Kilroy Was Here, 2010 is from a body of works Kara completed in 2010 - 2011, titled Dust Jackets for the Niggerati- and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker. The word ‘niggerati’, which is a portmanteau of ‘nigger’ and ‘literati’, was used ironically by Wallace Thurman to describe the young African-American artists and intellectuals of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, and Kara herself has said the series 'was conceived as potential book covers for unwritten essays, works of fiction, and missing narratives of the black migration.' She said she was 'thinking about that period of transition between Reconstruction and World War II when American blacks, the progenitors of a nascent arts movement, packed up and moved to urban centres under threat of local terrorism.’
