Tag: black history

Why Many Black History Accounts on Social Media Are Wrong

We are living in an era where Black history is being erased every day, so I understand the excitement over discovering all the amazing things our people have done.

However, while I love me a good fun fact, I cannot help but notice that many of the Black history memes floating around social media are often grossly inaccurate or lacking context.

And some are flat-out wrong altogether.

And I am not talking about small pages either. Many of your favorite Black history accounts with millions of followers put out false information every day in the name of Black history.

Yes, this includes those on Substack… not really sure why ya’ll think this isn’t also a social media platform.

With a culture so rich and expansive as ours, we really do not need to embellish what we’ve done. The work is already powerful on its own.

Here are just a few things I wish we would explain more deeply. I am starting with this one because someone told me to “Shut up” on Instagram for pointing it out.

Mary Beatrice Kenner invented the maxi pad.

Context:

What Kenner invented was called the sanitary belt and moisture-resistant pocket, which is not exactly the same as our modern disposable menstrual pad.

Kenner’s patent eventually expired, leading people to take credit for her invention. A company also expressed interest but pulled back after learning she was Black.1

If Kenner had not been rejected, it is highly likely that she would have also invented the disposable pad, likely based on her original idea. However, what she invented was not the same as today’s adhesive pad, as many of these posts insinuate without proper context.

Here is a timeline from a website on A short history of modern menstrual products:

  • 1880s–1890s: Early disposable pads were made of cotton and gauze, often marketed to women traveling by land or sea.
  • 1896: Johnson & Johnson marketed “Lister’s Towels: Sanitary Towels for Ladies,” which were a notable early commercial attempt but failed due to social stigma.
  • 1918–1921: Nurses in WWI used high-absorbency wood-pulp bandages, leading to the creation of Kotex, the first successfully marketed disposable pad.
  • 1926: Johnson & Johnson introduced Modess Sanitary Napkins.
  • 1956/1957: Mary Kenner patented an improved adjustable sanitary belt with a moisture-resistant pocket.

What I would change on this timeline, though, is that Kenner’s invention was in the 1920s, but because of racism, the sanitary belt did not come out until the late 1950s.

This is what I mean by adding context or looking deeper into what we read.

Let’s look at another one.

Claudette Colvin was the first to give up her seat before Rosa Parks.

Context:

She was not the first, but one of many. Irene Morgan did it in 19442, and Ida B. Wells did it in 1884.3

There was also Aurelia S. Browder, who did it in April 1955, almost eight months before Rosa Parks’s arrest and a month after Claudette Colvin’s.

History is not the linear event we think it is. There is so much that happened, and so many people it happened to, we might never know about.

What Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks represent is the culmination of many years of work and sacrifice by many different Black women.

And one more.

Lewis Howard Latimer invented the light bulb.

Context:

What Lewis Howard Latimer invented was an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for electric light bulbs.

In simpler terms, his invention made using light bulbs in homes and businesses more practical. His filaments could be heated to high temperatures without breaking, resulting in longer-lasting, more efficient, and affordable light bulbs.

These are a few easy ones I thought of because I see them a lot, but there are many more.

Before you sit in the Amen corner of anybody’s Black history post (including mine), make sure the information they are sharing is correct. Google (and Google Scholar) is right there.

  1. Sluby, Patricia C. “BLACK WOMEN AND INVENTIONS.” Women’s History Network News, no. 37, 1993, pp. 4.. ↩︎
  2. Lang, Martin. “Irene Morgan and her Impact on Freedom Riders.” ↩︎
  3. Orr, Nicole. Famous Women in History: Ida B. Wells: Crusader for Justice. Curious Fox Books, 2025. ↩︎

In Joseph’s Shadow Part Two

People knew his father and what he had contributed to the movement. They still spoke Joseph’s name with a kind of reverence, as though saying it might conjure the courage of another time. His photograph—creased at the corners, and yellowed with time, hung in barbershops and church foyers, beside posters for fish fries and gospel concerts.

Every February, Joseph’s face reappeared on classroom walls, a reminder of marches and megaphones, of a generation that refused to bow. For the community, Joseph was history come to life.

For Michael, he was just Dad.

Michael and his friends walked past the bulletin board in the school hallway. There it was again: his father’s face, eyes sharp, mouth set like a promise. Michael paused, thinking about his first days at Lindbloom.

