Rachel Aspinwall, who grew up in Groton and is a mother of three children, wife, teacher, and artist, always practiced art as an outlet for her energy and to cope with upsetting issues.

In the weeks following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, she couldn’t look away, but she felt helpless.

“For many people it was an awakening that this was happening,” she wrote in a write-up to the Groton Public Library. “Social media made it easier to see this world for some. While there were many others that knew and felt this injustice happening for ages and enough was enough.”

“I struggled with what I could do with my energy to help and although I marched and became a closer ally and educator to my children, I sat one night and created this piece of art,” wrote Aspinwall, 35, who studied art in college and is a commissioned artist on the side pursuing her masters in art therapy. “I started to research famous African American activists and read about each and every one. There are so many more to be added to this painting and I will continue to add to it or create a new piece. What I realized while I read and painted these individuals, is that I didn’t know about a lot of them, and they were huge historical leaders. I think we all have a duty to teach ourselves about the people that paved the way before us and while education catches up on including ALL our history, I decided to make this piece in hopes of educating myself, but also others.”

Aspinwall’s painting, called “The One Before Us,” includes the Tuskegee Airmen, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Eckford, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Wangari Maathai, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks, Gordon “Whipped Peter,” Jesse Owens, James Baldwin, Marsha P. Johnson, Ida B. Wells, Fred Hampton, Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh), a depiction of a prisoner/slave, Daisy Bates, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Carter G. Woodson, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Emmett Till and Al Sharpton.

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