As America turns 250 years old, there are a number of celebrations and commemorations around the country to mark the occasion, while simultaneously erasing the history and achievements of Black people.

Federal actions have included the removal of exhibits discussing slavery from dozens of National Park Service sites. Books are being banned from libraries, college courses are being pulled, and Congress is holding hearings to scrutinize how museums present American History is wild. The list goes on. As a public historian it’s mind boggling, and frightening. But we’ve been here before.

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was a time to celebrate innovation, creativity, and achievements. For Black people, the World’s Fair was an opportunity to shine a light on the accomplishments and successes of people, less than thirty years into their freedom from enslavement in America.

However, beyond providing labor at the fair, there were limited opportunities for Black representation. Black women were hired as domestic workers and Black men served as part of the “Columbian Guard” security and safety force, who assisted black fair goers. Yet there was no designated space or exhibition to highlight Black achievements. African Americans were physically present as workers, and visitors while institutional recognition of Black achievement remained largely absent.

There were however, remnants of slavery and stereotypical iconography present at the fair. Mammy and Aunt Jemima were caricatures of Black women all too familiar in entertainment and advertising in America at the time. These were representations of docile, desexualized, dark skinned Black women, happy in their service and content with their lives as slaves. They were never real, but as the South rewrote the history of Slavery in America, she became a necessary figure to confirm that slavery had not been all that bad.

In the Agricultural Building, alongside the world’s largest flour barrel, a Black woman cooked and served hot pancakes to patrons at the fair.

This version of Aunt Jemima was presented by the R.T. Davis Milling Company. The character became a sensation, but Nancy Green, the formerly enslaved woman hired to embody the company’s pancake-mix brand, did not receive the same lasting recognition.

Green had worked as a domestic servant for a prominent Chicago family before being hired to portray Aunt Jemima.

Accounts say she later used her stature as spokeswoman, to lead organizing efforts for her church, was one of the first Black missionary workers, and was an activist for equal rights and an advocate against poverty in Chicago, the stigma of Aunt Jemima would live well beyond her.

A coalition of individuals set to change the narrative of stereotypical images and depictions that were circulated throughout the fair.

Abolitionist, editor, author, orator, and elder statesman Frederick Douglass was the most recognized and celebrated Black person in the world at the time of the fair. As an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, and an activist for civil and women’s rights, he spoke out against the lack of representation and showcases of Black progress at the 1893 exhibition.

An exhibition celebrating American progress, in a nation gripped by rampant racism, that purposely excluded Black achievement.

Douglass joined journalists and newspaper editors Irvine Garland Penn, Ida B. Wells, and Ferdinand Lee Barnett in producing a publication that directly confronted that exclusion.

Ida B. Wells, a civil rights, women’s rights and anti-lynching activist, solicited funds to publish, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, which would serve as a tool to expose racism in America. It

The Negro wanted to show by his years of freedom, that his industry did not need the incentive of a master’s whip, and that his intelligence was capable of successful self direction. F.L. Barnett

It was not simply a protest, but a counternarrative distributed within the very exposition that had marginalized Black achievement. They demanded that the very concept of equality espoused by the exhibition be critiqued as it erased the experiences and histories of Black Americans.

Congress appointed a National Board of Commissioners and two commissioners were selected from each state by presidential appointment to preside over the planning and execution of the exhibition. Barnett argues that with 7.5 million Black people in America, and two states where the Black population outnumbers that of whites, and despite their significant numbers, the president refused to appoint one Black person.

The pamphlet chronicles the repeated requests for opportunities to present Black achievement in skilled labor, industry, invention, agriculture, and manufacturing, but it was determined that there would be no separate exhibit for Black progress permitted.

Black women faced exclusion from the planning of the Women’s Building exhibitions. After several petitions and letters, social reformer Fannie Barrier Williams was appointed by the Board of Lady Managers, as clerk in charge of colored interests, in the Women’s Building. The position gave her a point of entry, but little formal authority to correct the structural exclusion of Black women.

In response, Black women created an intellectual counterspace around an exposition that had largely excluded them from its official representation. But this was not new terriotory for Black women.

