Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast

What did we build in the fifteen years we were actually free? In this episode, Mr. Black History traces the mutual aid nation — the Black economic world built on trust when banks wouldn't serve us, insurers robbed us, and the government looked away.

From the West African susu — neighbors pooling money on nothing but reputation — to the Freedman's Savings Bank and its three million dollars in vanished Black savings. From Mound Bayou, the all-Black Mississippi town, to Maggie Lena Walker's St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, to the Black Wall Street they burned in Tulsa in 1921 and the Freedom Farm cooperative Fannie Lou Hamer planted anyway.

Featuring the words of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Booker T. Washington, Maggie Lena Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and A. Philip Randolph — grounded in scholarship from Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Mehrsa Baradaran, Shennette Garrett-Scott, and Scott Ellsworth.

The circle, the bank, the town, the farm. Built by us, for us, when nobody else would build it. Follow Sankofa Chronicles and send this one to a neighbor who needs to hear it.

This story is about Sam Cooke and how Black talent is constantly exploited. The Intellectual Property of Black artists is the most hunted Black business. This is the story of a door left open and how generational wealth is sucked out of our community.

Resistance ran a whole spectrum — from a newspaper on a cabin wall to a republic in the Caribbean. In this episode of Sankofa Chronicles, Mr. Black History walks that spectrum: the everyday resistance historian Stephanie Camp uncovered in the plantation South, the 1755 poisoning case of Mark and Phillis, the maroon towns that won freedom with a clause, Queen Nzinga of Angola — who fought Portugal for thirty years — and the Haitian Revolution, the one revolt that won outright... then paid France for its own freedom until 1947.

Drawing on Stephanie Camp, John Blassingame, Sylviane Diouf, Linda Heywood, Carolyn Fick, C.L.R. James, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot — with the honest middle intact: Nzinga owned slaves, the maroon treaties sent runaways back, and the fight was never simple.

Next: The Mutual Aid Nation.

Keep reaching back. Keep learning forward.

Inside the Seminole Nation stood Black towns — free, armed, and organized. In this episode of Sankofa Chronicles: The Southern Underground Railroad, Mr. Black History traces the Black Seminole alliance: the maroon town of Angola on the Manatee River, Pilaklikaha — Abraham's Old Town — and the tribute system historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter called "vassals, not slaves."

Meet Abraham, interpreter and lieutenant to head chief Micanopy, and John Horse — Juan Caballo — who co-led his people across the Rio Grande into Mexico in July 1850. Drawing on Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., Kevin Mulroy, Jane Landers, and Virginia Bergman Peters, this episode tells the alliance straight: it was not equality, the old respect hardened over time, and the fight over Black Seminole membership continues to this day.

Next: The Seminole Wars Were Freedom Wars.

Sankofa means go back and get it. Keep reaching back — and keep moving forward.

Enslaved men and women risked whippings and death to pray in secret. In the swamps and thickets of the antebellum South, they built hidden worship spaces called hush harbors - and there they created something entirely their own.

This episode of Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast goes deep into the world of the hush harbor, drawing on the work of historian Albert Raboteau and firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved people like Peter Randolph and Wash Wilson. Discover the coded songs, the lookouts, and the upside-down pot that muffled the sound of secret prayer meetings.

Trace the Exodus story from an enslaved Virginian's 1723 letter to the Archbishop of London, through Phillis Wheatley's writings, to the spirituals "Go Down Moses" and "Steal Away to Jesus" - and understand why Harriet Tubman earned the name Moses.

Finally, step into the story of Nat Turner, the visionary preacher whose 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia shook the South and led lawmakers to outlaw Black preaching and Black gatherings altogether.

This episode covers slave religion, African American spirituality, the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, the Nat Turner rebellion, and the hidden history of Black resistance in America. Perfect for listeners interested in Black history podcasts, African American history, and the untold stories behind American slavery and faith.

New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe to Sankofa Chronicles and go back to get the story they didn't teach us.

What do you do when they take your drum? You become the drum yourself.

In 1739, twenty Kongolese men marched out of Charleston shouting one word: Liberty. They marched with two drums beating. A year later, South Carolina made that drum illegal - 10 pound fine if your master let you near one.

That law didn't kill the rhythm. It moved it into our bodies.

In this Creation episode of Sankofa Chronicles, Mr. Black History traces the beat from West Africa to America - from the Yoruba talking drum to Congo Square in New Orleans, from pattin' juba and the ring shout to Master Juba inventing tap dance, from hambone in the yard to stepping on the yard, from double-dutch on the playground to Doug E. Fresh becoming the Human Beatbox.

Same rhythm. 400 years. Refusing to die.

In this episode:
The real story of the Stono Rebellion & the 1740 Negro Act, why Congo Square was the only place drums never hid, and how the ban gave birth to American music.

Sankofa means go back and get it. Let's go get it.

Next week: The Hush Harbor - how our people prayed when prayer was a crime.

