When Syracuse offered Sidat-Singh a basketball scholarship in 1935, the sport was as popular as lacrosse. The NCAA didn’t even have a national tournament, so Sidat-Singh’s Indian heritage didn’t make headlines. But when a coach saw him shredding students during an intramural football game, Syracuse begged him to play quarterback.

That was a problem.

Although the Orangemen and Cornell were two of the first colleges to recruit Black football players, football was a revenue-generating sport. So whenever the team played segregated schools from the South, the schools agreed to keep their “negro athletes” on the sideline.

But Syracuse’s football team was terrible. They had only won one game the previous year. The coaches wanted Sidat-Singh so badly that they found a solution. They noted that segregation laws only applied to Black players. And since Sidat-Singh was Indian, he became the “Hindu Halfback,” the first Indian college football star in America.

It worked. In 1937, Syracuse faced Cornell in a battle of two undefeated teams— Syracuse was nationally ranked for the first time in school history. Syracuse trailed until they put Sidat-Singh in the game.

“A new forward-passing hero stepped in front of the great white spotlight of fame at Syracuse today,” wrote Grantland Rice. “This phenomenon of the rifle shot even went on beyond Sid Luckman and Sammy Baugh. His name is Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, a Negro boy from Harlem wearing an East Indian name and with the deadly aim of Davy Crockett and Kit Carson.” Yes, Rice, maybe the greatest sportswriter who ever lived, had almost buried the lede that he had just learned from Sam Lacy, a legendary Black sportswriter:

Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was Black.

His mother was Black. His father was Black. But after his mother remarried when he was young, Sidat-Singh took his stepfather’s name. He wasn’t passing—but he wasn’t going out of his way to correct anyone, either. But Lacy and the Black students at Syracuse knew Sidat-Singh's secret. How?

Sidat-Singh had just pledged Que

Syracuse's next game was at Maryland. Howard University, where Omega Psi Phi was founded, had an away game that week. Every Black person who’s ever eaten Que Dog Chicken knew what was about to happen. But when Lacy noted that Maryland's stands might be filled with purple and gold at the next game, Grantland spilled the beans. And when Maryland found out that Wilmeth was not “Hindu,” Sidat-Singh was benched.

Cuse lost. But the following year, Sidat-Singh and his teammates drew a line: no more sitting. Maryland had a choice—forfeit or play against Black men. They folded. And you can guess what happened when Sidat-Singh hit the field.

Two weeks later, Sidat-Singh’s team traveled to North Carolina to play against Duke. If Syracuse won the game, they had a shot at the biggest college football game in America: the Rose Bowl. But without Sidat-Singh, they realistically had no shot. And since Duke was private, the contracts with their opponents stipulated that Black players could not participate.

“A Rose Bowl bid may hinge on the color line!” wrote the Chicago Defender. “Syracuse may come to the Duke game undefeated. But Sidat-Singh won’t be in the lineup. The Southerners have drawn the color line!”

Thankfully, Duke’s coach found a workable solution.

As soon as Duke’s coach heard that Sidat-Singh was Black, he sent the Syracuse coach a telegram (it’s like a text message except…well, actually, it’s just a text message). He notified the Orangemen that Duke’s “no negro” clause had been written before his tenure and that he would not be enforcing it.

It turns out, you can just not be racist.

When Sidat-Singh graduated, he was a natural selection for the emerging National Football League. Unfortunately, NFL owners had just quietly entered a “gentlemen’s agreement” to ban Black players. Pro basketball wasn’t much better. Because of his stance, Singh was effectively blacklisted. He joined the D.C. police and played semi-pro ball on the side.

Then Hitler happened.

The U.S. government needed pilots. They didn’t have enough. Mary McLeod Bethune told FDR she knew where to find some, if the country could manage to stop being racist for five minutes. FDR hid the funding in the budget. They went looking for sharp, fearless recruits with good hand-eye coordination and college degrees. And, of course, Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was one of the first names on the list.

He was in the first class of Tuskegee Airmen. He died when his engine failed on a training mission. He was 25 years old.

The government that had spent years telling him he wasn’t good enough to play professional football had no problem sending him to die fighting fascism.

The Kid Who Ran Alone

In 1945, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell asked 18-year-old Wesley A. Brown to give up a track scholarship at Howard University and try to desegregate the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland. The previous attempts had all ended with Black students dropping out under sustained harassment from classmates and faculty.

When Brown refused to give up his college athletics career, the white members of the cross-country team voted to boycott any race he ran…

Except one.

One senior midshipman refused to participate in the racist plan. He’d grown up around Black people but had never seen integration in practice. But because he had seniority, he also had the authority to make his white underclassmen run. Then he made them race against Black athletes from other schools. And the other sports teams at Navy started watching.

