This dynamic image by Diana Ejaita accompanied an article from September 3, 2020, by Times journalist Giovanni Russonello, who regularly writes about the intersection of music and politics. In the article, he explores the birth of jazz as protest music, and questions whether, after years of trickling into academia and the mainstream, it still has a place in the fight against racial injustice. Russonello writes, “This year, the pandemic and the protest movement against racial injustice have created a moment of enormous potential. Conversations about radical change and new beginnings have crept into seemingly every aspect of American life. But as jazz musicians reckon with the events of 2020, they have found themselves torn between the music’s roots in Black organizing and its present-day life in the academy.”

Diana Ejaita is an Italian-Nigerian artist, illustrator and textile designer based in Berlin. She has contributed to The New York Times as an illustrator and created covers for the New Yorker. In 2022 she published her first children’s book, “Olu and Greta.”