Why does everybody in the Black community have a play cousin? In this episode of Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast, Mr. Black History traces the blueprint of Black kinship from West African family systems (Yoruba, Akan, Igbo) through slavery to the chosen families we built in America. Discover how othermothers, church family, and fictive kin became survival technology when the system tried to break the Black family apart, and why the Moynihan Report got the story completely backwards. "Imagine surviving the storm and then being blamed for the umbrella." Featuring the scholarship of Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame, Carol Stack, and Patricia Hill Collins. This one's Kinship. Pull up a chair.

Follow Sankofa Chronicles for a new episode every week as we go back and get the stories they didn't teach us.

Enslaved Africans weren't brought to America just for labor — they were imported because of their knowledge. In this episode of Sankofa Chronicles, Mr. Black History traces how West African rice science, tidal-farming engineering, and iron metallurgy built South Carolina into the richest colony in British North America. Featuring the scholarship of Judith Carney (Black Rice) and Edda Fields-Black, the 1859 "Rice Field Negroes" broadside, Charles Ball's 1836 narrative, and the blacksmith lineage of Philip Simmons. Part of the Survival pillar of Season 1. Follow the show and share it with one person who needs to hear it.

The enslaved Black women who mapped the Underground Railroad to Mexico — the intelligence network history forgot.

They never ran. But without them, nobody made it. In Episode 4 of our Southern Underground Railroad series, we uncover the Black women who built and ran a secret intelligence network across Texas and the Rio Grande, guiding thousands of freedom seekers south to freedom in Mexico.

You'll learn how Mexico's abolition of slavery — from the 1824 constitution to President Vicente Guerrero's 1829 decree — turned the Rio Grande into a freedom border, and why Texas's 1836 constitution tried to reverse it. Through WPA slave narratives from the Library of Congress, we hear Felix Haywood's famous words — "free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande" — and the story of Rhodie, who beat tracking dogs with black pepper in her socks. We recover Silvia Hector Webber, a formerly enslaved woman who operated a licensed ferry across the Rio Grande, and the 1687 St. Augustine escape — the earliest documented women in the southward journey.

This isn't just a Harriet Tubman story. It's the hidden architecture of Black liberation: kitchens, whispers, and maps memorized but never written down.

Follow Sankofa Chronicles for weekly Black history episodes, and share this with one person who needs to hear it.

Did Black people have God before we had the Bible? Yes. And we can prove it.

In this premiere episode of Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast, host Mr. Black History reveals the African spirituality they erased from your textbooks. This is not an attack on Christianity. This is the story of how deeply spiritual African people recognized Jesus because we already knew God.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:
✓ What is Ifa? The 256 sacred texts of Yoruba spirituality older than America
✓ What is the Kongo Cosmogram (Dikenga)? The X with a circle found scratched into slave-made pottery in South Carolina and what it means about life and death
✓ What were hush harbors? The secret forest churches where enslaved Africans turned wash pots upside down to catch prayers
✓ How did the Ring Shout survive the 1740 Negro Act drum ban after the Stono Rebellion of 1739?
✓ Why is the Black church the first Black-owned national institution in America? AME Church 1816, Wilberforce University 1856
✓ Black people IN the Bible: Ethiopian eunuch Acts 8:26-39, Simeon called Niger Acts 13:1, Egypt & Libya at Pentecost Acts 2:9-11, Moses' Ethiopian wife Numbers 12:1, Jesus hidden in Africa Matthew 2:13-15, Psalm 68:31 Ethiopia stretches hands to God

We break down libation, ancestral veneration, Hebrews 12:1 cloud of witnesses, and why our shout, call-and-response, and dancing before the Lord like David in 2 Samuel 6:14 is African retention, not European.

Perfect for lovers of Black history, African American church history, African spirituality, Hoodoo, Ifa, Yoruba tradition, Kongo culture, Black liberation theology, and hidden Black history.

This episode blends Pre-Slavery, Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Modern eras to answer: What spiritual system did we have before the white Jesus? How did we keep it alive when drums were illegal? And why was the Black church the first place we could organize without white permission?

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED: Acts 8:26-39, Acts 13:1, Acts 2:9-11, Numbers 12:1, Matthew 2:13-15, Psalm 68:31, Hebrews 12:1, Matthew 22:32, Genesis 35:14, Exodus 20:12, Exodus 3:7, Psalm 149:3, Psalm 150:4, 2 Samuel 6:14, Acts 17:26, Matthew 18:20

BLACK SCHOLARS & SOURCES: Albert J. Raboteau - Slave Religion & the Invisible Institution, Sterling Stuckey - Slave Culture & Ring Shout, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham - Righteous Discontent, Cain Hope Felder - Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation, Michael Gomez - Exchanging Our Country Marks, Leland Ferguson - Colonoware Archaeology, Robert Farris Thompson - Flash of the Spirit

NEXT WEEK: Episode 5 Tease - The Slave Bible of 1807. They cut 957 chapters out of the Bible to make us slaves. We went to the woods to find the real Book. The Hush Harbor story.

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