During the Abolition Movement, Black women were often silenced in Black, male-led organizations, so they created their own platforms. Organizations, known as “clubs” were geared toward social, economic, and political empowerment for Black people. Clubs would continue into the 20th century as vehicles for uplift, intellectual discourse, community intervention, and political activism.

Williams was an educator, activist, and co-founder of the National League of Colored Women, and though not given a seat on the board, she used the opportunity to speak at several of the congresses and conventions around the fair and created opportunities for other Black women to do the same.

Her work opened doors for scholars and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Harper, Sarah J. Early, and others, to address academic, economic, social, and political impacts and achievements of Black women.

The Haiti Pavilion became the exposition’s most significant representation of Black achievement. Because Frederick Douglass had served as the U.S. Minister to Haiti, it became the central location for positive representations of Black people and the base of operations for Douglass, Wells, Penn, and others.

Because of their efforts, the exclusion of Black Americans from the nation’s vision of progress became part of the national, and international, conversation.

More than a century later, and at the celebration of the nations 250 years, the questions raised at the World’s Columbian Exposition remain unsettled: Who decides which stories are “American,” and are told? Who is permitted to represent America? Who decides which stories constitute progress? What happens when Black people are physically present in the nation but absent from its official memory?

The fair celebrated a carefully curated image of America. Douglass, Wells, Barnett, Penn, Williams, and others insisted upon telling the fuller story. At a moment when the nation is once again deciding which histories will be displayed, revised, or removed, their work reminds us that erasure is not new, but neither is Black resistance to it.

Gasha, Anna. “‘The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition’ by Ida B. Wells et al.” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 18, no. 2 (2021): 62–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48759188.

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. 2 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1993.

McPherson & Oliver. Escaped Slave Gordon, Also Known as “Whipped Peter,” Showing His Scarred Back at a Medical Examination, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. April 2, 1863. Albumen print on card mount. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018648117/

Paddon, Anna R., and Sally Turner. “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Illinois Historical Journal 88, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 19–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40192873.

Scott. “Remembering Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima, and the 1893 World’s Fair.” Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair. September 9, 2020. https://worldsfairchicago1893.com/2020/09/09/remembering-nancy-green-aunt-jemima-and-the-1893-worlds-fair/.

First, it took me several tries to remember the actual name of this show, because I, and apparently many other Black people, keep calling it House of Dragons. It is, in fact, titled House of the Dragon. Based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, the series tells the story of the Targaryens before the events of the A Song of Ice and Fire franchise.

I have loved fantasy for a long time, despite growing up with almost no representation and only a smattering of it well into the 21st century. So the decision to make the silver-haired Velaryons, the only other descendants to survive the Doom of Valyria along with the Targaryens, and the wealthiest house in Westeros, Black, filled me with joy and dread.

Fantasy, as well as many other nerd spaces, are not always safe or welcoming environments for Black people, people of color, or even women. A surface-level search for fandoms and racism will easily send you down a rabbit hole of hellish proportions.

When The Rings of Power cast a Black elf and a Black dwarf, some Tolkien fans lost their minds. When Finn, played by John Boyega, appeared on screen with a lightsaber in the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when Kelly Marie Tran played an Asian woman mechanic in the same series, or when Moses Ingram played a Black woman force user, Star Wars fans vehemently attacked the actors. When Rue, played by Amandla Stenberg, was cast as a girl of color in The Hunger Games, fans were outraged and swore it ruined the whole movie, despite the fact that Rue is described as having “dark brown skin” in the book. I’m not even going to bring up Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid.

Too often, mainstream fantasy fandom consumes imagined worlds through whiteness as the default, then reacts with anger when a screen adaptation challenges that image. Even though elves, dwarves, Jedi, and mermaids are fictional characters, anything other than a white actor playing those roles is treated as a challenge to the “norm,” which runs against the very purpose of fantasy: to imagine beyond the limits of the world we already know.

Hence, my dread when Corlys Velaryon, who is not described as Black in the book, appeared among the teaser images for the first season of House of the Dragon, and Steve Toussaint, definitely a Black man, showed up with long, flowing silver locs.

But ten seconds before that dread, there was joy.