That senior midshipman’s name was Jimmy Carter.

On Feb. 8, 1968, police lined up on the campus of S.C. State University and shot at least 28 students during a campus protest. Two of the three killed—Delano Middleton and Samuel Hammond—at the most violent event of the entire Civil Rights Movement were student athletes.

Black high school and college athletes were at the forefront of every Civil Rights Movement. The members of the Little Rock Nine had to give up sports to desegregate their school districts. Emmett Till dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. As a junior college athlete, Jackie Robinson was arrested for confronting a racist police officer.

So why do we think they’re “too young” to lead movements?

Black members of UTEP’s track team were not too young to boycott a meet against Brigham Young University over the Mormon church’s anti-Black doctrine. Black student athletes across the country joined the boycott. By 1970, five schools had cut BYU from their schedules. In 1978, the church’s leader suddenly had a “revelation” that Black people were worthy of God’s grace.

Jesse Jackson was not too young to play QB at N.C. A&T while leading civil rights protests and serving as the student body president. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was only 20 years old when he boycotted the Olympics “to point out to the world the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression.”

The next time someone tells an athlete to shut up and dribble, remember Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, who died flying a plane for a country that wouldn’t let him play football or basketball professionally. Remember Wesley Brown running cross-country alone. Remember the Orangeburg Massacre.

They were never too young. They were always right on time.

But here’s the thing:

You can say you’re scared. You can say you care more about money than the well-being of your community. You can just say, “I ain’t built like that.” Most of us aren’t.

But if you object to this strategy because it’s too burdensome...

No one was talking to you in the first place!

Today’s Reading List:

• “No Black Jurors. Thirty-Five Years” by Damario Solomon-Simmons

• “Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules” by Michael Harriot

• “Hit Them Where It Hurts” by Jemele Hill

• “Republican Redistricting Maps Are Motivated By Race, Not Politics” by Michael Harriot

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Join us every Friday for The Wake-Up Call Live.

This story was originally published on June 8, 2018.

Warning: This story is not about America’s criminal-justice system.

In this story, America’s criminal-justice system is a parable. In this story, “criminal” is synonymous with “not white.” In this story, “justice” is a mythical concept. In this story, Terra Morehead is synonymous with “injustice.” In th…

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Editor’s Note: When we talk about slavery, we tend to talk about stolen labor. But that is only the beginning of what was taken. This series, We Got Receipts, will lay out the fuller truth. Part one starts where the system began: with our bodies. In future stories, we will explore the impact of stolen land and the theft and monetization…

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And all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes!”

— Hans Christian Andersen

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the narcissistic leader of a crumbling empire is conned into buying a custom-made homecoming outfit from a pair of scammers. Intimidated by the egomaniacal authoritarian’s wrath, the entire kingdom pretends that the emperor didn’t show up to the parade in the capital city wearing his birthday suit…

Until a child asks why the emperor is “nekkid” (According to the Blactionary, “nekkid” is a state of undress only exceeded by “buck-booty-bone nekkid”).

For many, Hans Christian Andersen’s story is a parable about “self-deception, conformity, and obedience to authority.” Literary experts claim the classic 1837 folktale illustrates “the importance of authenticity and the courage to speak the truth, regardless of societal expectations.” While some literary revisionists suggest that the emperor and his ministers “fail to recognize the truth that the clothes do not actually exist,” there is one problem with these interpretations.

They are wrong.

Anyone who actually read the story (not the retellings of other people’s retellings) knows there was no “self-deception.” No one deceived themselves into seeing the emperor’s new clothes. The ministers weren’t bamboozled into seeing garments that weren’t there. The parade-goers weren’t afraid of the emperor. On the contrary, they liked him.

In Andersen’s original story (and in the translations), the swindlers finessed the townspeople. By the time the king placed an order with the charlatans, they had already spread the rumor that the designer clothes were “invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.” In fact, the emperor never even met the team of personal stylists. Instead, he sent his messengers and ambassadors to check on his outfit.

The people weren’t afraid of the king. Even though he didn’t care about his soldiers or the theater, according to the story, everyone lived “merrily” under his rule. His ministers didn’t question the counterfeit clothiers because they didn’t want the brilliant king to think they were stupid. The emperor pretended he could see the outfit because everyone else said they could. However, there is a reason the brilliant finesse worked so well.

“In short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes,” Andersen explained. “Because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office.”

No one was shocked that the emperor had no clothes.

They were shocked that their leader was as dumb and incompetent as they were.

“The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right,” Andersen concluded. “But he thought, ‘the procession must go on now!’

“And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.”

This story is about America.

Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed…when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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On Tuesday, AUWA Books released a special edition of Greg Tate’s “FLYBOY IN THE BUTTERMILK: Essays on Contemporary America.”

