Press for Freedom: A Collage History of Data Portrait No. 60 brings the history of the Black Press, the design and aesthetic strategy of early Black journalists and activists, and the data portraiture of the nineteenth century into relation together.

I love this animation so much! I am deeply obsessed with the data portraits era, shout out to Britt Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste who published a new edited compilation of W. E. B. DuBois’s data portraits a few years ago and Brittney Cooper who is thinking through data and making over in her Rage Lab at Rutgers University.

And in this moment, when journalists are under pressure and attack, the evolution of on the Black Press in a moment of arson, lynchings, and physical assault unto and including death deserves special attention. Thank you to my colleague Kim Gallon, founder and director of the Black Press Research Collective for all of her work, and the work of others, bringing this history to life!

Thank you Julia for hanging out with me at the kitchen table!!!! I appreciate you so much!

Enjoy the animation and follow Julia Mallory on IG.

I normally save video for the groceries and coffee crew, but sharing this one out to everyone this week, since I haven’t had office hours in awhile.

Light editing on the video, but mostly raw footage of me, feral and excited about Black history, giving a five minute summary of the origins of the National Negro Convention Movement.

Mentioned:

• Colored Conventions Project: coloredconventions.org

• Black Press Research Collective: https://blackpressresearchcollective.org/

The question: What are the conditions for resistance?

Also…

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And a quick squeal for Bad Bunny.

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No Office Hours Live at Kitchen Table History this week. I am so sorry y’all, I tried to rally, but I’m traveling tomorrow to James Madison University to deliver the keynote lecture at their African, African American, and African Diaspora Studies Center annual conference and the house is still a whirlwind. I am taking today to get things settled and rest a bit before I go.

Yesterday and today have been packed with meetings, teaching, getting ready to go (which means making sure the #SkyBabies are situated), and preparing remarks. I want a nap more than anything else, but I’m also so excited to hear what these young scholars are working on!! Shout out to Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste who is organizing a workshop that I’m excited to attend!

And next week, I’ll be hanging out with , chatting Haiti/Ayiti’s legacy of radical resistance to empire.

Last week’s Office Hours was live only, no video or audio shared yet. If you popped in you know why. Still deciding if sharing makes sense—that’s the thing about the hot take life. Saying things in the moment might feel good and right, but reflection and time always give a different perspective. But we can talk about it on the next Office Hours live. Maybe you’ll change my mind.

In the meantime, enjoy the previous week’s Office Hours or catch up on the first and second “Stitch Open My Eyes” offering, all below. Third Offering is coming, probably nearer the end of the week.

Whew — Groceries and coffee crew: I see you and appreciate you. There’s a video in the Office Hours post below just for y’all.

More is coming this calendar year. Be safe out there!

As promised, now in 2026, everyone has access to the lives and an after work drink of an audio clip (posted above and available via podcast rss feed). Paid subscribers (thank you!), please enjoy the video bonus below!

This week’s reading is a letter from Jackson Whitney to his former owner, back in Kentucky, letting him know he is safe in Canada and also letting him know about himself. At one point he writes:

“Although I was a slave, I pretended all the time that I thought you were someone else. Had a better right to me than I had to myself. Which, you know, is rather hard thinking. You know, too, that you proved a traitor to me in a time of need. And when, in the most bitter distress that the human soul is capable of experiencing. And could you have carried out your purposes, there would have been no relief. But I rejoice to say that an unseen, kind spirit appeared for the oppressed, and bade me take up my bed and walk. The result of which is that I am victorious and you are defeated.”

I am keeping his defiance close this week. In the end, I do believe we will be victorious and fascism will be defeated.

Things mentioned:

• Blood Orange with Georgia Anne Muldrow - Runnin’

• Operation Swamp Sweep Resources - Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, December 5, 2025, https://powercoalition.org/information/.

• “Zone of Peace Campaign,” The Black Alliance for Peace, January 3, 2026, https://blackallianceforpeace.com/zoneofpeace.