He was Black, with long locs, and he was Corlys Velaryon. I had read the book, so I knew the character, but from that moment on, he became Uncle Corlys. Making Corlys Black meant he could not be the only person of color in the cast, unless the show scrapped his children with Rhaenys or told a different story. But showrunner Ryan Condal did not disappoint.

The scene of House Velaryon entering the wedding feast in season one is epic. All the melanin is there, on the screen, and it meant something significant to me. For the 10-year-old me who loved fantasy and created stories with dragons, knights, and castles in faraway lands, but never saw or even imagined anyone there who looked like me, that part of me finally felt seen. I wanted it, but I did not know I needed it.

One character meant something. It was a door opening, a glimpse of possibility in a world where Black people had too often been left outside. We could love and celebrate the fandoms from the sidelines, buy the books, watch the shows, spend money on the merch, but only from the margins of a story that was not about us and too often felt like it was not for us.

But four meant something else entirely: a house, a family, with a lineage, a name and an inheritance, beauty, conflict, and dragonfire (that’s Rhaena), within a story and franchise we already loved, but that now made room to see us inside its world. Corlys himself says, “History does not remember blood. It remembers names.” And for once, those names carried Black faces, Black presence, and a claim to fantasy that could not be pushed back to the margins.

There was an undeniable, thunderous roar of joy at seeing Lord Corlys “The Sea Snake” Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), Lady Baela Targaryen (Bethany Antonia), Alyn (Abubakar Salim), and Addam (Clinton Liberty), with honorable mentions to Grand Maester Orwyle (Kurt Egyiawan) and Princess Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell)—though I’m still not talking about Rhaena, in this fictional story, about flawed humans, magic, and dragons.

For the man who told me his Dungeons & Dragons crew said he could not be an elf because elves are not Black; for the fantasy cosplayers ignored at conventions; and for the countless Black people living in the real world while dreaming of better, other worlds, it may seem like a small thing.

But Black people have dragons too.

March 25, 2026 was the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Observed annually since 2008, it serves as a permanent memorial honoring the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.

This year’s theme, “Justice in Action: Confronting History, Advancing Dignity, Empowering Futures,” calls for an honest reckoning with this history and recognition of its enduring impact.

President John Mahama of Ghana introduced a resolution seeking reparatory justice. Its key points include acknowledging the grave human rights violations against people of African descent, addressing the lasting legacies of slavery and systemic racism, affirming the rights of African nations to control their own resources, and supporting repair and reparations.

Resolution A/80/L.48, Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity, passed with 123 votes in favor. Fifty-three countries abstained, including the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, France, and Portugal.

Three countries voted against the resolution: Argentina, Israel, and the United States.

United Nations News. (2026, March). UN marks International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167199

European External Action Service. (2026). EU explanation of vote – UN General Assembly action on declaration on trafficking in enslaved Africans. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york/eu-explanation-vote-%E2%80%93-un-general-assembly-action-a80l48-declaration-trafficking-enslaved-africans_en

United Nations. (2026). International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade 2026. https://www.un.org/en/rememberslavery/observance/2026

United Nations General Assembly. (2007). Resolution 62/122: Permanent memorial to and remembrance of the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. https://docs.un.org/en/A/RES/62/122

Sinners is a masterclass in preserving heritage through the fusion of media and imagination. The characters are bold, rich, and beautifully rendered.

Delta Slim could have been a one-note cautionary trope, the alcoholic musician. Annie could have easily been reduced to the angry, and skeptical Black woman. But these characters are fully human and deeply familiar.

My father was born in 1930 in rural South Central Arkansas, in a community 100 miles south of Little Rock, one of 11 children on a farm in the segregated South. He left at 14 with his 16-year-old brother, heading north to work in a packing house. He spent the rest of his life in Omaha, Nebraska, and though he returned to Arkansas each year to visit, he had no desire to go back for good.

I asked about his childhood often. He was rarely forthcoming. Through my adulthood I kept reaching, trying to understand the man and the world that shaped him, but he would redirect to my mother, deflect the deeper questions, and I would only later recognize the squirm in his seat for what it was.

