Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.Ĭhasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. “A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear.” - Bryan Stevenson, AALBC bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative Now Winfred’s widow, Patsy is central to the journey that became Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South. It was Patsy who first convinced her husband to pursue art seriously, and to tell his life story visually, using the leather-tooling skills he’d learned in prison. Rembert became a longtime youth advocate.

After four years of letter-writing, the two married upon his release and moved north, settling in New Haven, CT, where they raised eight children and Mrs. Patsy Rembert at Tuskegee Patsy Gammage and Winfred Rembert met in 1970 while Rembert was in prison and doing forced labor near her home in Turner County, GA.

Chasing me to my grave book