Perhaps no contemporary writer has shaped me as a writer more than Gregory Stephen Tate, and the following essay seems as prescient as ever.

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In my second year of law school, I worked as a student attorney for the defense on a high-profile celebrity criminal case that never went to trial. While I thought the charges were unjust and was happy with the outcome of that case, I knew then that I would never practice law. I saw up close what it takes to win, how money and fame breed results that a poor Black person would never see, and I did not want to be a part of legitimizing the “criminal justice” system. Years later, I committed myself to abolishing that system.

Docuseries like Netflix’s Michael Jackson: The Verdict prove the abolitionist creed: There is no justice in the justice system.

Fresh on the heels of the empty, propaganda-filled biopic Michael, which stars Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the titular role, whitewashed of any allegations, Michael Jackson: The Verdict offers a fuller story of the man and his machinations to skirt accountability.

Ironically, The Verdict docuseries begins the way the original version of Michael was set to begin: with a police raid on Neverland Ranch in the wake of child molestation allegations against Jackson. Michael director Antoine Fuqua shot and was in post-production on this version, which was meant to cover (and ultimately try to discredit) the 1993 allegations made by 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. But Jackson’s $23 million settlement with the Chandler family in 1994 to avoid a criminal and civil trial included a clause that would prevent Jackson and his estate from dramatizing Chandler and his family, leading to that version of the film being scrapped and reshot to omit any allegations altogether.

The Verdict, however, was not made by the estate. It begins with police footage of the second raid on Neverland in 2003 and focuses instead on another 13-year-old boy’s allegations of child molestation against Jackson—the one who actually made it through to trial because Jackson didn’t settle the case to avoid it—Gavin Arvizo.

Recounting the events of the pop superstar’s 2005 criminal trial, Michael Jackson: The Verdict is a three-episode series that details how the legal system and American pop culture failed yet another child victim.

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James Harriot Jr. was unquestionably the greatest male influence in my life. He talked in adages, told stories like a griot, and he “knew things.” And, when I was only 10 years old, he introduced me to “The Elements.”

Twenty years ago, Uncle Junior stopped by my house on his way home when a snowstorm came out of nowhere. Trapped for the evening, we sat up all night talking and watching his favorite movie, The Godfather II. As usual, he predicted my future, telling me that I had already met the woman I was supposed to marry. “Sure, Uncle Junior,” I replied. “And you’re gonna live forever.”

He did not laugh.

After promising that I wouldn’t tell any other members of the family, Uncle Junior revealed that he’d recently been diagnosed with a liver disease. I don’t know why he swore me to secrecy because it’s not like anyone in the family would be concerned. Because if you asked my sisters, cousins or anyone tangentially related to the Harriot clan to tell you about Uncle Junior, they would all volunteer the same fact.

Uncle Junior couldn’t die.

Uncle Junior’s immortality was not a matter of faith. I can’t explain why we believed it or how it became an accepted truth. He wasn’t ranked in the Harriot family’s top 10 Holy Ghost practitioners, so it had nothing to do with religion or faith. Surviving Vietnam or coming out unscathed from the point-blank shotgun blast that tore my Uncle Rob’s arm to shreds had nothing to do with it. It was just a fact. So when Uncle Junior told me that he was sick, I just asked him if he wanted to listen to some Earth, Wind & Fire.

In less than a month, Uncle Junior had died.

On Feb. 6, 2016, I wrote my first obituary.

Although the article was intended to celebrate the passing of Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White, it was really about Uncle Junior. “I could write a Psalm about him that could rival anything David ever produced with his harp,” I wrote. “I am a better writer, and in my then-grade-school-age universe, Uncle Junior was God.”

That tribute to my favorite uncle and my favorite band eventually became “Earth, Wind and America,” the first chapter of my book, Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America. A few days after it was released, I received a call:

“You wanna help make a movie about your favorite band?” said the familiar voice on the other end. It was Questlove. He had just read that chapter of the book and wanted to know if I would participate in his next documentary.

On Wednesday, a few minutes before Robert De Niro introduced Questlove’s new documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World) at Tribeca Film Festival, I received a text from my Aunt Rosalind with a picture of her late husband…

James Harriot Jr.

When I first saw the picture, I thought it was a photo of James’ son, my cousin Jeremy. Until I received that text, I hadn’t noticed that they were the spitting image of each other. Then again, every now and then, Jeremy will text me a picture of his son, who is also the spitting image of Uncle Junior. But Jeremy’s son even bears his name:

Ever James Harriot.

But this is not what made me realize that Uncle Junior was right all along.