Memories of family and home came back with laughter. Questions about school or community were places he simply would not go. The two stories I was able to pry loose: a police officer shooting a child walking home from the candy store, stepping over him and saying “wrong nigger,” and a man hanging from a tree.

I still remember the pain in his eyes. As a young adult, I understood those stories as markers, the things that made him who he was, and fueled his dedication to ensuring his children grew up safe and educated.

As an adult now, I recognize the crippling fear and trauma those incidents carved into him. I wonder how many more stories were buried to protect his mind. And I wonder what role that buried weight played in his ultimate war with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

My father knew men like Delta Slim. Men who worked and labored under conditions beyond human endurance, but survived. Men who found refuge in the few spaces accessible to them. For my father it was the church and his family. For Delta Slim it was a bottle and his music. Different vessels, the same need to cope under unimaginable circumstances.

When Delta Slim recounts his story and replaces words with song, the pain of the memory is understood. He channels anger, anguish, and grief into art.

Annie is a woman who has survived grief and loss, the love interest of the central character and a recognized healer in her community. A root worker and herbalist, she draws on nature’s gifts to heal, protect, and sustain, with a transcendent understanding of ancestral wisdom.

She is a manifestation of the “Annies” who have always existed in Black communities, women who blended healing, prayer, ritual, and memory, becoming anchors of both survival and resistance. She reminded me of the women I grew up watching in church, whose faith and quiet knowledge held entire communities together.

Her mojo bag mirrors the prayers of the mothers of the church. Her medicines ease the sick and shut in. Her food nourishes like so many church dinners before it. And her knowledge, ultimately, saves lives.

She is also the embodiment of a story my mother carried, her paternal grandmother, born at the turn of the century in Arkansas, plagued with pain and ailments, mother to 12 children. She relied on medicines crafted by the “hoodoo woman” in town. My mother retold what her father remembered: strange jars filled with fantastical objects, visits made to get medicine for his ailing mother. Those stories always seemed otherworldly, until I understood that the woman was filling a medical gap left by “white only” hospitals, through ancestral knowledge and botanical practice.

Those practices once labeled evil and sacrilegious, make complete sense. Peppermint and ginger teas for digestion. Epsom salt baths for sore muscles. Vicks VapoRub, branded and sold in 1894 North Carolina, but rooted in the balms crafted by Black women on Southern plantations long before.

With so many trendy and “bespoke” remedies available today, I think back to the Black women who created them, discredited then and overlooked now. Their knowledge lives on in every “body butter” on the shelves at Trader Joe’s, and every nutrient green or herb that once grew free and now costs a small fortune at Whole Foods.

There are no real vampires, but there were real terrors that consumed Black lives in Jim Crow America, and they wore human faces. It is a story about blues and memory, love and loss, spirituality and survival, and the white supremacy that made all of it necessary. At its heart, it is also a story of supernatural forces that shape Black life and survival, cinematic and historical, revealing the resilience of Black communities, where memory, medicine, and spirit have always been intertwined as sources of survival, joy, and resistance.

Beginning in 1830, Black leaders gathered nationally to strategize freedom, education, and political rights decades before emancipation.

We have met together to devise ways and means for our own elevation.

— Proceedings of the 1830 National Negro Convention

Long before federal protections, Black communities built their own political infrastructure.

One member of this movement was Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. He was the first African American chaplain for the US Army; appointed to the Freedman’s Bureau in Georgia, and elected to the Georgia State legislature in 1868. He was known as a passionate civil rights advocate and a “fiery” orator.

You may expel us, gentlemen, by your votes, today; but, while you do it, remember that there is a just God in Heaven... who... never fails to vindicate the cause of Justice.

—Rev. H. M. Turner, “I Claim the Rights of a Man” (1868)

After the promises of rights and freedom were broken with Reconstruction, an outraged Turner, used his voice and writings to preach Black pride, Black self-determination, political independence, and reparations. Years before Marcus Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa Movement’, Turner encouraged Black migration out of America, and emigration to Africa.

Before rights were recognized, Black communities built schools, churches, conventions, and networks of power. We have always organized.

What does it mean that organized Black political advocacy predates the Civil War?

