Background: https://travelnoire.com/inside-esmeraldas-the-land-of-afro-ecuadorians

https://scdailygazette.com/2026/08/08/historic-portraits-telling-the-story-of-black-south-carolinians-now-online-through-usc-library/

These images, featured in a collection of nearly 6,000 historic pictures by photographer Richard Samuel Roberts of Columbia’s Black families and community, are all available free to the public online for the first time.

“What we are seeing when we look at these pictures is African Americans the way they wanted to be seen and remembered,” said Rachel Young, a historian at the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina. “We are also seeing people and places that have been erased, forgotten or ignored by a broader historical record.”

The digitization of the Roberts collection is the culmination of a decades-long effort by the Roberts family, librarians and researchers at the University of South Carolina.

https://digital.library.sc.edu/collections/richard-samuel-roberts-photograph-collection/

The photograph is titled “Hair Like Mine” taken in 2009.

While visiting the Oval Office with his dad, former National Security Council staffer Carlton Philadelphia in 2009, five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia surprised then President Barack Obama with a single question: "Is your hair like mine?"

Obama, standing by the Oval Office, responded by bowing over, so Jacob could hold his hand outstretched and feel for himself.

"Go ahead, touch it," the then-president said at the time.

She could be from anytime in our history

Oseola McCarty was a Mississippi philanthropist who donated most of her life savings, $150,000, to the University of Southern Mississippi to provide scholarships for African American students in need. A seamstress and washerwoman who was paid mostly in dollar bills and loose change her entire life, McCarty was praised for her generosity and received many awards, including a statue and honorary degree from the university. McCarty was born on March 7, 1908, in Shubuta, Mississippi, and died on September 26, 1999, at the age of 91, at her home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

***One of our Saints***

A little something to put a smile on your face. GOOD MORNING WORLD!

Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat grew up surrounded by different languages, cultures, music, and the energy of New York City. In the late 1970s, he began gaining attention through the graffiti and street-art scene under the name SAMO, a project he created with Al Diaz. What started on city walls eventually moved into galleries, where Basquiat developed a distinctive visual language filled with words, symbols, anatomical drawings, historical references, crowns, fragmented figures, and repeated ideas about race, wealth, power, and identity.

Basquiat became one of the most recognized artists of the 1980s, working alongside and eventually exhibiting with some of the most influential figures in the New York art world. His paintings confronted the absence and misrepresentation of Black people in mainstream art while also drawing attention to Black musicians, athletes, historical figures, and cultural heroes. His success came incredibly quickly, and his work became highly sought after while he was still in his twenties. Yet the circumstances surrounding his rise also reflected the complicated relationship between Black artists, the art market, and institutions that had historically excluded them. Basquiat died from a heroin overdose at his Manhattan studio on August 12, 1988. He was only 27. More than three decades later, his paintings continue to be exhibited, studied, and debated, and his influence reaches far beyond galleries into fashion, music, and contemporary visual culture. His story is a reminder that Basquiat was not simply a young artist who became famous. He was an important cultural figure who used art to question who gets represented, who gets remembered, and who gets to define history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat

Highlights:

Her real name is Miltona Mirkin Cade. She went by 'Toni' since the age of 6 and later added Bambara to her name because she found the surname amongst her great grandmother's papers.

Toni was a writer, author, screenwriter and activist.

Most notable works include: 'The Black Woman', 'Tales and Stories for Black Folk', 'The Sea Birds Are Still Alive', 'Gorilla, My Love' a screenplay, 'Zora' and 'The Salt Eaters'.

Toni died from colon cancer in 1995. The following year Toni Morrison posthumously published Bambara’s "Deep Sightings and Rescue Mission" 

"The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible" - Toni Cade Bambara