Fine Acts teamed up with Lee Mokobe – an award-winning trans slam poet – on Surviving Blackness, a poem on systemic racism towards Black people. Injustice is not to be navigated, but to be fought.

Text & Voice
LEE MOKOBE

Commission & Production
FINE ACTS

Animation & Art Direction
VASIL PETRAKOV

Font
BAYARD by VOCAL TYPE CO.

Lee Mokobe is an award-winning slam poet, content creator and creative director. They are the founder of Vocal Revolutionaries, a non-profit organization focused on empowering creative African youth using digital art. Lee is also an LGBTQ activist specifically referencing their experience as a Black transgender immigrant in South Africa and America. Their works and art are taught as part of university and college curriculum all across the world. Through queer advocacy, they have been published several times including alongside Barack Obama and Harvey Milk in Loud and Proud (LGBTQ speeches that inspired the world). They are also a trained traditional healer known as a sangoma. Lee is currently working on a co-founded creative arts platform known as The Other Street, where they present storytelling and advocacy for marginalized groups in Africa. Mokobe is a TED Fellow and Adobe Creativity Scholar.

For this project, we are using fonts by Vocal Type Co. — a type foundry uplifting creatives of colour, by award-winning designer Tré Seals. Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender — from the Women’s Suffrage Movement to the Civil Rights Movement.

MARTIN is a typeface inspired by remnants of the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. As they marched, striking workers, the majority of them Black, carried copies of a poster declaring “I AM A MAN,” a statement that recalled a question abolitionists posed more than 100 years earlier, "Am I Not A Man and A Brother?".

Martin Luther King Jr. joined the cause, speaking to a crowd of 6,000 in late March and returning on April 3rd to deliver one of his most famous speeches, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” King was assassinated at Memphis’s Lorraine Motel the next night.

BAYARD is a unique sans-serif typeface inspired by signs from the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom. Outside the March on Washing, Bayard was close advisor to Martin Luther King and one of the most influential and effective organizers of the civil rights movement, leading a number of protests in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as a public advocate on behalf of gay and lesbian causes during the 1980s.