• Brittney Packnett Cunningham as a resource for news and updates. A recent video of hers with Brittney Cooper is here: Evangelicalism, Justice Work, And Red Letter Christianity with Brittany Packnett Cunningham, directed by Beyond Sunday Worship, David Santistevan, 2026,

• Sherrilyn Ifill’s newsletter

Sherrilyn’s Newsletter

Civil Rights & American Democracy

By Sherrilyn Ifill

• Gabe Castro-Root and Claire Fahy, “What Travelers Need to Know About Canceled Flights in the Caribbean,” Travel, The New York Times, January 3, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/travel/caribbean-flight-cancellations-trump-venezuela.html.

• The Wolfpack, i.e. The Working Families Party https://workingfamilies.org/

• How to Survive the End of the World https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow

• Autumn Brown in Minnesota (read the caption)

• “This Day” podcast with Kellie Carter Jackson, Jody Avirgan and Nicole Hemmer, Radiotopia, March 24, 2020, https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/thisday.

• Michelle Alexander and Cornel West, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012).

• Deborah McNally, “Anthony Johnson (?-1670),” BlackPast.Org, December 14, 2010, https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/johnson-anthony-1670/.

• John K. Thornton, “Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663,” The Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1991): 25–40, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700025329;

• Linda M. Heywood, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017).

• Brenda Marie Osbey, “Writing the Words,” Callaloo, no. 11/13 (1981): 48–50, https://doi.org/10.2307/3043816.

• June Jordan. “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” in New perspectives on Black studies, edited by John W. Blassingame, 243. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

• Vincent Harding, “The Responsibilities of the Black Scholar to the Community,” in The State of Afro-American History : Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1986), http://archive.org/details/stateofafroameri0000unse_p1j1.

• Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Mariner Books, 1992).

• Deborah Gray White et al., Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2021).

• John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

Spring 2026 Office Hours are on Tuesdays, 2pm EST!!! Join us!!!

Other updates:

I’ll be joining the good folks at Kinfolk Tech for a teach-in on the legacy of the Haitian Revolution:

“As promised, registration for Haiti Freed Us All, our first virtual teach-in of the year has officially opened (🔗in bio)! You’re invited to Join us on Tuesday, February 17 at 6:30PM ET on Zoom for what’s sure to be an enlightening and inspiring discussion with an extraordinary panel. Through conversations with historians, artists, and archivists—Tasha Dougé (@convhersations_), Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson (@jessicamariejohnson_ ), Alain Martin (@alain.e.martin), and Dread Scott (@DreadScottArt)—we trace how Haiti’s example has fueled resistance from the Civil Rights Movement to contemporary struggles for reparations and decolonization across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.”

”We’re excited to be offering this first teach-in in partnership with @haiticulturalx”

”Registration is FREE and you can find the 🔗 in the Kinfolk Tech bio.”

Video Bonus for the Groceries and Coffee Crew

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We talked about it, I have cried about it, but I think we are also ready for a new year, a next world. Please and praise to all the powers that be—make it so. “I can hear her breathing” (Arundhati Roy).

Topics Covered:

This song:

My shirt which is part of this celebration (shout out to Black Women Radicals, I stay in their merch!):

• 45 Years of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Black Women Radicals, 2025,

These texts and trying to write when the world is on fire:

• Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (The New Press, 1995).

• Fire!! : A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, Volume 1, Number 1 (2023), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71448.

This exhibit:

This puzzle and the puzzle of emotions and hopes and dreams and heartbreaks it unleashed in me:

Our star this week was Harriet Jacobs, but not just Jacobs. Her grandmother Molly Horniblow. Her brother John (host of our audio note). Her kinship network (shout out to Shanae who joined live and is tracing her own family history of slavery and freedom in Edenton, NC) and Jacobs post-emancipation activism.

Jacobs spent seven years hiding in her grandmother’s garret, what she called her “loophole retreat.” This loophole of retreat is where many of us, as Black feminists, enter into her oeuvre and impact, but there is so much more to learn!

