Censorship Is To Art As Lynching Is

I Got A Letter From This Lady Of Russian And Jewish Descent. She Asked Me If I Was A Racist Because I Didn't Do Any White People. I Was Shocked, Because My Mandate Is To Do Black Studies. It Would Have Never Occurred To Me If This Lady Hadn't Written This Letter. We Decided We Were Going Expand The Brand And Do Everybody.

I First Learned That There Were Black People Living In Some Place Called Other Than The United States In The Western Hemisphere When I Was A Very Little Boy, And My Father Told Me That When He Was A Boy About My Age, He Wanted To Be An Episcopal Priest, Because He So Admired His Priest, A Black Man From Someplace Called Haiti.

We Really Invented The Genre Of Tracing Family Trees And Going Back As Far As We Could On The Paper Trail. When The Paper Trail Disappeared, We Used Dna Analysis. The Technology Was Just Being Invented That Allowed You To Trace Ancestry Through Dna.

The First Slave Came To Florida In 1526. The First One We Know By Name, Esteban, Which Means Stephen, Came A Couple Of Years Later. So, We Start With The Stories Of Juan Garrido And Esteban To Show That African-american People Have Been Here A Century Longer Than Anyone Thought, And That The Diversity We See In The African-american Community Today Has Existed Since The Beginning.

There Are Just So Many Stories That Are Buried On Family Trees.