Griots are narrators of oral traditions in Africa.  They are the social memory of the community.  As Africans were captured, herded into slave castle dungeons, contained in the hull of large ships and transported to the Americas, they had no idea of their future fate.  However, from the initial treatment from their captors, they, no doubt, knew their future was bleak and very different from where they were snatched from.  I imagine many questions filled their minds – who had taken them?  Where were they going?  What fate lied ahead?  Would the griots survive to tell the story? If not, who would tell the story?  Would the children remember Africa?  Would their children’s children know Africa?  Would generations to come know the stories of Africa?

Who would tell the story of their homelands?  Who would tell the story of their villages, their kings and queens?  Who would tell the story of their inventions and culture?  Who would tell the story of their rituals and religion?  Who would tell the story of their greatness?  Who would tell the story of their sordid experience of this unplanned trip?  

Each Trans-Atlantic voyage from West Africa to Savannah took between four and six months. The length of the trip and the unsanitary, tight spaces that the captured Africans were confined to, increased the likelihood of the spread of infectious diseases. To prevent the spread of disease in Savannah, a quarantine facility was constructed in 1767 on the west end of Tybee Island.  It was called a Lazaretto, which is Italian for “pest house”.  Before being brought into the Savannah port, enslaved people who were brought directly from West African remained quarantined at Lazaretto.  While there, a physician would inspect them to determine if they carried infectious diseases.  If they did, they remained at the Lazaretto.  Those who died there were buried on the west end of Tybee.  No doubt, while quarantined on Tybee, the Ancestors wondered would their stories survive them.

Through the years, Blacks in the US have put effort into telling the accurate story.  Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was intentional about telling the story and wrote about the harms associated with the Miseducation of the Negro.  W.E.B. DuBois (1863-1963) was conscientious about telling the story and discussed the challenge of double consciousness for African Americans. Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) added her voice to the story as she shared the experiences of Cudjoe Lewis, the last presumed living survivor of the Middle Passage in her book Barracoon:  The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. The controversial Yosef Ben-Jochannan (1918-2015) was dedicated to telling the story that ensured readers were aware of Black presence in the Bible. John Henry Clark (1915-1998) was devoted to making sure the accurate story was told and not forgotten. He advocated for and pioneered the creation of Africana studies in academia which shifted away from traditional Eurocentric perspectives. On a national level, contemporary keepers of the historical story include Ibram X. Kendi, Henry Louis Gates, the writers of The 1916 Project, Michelle Alexander and Joy DeGruy.  

As intent as Blacks in the US have been in ensuring the accuracy of the stories, the white power structure in our country has been just as adamant about diluting the story and even changing the narrative.  For over 250 years, the US government has tried to change the narrative of the story and/or silence the story.  The nation watched over the last weeks as US Senators in Washington, DC attacked writers of accurate stories about Blacks in the US in the name of ‘unity’.  Lawmakers around the country are seeking to ban ‘critical race theory’ from being taught in our nation’s schools in effort to squash the accurate story and forward move a more pleasant narrative.  What is interesting is that CRT is a 40+ year old academic concept that emerged out of a framework for legal analysis and is not actually being taught in schools.

The accurate story of Africans begins in Africa long before European invasion.  It is a story of greatness, ingenuity, survival, prosperity, knowledge, wealth, invention, etc.  The story travels across the Atlantic.  It entails the hardship, trauma, torture, and horrors of Black bodies being transported in the hull of ships, inspected like animals, sold as property, treated as subhuman, and counted as less than human.  Thank God, the story doesn’t end there.  The story, like Black people, persists through slavery, endures the Jim Crow era, prevails in the fight for basic human rights during the Civil Rights era, continues through the degradation of Blacks in the era of mass incarceration, and declares the audacity of a people determined to rise above situations designed to hold them down.  The children of the children of the children of the children of the children of captured and enslaved Africans must know the whole story from the perspective of the people who lived it – not from the perspective of the captors—the oppressors.

Why is this important?  So that we who are generations removed from the horrors of slavery can be informed to also tell the story, motivated to reflect, and encouraged to action.  I vow to continue to tell the accurate story – not a story of critical race theory.  But, rather, a critical story of race in the US.