A brief Jacobs bibliography below:

• Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 479–86

• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Marie Childs (for the author, 1860), https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

• Rafia Zafar, “Introduction: Over-Exposed, Under-Exposed: Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1996), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570414.001

• Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds., Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, Annotated edition (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

• Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

• Tina Campt, “The Loophole of Retreat--An Invitation,” E-Flux 105 (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/302556/the-loophole-of-retreat-an-invitation/.

• Koritha Mitchell, “I Was Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and the Corporeality of Slavery’s Legacies,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 30, 2023, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-was-determined-to-remember-harriet-jacobs-and-the-corporeality-of-slaverys-legacies.

• Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Koritha Mitchell. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2023.

Our conversation took a brief tributary to discuss Marcus’s tale of slavery and redemption as told to Lauren Olamina in:

• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (Grand Central Publishing, 2000).

….and then we wove through a reading from the National Anti-Slavery Standard reporting a John S. Jacobs speech demanding enslaved and free people of African descent engage in armed self-defense against the Fugitive Slave Act.

• Black Abolitionist Archive https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/index.php?collectionCode=bulletins_bul

The image below is the original text of the newspaper article, downloaded from the Black Abolitionist Archive https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/index.php?collectionCode=bulletins_bul

I cannot wait to teach Black Freedom Struggles to 1896 next spring—both in seminar and here as a community offering. We have so much to learn from the fight and fury of those who preceded us.

Their fight and fury is the fire I am taking into 2026.

About the Groceries (Paid Subscriptions)

As the year closes, I’m thinking about how to express my appreciation for paid subscribers in a way that feels authentic. The subscriptions help and the support is valued, but I won’t pretend I am not lucky to have a J-O-B that pays the bills.

As 2026 rolls in, I’ll probably start making the lives and after work audio open to all but try to offer something else special for those who buy the groceries. Maybe post-live video? Maybe previews of the next book project and other writing? I have some projects on the horizon for 2026 that I want to commit to. Having you all as accountability will mean I actually meet a deadline.

Whatever emerges, please know I have appreciated the support this year (it does actually buy the groceries!) and I hope to offer more enticing nuggets of appreciation in the new year. Thank you for hanging out at my kitchen table.

And a video for you is below. *prayer hands*

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No office hours today, as you saw. Full disclosure: I had a minor surgical procedure so I am in bed recovering. All is well. Yesterday was the anniversary of Toni Cade Bambara’s transition to ancestor. I told a dear sista friend about my surgery and she sent me this.

What a blessing to be loved by Black women who care and share words of wisdom by other Black women!!!

So I paused to rest. But I didn’t want to leave hump day with nothing.

Please enjoy this late night office hours kitchen table session just for y’all. Meet Catharina, who fought Étienne de Boré for her freedom and won in 1770s Louisiana. This audio is part of a talk I gave at SUGAR, an event organized by the Puerto Rican Organization for the Performing Arts (PROPRA) led by Melanie Maldonado at the Orlando Museum of Art in honor of Dawoud Bey’s exhibition Evergreen. Thank you Melanie for the invitation and opportunity.

To me, Catharina's message is clear: Be clever, be brave, and be present. To the rumors of freedom. To the strategies for resistance. To the joy (labeled licentiousness) that will keep you sane enough to fight back. Be present. Be HERE.

Catharina's story is available here.

What is she saying to you?

This talk has a few erratum. Boré, for example, is of French descent, but born in the Americas and Dr. Ashby works on Barbados not Jamaica. I am sure there are more errors, feel feee to point them out and please forgive a fast speaking historian her fumbles.

Enjoy the story and see you live next week! I promise!

Overflowing with gratitude and joy for the work, and for our team, but especially our Community Circle and Advisory Board:

Malik Bartholomew (Dillard University, KnowLa Tours)

Freddi Evans (Author, Arts Educator, Independent Scholar)

Denise Frazier (Educator, Multimedia artist)

Shana M. griffin (Founder of PUNCTUATE, creator of DISPLACED)

Kathe Hambrick (Amistad Research Center)

Gia M. Hamilton (New Orleans Museum of African American History)

Phebe Hayes (Dean, University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Dianne Honoré (Gumbo Marie and Unheard Voices of LA)

Alex Lee (Genealogist)

