No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter

Nautilus Book Awards’ Better Books for a Better World

A Movement in Words and Images

Award-winning photographer Devin Allen has devoted the last six years to documenting the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, from its early days in Baltimore, Maryland, up to the present day. The riveting images in No Justice, No Peace provide a lens on the resistance that has empowered Black lives generation after generation. Allen’s signature black-and-white photos bear witness to the profound history of African Americans and allies in the fight for social justice and portray the collective action over decades in stunning, timeless portraits.

Allen’s remarkable photos of today’s Black Lives Matter protests, which have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and twice on the cover of Time magazine, were inspired by Gordon Parks of the Civil Rights Movement, and create a vision of the past and future of Black activism and leadership in America. With contributions from twenty-six bestselling and influential writers and activists of today such as Clint Smith, DeRay Mckesson, D. Watkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Emmanuel Acho, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and more, alongside the words of past writers and activists such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and John Lewis, No Justice, No Peace is a reminder of the moral responsibility of Americans to break unjust laws and take direct action.

In words and pictures, No Justice, No Peace honors the connection between activism today and that of the past. If indeed hindsight is 20/20, this artistic look back is a lens on history that enlarges our understanding of the lasting predicament of racism in the United States of America. At once deeply intimate and profoundly uplifting, No Justice, No Peace is a visual tribute to Black resistance and a stern missive on the tough, but necessary, road that lies ahead.

Devin Allen is a self-taught artist, born and raised in west Baltimore. He gained national attention when his photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of TimeMagazine in May 2015-only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had been featured. Five years later, after the death of George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Breonna Taylor, his photograph from a BlackTrans Lives Matter protest was published on the cover of Time magazine in June 2020. He is winner of the 2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. Also in 2017, he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award as a debut author for his book A Beautiful Ghetto. His photographs have been published in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Aperture and are also in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C., the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and recipient of an Award from The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture for dynamic leadership in the Arts and Activism. He lives in Baltimore.