“The Archive Is Alive: We Are What They Imagined

Written By: Lamont Jack Pearley

How Foundational Black Thinkers Confirm and Call for the Work of The African American Folklorist

The African American Folklorist platform is a contemporary manifestation of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual legacy left by Black scholars, activists, cultural workers, and theorists. Many of these individuals called for or modeled the very practices now embedded in the African American Folklorist’s mission—oral history collection, community-based publishing, cultural repatriation, and the interpretation of Black life through the lens of folklore, Blues, and lived experience.

The Archive Is Alive: We Are What They Imagined — Confirmed by the Ancestors, The African American Folklorist as Continuum

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. This essay traces how foundational Black thinkers, scholars, and cultural workers have not only confirmed our mission but, in many ways, demanded it. This is a chorus of lineage, and we are its next verse.

W.E.B. Du Bois laid the foundation with his insistence on documenting Black life through a lens that recognized its soul, its sorrow songs, and its sociological richness. In The Souls of Black Folk, and even more so in his Georgia fieldwork, Du Bois called for what we now recognize as folklore work rooted in lived Black experience. His vision of cultural science from within is a direct ancestor to the Blues Narrative we carry forward today.

Arturo Schomburg

Arturo Schomburg reminded us that the Black archive is not optional—it is essential. By insisting on the collection and preservation of Black cultural materials, Schomburg emphasized that self-representation is historical reclamation. The African American Folklorist, in all its formats—print, digital, audio, and live broadcast—embodies that ethos. We are not collecting for curiosity; we are archiving for sovereignty.

Carter G. Woodson democratized the discipline. By founding Negro History Week and writing for everyday people, he validated community-led knowledge production. Our platform exists in that same spirit, guided by the belief that tradition bearers, community scholars, and culture keepers are theorists in their own right. Like Woodson, we reject the ivory tower as the sole house of knowledge.

Anna Julia Cooper ensured that Black women’s voices were never footnotes. She spoke from the intersection before it was named as such, claiming space for Black women as central agents in cultural theory and preservation. Our "Women's Folklife" series and the Black Blues Women project echo her call.

John Wesley Work III quietly modeled what we now do loudly—he collected, documented, and dignified Black music as a folklorist. His fieldwork on spirituals and Blues set the stage for the Blues Ecology framework we now build upon: music as memory, landscape, and liberation.

LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, did not merely describe Black music; he politicized it. Blues People is a map of our musical epistemology. Through Baraka, we understand that every moan, shout, and lyric is a historical document. Our podcast episodes, narrative essays, and musical analyses stand on his shoulders.

James Cone gave us the theology. He revealed that the spirituals and the Blues are not oppositional but deeply entwined expressions of Black theology. When we speak of Slave Seculars as sacred testimony, we are echoing Cone’s liberation theology with a folklorist's ear.

John Henrik Clarke demanded that Black people write, teach, and theorize their own history. He modeled intellectual sovereignty, which is the bedrock of our editorial and fieldwork ethos. Our contributors are not just writers—they are cultural witnesses.

Michael Gomez

Michael Gomez traced the continuity from Africa to the American South, from country marks to communal memory. His diasporic methodology informs our cultural documentation of Blues people, African survivals, and folk traditions that span generations.

bell hooks, in Black Looks and beyond, urged us to view Black cultural production as resistance and as love. She reminded us that theory lives in the everyday. Our magazine and platform bring theory to the porch, the juke joint, the sanctuary, and the street.

The Negro Women’s Club Movement were grassroots folklorists before the term became academic. They held pageants, collected oral histories, and preserved foodways. We follow in their tradition by uplifting vernacular knowledge and celebrating communal care as cultural labor.

Charlotte Forten Grimké documented the everyday life of Black folk during Reconstruction—a proto-ethnographer who reminds us that journaling, witnessing, and testifying are tools of survival and scholarship. Our fieldnotes echo her pen.

Alexander Crummell believed in Black moral uplift and nationalism. His call for sovereignty undergirds our push for Black cultural self-determination through folklore.

Chancellor Williams, in The Destruction of Black Civilization, offered historical repair through people’s history. That same repair is what we aim to enact in our heritage and repatriation work.

Nathaniel Norment Jr.

Nathaniel Norment Jr. advocated for Black rhetorical traditions as identity formation. We continue this by affirming storytelling, performance, and vernacular speech as theoretical frameworks.

Anthony Benezet, though not Black, represents early allyship in educational justice. His presence reminds us that solidarity is a practice, not a slogan.

James Forten and his family legacy supported abolition and Black education through print culture. We are his digital descendants, publishing for liberation.

Written By: Kimberly R. Norton

Kimberly R. Norton represents our scholarly present and future. Her work in Black cultural heritage and folklore bridges the academic and the communal, much like our mission.

We are the living archive. We are the embodied return. The African American Folklorist is not just a publication; it is confirmation. Confirmation that the ancestors dreamed us. That they theorized this work. That they laid the foundation so we could build. And now, build we must.