In my quest to become a scholar on Earth, Wind & Fire, I remembered a passage from Maurice White’s biography:

On one of my walks back from getting water, with the work group at least a half mile off in the distance, I heard a clear, strong voice saying, “Stop.” I believed this was the voice of God.

“Why do we have to die?” I asked.

“You will live forever; you are immortal.”

Shortly after the film premiered, Earth, Wind & Fire gave a special performance backed by The Roots. I was ecstatic because…well…here’s the thing:

Earth, Wind & Fire is not actually my favorite band.

Technically, my favorite band is The Roots.

Maurice White died. Uncle Junior died. Everything that has ever lived will also die...including America. But the fire they sparked still burns.

We are the fire.

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I was looking forward to Peckerwoodstock.

Billed as “The Great American State Fair,” the Freedom 250 concert was organized by a bipartisan group of Trump supporters to “bring together all 56 U.S. states and territories in a World Fair-style celebration of America's 250th birthday, featuring live entertainment, immersive exhibits, patriotic tributes, innovation showcases, cultural programming, and family-friendly attractions stretching from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument.”

The list of performers featured the worst parts of music’s mediocre-est acts, including:

• Either Milli or Vanilli

• Poison-less singer Brett Michael

• The Commodores not featuring Lionel RIchie

• The senior citizen rapper known as “Young MC”

• The Time-less Morris Day

And yes, I was going to attend.

First of all, who doesn’t like holidays? Unlike those white people who are still whining about Juneteenth, I love celebrating. Although my ancestors were locked in the horse garage when the Founding Fathers declared their independence, I still throw some meat on the grill and watch fireworks on July 4th because I know what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted:

To whip me.

Plus, watching white people dance has always been one of my favorite white pastimes. Unfortunately, aside from that one time I attended a “Save the Princess” frat party with my college friend Beebo (May he rest in power), I’ve never been invited to a white cookout, wedding or a Caucasian birthday celebration. (Also, I don’t know if Beebo is dead. But, if you ever met Beebo, you’d know…I’m probably right.)

I was ready to purchase two back row seats and spend an afternoon laughing at flip-flop-wearing white folks’ off-beat boogieing to patriotic tunes about apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur (fun fact: “Get Low” is a negro spiritual that informed Underground Railroad escapees that the slave catchers were coming). But, as it turns out, the MAGApalooza lineup was like Cheyenne Bryant’s “doctorial” degree, American democracy, or a country where “all men are created equal.”:

A good idea that never happened.

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There is a card game we play in the South called Spades. You partner up, you bid your hand, you play it out, and when you take the books, you bid, you win. Everybody at the table agrees to that before the first card is dealt. Now imagine you win that hand fair and square, and the person across the table, the one who lost, reaches over, scoops up your books and declares the game over. No new rules. No new cards. Just a loser who decided, after the fact, that losing was unacceptable.

That is what the Supreme Court of the United States did to Black voters in Alabama this week.

On Tuesday night, in a 6-3 order, the court allowed Alabama to throw out a congressional map that a lower federal court had already ruled was intentionally discriminatory against Black people, and run the 2026 elections under the very map that court rejected. The seat at its center belongs to Congressman Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat elected in 2024 in a district that civil rights plaintiffs fought for more than three years to create. Understand what just happened: An election has already taken place in Alabama. Voters in that district chose their representative. And now the highest court in the land has blessed a do-over, a do-over designed to take that seat away.

I am a daughter of Alabama. I am not writing about this state from a distance, from some studio in another city, reading off a map I have never walked. This is home. I learned what I know about power in Alabama, and I learned how to be an organizer here, on this red clay, knocking on doors and counting votes and watching how the game gets rigged in real time. So when I tell you how white supremacy operates in this state, understand that I am not theorizing. I am testifying.

I want to be precise, because precision matters when you are telling the truth about power. The district in question, Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, was never even a majority-Black district. The federal court drew it with a Black voting-age population of roughly 48.7%. Less than half. It was not a gift. It was not a guarantee. It was simply an opportunity, a district where Black voters finally had a fighting chance to elect a candidate of their choice in a state that is more than a quarter Black but for decades drew only one Black district out of seven. That is the thing they could not abide. Not Black control. Just Black possibility.

How we got here

This is not a story that started this week. It started in 2021, when Alabama drew a new map after the census with a single majority-Black district in a state that is 27% Black. Voters sued. They said the map diluted Black voting power in violation of the Voting Rights Act. A three-judge federal panel agreed. And in 2023, in a case called Allen v. Milligan, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that finding and ordered Alabama to draw a map with two districts where Black voters had a real chance to elect their candidate of choice.

