We quote Martin with a rhythm that swells the chest.
Malcolm’s words hum like power.
Assata’s taste like survival.
Garvey’s tickles the ear.
Lumumba’s boom like djembe drums.
Angela’s convinces the tongue that it is brave.
But no one applauds
the silence that follows a truth
told too clearly
in a world where lies
are the laws of the land.
We forget that Zora died counting coins,
her name folded small in her own purse.
Lowered into the earth without a stone to speak for her
in a segregated garden of silence
while her words, once blazing,
lay out of print like abandoned children.
We forget that revolution is only another word for change,
and change is rarely applauded in its own lifetime.
The ones who bend the arc of the world
often do it alone,
unclapped.
Revolution sounds sweet in the mouth
like a hymn rising,
like the lift of a firstborn into waiting arms,
like the soft hush of skin against skin.
But ain’t no red carpet
for the prophet.
Just dust. Truth.
And the long walk home.
This poem was inspired by an amazing podcast episode of “Our Ancestors Were Messy” about the friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (which I’ve hinted at in my novel Renaissance), their fall-out, and what culminated in the tragic ending of a folklorist, documentarian, author, and anthropologist.
Once one of the most successful writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston would die in poverty in the segregated wing of a welfare home. Her body would be buried in an unmarked grave. The woman who preserved Black life faded into obscurity until she was rediscovered by Alice Walker in 1973.
Walker would resurrect Hurston’s writings and place a marker on her grave that read, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”
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.
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.
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.
This is the time of year when many of us are inundated with a call to “finish the year strong.”
A time when we will be pressured by businesses, organizations, and entrepreneurial gurus to race to the finish line. Social media posts will bombard us with how many days of the year are left, year-end discounts, constant promotions, and posts about how much we’ve grown before the year is even over.
But rushing into the new year doesn’t guarantee a fresh start. Sometimes, it just carries our burnout into January.
Yes, we know. January is not the start of a New Year. Anyone who has done the tiniest bit of research knows that a real new year starts in the spring, when everything is reborn, not in the dead of winter. Stay with me tho.
We’ve all experienced or witnessed the last-minute scramble of trying to summarize the year without fully processing it: trying to complete a weight loss program, write a book, or achieve financial goals in just 10 days. Office parties, school events, family gatherings, all crammed together to see who can win the most before January first.
It can feel like we’re running from something. Perhaps a feeling of not having done “enough,” maybe comparison, and maybe the belief that value is measured by productivity.
It’s already happening with Black Friday sales. As you may have noticed, I rarely have one. I have nothing against them, and I am sure I’ll have something special in the future. Maybe even next year. But for now, it just all feels so exhausting.
I’M TIRED YA’LL.
If you are also tired, remember there is nothing wrong with slowing down at a time when everyone is speeding up. If you are a nature person like me, you know nothing blooms all year long. We were born from the Earth, yet we move opposite to it.
While humans rush to prove their year was meaningful to other flawed humans, nature is slowing down for the winter months. Animals are hibernating, finding ways to escape the cold, and trees have shed their leaves, with plants stopping growth to conserve energy. Even the soil rests, with nutrients being regenerated under frost and snow.
Meanwhile, my neighbor blows his leaves every morning. Poor thing. I want so badly to tell him they are just going to fall again. Let them leaves alone. They are doing what they are supposed to do and helping the soil in the process.
On this side of the Earth, humans accelerate and accomplish as much as possible before the final countdown. But for other living things?
For them, this is a period of rest and preparation for spring.
Slowing down isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about doing what matters with intention.
When we slow down, we reclaim time.
We notice the beauty in ordinary moments, and we greet the “new year” with clarity rather than exhaustion.
Instead of rushing to create a version of ourselves that looks good on paper, we can walk grounded, nourished, and whole.
When I was ten years old, my family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just months after learning to walk again after the car accident. It was the only time we did not live in Chicago during my childhood.
Shortly after moving into a big, beautiful home, we were evicted. With only a few family members in the state who decided we could not live with them, my mother and her three daughters went to a woman’s shelter. My brother was welcomed to stay with an older cousin, but she didn’t have room for the girls.
I’ve gone days without food, months without a roof, and years without the kind of nourishment most people take for granted. So watching people mock families who are about to lose their SNAP benefits isn’t just sad — it’s cruel, and it reminds me how easily empathy gets lost in comfort.
In a matter of days, many American families face the risk of losing their food stamp benefits as the Trump Administration intends to cut payments, affecting about 42 million individuals across the nation. What people are feeling and witnessing is not about lazy parents who are not working to put food on the table. This is about a trash economy that has forced even the hardest-working families to rely on assistance. You might not need it today, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need it tomorrow.
