William Still wasn’t just recording history. He was practicing a distinctly Black ethnographic methodology grounded in survival, storytelling, and freedom.

In the Black folk tradition, we say the ancestors are always speaking. You just have to listen. The African American Folklorist was born out of that deep listening. It is not simply a magazine, platform, or project—it is a response. A call and response, to be exact. We are answering the calls of those who came before, affirming their intellectual labor, carrying forward their cultural vision, and transforming their blueprints into living, breathing work.

The idea that major record labels will be devastated by the wave of artists reclaiming their copyrights is almost laughable, especially when considering what these labels currently own and control.

Harvard recently fired researchers for their Slavery Remembrance program without notice

Growing up, seeing black girls on television made me appreciate my skin color and inspired me to be an actress. But I never really paid close attention to the role of black girls on syndicated cable shows. Lately I've noticed that a lot of black roles in programs I watch are grounded in tokenism. Tokenism was established in the 1950s and was termed in the 1970s. In the late 60s and early 70s another form of token was established, “the token black”. According to Ruth Thibodeau in her piece From Racism to Tokenism:

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.

As enslaved Africans gained their freedom in colonial America, they used the labor activities learned in slavery to start a new life. Across the cities and towns of this nation, free Blacks set up agribusinesses and took up as bricklayers, gunsmiths, shoemakers, nurses and innkeepers to form the initial steps of the Black business community.

I am the grandson of a sharecropper on my father’s side. He had a simple philosophy about firearms: “better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” Racism, then as now, represented a mortal threat, be it physical violence of the lynch mob or the systematic violence exercised by the legal system. My maternal grandfather was raised by a single mother who was born into slavery and washed clothes for white folks for a living. Nevertheless, she made sure that her ten children learned to read

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.

In this episode of the African American Folklorist, I speak with Sherley Spears, NAACP Unit 6219 President, President of the National Historic Landmark Fort Concho, and founder of the Buffalo Soldier Project. The National Historic Landmark Fort Concho Museum preserves the structures and archeological site features for pride and educational purposes, serving the San Angelo, Texas community.

Gentrification reflects how communities change. The question always is how good or bad it is for the community. Pictures provide different stories related to Gentrification. They include building improvements, more people, more businesses and different races living together.

The Colored Musicians Club Museum is housed in the building. Named for a self-anointed 'colored' wing of the Musicians Local in 1917 by blacks whose participation had been rejected by Musicians Local 533, it was incorporated in 1935. The Colored Musicians Union morphed in the Colored Musicians Club, a place where black musicians gathered to practice and jam, to share information about gigs, musical trends, and lend each other communal support.

Honestly, the term guests would be an overstatement. We are treated as servants in their houses. Lord Jamar, whose feud with Eminem is well chronicled, stated that Eminem is a guest in the house of Hip Hop. He’s saying that all “White folk who participate in Hip Hop are guests in the “Culture”

Some think Anime and the average cartoon are the same things. However, there is a difference. Cartoons are produced for humor, featuring caricatures created for satire, where Anime focuses on life issues, human emotions, sex, and violence. The first cartoon was released to the public on August 17, 1908

Much has been said about the influence exerted upon white mainstream culture by blackface minstrelsy in the 19th century. The demise of the genre and the rise of the blues heralded Black folk’s construction of a popular space in which they sang of their real life experiences. Similar to blackface, the blues in mainstream White culture operates as the space in which racial difference is negotiated and utilized to control blackness and direct its energy according to an artist's own cultural aesthetic and worldview.

On May 25th, 1894, Anna Julia Cooper, an African American activist, educator, and writer, spoke at a Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University). Invited to speak at a Folklore Conference, Cooper delivered a speech in a large assembly hall, addressing an audience of teachers, trustees, Hampton graduates, and folklore society members. What did she discuss that Friday evening? African American folklore.

On June 20, 1859, the schooner A.C. Brewer left New Orleans wharf bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Onboard were 200 free people of color, mostly families, who planned to emigrate to Haiti permanently. They were answering a call from the Haitian government for African Americans to put their skills to work in the service of the first independent, Black nation in the western hemisphere. The young island-nation needed sailors for its ships, field workers for the abandoned sugar and coffee plantations left by French planters after the revolution, and other forms of nation-building.

Determining if slave breeding actually occurred or if it is merely a myth has been for the academy one of the most controversial topics in the study of American slavery. Sources such as slave narratives, oral histories, and abolitionist materials were assumed to be unreliable, and plantation financial records documenting the practice have yet to be located. While professionally trained historians are generally incredulous that slave breeding existed, black American collective memory continues to testify to its truth.