“Ey, Mike! Mike!” a classmate had called. “Yo man, so how is it being famous? What was it like?”

Today, he would tell the person to go to hell, but back then, he just shook his head, a small, polite refusal that spoke louder than words.

Michael kept walking, shoulders tight, mind elsewhere, like the chess match he had lost last night. If he had not been hungover, his opponent would not have stood a chance. He didn’t particularly enjoy the taste of liquor, but it got his mind off thinking about walking in a legend’s shadow.

Tanya carried the legacy easily, quoting speeches and smiling at cameras as if born for the stage. But Michael kept to the edges. He wanted to be noticed for his own quiet triumphs—for the way his mind worked over a chessboard, or how the basketball arced perfectly from his fingertips.

Instead, people only ever asked about “The Movement,” their eyes expectant, as if he held some sacred story he refused to tell.

His father’s name was everywhere, in every conversation, every display, every “remember when” retold by people who seemed to think history lived only in him. Not in Michael. Not in the quiet hours he spent imagining, planning, thinking. They acted like he was Martin Luther King’s son.

So what, his father took part in the Freedom Rides? What did that have to do with him? Michael didn’t care about no Barack Obama either. He wasn’t his Savior. He was just another politician. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of being overlooked for the wrong reasons.

History had chosen him without asking, which is why he couldn’t admit to his friends or himself that he had a crush on a white girl.

In Joseph’s Shadow: Part One

Tanya McNair, dressed in her favorite navy-blue blouse, which bore a faint trace of glitter from the campaign rally a month ago, moved from group to group of the crowded apartment. Her living room was alive with chatter, laughter, and the occasional burst of applause from friends and neighbors whenever a commentator announced another state leaning toward Obama. Tanya looked fondly at the old TV set sitting on the floor beneath the big, flat-screen they were all watching.

The floor model television belonged to her grandmother, Sidney McNair—Mama Sidney to everyone who knew her. Uncle Eddy had bought it after great-grandma Judith passed, back when he and his sisters decided to remain in Chicago a while longer. That was also around the time her father, Joseph, disappeared into what he later called a revolution of self-discovery, also known as abandoning the family until he found himself.

The television had been there through it all.

It was the same set where great-grandma Judith—daughter of the great Solomon, son of the first Stella—watched the Black Panthers march down the street in their berets and rifles, demanding the freedom of Huey Newton.

The same screen that flickered quietly in the corner the day Aunt Karen’s boyfriend, Noah, stormed into their lives. Years later, she would name their first and only son after him.

For Tanya, it wasn’t just a piece of furniture but a sacred repository for memories, a portal to her family’s history.

Tanya frowned at the stacks of books on top of it, wondering if she was disrespecting her grandmother by using her TV as a table.

A cheer erupted from the room as the phone rang. Tanya’s heart raced as she ran to answer it without taking her eyes off the flatscreen. So far, Obama was winning.

“Sisss,” sang her little brother.

Tanya raised her eyebrows, “Are you drunk already, Mike?”

“Nah. I’m good. What’s the word?”

Tanya sighed, “Michael, you are not good. I can smell the Hennessy through the phone.”

Mike burst into laughter, and Tanya pulled the phone from her ear. That boy was gonna make her go deaf. “Where are you anyway?”

“I’m handling some business. Why, what’s good?”

“The business you were supposed to be handling is here. What happened to you helping me with the party?”

“The election party? You know I don’t get into alla that,” he said, slurring his words.

“Well, you need to get into it. History is being made. Have you talked with Dad?”

“History? Yea okay. Nah. I ain’t spoke to him today.”

“He was supposed to be coming over.”

“Coming over where?”

“Over here, to the apartment.”

“Not today, he ain’t. He told me he was working on the Malibu.”

“That beat-up old thing?” Tanya sighed. “And I thought you ain’t talk to him?”

“Look, pops don’t wanna hurt yo feelings, but you know the old man don’t vote.”

It didn’t make sense to her. Joseph McNair was born in 1945 and grew up in the ’60s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He had heard Dr. King speak, fought segregation with his friends through protest, and was even beaten for trying to integrate at a bus station during the Freedom Rides.

Finding out he really was a mixed Black man and not the white boy he grew up believing himself to be is a history lesson all its own.

And now, as the country waited with bated breath to see if the United States really would elect its first Black President, her father, the revolutionary of the family, didn’t participate in politics?