Kristina Kay Robinson (Poet, Writer, Visual artist)

Mona Lisa Saloy (Dillard University)

Ibrahima Seck (Whitney Plantation and Slavery Museum)

Pat Schexnayder (Louisiana Creole Research Association)

Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir (Xavier University)

Leon Waters (Louisiana Museum of African American History)

Monique Moss (Louisiana Museum of African American History)

Bruce Sunpie Barnes (Musician, Culture Bearer)

Angela Proctor (Southern University, Baton Rouge)

If they'd said no, we would have shut the doors on this work, full stop. But they said YES and they keep saying yes, offering support, advice, critique and knowledge.

And in these times, fighting for Black histories of slavery as resistance, as demands for dignity, life, and humanity, is what we need.

More K4BL updates to come; but subscribe to the ecosystem newsletterto follow: .

“I have my style of data collection, collect the dog’s bark, the wind whispering, and collect nonverbal expressions.” - Ella in Louisiana by Edna Brodber

Special heart emojis to and today!

Loved the conversation today and the chance to unfurl on so many topics. I appreciate these Office Hours so much!! From Prince to 90s Black girl dramatics (shout out to Flava! IYKYK) to this week in politics to nuances of enslaved peoples' political knowledge to keeping it very real about African diaspora kinship to the book of the week (Edna Brodber’s Louisiana), we went wide and wild and somehow still found our way back home. That’s a true kitchen table conversation.

See below for topics covered. An additional video where I brainstorm how we can bring Myriam Chancy, Jenny Sharpe, and Brodber into conversation together is under the fold. And a bonus raw, unedited and uncaptioned clip posted on my Substack Notes as well.

Topics covered:

• These icons

• TENET a treatise about history (i.e. history as science fiction). Also how objectively fine Denzel’s son is.

• This song and the Prince Hits/B-Sides album

• This panel

• This master drummer

• This reflection on airline travel and how we can and should be kind as practice for a general strike

• This exhibition by Dawoud Bey at the Orlando Museum of Art https://omart.org/exhibitions/dawoud-bey/

• Evergreen Plantation -

  https://www.evergreenplantation.org/

• Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts Of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives, First edition (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002).

• Myriam J. A. Chancy, Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora, 1st edition (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

See you next week….

Find the Books on Bookshop

Video office hours excerpt for paid subscribers below. Office Hours and post-live videos are only for paid subscribers, something like a limited preview, just for y’all, of something wild and raw that I am still trying out. I am grateful for your support, patience, and generosity in these times of cruelty and hyper critique. Let’s keep having fun with this together.

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The trade off for y’all is the video today is available in full below. Enjoy me singing Brandy/Monica and going off about the state of generosity in the academy before the weekly reading—Jenny Sharpe’s Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (2020)—puts me in a trance state not unlike the one Ella experienced as she spoke to the dead through her recording device in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994).

This week has a bit of sparkle on it and we know why. Peace to the organizers, peace to the organizers, peace to the organizers!!

See you next week!!

The video that accompanies the audio above (and more) is below the fold. Office Hours and post-live videos are only for paid subscribers, something like a limited preview, just for y’all, of something wild and raw that I am still trying out. I am grateful for your support, patience, and generosity in these times of cruelty and hyper critique. Let’s keep having fun with this together.

Topics covered during Office Hours:

• This song

• This piece

• Diaspora Solidarities Lab’s Community Knowledge Lab - dslprojects.org

• Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (PublicAffairs, 2021).

• Heather Cox Richardson

  Letters from an American

  November 4, 2025 (Tuesday)

  So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before…

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  5 months ago · 8020 likes · 979 comments · Heather Cox Richardson

• This AstroBestie making me cry

• Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

• Erna Brodber, Louisiana (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2022).

• Marisa Parham, .“.Break .Dance,” Sx Archipelagos, no. 2 (July 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-xn3y-vj19.

• María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).

• Yomaira Figueroa, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Find the Books on Bookshop

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Objectivity, the Black digital, and enslaved testimony all in one office hour. Special thanks to for popping in and hanging out.