Marcus Garvey was born on April 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, into poverty but not into small thinking. Raised in a family of ministers, Garvey absorbed both the cadence of the pulpit and the discipline of scripture. Faith shaped him, but so did ink and paper. By fourteen, he was working at a newspaper, learning the craft of printing, mastering the machinery that would later amplify his voice across oceans.

As a young laborer, he witnessed exploitation and racial discrimination firsthand. He attempted to organize workers in Jamaica, already sensing that dignity required structure, not just outrage. His travels to London expanded his political imagination. There, amid conversations about empire and reform, he encountered the writings of Booker T. Washington, whose philosophy of self-reliance and economic advancement deeply influenced him. Garvey’s vision grew larger: uplift would require not only individual progress but collective sovereignty.

In 1914, back in Jamaica, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), committed to the independence and global unity of African peoples. Two years later, he traveled to the United States at Washington’s invitation, though they never met, Washington died before Garvey’s arrival. Still, Harlem became fertile ground. By 1916–1917, the UNIA established its headquarters in New York, and Garvey’s message began to thunder.

In 1918, he launched the Negro World, a paper that carried Garveyite philosophy across the diaspora. By the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed hundreds of branches—over 700 in the United States alone, and millions of followers worldwide. Though membership numbers were likely inflated, the reach of the movement was undeniable. Parades filled Harlem streets. Uniforms signaled discipline. Speeches proclaimed a bold idea: Black self-determination on a global scale.

Garvey became best known for the Back to Africa Movement and for founding the Black Star Line, a steamship company intended to facilitate economic exchange and, eventually, emigration to Africa. His dream extended beyond return; he envisioned the creation of a United States of Africa, an independent Black nation that could stand as a preeminent world power. Cooperation across the diaspora, he believed, would unlock collective advancement.

Yet his methods were controversial. In pursuit of funding and recognition, Garvey met with and accepted financial support from the Ku Klux Klan, an act that alienated many Black leaders and remains one of the most debated chapters of his life. His grand vision also collided with legal trouble.

Garvey was targeted by the U.S. government and convicted of mail fraud in 1923. His prosecution was politically motivated. Garvey began serving his sentence in 1925. In

1927, his sentence was commuted, and he was deported back to Jamaica. His movement in the United States weakened without his physical presence, but Garveyism did not disappear. Its emphasis on racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and global Black unity reverberated through later generations, from the Nation of Islam to Pan-African independence movements across the continent.

In January 2025, President Joe Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey, acknowledging the historical significance of his contributions and addressing the contentious nature of his unjust conviction. Marcus Garvey’s dream of Black unity, economic empowerment, and global Pan-Africanism remains relevant today. His teachings remind us to uplift our communities and take pride in our heritage.

Marcus Garvey’s life was bold, contradictory, visionary, and flawed. He preached independence with the fervor of a minister and organized with the precision of a printer. His dream of Black unity across the diaspora reshaped political consciousness, even when the machinery of that dream faltered.

To study Garvey is to wrestle with ambition on a global scale, to ask what self-determination requires, and what it costs.

Black History is not a side quest.

From childhood, I dreamed of far-off places and magical eras, enchanted by stories of fascinating lives and beauty. My love for all things Renaissance and Tudor bloomed early, but I didn’t see myself represented in the books, movies, TV shows, or art of the time. And representation matters. It may sound cliché, but it’s true. When a child never sees anyone who looks like them in media, it affects them. Media has an impact on the formation of identity, and when you're not represented, it’s easy to feel invisible and unworthy. It influences your sense of self and how you see yourself in the world.

I’ve always loved the art, creativity, and inventiveness of the Renaissance, but I felt like an outsider—observing from the margins of a story that wasn’t mine. I could read about it, watch it, even dress up in Renaissance clothing, but it was just cosplay.

I was raised to be proud of who I was and to believe that the history of African people was rich, even if we didn’t fully understand the details of that history. Deep down, I was always searching for connections, even when the world seemed to suggest that my story—my place in history—was unrecorded, forgotten, and unimportant, I knew there had to be more to the story.