Joseph McNair was politics!

“Yo T, you there?”

Michael’s voice startled Tanya back to the present, her heart beating a million miles per minute as her guests sat on their hands, quietly waiting on the biggest announcement of their time, the walls echoing with hope.

“Okay, well. I’ll call you back.”

Yep. It’s another Stella book in the works!

Black History Lives

Meeting Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph, the lone survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, 1963

The more I study Black history, the more I am humbled by how close it still is to us, and how often the past breathes in the same rooms we do. It lives in the hands of my elderly aunts and uncles, in my husband’s great-aunts now in their eighties and nineties, in the quiet authority of people who remember a world entirely unlike the one we inhabit today.

When I look at them, I am struck not just by their age but by the eras they have survived. Even my late parents, born in the 1940s and 1950s, moved through a country so different from the one I know that it feels almost unrecognizable. I used to think that world was gone, and in many ways, it is. And at the same time, it is also sitting across from us at dinner tables, folding laundry, telling stories we don’t always ask to hear.

This is what makes Black history (and history in general) so accessible and so urgent. It is not only found in textbooks, memorials, museums, or the names etched into stone. It is carried by people who are still alive. People whose memories collapse the distance between then and now. It reminds us that history is not just the past, but it is also inextricably connected to the present. Those who made history were simply living their lives, never knowing their present moment would one day be named.

This weekend is the perfect example of this.

On February 7, 2026, I had the esteemed honor of meeting a woman whose story should have been in our history books, but the world barely remembers her name.

On September 15, 1963, the distance between past and present collapsed in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A bomb exploded beneath the church steps, ripping through a space that had long been a place for organizing and for Black resistance. In 1963, Sixteenth Street was the largest Black church in Birmingham, a heartbeat of the Civil Rights Movement.

History often tells this story in a single, devastating sentence: four little girls were killed. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (between the ages of eleven and fourteen) lost their lives in an act of white supremacist terror. Their names are remembered, mourned, and rightly so.

What is mentioned less often is that there were five girls in that basement lounge that morning. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah, was also there. She lived, but survival came at a cost that would follow her for the rest of her life.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Collins Rudolph was standing nearby when the bomb went off. The blast hurled shards of glass into her body, leaving her immediately blind in both eyes. Though she eventually regained partial sight in her left eye, her right eye was so severely damaged that it had to be removed and replaced with a prosthetic. Tiny fragments of glass remained embedded in her skin, even in her eye.

“If a single strand of hair got into my right eye socket, the pain was unreal,” she says, “The skin around my eye was very sore and still healing. It felt like something was cutting my eyes whenever hair or anything sensitive brushed over this area. The hair itself felt like tiny particles of glass stuck inside my eye socket all over again.”

– Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph

Sarah did not die in that basement, but she carried September 15, 1963, with her into adulthood, into older age, into the present we are still living in.

With no counseling or therapy, Sarah was forced to return to school as she struggled to heal, grieve the loss of her sister, and her old life. The world moved on. Dr. King spoke at the joint funeral for three of the girls, and it attracted over eight thousand people. Photographer Frank Dandridge took a picture of Sarah while she lay in the hospital, with patches over both eyes, and it was published in Life Magazine on September 27, 1963.

However, despite this searing image, Sarah Collins Rudolph and what happened to her faded from public consciousness, limiting her story to nothing more than a historical footnote.

It was only when Mrs. Rudolph herself felt compelled to share this story that the world began to learn about the part of that tragic day that had not been told before.

Today, Mrs. Rudolph is a social justice speaker, author, and activist speaking to people all over about what happened to her and why stories like hers matter.

Don’t forget we have Black History articles on this blog under Black History Fun Fact Friday and on Substack at substack.com@yecheilyah!

A Month and A Mirror

A hundred years ago, in 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson planted a small but deliberate marker in time—Negro History Week—never knowing it would one day swell into a month, a memory, a reckoning.

February has carried that weight ever since, in what is now known as Black History Month. It is a month crowded with remembrance, with names spoken loudly and moments replayed until they feel familiar.

But February also carries the ongoing debate over whether Black history should be relegated to a single month, primarily since Dr. Woodson himself never intended the week-long celebration to be permanent, let alone to encompass a whole month lasting 100 years.

For Woodson, he wanted Black history integrated into the mainstream curriculum, not restricted to a single week or, in our case, a single month.