To hear a clip, catch me reading public/private divide during slavery via Thavolia Glymph above. Below, you can find me reading Blassingame and sharing my thoughts on black testimony and who is really telling the truth about slavery (under the money fold).

Topics Discussed:

• This song

• Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021).

• Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021).

Technically, I didn’t discuss this post, but in the Black Creative Worlds community offering, there is a day on this text:

• In Misogynoir Transformed, the experiences of Danielle “Struggling to be Heard” Cole and Antoinette Luna Myers (formerly ancestryinprogress on Tumblr).

• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017). (I cannot stop talking about this book)

• Yomaira Figueroa, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

• Jim Milliot |, “Authors’ Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI Moves Ahead,” PublishersWeekly.Com, October 28, 2025, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/98961-authors-class-action-lawsuit-against-openai-moves-forward.html.

• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

• Saidiya Hartman et al., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Updated edition, ed. Cameron Rowland (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).

• Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

• Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

• Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2001).

• Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household Cambridge University Press, 2008).

• John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

• John W. Blassingame, “The Mathematics of Slavery,” The Atlantic Monthly (1971-1981); Boston 234, no. 000002 (1974): 78. [Not “Mathematics of Black Life” - that was McKittrick]

• Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16–28.

• Jessica Marie Johnson, “Black New Orleans Is the Center of the World,” The Journal of African American History 103, no. 4 (2018): 641–51, https://doi.org/10.1086/699959.

See you next week!

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Audio for all above and a few topics below.

Topics Discussed:

• Essah Diaz et al., The AfroCENTRO Reader: Revisiting Black Puerto Rican Scholarship (CENTRO Journal, 2024), https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/publications/the-afrocentro-reader-revisiting-black-puerto-rican-scholarship/.

• Zora Neale Hurston et al., Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Amistad, 2018).

• Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurson: A Life in Letters (Anchor, 2007).

• Sarah Bruno, Essah Diaz, Jessica Marie Johnson, Daniel Morales-Armstrong, Special Issue of Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Water Proof: Olas de Memoria ( pring 2025 issue of Centro edited by members of Taller Entre Aguas, a Black Puerto Rican collective)

See you next week. Unless the world explodes with breaking news, expect more Barracoon or a Black DH (digital humanities) reading list. Let me know if there’s a preference.

Lives and post-live videos are still only for paid subscribers, something like a limited preview, just for y’all, of something wild and raw that I am still trying out. I am grateful for your support, patience, and generosity in these times of cruelty and hyper critique. Let’s keep having fun with this together.

But I will keep posting audio clips and topics for all. xo. jmj

Hi loves —

As you’ll see below, I am not live this week! Ac…

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Thank you to those who joined the live (special love to , , and ).

If you missed the conversation, a short audio clip of me reading from Mark Anthony Neal in the midst of stanning for Black popular culture as a global Black love language of healing, politics and critique is below (for paid subscribers a longer video clip of me discussing the late Clyde Woods, beloved mentor and Black studies genius, is below the fold—thank you for supporting the work).

Topics Discussed

Rest in peace beautiful soul….this one hurts.

• Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017).

• Bettina Judd, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022).

• Lindsey Stewart, The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic (2025).

• Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (Routledge, 2013).

• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017).

• Meredith D. Clark, We Tried to Tell Y’All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives (Oxford University Press, 2025).

• Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021).

• Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Amistad Books, 2008).

• Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class Simon and Schuster, 1996).

If I missed any topics, let me know.

Find the Books on Bookshop

Next Wednesday:

I’ll be back on at 12:00 EST. Leave a comment or a chat with topics you want to hear discussed.

And thank you for coming to the kitchen table and into this experiment with me. I hope it feeds you.

Lives and post-live videos are still only for paid subscribers, something like a limited preview, just for y’all, of something wild and raw that I am still trying out. I am grateful for your support, patience, and generosity in these times of cruelty and hyper critique. Let’s keep having fun with this together.

But I will keep posting audio clips and topics for all. xo. jmj

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Went live and had a blast. If you popped in (hey !), thank you! The video was “not my favorite…

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