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According to the U.S. Census, in 2024, Alabama’s Black voter registration rate was 67.2%, while the white registration rate was 70.3%. Louisiana’s Black voter registration rate was 61.4 vs. 69.7% for whites. In Mississippi, 81.6% of Black people registered to vote, compared to 81.4% of white Mississippians. Tennessee was 64.5% Black vs. 77% white. In most of these states, the voter turnout rates usually mirror the registration rates.

While this may seem like white people vote more than Black Americans, these statistics are devised by comparing the voter-eligible population (the number of U.S. citizens over 18) to the people who are actually registered or turn out to vote. But if you include the number of Black people who can’t vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws, the Black people who are eligible to vote might actually outvote whites.

A new study on Alabama’s “moral turpitude” disenfranchisement law puts it more plainly.

The Alabama Reflector reports:

According to the study, Black men were disenfranchised at a rate of 22.4 citizens per 1,000 men of voting age. That is almost four times the rate for their white counterparts, whose rate was 6.7 citizens per 1,000.

The rate for disenfranchising Black women was 3.9 citizens per 1,000, almost twice the rate of white women, whose disenfranchisement rate was 2.1 citizens per 1,000 white women.

Counties with significant Black populations had some of the highest Black disenfranchisement rates and largest racial disparities in disenfranchisement. Seven of the 10 counties with the highest rates of disenfranchised voters are within the Black Belt.

That’s why the felony disenfranchisement map looks like this:

They have to cheat to win.

Because they know who has the power.

Today’s Reading List

• Alabama’s Moral Turpitude Law Disproportionately Strips Black Citizens of Their Voting Rights by Richard Fording, Dori Miles and Maddie Minkoff

• Is the South More Racist Than Other Parts of the US? by Michael Harriot

• Counting the Votes: South Carolina's Stolen Election of 1876 by Ronald F. King

Thank you, , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Michael Harriot in the Substack app

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As efforts to undermine initiatives for equity and representation intensify, backlash against healthcare diversity, equity and inclusion programs has predictably taken center stage.

The latest challenge—a lawsuit filed by a white dermatologist, Dr. Travis Morrell, and the anti-DEI organization Do No Harm—targets FindABlackDoctor.com’s mission to narrow health disparities by connecting Black patients with Black providers. This legal action follows a wave of anti-DEI legislation designed to dismantle the progressive reforms that have sought to bridge racial and ethnic inequalities.

At best, the lawsuit is perplexing; at worst, it fundamentally misunderstands the law and undermines quality healthcare for one of our nation’s most vulnerable populations.

The lawsuit cites “professional misconduct” based on the premise that doctors on the platform refuse services due to a patient’s race; however, this claim wrongly implies that the providers on this platform only aim to assist Black patients. Furthermore, by suggesting that seeking a doctor of the same race reflects or creates an inherent distrust of providers from different backgrounds, the suit ignores profound historical context—such as the legacy of unethical experimentation and Jim Crow-era policies—that drives many Black patients to seek out Black clinicians.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, as of 2023, Black women were more than three times as likely as white women to experience a pregnancy-related death. Infants born to Black women were more than twice as likely to die before the age of 1 compared to those born to white women. And Black men and women had higher rates of chronic diseases such as asthma, obesity, and diabetes—largely a product of living in more polluted areas with food deserts, predatory food marketing practices and limited access to economic upward mobility or opportunities to move due to historical and ongoing inequities such as redlining and residential segregation. Numerous public health studies have demonstrated that systemic racism, rather than genetics, drives these health disparities.

These alarming statistics, along with the difficulty of finding a Black doctor—Black people make up nearly 14% of the U.S. population while representing only 5.7% of the physician workforce—are precisely why platforms like Find A Black Doctor were created. Morrell and Do No Harm—who are undoubtedly aware of these systemic issues—are joining the anti-DEI pile-on by attacking Black spaces with legal action to dismantle this resource rather than working to build the bridges necessary to solve these problems, an atypical response given most doctors’ propensity to find solutions that help make healthcare better for everyone.

Ultimately, the lawsuit underscores a persistent ideological chasm that exists among healthcare professionals despite extensive research into health disparities: the dismissive notion that cultural and ethical considerations are minor factors that exert far less influence on health outcomes than Black communities think. This widening gap between Black patient autonomy and clinical autonomy hinders efforts to find common ground, complicating ongoing efforts to build trust within Black communities in the federal government, healthcare systems and healthcare providers.

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It is an unsolved mystery that has long dogged music aficionados and others. Some say it was the growing popularity of the Cops theme song, but that song dropped in 1987, and the show debuted in 1989. Others attribute the boom to the popularity of UB40’s hit. Then there’s the more inclusive Evolutionary Slow Drag Grand Th…

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Between lobbing the words “retard” and “midget” around and chastising host Shane Gillis for almost using the n-word during The Roast of Kevin Hart, comedian Sheryl Underwood paused to sincerely thank streaming giant Netflix for standing up for the First Amendment.