In college, Black History courses opened my eyes. I learned that my ancestors’ history didn’t begin with slavery and that Africa had a rich history of art, creativity, and inventiveness. Africans explored the world, seeking new lands and opportunities beyond their own communities, long before European ships reached their shores. During the Renaissance—a period that coincided with the Transatlantic Slave Trade—there were also Black people living in Europe. Yet, contrary to popular belief not all of them were enslaved.

John Blanke, for instance, was a royal trumpeter at the English court of King Henry VII in the early 16th century. Records describe him as Black, and he was paid for his eight days of service, 20 shillings, in November 1507. In 1526, while all trumpeters were earning 8 shillings, he petitioned King Henry VIII for a raise, successfully doubling his wages. His portrait is featured in a 1511 tournament tapestry, evidence not only of Black musicians' artistic contributions to European courts but of his life as a free or freed Black man in 16th-century England. A man who understood his value and pursued what he desired with confidence.

It is believed that John Blanke traveled to England with Catherine of Aragon from Spain when she was betrothed to Prince Arthur, Henry’s brother. However, he was not the only Black person at the court.

The television series The Spanish Princess, based on the book of the same name by Phillipa Gregory tells the story of Catherine of Aragon arriving in England with her entourage, among whom is a Black servant, and ladies maid named Lina de Cordonnes. Though there is some speculation that this is a composite of two Black women in service to Catherine, recorded history is only clear on one woman, Catalina de Motril, a Muslim "Moor" from Grenada.

Her story begins with capture and enslavement, but ends with her returning to Spain, marrying, having a family, and eventually returning to the home of her birth. She would become an important figure in the investigation of Catherine during Henry VIII’s case for divorce. Catalina would have been present in Catherine’s bed chamber. She would have intimate knowledge and though it is believed she was questioned, her account does not exist. Nor does any information on the end of her life. What is important is that we know Catalina lived a full life, and we know her name.

There was backlash at her casting, and accusations of race-swapping because there couldn’t have been Black women in Europe during that time. Those flawed ideas highlight how deeply misunderstood this history is.

Then there’s Alessandro de’ Medici, my first discovery on this journey to find Black people in the Renaissance. Born in 1512, he is thought to be the son of an enslaved woman in the Medici household, of African descent named Simunetta, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. Though there is an argument that his actual father is Giulio de Medici who later became Pope Clement VII.

Alessandro was acknowledged by the Medici’s, educated and ultimately became the Duke of Penne and the first Duke of Florence, ruling from 1530 to 1537. Several portraits of Alessandro exist, depicting him with dark skin and tightly curled hair. Alessandro's story is remarkable, shedding light on the complexities of slavery and the undeniable role Black people have played throughout world history. Though his rule was cut short due to his assassination, he had two children and a great number of his descendants are still in Europe today.

John Blanke, Catalina of Granada, Alessandro de’ Medici—these are the figures I wish I’d known about as a child, when I played dress-up in bedsheets, with my mothers white slip on my head, imagining I was royalty with long, flowing hair. I always believed there must have been Black people in those magical places, with hidden lives, unseen faces, and voices silenced by history, but silent no more.

That early connection ignited my deep love for genealogy and oral history—powerful tools that help me trace roots, recover voices, and bring light to the stories of Black families and communities too often left out of the historical record.

As an Oral Historian, I blend the power of ancestral storytelling with today’s digital tools to preserve the memories of marginalized communities. By piecing together the forgotten and the overlooked, I celebrate resilience, honor legacy, and affirm that history isn’t just what happened—it’s who we are, and who we’re becoming.

I’ve spent the entirety of my adult life studying history and now there are those that wish to erase it. They will fail. We owe it to those before us, and those yet to come, to stand guard over the truth and protect it by any means necessary.

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So here we are. I know a lot, I’m a good teacher, and now’s the time to protect history by sharing it with as many people as possible. I’ll be sharing content organized around key themes and subjects that shape the Black experience in America.

Each topic will be supported by downloadable readings, curated links, and book recommendations to encourage deeper exploration beyond the core material. Whether you’re new to the subject or looking to expand your understanding, this course is designed to offer accessible, engaging, and meaningful insights into the stories, struggles, and triumphs of Black people across centuries.