FIGHTING DARK speaks to a dark side of American history as well as the dark-skinned people impacted by it. The week of Monday July 13th 1863, Black New Yorkers fled in the dark of night to avoid white mob violence. That same year, Black men enlisted in the Union Army “Colored Troops 20th Infantry” from New York City. This talk provides a platform to draw out lessons on how Black people find resilience in the face of racial violence in an underrepresented act of racial violence during the Civil War. The Shed commissioned Kamau Ware to create FIGHTING DARK to be in dialogue with the investigation of the legacy of racial violence in the United States in the exhibition by Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water 2020-2021.