“Freedom of Speech is alive today!” the former host of The Talk bellowed. “It shows that we can all come together and crack jokes on each other and still respect each other.”

A hall-of-fame stand-up comedian and a lifelong Republican, Underwood was echoing the sentiments of her comedian colleagues and fellow conservatives. According to these so-called “free speech purists,” the artistic and personal freedoms of everyday Americans are under attack by overly sensitive snowflakes who refuse to recognize their right to offend. The current generation of comedians and white people are always lamenting how they can’t say anything without “cancel culture,” the “woke mob” or people with a “victim mentality” complaining.

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Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon also occurred on Netflix, when Kevin Hart, the roast’s guest of honor, appeared on The Breakfast Club. Asked about MAGA comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s sentences about George Floyd (it wasn’t a joke; jokes have punchlines), Hart would only say: “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe; I don’t expect less, I don’t expect more.”

They talked about my dead mom and my dead dad,” Hart continued. “I don’t get affected by the attempt of humor…I don’t understand why we stand on a hill, and it becomes like this, this big thing of like: ‘Oh man, the motherfucker, they do this, and they’re attacking the culture.’ It doesn’t have to be that. It literally is either you’re a fan of this level of content or you’re not, and if you’re not a fan, then you don’t watch it.”

See what he did there?

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Let me tell you what I know for sure.

They will be back. And when they come back, they will be BLACK around.

Black-talking, Black-marketing, Black-imaging, Black-everything-but-actually-Black-investing. Rolling up in our churches, our HBCUs, our cookouts and our culture (uninvited, mind you) with a deck of slides and a budget line called …

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Perhaps they’d join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People's Campaign. Although King’s criticism of the war made him one of the most unpopular people in white America, Cpl. Isaiah R. McMillan and Sgt. Thomas J. Davis were 20 years old. Thanks in part to King and the Voting Rights Act, they would be able to vote in the election that year.

King’s friend, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was preparing to enter the presidential race. But to win the Democratic nomination, Kennedy would have to defeat one of the most popular politicians in the country, the patriotic Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Even if Kennedy won the nomination, he’d have to face two extremely “honest” and patriotic candidates who were more popular than King:

Richard Nixon and George Wallace.

Born and raised in the American South, McMillan and Davis had never seen the so-called “democracy” they were supposedly fighting for. If they wanted to stop an oppressive, authoritarian government from massacring its people, they could’ve just fought in Orangeburg, S.C. They could’ve gone to Wilmington, Del., to stop a military occupation. If they were pining for armed conflict, they could have grabbed their guns and fought in Cleveland.

McMillan was a 20-year-old newlywed who volunteered for the Army one month after graduating from high school. He had just married his high school sweetheart and had a son. Davis, also 20, was one of the newest enlistees. The ink had barely dried on his enlistment paperwork when he was deployed. As McMillan and Davis’ country negotiated the terms of their citizenship, their radios crackled with the kind of news that interrupted their conversation.

An ambush.

As part of a six-man mortar team patrolling a hilltop, they were informed that two platoons had walked directly into an ambush below them. They ran down the hill and waded through a rice paddy to help. Thankfully, the message was wrong. There was no ambush.

Until the mortar team arrived.

The so-called “ambush,” as Davis later recounted it with the measured calm of a man who has made peace with the absurd, was probably just one soldier with an AK-47. Had he possessed slightly more patience or experience, one man could have ended things right there. Instead, Davis opened fire too early, revealing his location to the waiting enemy.

When Sgt. Porter Calloway went down under enemy fire, McMillan told Davis they couldn’t leave anyone man behind. Disregarding his own broken ankle, Davis ran back into the rice paddy and carried his wounded comrade out, as McMillan provided cover.

This is the part of the story where someone is supposed to say “valor,” “heroism” and “above and beyond the call of duty.” And all of that is true. But what it actually was, stripped of the ceremonial language, was one young Black man from America deciding that his friend’s life was worth more than his own safety. That is not a military value. That is older than any army. Davis said it plainly:

“You never leave behind a friend. Ever.”

They made it to the tree line. They were nearly out of ammunition. The Viet Cong found them anyway, flushed out with gas grenades, dragged from the brush—Calloway severely wounded, Davis on a possibly broken ankle, McMillan knocked unconscious by the gas.

They were bound to trees and marched, under active American fire, for three days. Calloway did not survive the journey.

McMillan and Davis would not see home for 1,832 days.

This is the story of the two men who survived, and how they remember the men who didn’t.

