GOT TIME

Christopher John

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History

A candid exchange of thoughts and perspectives where Black history intersects with art, culture, politics, and shades of social realities.

4d ago

A Few Presidential Libraries Including Obama

Four presidents. Four libraries. This episode explores the LBJ Library, where the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act reshaped the law. The JFK Library, where leadership, public service, and the enduring relevance of American ideals converge. The Carter Library, where human rights became foreign policy, but domestic racial equity continues to be a complicated story. And finally, the Obama Presidential Center, the first of its kind built without federal archives, built instead as a living investment on Chicago's South Side. Christopher John offers a candid reflection on the institutions, what resonated with him, and what it means for a nation still deciding how honestly it will tell its own story.
Oct 22

America Two-Fiddie | Hair, Housing, and More

When and how did Black hair become political in America? And what does that long history tell us about why we are still fighting this fight in 2026? Here is the answer. It was never about hair. American beauty standards labeled natural Black hair "unkempt" and "unprofessional," pressuring generations to straighten, conform, and shrink. That was not a trend. It was a system of racial control and assimilation. Then came the 1960s and 70s, when the Afro became a crown of the Black Power movement, a visible rejection of Eurocentric norms and a declaration of cultural pride. Wearing your hair as it grows from your head became an act of resistance. In this episode, we explain the CROWN Act, which stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair. It protects people from discrimination based on hair texture and protective styles like braids, locs, and twists in schools and workplaces. We ask why a law like this is needed at all, and why a federal version keeps stalling in Congress. But hair is only the doorway. Walk through it and you land in the neighborhood where redlining still draws the map. Between 1935 and 1940, the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation graded 239 cities by race, ethnicity, and perceived risk. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were marked red, and federally backed mortgages vanished. The Federal Housing Administration refused to insure loans in those areas while subsidizing white suburban growth. Today, more than 8 million Americans still live in formerly redlined neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed the practice, but the patterns did not disappear. They evolved. Press play. Learn the history. Then ask who is leading with humanity, and who is just leading.
Oct 13

Black Women in Politics ft. Dr. Vaneesa Enoch “Doc Enoch”

Dr. Vaneesa Enoch comes to the table for a provocative conversation that challenges conventional narratives about power, politics, and who gets to shape the future of American democracy. Long before they were elected to public office, Black women were organizing communities, building institutions, mentoring future leaders, and creating the political infrastructure that has sustained movements for justice and equality. Yet their leadership has too often been overlooked, undervalued, or deliberately marginalized. This episode examines the undeniable influence of Black women as pioneers of political organizing, civic engagement, and transformational leadership. We explore why Black women consistently demonstrate extraordinary campaign effectiveness and voter mobilization while continuing to confront systemic barriers, including fundraising inequities, racialized and gendered stereotypes, media scrutiny, and institutional gatekeeping. Dr. Enoch also shares the personal convictions that inspired her congressional candidacy, offering insight into the challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities of seeking public office in an era marked by deep political division and heightened attacks on representative democracy. At its core, this candid conversation asks a bold question: What would American democracy look like if the leadership, vision, and political labor of Black women were no longer treated as exceptional, but recognized as essential? Through history, experience, and an unwavering commitment to public service, this episode invites listeners to reconsider who has truthfully been doing the work of strengthening our democracy and who will help shape its future. For more information: https://enochforcongress.com/
Sep 22

ABOUT TIME | The Black Church & Social Justice ft. Rev. Dr. Richard Hughes

September is International Underground Railroad Month. And if you're looking for the blueprint on civil disobedience converged with social justice, look no further than the UGRR itself, a movement the Black church led. In this candid conversation, Rev. Dr. Richard Hughes shares his poignant perspective on the social justice identity of the Black Church. We ask the question too many congregations are avoiding: what happened to the church that used to hide freedom seekers in its basement and now can't say the word "injustice" from the pulpit? Somewhere between then and now, too many of our churches have adopted capitalistic mindset. Prosperity gospel replacing liberation gospel. Comfort replacing conviction. The same institution that once provided refuge for Freedom Seekers now hesitates to name injustices. It's ABOUT TIME we call it what it is!
Sep 16

