Nina Simone's memory that she and her friends never talked about men or clothes, only Marx, Lenin, and revolution, comes from her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You. She was describing her friendship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry had come of age on the radical left, writing for Paul Robeson's newspaper Freedom and immersing herself in Marxist thought and the struggles of colonized Africa. In long conversations at Simone's home, Hansberry introduced the singer to revolutionary literature and politics, and Simone later credited her with awakening her political consciousness.

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, Simone trained as a classical pianist and dreamed of becoming the first Black concert pianist in America. She was turned away from the Curtis Institute of Music, a rejection she always believed was rooted in racism. Turning to jazz clubs to earn a living, she became one of the most original artists of her time. After the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, she wrote "Mississippi Goddam," a song of fury that broke with the gentle protest songs of the era. She went on to record "Four Women" and, after Hansberry's death, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," named for her friend's work, and she performed for the marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march.

Simone believed it was an artist's duty to reflect the times, and she paid for that conviction. Radio stations banned her songs, her career in the United States suffered, and she eventually left the country, living in Barbados, Liberia, and Europe until her death in France in 2003. Her friendships with Hansberry, James Baldwin, Kwame Ture, and Miriam Makeba placed her at the center of a circle of Black artists and revolutionaries who saw culture as a weapon in the struggle. This print honors that tradition of artists who studied, debated, and created in service of the revolution, and the friendships that made them stronger.