Twenty years ago this past April, filmmaker Boots Riley and his Oakland hip-hop band The Coup released their fifth studio album Pick a Bigger Weapon. The 13th track of the revolution-minded production is a little song called “I Love Boosters.” The song is Riley’s ode to the (usually) Black women in the Bay who steal clothes from department stores and “And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale”:

“For some of y’all folks, this stuff might phase ya / This ain’t the way the society raised ya /

But most of it was made by children in Asia / The stores make money off of very low wages /

The next time you see two women running out The Gap / With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack / Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat / If you have to say something, just stand and clap.”

Now, Riley has turned the song and its central thesis of corporate exploitation of labor as the real thief and burden on society into the genius new film of the same name, I Love Boosters. Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, the head of an all-Black women booster crew called the Velvet Gang. The opening of the film mirrors the first verse of Riley’s song, where a man goes into what he thinks is a woman’s apartment looking for a hook-up, but it turns out that the place is full of boosted clothes and shoes in all sizes that she’s selling on the low.

Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige round out the gang who have become a thorn in fashion mogul Christie Smith’s side, whose department stores they’ve been robbing blind.

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According to the story, a group of kidnapped Igbo people screamed all the way from Africa to America. Every time the captain would send members of the crew down into the belly of the ship to quiet them, the crew members would be afraid because they would realize that the captives weren’t just screaming; they were saying one chant, over and over, in unison. They were just waiting and praying: “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina.”

As the ship drew closer to the shore, the chants grew louder. “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” they yelled in unison.

And somehow, the Africans broke the chains, rebelled and threw the entire crew overboard. Led by a captured chieftain, the people walked calmly into the sea, chanting: “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” drowning themselves rather than be slaves. Some say the number was 75; others say it was 13.

But that’s the white version of the story.

In the Black version, the enslaved people survived.

Which one do you believe?

In 1940, the Georgia Writers’ Project released what might be the whitest and the Blackest book ever published.

Drums and Shadows is essentially a collection of interviews conducted by the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project workers and the Gullah people in the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia. The book opened with a warning that while most of the people were God-fearing Christians, they still managed to hold on to superstitious beliefs and pagan rituals from their African ancestors.

“Today sorcery is still practiced,” district supervisor Mary Granger explained whitely in the book’s introduction. “Modern root doctors, visited frequently by their superstitious clients, perform mystic rites and promise to work miracles and cures.”

These white people had no idea what they were talking about.

First of all, instead of treating the interviewees like they treated white men with Southern accents, they wrote the Gullah people’s words phonetically. But my favorite part is how they wrote about the Igbo Landing and other crazy “superstitions” of these Christian communities.

Here are a few that I have kept in the original Gullah language, followed by my translation into standard English:

Muh mothuh use tuh tell me bout slabes jis brung obuh frum Africa wut hab duh supreme magic powuh.Deah wuz a magic pass wud dat dey would pass tuh udduhs. Ef dey belieb in dis magic, dey could scape an fly back tuh Africa.  I hab a uncle wut could wuk dis magic. He could disappeah lak duh win, jis walk off duh plantation an stay way fuh weeks at a time. One time he git cawnuhed by duh putrolmun an he jis walk up to a tree an he say, ‘I tink I go intuh dis tree.’ Den he disappeah right in duh tree.

— Jack Wilson

Translation: My mother used to tell me about slaves just brought over from Africa who had the supreme magical power. There was a magic password that they would pass on to others. If they believed in this magic, they could escape and fly back to Africa. I have an uncle who could work this magic. He could disappear like the wind, just walk off the plantation and stay away for weeks at a time. One time he got cornered by the patrolman and he just walked up to a tree and said, ‘“I think I will go into this tree.”

Then he disappeared right into the tree.

Wen I wuz a boy I heah lots uh stories bout people flyin. Some folks brung obuh frum Africa could fly off aw disappeah anytime dey wanted tuh. I alluz belieb dat story. I know folks right now dat kin make duh spirits uh dead people come back.

— Henry Bates

Translation: When I was a boy I heard lots of stories about people flying. Some folks brought over from Africa could fly off or disappear anytime they wanted to. I always believed that story. I know folks right now that can make the spirits of dead people come back."

Doze folks could fly too. Dey tell me deah’s a lot ub un, wut wuz bring heah an dey ain much good. Duh massuh wuz fixin tuh tie um up tuh whip um. Dey say, ‘Massuh, yuh ain gwine lick me,’ and wid dat dey runs down tuh duh ribbuh. Duh obuhseeuh he sho tought he ketch um wen dey git tuh duh ribbuh. But fo he could git tuh um, dey riz up in duh eah an fly way. Dey fly right back tuh Africa. I tink dat happen on Butler Ilun.