Black Cinema & Cultural Memory ft. Donna Dabbs

For generations, Black filmmakers have challenged the stories America reveals about itself, reclaiming narratives too often erased, distorted, or ignored. Every frame has the power to preserve memory, spark dialogue, and inspire movements that transcend the screen. In this episode of GOT TIME with Christopher John, we talk with Donna Dabbs, founder and executive director of the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival (GCUFF), to explore how one of the nation's premier Black film festivals has become far more than a showcase for independent cinema. It has become a cultural institution where history, identity, creativity, and community converge. Celebrating its fifteenth year, GCUFF continues to elevate filmmakers from across the African Diaspora, creating opportunities for emerging artists while connecting audiences to stories that educate, challenge, and transform. Together, we examine why authentic representation matters, how Black film functions as both historical record and cultural resistance, and why independent storytellers remain essential to preserving the richness and complexity of the Black experience. Our conversation explores the responsibility of cultural institutions to invest in Black creative voices, the evolution of independent filmmaking, the importance of creating spaces where underrepresented stories can flourish, and the enduring relationship between cinema, social justice, and collective memory. From documentaries that uncover forgotten histories to narrative films that imagine new futures, this episode reminds us that Black cinema is not simply entertainment. It is preservation, protest, and possibilities. Link: Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival
Sep 14

Ethical Leadership & Academic Freedom ft. Dr. Darryl B. Rice “Dr. Ice”

What happens when the institution entrusted with the pursuit of truth becomes an instrument of suppression? What does ethical leadership look like when the policy is the problem? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Darryl B. Rice, the Richard T. Farmer Associate Professor of Management at Miami University and Associate Editor at the Journal of Managerial Psychology. An award-winning scholar whose research centers organizational justice, behavioral ethics, well-being, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Dr. Rice brings both intellectual firepower and lived experience to a conversation that is as urgent as it is clarifying. Dr. Rice isn't just studying ethical leadership from a distance; he is living it in real time. In April 2025, Miami University began dismantling its DEI programs and initiatives in compliance with Ohio's Senate Bill 1, the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, which effectively prohibits DEI offices and training courses at public universities. Dr. Rice, who built a record of service through DEI committees, the Across-the-Divide Conference, the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, and the Inclusive Excellence Faculty Fellows Program, filed a federal lawsuit against Miami University's Board of Trustees in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, arguing that the closures violated his First Amendment rights and his academic freedom as a tenured faculty member. This episode doesn't just cover a lawsuit. It excavates the architecture of institutional power, the weaponization of legislation against protected speech, and what it costs a scholar, personally and professionally, to stand on the side of justice when the institution moves against it.
Sep 2

By Any Means: The Real Story THEY Won't Tell

Hollywood's new civil rights thriller invents a mafia hitman to share the spotlight with a Black FBI agent hunting the killers of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi. The real story needs no invention. This episode tells the true account of Vernon Dahmer, a Black farmer and NAACP leader who was firebombed and murdered by the Klan for offering to pay poll taxes so his neighbors could vote and asks why the truth still isn't enough for the big screen.
Aug 27

The Making of a Global Citizen ft. Dr. Michael A. Battle Sr.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Michael A. Battle, Sr., chaplain, scholar, and former U.S. Ambassador to both the African Union and Tanzania, for a conversation that refuses to stay small. We talk about foreign policy that serves people instead of politics. We talk about standing in rooms with Nelson Mandela and Ethiopian leadership, and what it means to represent a country that hasn't always represented you. We illuminate Dr. Battle's 2024 article in Ambassadors Review, a publication of The Council of American Ambassadors, examining BRICS, the multilateral alliance among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and the shifting contest among nations to shape public opinion across the African continent. His argument is direct: the United States needs to pursue deeper trade and investment with African nations, not just extract from them. Dr. Battle makes the case that the United States should be partnering directly with African nations, both for supply and for value added production, recognizing Africa's global significance as an economic partner rather than a resource to compete over. This is a candid conversation that challenges us to rethink what citizenship means when the world is our neighborhood. Dr. Battle has spent a lifetime proving that diplomacy isn't abstract. It's personal. It's urgent. And it starts long before anyone hands you a title.
Aug 13

