Black Liberators

Blog overview

This new blog series is about the Black Liberators – the African American soldiers who helped liberate Western Europe during the Second World War. We discuss the Black Liberators exhibition at the Dutch Institute for War-, Holocaust- and Genocide-studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam, the graphic novel ‘Franklin – A Dutch Liberation Story’ and interview a number of people who have been involved in these projects.

Mieke Kirkels – The Oral History of the Black Liberators

By Jonathan Pieterse

April 15, 2020

  There is one person who has done more than anyone else in the Netherlands to bring the stories of the Black Liberators into the light of day: Dutch oral historian Mieke Kirkels. She is the author of From Farmland to Soldiers Cemetery, From Alabama to Margraten and Children of Black Liberators. I interviewed her …...

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Marga Altena – Bringing Color to Dutch History

By Jonathan Pieterse

April 8, 2020

Marga Altena wrote the text for the graphic novel Franklin – Een Nederlands Bevrijdingsverhaal (Franklin – A Dutch Liberation Story). She is a cultural historian who publishes about class and ethnicity like the book A True History Full of Romance. Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media and Popular Culture (1833-1955). The scenario …...

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Gloria Wekker – Suppressed Histories

By Jonathan Pieterse

April 1, 2020

  Gloria Wekker is an professor emeritus of Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Utrecht. In 2016 Duke University Press published White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, about racism in the Netherlands. She is Surinamese-Dutch. At the Institute for War-, Holocaust- and Genocidestudies she spoke about the importance of an inclusive history. The …...

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Kees Ribbens – Comics and Popular History

By Jonathan Pieterse

March 25, 2020

  Kees Ribbens is a big comic book fan. He has a large collection of comic books, many of them about World War II and so I interviewed him about his involvement with Franklin – A Dutch Liberation Story. He is also a senior researcher at the NIOD, the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and …...

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Brian Elstak – Art, Racism and the Black Liberators

By Jonathan Pieterse

March 18, 2020

  For the first instalment of this blog about the Black Liberators, I interviewed Brian Elstak. Not only did he contribute to the Black Liberators exhibition at the NIOD (temporarily closed), he’s also the illustrator of the graphic novel Franklin – A Dutch Liberation Story. It tells the fictional story of the African American soldier …...

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