— Cuffy Wilson

Translation: Those folks could fly, too. They tell me there's a lot of them who were brought here, and they weren't much good (to the slaveholders). The master was fixing to tie them up to whip them. They said, 'Master, you aren't going to lick me,' and with that they ran down to the river. The overseer surely thought he would catch them when they got to the river. But before he could get to them, they rose up in the air and flew away. They flew right back to Africa. I think that happened on Butler Island

Some of the blasphemous, so-called “mystic rites” practiced by these so-called Christians were actually everyday religious practices. For instance, when the interviewers wrote about Bilal, an enslaved man who came from Africa, they didn’t just spell his name wrong; they were too dumb to associate his name, the names of his children, the waistbeads his daughter wore or even the way they prayed with Bilal’s Muslim faith.

“Belali hab plenty daughtuhs: Medina, Yaruba, Fatima, Bentoo, Hestuh, Magret, and Chaalut,” the interviewer wrote. “Dey weah duh string uh beads on duh wais. Dey pray at sun-up and face duh sun on duh knees an bow tuh it tree times, kneelin on a lill mat.”

Now here’s my question: Which one is more believable?

1. The stories I translated about enslaved Africans who had magical powers that allowed them to walk on water, raise the dead and fly back to the place where they were born; or:

2. The stories a white man translated about a Jew who had superpowers that allowed him to walk on water, raise the dead and ascend back to his father in heaven.

Here’s another question:

What if Harriet Tubman could fly?

We still don’t actually know how Harriet Tubman reached freedom. Historians say “her exact escape route is unknown, as is the source of help she received on her way to Pennsylvania…and it is unclear how long it took her.” The people who were there say Harriet Tubman “disappeared” into thin air. The white people translated it into “escape.”

And in regard to her escape, all she ever said was: “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”

Anyway, back to the Igbo Landing.

In the 1980s, researchers found a 150-year-old letter from Roswell King to Pierce Butler, a plantation owner and slave owner on St. Simons Island, detailing how he had lost an entire shipload of enslaved Igbo people who walked into the water. A few years later, someone found another letter from a company demanding payment for being hired to recover bodies from a marsh of Igbo slaves who jumped to their deaths. But Pierce refused to pay the company, because...well…

They didn’t find any bodies.

What if I told you that Harriet Tubman actually said that she “flew like a bird?” What if her brother said she got her powers from a meteor shower and not being beaten by a slavemaster? What if she said it, too? What if the Star of Bethlehem that signaled Jesus’ birth was a meteor?

What if Maurice White claimed a voice spoke to him and gave him a superpower that became the music of Earth, Wind & Fire?

Now that’s just crazy.

Thank you, , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Today’s Reading List:

• Earth Wind and Fire Explained by Michael Harriot

• The Hoodoo Guide to the Bible by Sherry Shone

• My Life With Earth Wind & Fire by Maurice White

• The Undeniable Witchiness of Harriet Tubman by Astrea Taylor

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This article was originally published on July 19, 2018.

America is angry.

Conservatives are mad for the same reasons they wanted to oust Obama, Muslims, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t support the Russia-fellating, rust-colored dotard in chief: They want their country back.

Progressives believe Trump is destro…

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What do you do after you change the world?

In 1954, 13 years after he co-authored the executive order that changed America’s demographic landscape, created a Black middle class and helped America defeat the most powerful fascist on the planet, historian, professor and policymaker Rayford Logan released The Negro in American Life and Thought.

Logan’s seminal text covered the years between 1877 and 1902, when America dedicated itself to “the deliberate relegation of Negroes to the role of an inferior class.” Although the groundbreaking work is often republished as The Betrayal of the Negro, the book’s original subtitle coined a term that would come to define the era when anti-Blackness reached its rock bottom:

The “nadir.”

“The last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century marked the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” Logan wrote. “At the turn of the century, it seemed, indeed, that they might become a caste.” Today, Logan’s term is so ubiquitous that it has its own Wikipedia page. Subsequent scholars would extend the “nadir” to include the Red Summer of 1919, the post-World War I lynching epidemic and everything up to Franklin Roosevelt asking a Black man to help him save the world. However, no one ever disagrees with Logan’s start date.

But why 1877?

No, white people didn’t hold a national whites-only Zoom call announcing the opening day for racism. There was no anti-Black group chat (Trust me, Pete Hegseth would have exposed it). And while 1877 marked the official end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow, the event that sparked a half-century of terrorism, disenfranchisement and racial apartheid can be traced to one American phenomenon:

The gerrymander.

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Excerpted from “The Overseer Class: A Manifesto.” Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted 2026 by Steven W. Thrasher. Available now where all books are sold. We encourage you to buy from Black-owned or independent bookstores.

As an undergraduate film student, I took a class with cinema scholar Don…

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