For me, two things can be true.

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I spend 90% of my time reading, researching, documenting, and sharing Black historical facts year-round. Thus, I am for incorporating Black history into the mainstream curriculum and reducing its focus to a footnote or an elective.

But I do also love the idea of keeping it separate, special, and set apart, as we are.

Additionally, it’s a great time to promote reading. The harsh reality is that American reading levels are still declining. (2024 NAEP data show 12th-grade reading scores at their lowest level since 1992.) I’d bet that your average adult had not read a full-length book since High School, if even then.

Therefore, if February is a time when the minds of the people are not as distracted, then let us use it to do some good.

To quote Bob Marley, “The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”

So while Black History Month is not the movement itself, I do see it as a mirror history placed in our hands. When we look into it, we do not see the past frozen in black-and-white—we see ourselves.

Our language. Our resistance. Our contradictions.

The mirror does not lie.

It shows us who we’ve been bold enough to become and who we’ve been too afraid to remember.

Don’t forget we have Black History articles on this blog under Black History Fun Fact Friday and on Substack at substack.com@yecheilyah!

Black History Month UK

September walked out of here like she had somewhere to be, and October is strolling in with hella causes, from Breast Cancer Awareness Month to World Mental Health Day (10/10), to PAIL: Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. (We gotta come back to this one!)

Additionally, October is Black History Month in the UK, and since I haven’t seen many people in the US discuss it, let’s do so.

If you didn’t already know, October marks Black History Month in the United Kingdom and was first celebrated in October 1987 to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. (1838-1988)

The observation of October as Black History Month had its beginnings in programs and priorities of the Ethnic Minorities Unit (EMU) of the Greater London Council (GLC), and by the Principal Race Relations Adviser and Head of the Unit, Ansel Wong.

But it was Akyaaba Addai-Sebo who took it to new heights. Addai-Sebo came to the UK from Ghana to seek refuge from political persecution in 1984. Like the founder of Black History Month in America (Dr. Carter G. Woodson), Addai-Sebo wanted to challenge racism and celebrate the history and achievements of his people.

But that’s not all.

Akyaaba’s chief inspiration was young people. He says one of the reasons the celebration is in October is to appeal to children returning to school from summer break. According to one story, Akyaaba encountered a distraught mother who complained that her son (whom she had named after Marcus Garvey) asked her why he couldn’t be white.

“The inspiration for Black History Month came from an incident that happened at the GLC where I worked as the Co-ordinator of Special Projects. A colleague of mine, a woman, came to work one morning, looking very downcast and not herself. I asked her what the matter was, and she confided to me that the previous night, when she was putting her son Marcus to bed, he asked her, ‘Mum, why can’t I be white?’

A young Akyaaba Addai-Sebo

He goes on to say:

“So when this incident with Marcus took place in London, it dawned on me that something had to happen here in Britain. I was very familiar with black history month in America, and thought that something like that had to be done here in the UK, because if this was the fountainhead of colonialism, imperialism and racism, and despite all the institutions of higher learning and research and also the cluster of African embassies, you could still find a six year old boy being confused about his identity even though his mother had tried to correct it at birth.”

– Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, www.crer.org.uk

Why It Matters

Although the overwhelming majority of enslaved Blacks were transported to the Caribbean and South America, not just North America, many Americans are still not familiar with our history in other parts of the world.

For example, the English ship that brought the first recorded enslaved Blacks to the American colonies was called The White Lion and arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, on August 20, 1619. However, we were also already being enslaved by other nations, such as being brought to Puerto Rico by Spanish conquerors as early as 1509.

“People from African and Caribbean backgrounds have been a fundamental part of British history for centuries. However, campaigners believe their value and contribution to society are often overlooked, ignored, and distorted.” (trisha@whatson.uk.com)

My Poetry

Black History does not just live in textbooks,
but on the tongues of poets.

Every stanza is a stepping stone
laid by those who came before me.
It echoes of cotton fields, jazz clubs,
freedom songs, and community.

This is more than poetry.
This is preservation.
This is protest.
This is legacy.
This is poetic justice.

These words be the revolution my ancestors prayed for.

This is why my poetry
cannot be disconnected
from my History.

Pen in hand, I’m stitching liberation into every line.

This is Phyllis Wheatley
and Gil Scott-Heron’s reminder
that my future is Black, brilliant,
and beautifully written.