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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 5h

1919-1926: Jessie Redmon Fauset read unsolicited manuscripts at The Crisis.

Hughes. Cullen. Toomer. McKay. Larsen.

The Harlem Renaissance.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

October 1919. Jessie Redmon Fauset left Philadelphia, moved to New York, became literary editor of The Crisis. Her office at 70 Fifth Avenue. She'd been writing for the magazine for years—poems, ...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 2d

Every Tuesday for 27 years, Benjamin E. Mays told Morehouse students their minds were free.

Spring 1960: They closed 16 Atlanta lunch counters in one afternoon.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Chapel wasn't optional at Morehouse when Benjamin E. Mays was president. Every Tuesday morning, Sale Hall filled with students—freshmen in front rows, seniors in back, all required to be there. Mays ...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 3d

The Boy King showed us a boy in 1986. The prophet was already dead. We’ve been saying “one day, one day” ever since.

One Day, One Day

Vol. 1, Issue 35 | October 13, 2025 - October 19, 2025

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 5d

Oscar Micheaux made 44 films over 30 years–carrying every reel theater to theater himself. Most people have never heard his name.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Oscar Micheaux wrote The Homesteader in 1917. His own story, barely disguised. A Black man claims land in South Dakota, marries a preacher's daughter, loses everything when her father sells the prop...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 7d

What happens when you teach women chemistry, bookkeeping, and how to keep 100% of their profits?

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Madam C.J. Walker made a formula in St. Louis and went door to door. At churches and lodges, in women's kitchens, she demonstrated the Walker Method—washed hair with her gentle shampoo, worked the tr...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 8d

Pullman porters carried the Chicago Defender in their luggage, folded inside uniforms, tucked between cargo.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Robert Sengstacke Abbott started the Chicago Defender in his landlord's kitchen in 1905 with 25 cents. He knew what people needed to see: train schedules North, photographs of Chicago's schools and ...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 10d

A bone saw. A 4 a.m. flight. A family waiting. The stories news organizations aren’t covering.

The Substance of Things Hoped For

Vol. 1, Issue 34 | October 6, 2025 - October 12, 2025

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 11d

2013: A compilation.

2021: A library shipping rare books for free.

2025: An institution.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

In 2013, Solange Knowles commissioned Rashaad Newsome to wrap a Lamborghini. She made a compilation. Twelve tracks. No record stores. She sold them from the Lamborghini, hand to hand, meeting people ...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 12d

An atlas. Seventy-seven cents. A rooftop. A magazine page. An IV drip.

Five essays that won’t let you look away…

The Bridge: Stories from Our Third Quarter

Vol. 1, Summer Issue | October 2, 2025 — Five Stories from The Black Third’s Third Quarter

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 13d

One reporter walked into an Oakland press conference in 1968 knowing what the other reporters didn’t know they didn’t know.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Belva Davis walked into an Oakland press conference in 1968 knowing what the other reporters didn't know they didn't know. She knew Bobby Seale. She knew Huey Newton. She knew the mothers lining up a...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 14d

The phone rang at 2 a.m.

A performer in Chicago. Three days from eviction.

Fredi Washington made calls. By morning, problem solved.

It was 1937. Washington was just getting started.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

The phone rang at 2 a.m. A performer in Chicago, three days from eviction. Fredi Washington made calls—a theater owner, a producer, someone with connections. By morning, rent was paid and work was lin...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 16d

Mildred Thompson painted magnetic fields in a German studio covered in sawdust. Then settled in Atlanta where hundreds of students lined hallways and waited years for her class.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Mildred Thompson knew that humans can hear eleven octaves of sound but see only one octave of color. In the early 1960s, she stood on New York's Lower East Side, looking at vegetable crates someone h...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 17d

In 1996, when Black churches burned, federal coordination led to legislation in six months. That coordination hasn’t returned.

What Happens to a Dream Deferred?

Vol. 1, Issue 33 | September 29, 2025 - October 5, 2025

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 19d

Luxury was just a code—and Dapper Dan cracked it.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

In 1980s Harlem, Daniel "Dapper Dan" Day discovered that luxury was just a code—and like any code, it could be cracked. His 125th Street boutique, open around the clock, operated on a made-to-order m...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 20d

What looked like shopping was strategy. What looked like luxury was liberation.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Eunice Johnson spent over $1 million a year on couture—not as indulgence, but as investment. Each Dior dress, each Valentino gown became raw material for a platform of her own making: Ebony Fashion F...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 21d

She turned worship into rebellion and her body into revolutionary scripture…

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Grace Jones understood something her Apostolic preacher father never intended to teach: the body in motion creates its own gospel. Raised Pentecostal, she learned early that flesh could be both sacre...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 23d

From a grandmother’s sewing machine to the Battle of Versailles, the erratic, rebellious line that rewrote the rules of American fashion…

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Stephen Burrows was eight years old when he discovered the zigzag stitch on his grandmother’s sewing machine. The erratic, rebellious line fascinated him—so different from the straight, obedient sea...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 24d

In 1990, my stepfather spread an atlas across his SUV’s hood on a back road in Florida. He never made it to where he was going.

I, Too, Sing America

Vol. 1, Issue 32 | September 22, 2025 - September 28, 2025

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 26d

A daughter’s quest to decode her father’s words changed American film forever.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot)

Julie Dash spent her childhood listening to her father speak a language she couldn't understand. The sounds haunted her—musical, ancient, incomprehensible. Decades later, she discovered he was speaki...

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Khalilah L. Liptrot @khalilahliptrot.bsky.social · 28d

A young man had his whole life mapped out. Romance languages at UCLA. Teaching. A respectable career.

Then he saw a performance that changed everything…