Writer in Atlanta covering the Black Atlantic — Pan-Africanism, memory, and the ties between the African American experience and the continent. History is never past.
On a South Carolina barrier island, a Gullah Geechee congregation hosted visitors from Sierra Leone. The two groups, separated by an ocean and 250 years, discovered they still shared words, songs, and the same rice.
This week's edition is personal. I want to tell you about the box of cassette tapes I found after my grandmother's funeral — and what her seventy years of silence taught me about how memory actually survives.
Letters between a jailed Oakland activist and a Kwame Nkrumah loyalist in Conakry, recently surfaced in a Ghanaian archive, expose the painful debate at the heart of Black liberation: build power here, or build it there?
A music historian and a Nigerian percussionist spent four years chasing one rhythmic figure across three centuries. Their conclusion — that the heartbeat of jazz is an Atlantic survival — is rewriting how we hear American music.