Before the stock market crash of October 1929, there was a time of optimism. Many families prospered as cars and new technology grew. People did not expect to go to their banks and be locked out without warning. Families didn’t expect that they would have to stand in bread lines. It happened suddenly, and it could happen to you, too.
“The loss of SNAP benefits leads to food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition, which are associated with numerous negative health outcomes in children, such as poor concentration, decreased cognitive function, fatigue, depression, and behavioral problems.”
“Food stamps fed all of us. Medicaid paid them hospital bills. WIC kept formula in our baby’s bottles. Free lunch stopped our stomachs from growlin in class. The projects gave most of us a roof when we ain’t have one. Financial Aid got a lot of ya’ll them degrees you flexin now. We’ve all had help at some point, so quit looking down on folks still getting it. You just forgot what struggle felt like. Don’t get too high up…the ground still waiting if you fall.”
I was sitting here thinking about how I got to this place of advocating for the restoration of Black history. If it were solely up to me, I would have chosen a less taxing, less unrewarding cause to advocate for.
However, in the words of Nina Simone, “I have no choice in the matter. An artist’s duty, as far as I am concerned, is to reflect the times.”
In school, I was not a student who loved history, and I certainly had no plans to teach it when I grew up.
Unlike other professions where a mistake can be smoothed over, history leaves no room for error. The slightest slip can draw the sting of a thousand voices ready to correct, dismiss, or condemn.
I’ve experienced people debating a point in a video or article they didn’t even finish watching or reading. Yet, here they are, flying Delta to the comment section to respond.
It’s like people talk with their mouths open, the meat still in between their teeth, droplets of spittle sky rocking out of their mouth from food they have not chewed properly, let alone swallowed.
In a time where many of the Civil Rights that Black people fought for are being stripped away, there is no safety net when the facts slip.
Still, I show up.
I press record and publish with hands slick from sweat, skin raw from the invisible cuts of criticism, and keep offering what my people literally bled to learn.
Even when I wonder why I’m doing this, I keep moving forward, not because it’s always fun. It is not. As the saying goes: “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
I move forward because I must, and because, to quote Toni Morrison, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
And so, while it is not always exciting, it is worth it.
I march on, a pen in my hand, a computer in my lap, and a calling in my heart.
My big brother Ray, nieces Gigi, Jamie, Brook, and Me
Some families keep their history alive around picnic tables, their roots watered each summer by laughter, shared meals, and stories that stretch back generations.
Mine did not.
On my mother’s side, there were no great migrations back home for a weekend, no sea of matching shirts declaring our kinship, no annual roll call of who had been born, married, or passed on.
I didn’t grow up with the smell of charcoal and cousins’ laughter drifting across a summer lawn, the kind of memory stitched into photo albums and passed down like a family recipe. Family reunions simply weren’t our thing. There were no matching T-shirts, no group photos under a banner.
Cousin Laura, Pam, and Me sitting in the back of this truck like some thugs, lol
The closest I came to that sense of gathering was at Chicago block parties. We’d shut down the street, our banquet hall, line the sidewalks with tables and sizzling grills, and open the fire hydrant so the water arched into the air like a silver ribbon. Kids ran barefoot through a cracked-open hydrant, laughing because this time, no one called the police.
Music pulsed from speakers, and for one day, neighbors felt like cousins, and the whole block became family.
But it wasn’t our family.
Six years ago, this ended with our generation.
Jeremiah in the background (Nephew), Big Sissy Pamela, and Lil Cuzzo Angela
What began as a simple backyard barbecue has grown, year after year, into something bigger that we can finally call by its true name: a Family Reunion.
It’s a strange and humbling thing to realize we’re the aunts and unks now—the ones setting the tone, carrying the stories, and shaping the memories for our children.
We’ve rewritten the narrative we inherited.
Many of us are building marriages we’re proud of, raising children under our own roofs, and pursuing careers that light us up. We are not lost to the streets, not numbed by addiction, not absent from the lives we brought into this world.
Aunt Barbara, Lil Reg, and his daughters, Gigi and Brooklyn
Instead, we have passports now. We take our children to see oceans they’ve never touched, mountains they’ve never climbed, cities that speak in languages they’ve never heard. We give them richer experiences, not just with our words but with our lives.
Sometimes, breaking from tradition can be a good thing!
My crazy sisters and me: Yecheilyah, Tracey, Pam, and photo bombed by her daughter, Jamie.
The PBS Blog 