Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast

September 5th isn't on most calendars — but it should be.

On this date in Black history, two Black writers on two different continents picked up a pen and refused to disappear. In 1859, Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig in Boston — generally considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in the United States. Printed anonymously by George C. Rand & Avery and likely self-financed, her story of indentured servitude in free-state New Hampshire exposed that slavery's shadows fell even in the North. Then the book vanished for over 100 years until scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. rediscovered it in 1981 and republished it in 1983.

Exactly 101 years later, on September 5, 1960, poet and Negritude movement co-founder Léopold Sédar Senghor was elected as the first President of Senegal. From Paris classrooms to the presidency, Senghor used French — the colonizer's language — to affirm African dignity and build a nation.

This episode of Sankofa Chronicles connects Wilson's survival literature and Senghor's nation-building poetry to ask: What are you writing today that outlasts you?

We look back so we can move forward.

In this episode:
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig meaning, first Black woman novelist, Léopold Sédar Senghor, September 5 1960 Senegal independence, Negritude movement explained, Black literary history

On September 4, 1949, 20,000 people showed up to hear the most famous Black man in America sing - and a mob tried to kill them for it.

This is the story of Paul Robeson at Peekskill. His concert was burned down on August 27th, he vowed to return September 4th, and this time he was protected by a human line of Black veterans, Jewish families, and union workers. Including a folk singer your playlist knows - Pete Seeger.

Library of Congress verified. This wasn't just a riot - it was the blueprint for "shut up and sing."

In this headliner episode:

• Why Robeson was blacklisted before the Cold War
• Who Pete Seeger really was (and why Gen Z should know him)
• The AP photo of smiling men next to an overturned car
• What "Hold The Line" really means today

Fact-checked with Tier 1 sources: Library of Congress Today in History - September 4.

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Why does America celebrate July 4th but ignore September 3rd? Because July 4th is the advertisement, September 3rd is the contract — and Article 7 says they demanded their slaves back as a condition of freedom.

On this one date, September 3rd, four Black history stories collide:

1783 - The Treaty of Paris exposes America listing us as property to be returned.
1838 - Frederick Douglass steals himself in a sailor's disguise funded by his fiancée's feather bed.
1898 - Black settlers buy their own 40 acres to open Langston University in a church after being banned from white schools.
1895 - Charles Hamilton Houston is born — the Man Who Killed Jim Crow.

From a broken promise, to a stolen freedom, to a self-built school, to the legal blueprint for Brown v. Board.

This is Sankofa Chronicles. Go back and get what they didn't teach you.

He was 20. Honors student. Junior ROTC lieutenant. Varsity soccer player. Texas Roadhouse server. Future neuroscientist. Son.

Pierre Damas Bel came from Haiti to Columbus in 2024, moved to Springfield so he could play soccer, and graduated Springfield High School in 2026 with a 3.8 GPA and a full future at Wright State University studying neuroscience. Yes, he was 20 when he graduated, because he arrived as a teenager and had to learn English and earn his credits all over again.

On July 29, 2026, after Haitians were stripped of Temporary Protected Status, he was placed on a GPS ankle monitor while his asylum case was still pending. He told the world how it felt. Shame. Humiliation. On August 31, after being excluded from his JROTC uniform distribution and bullied in his first week of college, he called his father and said he was not feeling okay. He never made it home.

This is not an immigration headline. This is Black history, right now. From slave passes to ankle shackles to GPS monitors, Sankofa teaches us that the state has always found a way to mark Black bodies. Today we say his name and remember the kid, not the bracelet.

Content Note: This episode discusses suicide and self-harm.

If you or someone you love is carrying that kind of shame, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Free, confidential, 24 hours.

Say his name. Pierre Damas Bel.

On September 1, 1975, Daniel "Chappie" James Jr. was promoted to four-star general in the U.S. Air Force — the first Black American to reach that rank in any branch of the military. From the segregated South to commanding NORAD, this episode traces how a sharecropper's son who learned to fly at Tuskegee rose to the highest rank the military had to offer.Sources: U.S. Department of Defense; Official U.S. Air Force Biography (AF.mil); National Museum of the United States Air Force; Air Force Magazine; Britannica; National Museum of the United States Army; Stanford University King Institute.

This Day in History: On August 31, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer and seventeen neighbors boarded a bus in Ruleville, Mississippi, and rode to the Sunflower County Courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. What happened next — eviction, economic retaliation, and a hail of gunfire — did not stop her. It started her. This episode traces the moment a sharecropper became a movement leader, and why that courthouse trip changed the course of American democracy.

