DAYTON, Ohio — Just looking around the Booth family home is enough to convince anyone, art holds a special place in the family's heart. The walls are lined with their paintings, instruments lean against the wall and daughter Malaya Booth is likely sketching at the table.
It makes for an inviting home, but for the patriarch, John Booth, it's not a matter of beauty. It's about pride.
What You Need To Know
- The Booth family can trace their lineage to escaped slave Addison White
- White fought off his owner and marshals to maintain his freedom
- The Booth family uses that legacy to continue fighting for justice through art
A hunger for justice runs in the family. Booth said it's been that way since he learned his own history.
"I came home from school and I was talking about a lesson we'd had in slavery and my grandma said 'No, that's not what it was like,'" he said.
Grandma would know. Booth said his grandmother was the first in family born free in Ohio. Her parents escaped slavery, starting with her father.
"He decided he was no longer willing to be a slave and was willing to sacrifice his life to be free," Booth said.
His name was Addison White and he was born into slavery in Kentucky. Booth said he was always a fighter. He fought his way out of slavery, across the Ohio River into a free state and kept fighting.
He settled in Mechanicsburg, but because of the Fugitive Slave Act, marshals came after him, trying to force him to go back to Kentucky. He armed himself and refused to go quietly. Booth owns a replica of the heavy lead pistol his great grandfather used to protect himself. He brings it out whenever he tells this story.
"They taught me to fight back for what's yours," Booth said.
It worked for Addison White. Booth said he injured one of the marshals and they never came back for him. After that with the help of abolitionists in Champaign County, he raised enough money to buy his freedom.
Generations later, Booth said there's still fight in him.
"It gives me an obligation," he said. "I feel that I have to fulfill the prophecy. I cannot just let it go. They sacrificed so much so that I can do what I do."
Booth uses that fight to fuel his art. He's a poet, a musician, a painter, and a teacher and all of his work, has a common theme: justice.
"That's what we're all about and that's what our family's about," he said.
Now his daughter, Malaya, is carrying on that tradition.
Since middle school, she's found a way to connect to history. She was tapped to lead Black history tours through Yellow Springs, sharing the stories of families much like her own, who helped shape the village.
"It gives me some insight I didn't think I could have. If I didn't do these tours or learn about the history in this little town," she said.
Like her father, though, her true medium is art. That's where Malaya's passion for justice shines through.
Many of her pieces revolve around justice and the Black experience, and this past summer Malaya took up photography, documenting the Black Lives Matter protests in Yellow Springs.
"It was very educational," she said.
Several of those photos made it into the Yellow Springs newspaper, sharing her vision and their message with the village. She hopes soon it will spread beyond Yellow Springs.
Malaya gradautes high school next year and she's hoping to continue studying art in college. She wants to use it as a medium to help others help eachother and understand the world, just as she does.