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.

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.
Jul 30

America Two-Fiddie | The Hidden Curriculum

Ryan Clark's firing from ESPN isn't just a sports media story, it's a case study of the hidden curriculum, the unwritten rules Black professionals learn just to survive inside institutions never built for them. This installment unpacks Clark's own words on concession and double standards, connects them to 2026's widening Black unemployment gap, and traces a straight line from corporate "dictatorship" culture back to the historical practice of buck breaking. A provocative look at survival, consciousness, and why understanding the game was never the same as being free from it.
Jul 28

America Two-Fiddie | Lift EVERY Voice

It's about time to account for every voice, especially the voices of the oppressed and disenfranchised who built the pathway to our present day. This episode digs into the origin story behind "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song many Black schools opened their day with as early as 1910, two decades before "The Star-Spangled Banner" was even named the official national anthem. We trace the life of James Weldon Johnson: composer, diplomat, civil rights activist, and the son of Bahamian immigrants, who became one of Florida's first Black attorneys, founded the state's first Black newspaper, and transformed a Broadway songwriting career into an anthem that would outlast the moment it was written for. Along the way, this episode questions the nostalgic mythology built around Abraham Lincoln in early twentieth century Black memory, and holds it up against the more complicated, agitator driven truth of emancipation. It also traces a throughline from the Niagara Movement to the founding of the NAACP to the legacy of HBCUs, tracking a pattern of Black inclusion and coalition building that has defined resistance movements for generations, even as some of the institutions born from it now wrestle with how far they've drifted from that original vision. This is a conversation about memory, authorship, and who gets remembered as a contributor of the American story, and who gets written into a footnote. #LiftEveryVoiceAndSing #America250 #JamesWeldonJohnson #BlackNationalAnthem #BlackHistory #NiagaraMovement #NAACP #HBCU #GTWCJ #ReclaimTheNarrative
Jul 21

America Two-Fiddie | From Colonization to Gentrification

What happens when the fight for land, belonging, and community never truly ends, but simply changes its language? In this episode, Christopher John illuminates the remarkable story of Zipporah Potter Atkins, a Black woman who purchased a home in Boston in 1670, long before the founding of the United States. Her story challenges familiar narratives about Black history and reveals how Black people claimed space, built communities, and exercised agency even as laws increasingly sought to deny those rights. From the Age of Discovery and the rise of colonialism to Boston's historic North Slope, home to one of America's most influential free Black communities, this episode traces the enduring relationship between land, power, and displacement. By connecting the histories of colonization, enslavement, abolition, and urban development, CJ examines how today's gentrification echoes older systems of removal, replacing people while preserving only fragments of their stories. Rather than treating these histories as isolated events, this conversation asks listeners to recognize recurring patterns that continue to shape American cities and communities. Through the stories of the African Meeting House, the Abiel Smith School, and the transformation of Beacon Hill, we explore who gets to belong, who gets displaced, and who ultimately controls the narrative of place. This episode challenges us to move beyond patriotic mythology and engage in a more honest history that acknowledges both the resilience of Black communities and the systems that have repeatedly sought to erase them. It is a conversation about memory, historical preservation, public history, and the urgent responsibility to ask not only what we preserve, but who is still able to call a place home. #BlackHistory #America250 #PublicHistory #AfricanAmericanHistory #ZipporahPotterAtkins #BeaconHill #BostonHistory #MuseumEducation #HistoricalMemory #Gentrification #Colonization #UrbanHistory #CommunityHistory #HistoryMatters #BlackCommunities #AmericanHistory #HistoricPreservation #Storytelling #KnowYourHistory

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