Artistic Portals of Histories ft. Sojourner Tru

What happens when history becomes a portal to the future? In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Sojourner Tru to explore Portals of Remembrance, a powerful solo exhibition that merges archival photographs with digital art to reimagine the Black experience across time. Drawing from lesser-known histories of agricultural labor and migration, Sojourner Tru transforms historical fragments into expansive visual landscapes where memory and imagination coexist. Her work invites us to move beyond simply remembering the past and instead engage history as a living force that shapes new possibilities. Through each composition, she "time walks" across generations, constructing worlds that honor ancestral resilience while envisioning liberated Black futures. Together, we examine the intersection of public history, contemporary art, and Afrofuturism, asking how artistic practice can recover overlooked narratives while creating new ones. This conversation challenges us to see archives not as static repositories of the past, but as portals that inspire innovation, identity, and collective imagination. If Afrofuturism asks us to imagine what is possible, Portals of Remembrance reminds us that the blueprint for those futures is already embedded within the histories we choose to remember.
Aug 10

America Two-Fiddie | Understanding Reparatory Justice

As America 250 continues, one question refuses to be drowned out by pageantry: What does this nation owe to the people it built itself upon? In this installment of America Two-Fiddie, we examine the realities of reparatory justice: what it is, what it demands, and why the discomfort it produces is itself a form of evidence. Reparatory justice is not simply a check in the mail. It is a reckoning encompassing material, symbolic, and structural action aimed at restoring dignity, addressing inequalities rooted in enslavement and colonialism, and ensuring the machinery of harm is dismantled rather than rebranded. No story makes that demand more vividly than what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921. In less than 24 hours, a White mob aided by official complicity killed as many as 300 Black Tulsans, displaced thousands, and destroyed hundreds of businesses, homes, churches, and schools. What really sparked the violence? An interracial relationship. The fragility of white social order, threatened by proximity across the color line, ignited one of the deadliest acts of racial terror in American history. We explore Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America by attorney and activist Damario Solomon-Simmons, a book that chronicles the legal and moral struggle to address the injustices inflicted on Greenwood and its survivors. Solomon-Simmons represented three centenarian survivors of the massacre, navigating courtrooms from Tulsa to the nation's capital in a pursuit of reparations that are equal parts legal brief and moral indictment. Reparatory justice is not radical. It is what accountability looks like when the damage is this deep.
Aug 6

America Two-Fiddie | Preserving Black Places & Spaces

Some buildings are more than brick and mortar. They are testimonies of resistance. They are the physical evidence that we were here and that we built, gathered, worshipped, organized, and thrived. In this installment, we explore the preservation of Black places and spaces: what it means to protect them, what we lose when we don't, and who is doing the sacred, unglamorous work of making sure our built environment survives the bulldozer of so-called progress. Every time a Black historic site is saved, someone fought for it. Every time one falls, someone looked the other way. Memory has an agenda and so does erasure. The deliberate neglect of Black historic structures is itself a form of violence: slow, bureaucratic, and dressed up in the language of development. We examine how the fight to preserve Black places is inseparable from the fight for Black dignity and why the activism of memory is as urgent as any march, any ballot, any courtroom. We illuminate the preservation of the historic Manse Hotel in the heart of Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, a landmark of Black social life, community gathering, and cultural dignity in a neighborhood that has weathered decades of disinvestment and displacement. The Manse is not just a building with a past. It is a call to the present. Preservation is proclamation. Memory is mission. The places we protect tell the world who we believe deserves to be remembered and the places we abandon say the same thing, even louder. Do the work. Save the places. Tell the stories.
Aug 4

America Two-Fiddie | Idealism We Have Never Seen

What if the greatest challenge facing America isn't that we've fallen short of our ideals, but that we've convinced ourselves we've already achieved them? As the nation commemorates America 250, this installment turns to the enduring words of James Baldwin, whose piercing observation still echoes across generations: he had never seen the American idealism this country so often proclaims. This installment is not an argument against patriotism. It is an invitation to practice a more courageous one. Beginning with Baldwin's unforgettable reflections, we examine the distance between America's cherished promises and its lived realities. From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, from national mythmaking to contemporary debates over democracy, the conversation explores a recurring pattern: each time the nation approaches its highest ideals, a spirit of insecurity emerges to pull it back. Rather than celebrating America's 250th birthday through nostalgia alone, this episode asks listeners to embrace a deeper form of remembrance rooted in honesty, accountability, and hope. Because ideals are not measured by the stories, we tell ourselves, they are measured by the courage to close the distance between aspiration and action. If Baldwin's words still feel urgent today, perhaps it is because they were never meant for one generation alone. They are an unfinished invitation to become the nation we have long imagined but have yet to fully create.

12 Episodes

A candid exchange of thoughts and perspectives where Black history intersects with art, culture, politics, and shades of social realities.

Creator

Christopher John
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

12
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 GOT TIME