White understood the importance of Black feminism to the fight for racial justice, and he celebrated Black women activists in his art, including Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Sojourner Truth. In this work, White portrays Bessie Mitchell, a garment worker who rallied support for the Trenton Six, a group of men wrongfully convicted for the murder of a White shop owner in Trenton, New Jersey. Arms outstretched, Mitchell gestures toward the men imprisoned behind barbed wire, one of whom is her brother, Collis English. White conveys Mitchell’s moral authority through a robe that echoes the biblical Virgin Mary, and his attentive cross-hatching draws out her body as the expressive core of the image. White reproduced Trenton Six as a print, which he sold to raise funds for the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, an organization that conducted advocacy and training for aspiring Black professionals in media and the arts.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)