Composing a Memorial for Musicians Exploited by the Black Church | Sojourners

Composing a Memorial for Musicians Exploited by the Black Church

Ashon T. Crawley. Original photo courtesy Trust for the National Mall. Candace Sanders/Sojourners

Ashon T. Crawley, author, artist, and professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia, constructed a memorial for Black church choir directors who died during the U.S. HIV/AIDS crisis. The exhibit, “HOMEGOING,” told the story of the musicians who, as he puts it, “died within a kind of epistemological moment,” where to be a musician in the Black church was to be understood as gay, to be gay was to be understood as HIV-positive, and vice versa.

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