Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
There is a photograph I keep on my desk. It was taken in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965 - the day that would become known as Bloody Sunday. In it, a line of unarmed men and women in their Sunday best walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward state troopers on horseback, toward men with clubs and tear gas, toward a violence they knew was coming and walked into anyway. At the front of the line was a twenty-five-year-old named John Lewis. He had already been arrested eighteen times. He would be arrested twenty-six more.
I look at that photograph when I need to remember what courage actually looks like. I look at it when the work of building anything feels difficult. I look at it when I am tempted to confuse inconvenience with sacrifice. The people in that photograph did not survive the bridge that day on luck. They survived it because generations of people before them - people who were beaten, imprisoned, and killed - had built an infrastructure of conviction that made walking onto a bridge and absorbing a beating into a political strategy instead of a suicide mission.
That infrastructure is being deliberately dismantled. Not by accident, not by neglect, but by political actors who understand that a people who do not know their history cannot effectively defend it or extend it. The Stop WOKE Act in Florida. Senate Bill 3 in Texas. Restrictions on teaching anything that makes students feel “discomfort” in classrooms across twenty states. The attacks on Black history instruction are not primarily about what children should or should not read. They are about who controls the narrative of American democracy - who gets to say what this country is, what it was, and who built it.
“History is not nostalgia. It is the operating manual for the work ahead.”
Black-History.com is a response to that attack. It is not a hot-take response or a reactive one. It is an institutional response - the kind that takes decades to build and that cannot be legislated out of existence because it does not live in any single classroom or any single curriculum. It lives on the internet. It is indexed by search engines. It is findable by the thirteen-year-old in a Florida public school whose teacher has been forbidden to teach certain things, and by the doctoral student at a research university who needs a comprehensive reference, and by the grandmother in Birmingham who wants to understand what her mother endured.
I came to this work through a specific convergence of capabilities and convictions. I have spent two decades in executive roles at some of the largest organizations in the world. I hold a PhD in Management and teach graduate students how organizations are designed and how they fail. I have served as Chief Operating Officer of a 135-year-old trade association and as a management consultant and executive coach through my firm, Innovatus Advisory. I know how to build institutions. I know how to manage to a budget. I know how to sustain a mission past the founding enthusiasm.
But the credential that matters most for this work is not on my CV. It is that I grew up in a family that treated Black history as a living practice, not an academic subject. My grandmother kept clippings. My father argued cases. The Movement was not something that happened in another country or another century. It was the ground under our feet. It shaped what we were expected to do with our lives. This platform is the answer to what I was expected to do with mine.
The platform operates through a hybrid legal structure: Black-History.com Media, LLC for the commercial and editorial work, and the Black History Educational Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, for the educational programs, curriculum development, and HBCU Wiki research. The two entities are distinct in governance, finances, and legal standing. They are unified by mission and by the conviction that history is not nostalgia. It is the operating manual for the work ahead.
We will be publishing the full record. The heroes and the complications. The triumphs and the betrayals. The figures who were erased from the story after they were no longer useful to the narrative of comfortable progress. We will publish it in language a curious twelve-year-old can follow and a tenured professor can cite. We will source every claim. We will name every voice. We will correct every error, publicly and promptly.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything this platform can do - every essay, every HBCU profile, every mug shot in the Good Trouble archive, every newsletter issue - is possible only because people who had far less went to jail, absorbed beatings, and sometimes gave their lives for the right of their descendants to move freely through the world. This platform is one small contribution to the project they began. We plant trees in whose shade we will never sit. We are working on this one together.
— The Editors
Black-History.com
May 2026