The inaugural North Philadelphia History Festival, a celebration of African American and Puerto Rican heritage through art, music, film, history and culture, will be held July 24-27, 2025.
In the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. In addition to voter education, COFO organized 41 Freedom Schools where Black children were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as Black history and culture.
In the winter of 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to whitewash American history. Federal agencies are deleting webpages.
In a memorandum, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell wrote:
By March 5, 2025, Components must take all practicable steps, consistent with records management requirements, to remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos, and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). All articles, photos, and videos removed from DoD websites and social media platforms must be archived and retained in accordance with applicable records management policies/
[…]
Social Media Content: Components must remove and follow records management requirements for DEI content removed from all official DoD social media accounts. If Components cannot remove DEI content from DoD social media accounts by March 5, 2025, they must temporarily remove from public display all news articles, photos and videos published between January 20, 2021, and January 19, 2025, until the content is fully reviewed and DEI content removed. While DBI-related content outside of this date range must also be removed, articles, photos, and videos from the last four years are the immediate priority to align DoD communication with the current Administration.
Federal agencies plan to decommission hundreds of websites. We must be intentional and fight the erasure of webpages related to Black history and culture.
Inspired by the freedom schools of the Civil Rights Movement, Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) has organized the Freedom School for Web Archiving, a series of webinars that will train “new generations of memory workers to preserve and steward online content that reflects the Black experience… Participants will gain foundational skills in web archiving—whether for personal, community, or institutional use—and explore how this work resists erasure, disinformation, and historical revisionism.”
The Freedom School for Web Archiving is free and open to the public. To register for a webinar, go here.
As the descendant of enslaved people, I mourn the Fourth of July.
That said, Independence Hall has a prominent place in Black history.
Independence Hall is the place where the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; 34 of the 56 signers, including Thomas Jefferson, enslaved Black people.
Independence Hall is the place where the U.S. Constitution, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person and mandated that freedom seekers be returned to bondage, was signed.
Independence Hall is the place where, from 1850 to 1854, hearings were held to return the self-emancipated to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Independence Hall is the place where master silhouette artist Moses Williams worked “every day and evening.”
I have nominated Moses for a Pennsylvania historical marker. If the nomination is approved, the marker will be installed near Independence Hall in 2026.
UPDATE: My nomination was approved. Moses Williams’ historical marker will be dedicated in 2026, the 250th anniversary of his birth.
In the meantime, All That Philly Jazz Founding Director Faye Anderson will lead a walking tour, Moses Williams’ Philadelphia.
To celebrate Black Music Month, I will give a gallery talk highlighting some of the items in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s exhibit, “Message In Our Music.” The items span the 1770s to the 1970s.
It was illegal for the enslaved to learn how to read or write. Stories and cultural practices were passed down from generation to generation in the music. In the prelude to gospel legend Bobby Jones’ “Just A Closer Walk with Thee,” Maya Angelou said, “They sung us all the way out of slavery.”
Music was the first draft of Black history.
One of the items in the exhibit is a collection of spirituals sung before the Civil War, including Free At Las’, compiled by Edward Avery McIlhenny whose family enslaved hundreds of Black people.
“Free at last” has resonated with African Americans for hundreds of years. The significance of the phrase was lost on Kroger. The supermarket chain came under fire for selling Juneteenth cakes decorated with AI slop.
TikToker Blaq Monalisa posted images of the cakes saying:
Y’all decorate everything else around here cute, everything else around here cute. But for Juneteenth, you wanna just throw something on a freaking cookie cake and expect someone to buy it.
The video went viral. After the backlash, Kroger said the “products have been removed” from the store.
The phrase “free at last” is known for being a prominent part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, borrowed from the title of a Negro-Spiritual song. And now the phrase, which represents a hard-fought struggle, is being featured on a supermarket cake, casually scribbled in internet shorthand.
As you will see in the “Message In Our Music” exhibit, the phrase predates Julia Perry’s 1951 composition.
My gallery talk is free and open to the public. To register, please go here.
UPDATE: Check out 6abc Action News’ report about the exhibition.
In his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride,” William Congreve wrote: “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.”
Ever since the ancestors were brought here in the bowels of a slave ship, songs gave voice to their suffering and longing for freedom.
The experience of the enslaved is “the wellspring of Black music” (h/t Amiri Baraka).
From Black Suffering to Black Joy, there is a message in our music.
It was an honor and pleasure to tell the story of Black music using music scores, documents, photographs, books and ephemera in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for their new exhibit, Voices of the Community: Local Black Preservation.
The exhibit “explores the history, migration, and preservation” of African American communities in Philadelphia, and Lawnside, New Jersey.
The opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 12, 2025, from 6pm to 8pm. The event is free and open to the public. To register for the reception, please go here.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania will unveil a new exhibit, Voices of the Community: Local Preservation in Philadelphia, on June 12, 2025. The exhibit explores the history and preservation of Black communities in Philadelphia and Lawnside, New Jersey. I am one of the community curators, along with Shamele Jordon.
The exhibit focuses on four themes:
Black Joy: Development of Lawnside, the only historically African-American incorporated municipality in the Northern United States
Sounds of Freedom, Resistance and Resilience
Fulfilling America’s Promise: Founding of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH)
All Power to the People: Local community efforts to preserve and restore Black Philadelphia
With the “Sounds of Freedom, Resistance and Resilience,” I use archival materials to tell the story of Black music from the 1770s to the 1970s.
Voices of the Community: Local Preservation in Philadelphia will be on view June 12, 2025 to September 26, 2025. To be added to the mailing list for the exhibit opening and my gallery talk, send your name and email address to phillyjazzapp@gmail.com.
While still a British colony, South Carolina passed the first law that denied enslaved Africans the right to learn. The Negro Act of 1740 outlawed teaching enslaved people to read. President Trump threatens to withhold federal funding from schools that teach uncomfortable truths about American history.
Across the country, churches, civil rights organizations, activists and concerned citizens are speaking up and resisting efforts to erase Black history. We have come too far to go back.
The Freedom to Learn Network, convened by the African American Policy Forum, has organized the National Week of Action to resist Trump’s attempt to erase Black history, and defend our freedom and right to learn.
The activations include a #HandsOffOurHistory gathering in DC on Saturday, May 3, 2025.
With little fanfare, President Trump has tapped Hillsdale College to produce a video series, “The Story of America.” A member of the Project 2025 network, the conservative Christian college’s demographically monochromatic faculty and student body does not look like America.
Moses Williams was enslaved by Charles Willson Peale whose portrait of George Washington is prominently displayed in Trump’s tricked out Oval Office. The title of my presentation is “Mapping Moses Williams’ Philadelphia.”
On Friday, April 25, historian and artist Nell Irvin Painter will give a keynote address, “Arrived, New Names.” Painter “will set the tone for exploring how creative projects can share complicated and compelling histories.”
On Saturday, April 25, public historians, educators, artists, preservationists and community members will share strategies on how they are breathing life into the archives to tell untold or undertold stories, and stories of belonging.
The event is open to the public. To register, go here.
The first National Park Week was observed in 1991 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the National Park Service. National Park Week has been an annual celebration since 1994. The 2025 celebration will be held April 19 to April 26.
This year’s theme of the National Park Playlist “celebrates musical connections to national parks and the American story.”
The Hotel Lorraine, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, is included in the NPS African American Civil Rights Network. So my playlist includes Otis Spann’s “Hotel Lorraine.”
Rev. Richard Allen, founder of Mother Bethel AME Church, produced the first compilation of hymns for an African American congregation, “A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs,” published in 1801. The hymns include “Am I a Soldier of the Cross?” I will play a 20th century version of the hymn.
Lee Morgan’s homegoing ceremony was held at the Church of the Advocate. Needless to say, “The Sidewinder” will be on repeat.
John Coltrane composed “Giant Steps” while living in the Strawberry Mansion rowhome that is now a National Historic Landmark.
President Trump’s latest diktat claims there is “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is in the crosshairs. First proposed by Black Civil War veterans, NMAAHC was more than 100 years in the making. The Smithsonian museum traveled a long road to hard truth.
Trump’s “corrosive ideology” is the hard truth about American history.
[Black] history … contains the truth about America. It is going to be hard to teach it.
[…]
I am the flesh of your flesh and bone of your bones; I have been here as long as you have been here – longer – I paid for it as much as you have. It is my country, too. Do recognize that that is the whole question. My history and culture has to be taught. It is yours.
[…]
Everyone has basic emotions of hate, fear, and love, and I think the whites in this country have used the machinery of propaganda very skillfully. You find blacks who want to know something about their history and you find whites who don’t understand or who are fearful. They will publicize this sort of thing as a hate gathering and a hate meeting, when actually it could possibly be a historical meeting that whites and blacks could learn from.
From the forced removal of Indigenous People to the enslavement of Africans, “race-centered ideology” is woven into the fabric of the nation.
Signer of the Declaration of Independence and second President of the United States John Adams said:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
Slaveholder Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It is an objective fact that Jefferson was accompanied by his enslaved personal servant, Robert Hemmings.
It is an objective fact that the nation’s founding principles did not include Black people. It is a national shame that “our shared past” includes ratification of the U.S. Constitution that counted the enslaved as three-fifths of a person.
It is an objective fact that George Washington hounded self-emancipated Ona Judge until the day he died.
It is an objective fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings.
All That Philly Jazz 