattering bursts of violence and grainy images of rioting shrunken and corralled on television screens. A concluding note addresses the actual 1967 TSU episode and ensuing trial.