Author: Reggie Jackson

“…black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.” – James Baldwin Over the past nearly twenty years of my life I have been honored to share the history of my people in a variety of ways and in a multitude of spaces around the country. I do this because I’m proud...

This year marks the 95th annual celebration of Black History Month. It has actually been a month-long celebration since just 1976. Each year the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), established in 1915 by the founder of the annual celebration, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, establishes a theme for the celebration each year. This year’s theme is, The Black Family: Representation, Identity and Diversity. They say this about the theme: “The black family has been a topic of study in many disciplines—history, literature, the visual arts and film studies, sociology, anthropology, and social policy. Its...

Amazing as this may sound, I’m writing you a letter from the future. I can’t explain how this is possible. What’s more important than how this is possible, is the fact that I’m here because of your sacrifices. I just discovered in the last year (2019) that you volunteered to join the Union Army in 1863. I’ve read about the 180,000 brave Black men who served in the Army and 20,000 that joined the Navy in some of the history books. Not the ones I used in school though. Your valiant efforts have been mostly forgotten unfortunately. I want...

In 2005, a catastrophic hurricane named Katrina, hit Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana with a ferocity rarely seen. We witnessed the infrastructure designed to protect the city of New Orleans, fail miserably. It should have been a wake up call about the impact of disinvestment in Black communities around the country. Instead, it gave rich developers and the politicians that do their bidding, an opportunity to get rid of a great segment of the Black residents of the city. The Black people who gave New Orleans its unique “soul” were discarded and sent across the country as so-called “refugees.” The...

“The Negro in Birmingham, like the Negro elsewhere in this nation, had been skillfully brainwashed to the point where he had accepted the white man’s theory that he, as a Negro, was inferior. He wanted to believe that he was the equal of any man; but he didn’t know where to begin or how to resist the influences that had conditioned him to take the line of least resistance and go along with the white man’s views. He knew that there were exceptions to the white man’s evaluation: a Ralph Bunche, a Jackie Robinson, a Marian Anderson. But to...