Black History & Black Futures Month

May They Also be Feminist

February 2021, the Movement 4 Black Lives offered us Black Futures Month. They published a video on the website where two Black people open a time capsule in “Solar Year 2172” and get a glimpse into Freedom Summer of 2020—Sankofa.

In June 2021, my dad, son, cousin, partner and I journeyed to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum & Memorial in Montgomery, AL.  Trudging through the dark history of lynching in Georgia, I located one possible explanation for the 110-year story that was passed down through three generations on my father’s side that claimed Will Davis, my grandfather’s father, absconded and left his twin newborns after their mother died. My grandfather died in 2004 at 94 years old believing that my great grandmother died giving birth to him and that his father left him.

However, the census and other archival data (accessed through Ancestry.com) tell a different story. According to the 1910 census, Will and Connie were both alive and living together when my grandpa “Jack” was 3 months old. This story, with a little more context, marks a shift for our family narrative. Not one male descendent of Will Davis (my father has two brothers and a male cousin) has ever left any of their children so that narrative just never fit. Now we have the possibility of a “new origin story”, and unfortunately this might mean that racial terror, which was not uncommon in 1910 Georgia, is the reason for my grandfather being orphaned as a baby. However, with more historical and political context, my son has another story to tell to future generations.

Like the 1960’s cultural movement, “Black is Beautiful,” this is a significant turning point. Today with museums, books, art exhibitions, documentary series, social media, and Afrofuturist imaginings we have so many ways to learn about our past and think about our future. This knowledge has carried Black folks to a critical moment because we are not the same people that we were before the summer of 2020. Having harnessed the work of literary geniuses, historians (trained and homegrown), and social justice activists, we are beginning to tell a new public narrative. We are ushering in a new era where Black people not only survive, but we are also shaping a future where we thrive because we appreciate our culture from sports arenas to Legendary ballrooms.

My son lives in the future that each generation before him built.

I’m from Atlanta, and in the 6th grade Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday officially became a federally recognized holiday. I learned about the MLK “dream” speech maker who acted alone; my son knows a young racial justice and labor activist who worked alongside Rosa Parks, a fierce racial and gender justice activist; Ella Baker, the courageous organizer; and Bayard Rustin the Black gay movement strategist. In 1993, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in an early college program; my son is reading it in his sophomore year at a multiracial urban public high school. In my suburban predominantly white public high school library, the only book written by a Black woman was Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland. My son’s favorite writer is Angie C. Thomas among many other Black writers. He is not a feminist or an activist, he simply has access to Black history and culture in ways that I did not have growing up in the South in the 80’s.

We are living in the future that Octavia Butler prophesied in Parable of the Sower.

In 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones and many other contributors gifted the nation with the Pulitzer Prize winning “The 1619 project” published in the New York Times Magazine. This project marks the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in what would become the United States; the project effectively presents “a new origin story” for what is now known as the United States of America. The mythology (passing for history) that many of us 80’s babies rejected as students is now being openly challenged not just in higher education, but in the popular streets of Barnes and Noble, with The 1619 Project book. I bought 10 copies to distribute to my friends and family because every Black household should have one.

As I imagine with 1926 and 1976 when Negro History Week and Black History Month, respectively, were thrust into mainstream American culture, The 1619 Project is an unwelcome disruption to the pervasive and exclusive white supremacist heteropatriarchal national narrative. Couple this disruption with that of the 2020 #BlackLivesMatter racial justice uprisings and #SayHerName movements; the wave of sanctioned/unsanctioned labor strikes; and women refusing to quietly endure gender-based violence, discrimination and oppression but instead demanding a feminist future; the times they are a changing.

There is a counternarrative being written in the sky and on the ground beneath our feet. The marginalized have grabbed pens. We have written ourselves into existence and through scripts for television and films that reflect our life stories; scholarship that reflects our inquiry and perspectives; legislation that not only reflects our concerns but tries to repair past harms; and Black Worker Centers fighting for black workers unapologetically across the country.

The future is a radical freedom dream of a multiracial economic democracy.

Will Davis probably never imagined that four generations later we might find him and change the family narrative; but we did and we are. While I know we cannot build a more just future without knowing the details of our past, I believe that M4BL was right. 2021 did mark a shift. With history and new narratives gifted to us from the Carter G. Woodsons to the Nikole Hannah-Joneses, we must live in this future as “our ancestors wildest dreams.”

So this year, after celebrating Black History Month since I was a toddler, I now stand firmly upon a legacy of resistance, resilience, and freedom dreams AND I also affirm and celebrate the Black Futures we are building. I think it is just as important for my son to know Black history as it is for him to see and shape Black Futures. And maybe if I keep working at it, our Black future will also be feminist.