The formative graffiti artist and hip-hop pioneer, whose memoir Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture was published on March 10, discusses Black piracy and news of the day. Even with all the films made about pirates, you would never know that a lot of pirates during the time of Pirates of the Caribbean [the 18th century] were of African descent, particularly when the big moneymakers were the slave trade and sugar. It’s like with Westerns: Watching them, you would never know that Black folks played significant roles in the West. There were a lot of Black pirates; a good book about them is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss. It stars the father of Alexandre Dumas, who wrote The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846). One purpose of his own books was to keep the legacy of his father—Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a great general during the time of Napoleon—alive.…