Sources: PBS American Experience; Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Mississippi History Now); Fannie Lou Hamer, sworn testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, August 22, 1964 (via American RadioWorks); National Women's History Museum; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

They taught you the Underground Railroad only ran NORTH. That map was a lie by omission.

In the premiere of our 28-episode series, we correct a 125-year-old erasure. Freedom didn't just run north to Canada - it ran SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, and ACROSS OPEN WATER.

In this episode, Mr. Black History breaks down the 4 freedom corridors that make up The Southern Underground Railroad and why you never learned them in school.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:

• Why the "North = Good / South = Bad" narrative is a simplified myth that lets America off the hook
• The story of Fort Mose (1738) - the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the U.S., 125 years before Emancipation
• Who Francisco Menéndez was - the Mandinka man who survived the Middle Passage and commanded the Black militia of Fort Mose
• How the Texas-Mexico corridor became a freedom line after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 - 34 years before the U.S.
• The Gulf maritime road and the hidden internal maroon nations inside the Great Dismal Swamp, Florida, and Louisiana
• Why this history is navigation for 2026 - from TPS to borders to Black self-governance

This is not the Reverse Underground Railroad. This is freedom sought, claimed, and built by our ancestors.

This series is Sankofa - reaching back to retrieve what was lost so we can carry it forward.

New episodes of The Southern Underground Railroad drop EVERY MONDAY for 31 weeks. Sankofa Chronicles continues Wednesdays & Fridays.

Subscribe, rate, and share this with one person who still thinks the arrows only pointed north. Independent Black history media survives by word of mouth. You are the infrastructure.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING FOR THIS EPISODE:

1. Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press, 1999. [Core source on Fort Mose and the 1693 Spanish Royal Decree]

2. Fort Mose Historical Society & Florida State Parks - Fort Mose Site (St. Augustine, FL), established 1738.

3. Spanish Royal Decree of 1693 (Recopilación) - Offering asylum/freedom to fugitives from British slavery who converted to Catholicism.

4. Mexico Abolition Decree - President Vicente Guerrero, September 15, 1829. Abolished slavery 34 years before the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation (1863).

5. Estimates on Texas-Mexico crossings (3,000-10,000 pre-Civil War) - documented in Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Basic Books, 2020.

6. Great Dismal Swamp maroon research - Sayers, Daniel O. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People. University Press of Florida, 2014.

Keep looking back so we can move forward.

Next Episode: Episode 2 - Fort Mose: The First Free Place

About this trailer: The map you learned in school was a lie by omission.

Welcome to The Southern Underground Railroad - a 28-episode, 31-week series from Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast, hosted by Mr. Black History.

For over 125 years, free Black people built settlements, militias, and sovereign nations that ran SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, and ACROSS WATER - not just north.

If you only know Harriet Tubman and Canada, this series is for you.

In this series we walk Fort Mose, the Rio Grande, the Gulf maritime road, and the Great Dismal Swamp.

Hit FOLLOW and turn on notifications. Episode 1: The Map Was A Lie - is out now.

🎧 New episodes every Monday.

In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave racial segregation the full weight of American law. In this episode, we go deep on Plessy v. Ferguson - the case, the man, and the machinery it put in motion. Homer Plessy was a light-skinned Black man who deliberately boarded a whites-only train car to challenge Louisiana's Separate Car Act. The Court ruled 7-1 against him, and "separate but equal" became the law of the land for the next 58 years.

We break down what the justices actually argued, what Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent revealed about the conscience of that era, and how this single ruling became the legal foundation for every Jim Crow law that followed. This history lives in our schools, our neighborhoods, and our institutions to this day.

Know the blueprint. Know the fight. Know your history.

The Underground Railroad ran south to Mexico. Black Seminoles, Mascogos & Mexico's Black president who abolished slavery. In 1829, Afro-Mexican President Vicente Guerrero freed every slave in Mexico while Texas was still Mexican territory.

When Texas seceded in 1836 to protect slavery, 3,000 to 10,000 Black freedom seekers walked 150 miles through the Nueces Strip to freedom in Coahuila. Mexico refused every US Fugitive Slave extradition demand in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857.

Mexico gave them land. Black Seminoles led by Wild Cat and John Horse (Captain Juan Caballo) founded El Nacimiento. Granted 26 square miles along the Rio Sabinas, they became Mexico's border army, fighting Texas Rangers and slave catchers who crossed to kidnap people like Mathilde Hennes in Reynosa.

In 1857, Mexico wrote it into its Constitution, Article 2: slaves recover freedom by touching Mexican soil.

Today, 300 Mascogo descendants still live in El Nacimiento, celebrating Juneteenth as Día de los Negros with capuyuye spirituals, tetapún and soske.

If you thought the Rio Grande was a wall, this is the history Texas erased.