Each month, The African American Folklorist honors a Black scholar whose life’s work is immersed in the deep study and preservation of African American folkways, knowledge systems, and community truth-telling. For June, we recognize Dr. Elisha Oliver, a biocultural anthropologist, visual ethnographer, and Executive Director of Texas Folklife, as our African American Folklorist of the Month.

Thank you for making time to meditate on two prominent dates, April 4,1968, the day of Dr. Martin Luther King's Murder at the  Lorraine Motel in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, and April 2, 2020, the evening our oldest sibling and sister "Cookie" died from Covid 19. Her vibrant 52-year-old Daughter, Melvenia, passed 8 hours later. We didn't know Mel was infected.

Thinking about my grandmother and taking her advice to heart. 

One hundred years since Fred Shannon’s life was stolen by a mob of white men in a small town in Eastern Kentucky. As I stand here, in this place, I can’t help but feel the weight of that century—one hundred years of silence, unanswered questions, and untold pain.

Soon after Freedom
Jim Crow was declared
Between Civil War and Civil Rights.
Holocaust like a virus spread
Another century went by

Your noose of deaf zeal is
As tight as the stem of strange fruit
As damning as the rod spared
As stifling as the bleached white hood of night

Andrew Rosa, author (top row, second from left); John H. Bracey, Jr. (front row, fourth from left), Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, South Carolina Oct. 2, 2019.

The question of roles within a power couple cannot be asked in isolation. Who takes care of the kids? Is the woman only prominent as a byproduct of the man’s prominence? If the man’s role is critical to society, should the woman simply accept the position of support for the greater good? Is the woman’s calling just as important as her partners?

Back in 2014, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo suffocated Eric Garner in a chokehold one long and hot summer day in Long Island, New York, scores of professional athletes decided to express their frustrations. Some kneeled while others donned shirts bearing the words, “I cant breathe” as a way to silently but visibly protest the continual confluence of Black death, racism, poverty, and endemic police brutality in the US. Many Black sports fans welcomed this expression of solidarity while many White fans did the exact opposite.

On May 4, 2023, when I walked into Joyride Studio at Chicago Avenue and Sacramento, not far from where I live on the West Side, I really didn’t know what would happen. With three guys from my band, I was going to play music behind a rap song.

There is a deep and complex battle that hovers over Charlotte. In competition, being the first usually comes with celebration; however, in a racist society, being the first usually comes with sorrow, anger, rage, or plain sickness. I’m not necessarily saying Charlotte felt any of those emotions, though it’ll be hard to believe she didn’t.

I think, in an essence, this means going beyond the superficial tendencies we have during this time of year. I refer to Lil Son Jackson, who sings

Did the descendants of the Confederate States of American create Native American tribes and appropriate heritage to profit off of government contracts and pose as American Indians?

Let's hear from Tom Acklen creator of the Bayou La Combe Choctaw, Jena Band of Mississippi Choctaw, MOWA Choctaw, and various Oklahoma nations have sanctioned various perpetual nefarious acts against the people of the Florida Parishes, Mississippi, Alabama and throughout the United States

Michelle Slater loves history. That’s a good thing because her family’s story is woven into Pittsburgh’s Hill District’s history about as tightly as possible. Slater’s grandmother wrote numbers for some of the Steel City’s best known numbers bankers

In this episode, I speak with Deidra R Moore Janvier, Esq. about her new book, From Me to You: The Power of Storytelling and Its Inherent Generational Wealth.