Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs asserts that, fantasy can be a form of social protest, but fantasy can also be a form of mental conquest. The imagination of the black mind has produced some the most advanced conceptualizations of justice, freedom, citizenship, and peace. The sovereignty of the black imagination has also been constantly under assault. It is the duty of those who create to educate their audience into the habits of thinking. According to David Scott in his interview with George Lamming, the sovereignty of the imagination has neither to do with the sequestering of creativity from, nor its absorption by, the world of affairs—this would be merely bad faith. Rather an authentic sovereignty of the imagination has to do with the active will to refuse submission to the customs that seek at every turn to inspire our self-contempt and our unthinking docility, and to command our understanding of, and our hopes for, what it might mean to live as a free community of valid persons”. The use of and control of popular cultural platforms are a documented method of social control and political consolidation. Today, Drs. Todd Steven Burroughs, Jared Ball, and Mark Bolden explore the continuities in popular culture, futurism in black literature, and the sociopolitical implications on the histories and futures of black think. Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs is an independent researcher and writer based in New-ark, New Jersey. He has taught at Howard and Morgan State University. A professional journalist since 1985, he has written for The Source, Colorlines, Black Issues Book Review and The Crisis magazines, web-based blackamerica.com and The Root.com, and newspapers such as The New York Amsterdam News, The Afro-American (New Jersey edition) and The Star-ledger. He is author of Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography From Stan Lee to Ta-Nahisi Coates, as well as co-author of Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today with Herb Boyd, and A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells. He also curates a popular culture blog: drumsintheglobalvillage.com Dr. Jared Ball is a father and husband. After that, he is a Research Professor of Communication Studies in the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and is the curator of imixwhatilike.org, an online hub of multimedia dedicated to the philosophies of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting. He is author of I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto and co-author of, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His work has been published in The Black Scholar, Radical Teacher, International Journal of Communication, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Journal of Black Studies, The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, Journal of Pan African Studies. He is the creator and curator of the multimedia platform: www.imixwhatilike.org I mix what I like is Dr. Ball’s homage to the great activist-theorist Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like. Dr. Mark Bolden is an African sovereignty psychologist in private practice. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! For more: Visit imixwhatilike.org