Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast

Dennis Harvey

Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast brings history back to the forefront through daily "This Day in Black History" episodes. From groundbreaking achievements and pivotal events in African American history to stories from Africa and the global African diaspora, each episode explores the people, movements, and moments that shaped Black America and influenced the world. Discover forgotten stories, celebrate enduring legacies, and reconnect with the past to better understand the present.

  1. 3h ago

    August 31, 1962: Fannie Lou Hamer Tries to Vote

    This Day in History: On August 31, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer and seventeen neighbors boarded a bus in Ruleville, Mississippi, and rode to the Sunflower County Courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. What happened next — eviction, economic retaliation, and a hail of gunfire — did not stop her. It started her. This episode traces the moment a sharecropper became a movement leader, and why that courthouse trip changed the course of American democracy. Sources: PBS American Experience; Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Mississippi History Now); Fannie Lou Hamer, sworn testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, August 22, 1964 (via American RadioWorks); National Women's History Museum; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

  2. 12h ago

    The Southern Underground Railroad

    They taught you the Underground Railroad only ran NORTH. That map was a lie by omission. In the premiere of our 28-episode series, we correct a 125-year-old erasure. Freedom didn't just run north to Canada - it ran SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, and ACROSS OPEN WATER. In this episode, Mr. Black History breaks down the 4 freedom corridors that make up The Southern Underground Railroad and why you never learned them in school. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: Why the "North = Good / South = Bad" narrative is a simplified myth that lets America off the hookThe story of Fort Mose (1738) - the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the U.S., 125 years before EmancipationWho Francisco Menéndez was - the Mandinka man who survived the Middle Passage and commanded the Black militia of Fort MoseHow the Texas-Mexico corridor became a freedom line after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 - 34 years before the U.S.The Gulf maritime road and the hidden internal maroon nations inside the Great Dismal Swamp, Florida, and LouisianaWhy this history is navigation for 2026 - from TPS to borders to Black self-governanceThis is not the Reverse Underground Railroad. This is freedom sought, claimed, and built by our ancestors. This series is Sankofa - reaching back to retrieve what was lost so we can carry it forward. New episodes of The Southern Underground Railroad drop EVERY MONDAY for 31 weeks. Sankofa Chronicles continues Wednesdays & Fridays. Subscribe, rate, and share this with one person who still thinks the arrows only pointed north. Independent Black history media survives by word of mouth. You are the infrastructure. SOURCES & FURTHER READING FOR THIS EPISODE: Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press, 1999. [Core source on Fort Mose and the 1693 Spanish Royal Decree] Fort Mose Historical Society & Florida State Parks - Fort Mose Site (St. Augustine, FL), established 1738. Spanish Royal Decree of 1693 (Recopilación) - Offering asylum/freedom to fugitives from British slavery who converted to Catholicism. Mexico Abolition Decree - President Vicente Guerrero, September 15, 1829. Abolished slavery 34 years before the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Estimates on Texas-Mexico crossings (3,000-10,000 pre-Civil War) - documented in Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Basic Books, 2020. Great Dismal Swamp maroon research - Sayers, Daniel O. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People. University Press of Florida, 2014. Keep looking back so we can move forward. Next Episode: Episode 2 - Fort Mose: The First Free Place

  3. Trailer

    Trailer: Southern Underground Railroad

    About this trailer: The map you learned in school was a lie by omission. Welcome to The Southern Underground Railroad - a 28-episode, 31-week series from Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast, hosted by Mr. Black History. For over 125 years, free Black people built settlements, militias, and sovereign nations that ran SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, and ACROSS WATER - not just north. If you only know Harriet Tubman and Canada, this series is for you. In this series we walk Fort Mose, the Rio Grande, the Gulf maritime road, and the Great Dismal Swamp. Hit FOLLOW and turn on notifications. Episode 1: The Map Was A Lie - is out now. 🎧 New episodes every Monday.

  4. 3d ago

    Jim Crow's Legal Blueprint: Breaking Down Plessy v. Ferguson

    In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave racial segregation the full weight of American law. In this episode, we go deep on Plessy v. Ferguson - the case, the man, and the machinery it put in motion. Homer Plessy was a light-skinned Black man who deliberately boarded a whites-only train car to challenge Louisiana's Separate Car Act. The Court ruled 7-1 against him, and "separate but equal" became the law of the land for the next 58 years. We break down what the justices actually argued, what Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent revealed about the conscience of that era, and how this single ruling became the legal foundation for every Jim Crow law that followed. This history lives in our schools, our neighborhoods, and our institutions to this day. Know the blueprint. Know the fight. Know your history.

  5. 4d ago

    The Southbound Underground Railroad to Mexico

    The Underground Railroad ran south to Mexico. Black Seminoles, Mascogos & Mexico's Black president who abolished slavery. In 1829, Afro-Mexican President Vicente Guerrero freed every slave in Mexico while Texas was still Mexican territory. When Texas seceded in 1836 to protect slavery, 3,000 to 10,000 Black freedom seekers walked 150 miles through the Nueces Strip to freedom in Coahuila. Mexico refused every US Fugitive Slave extradition demand in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857. Mexico gave them land. Black Seminoles led by Wild Cat and John Horse (Captain Juan Caballo) founded El Nacimiento. Granted 26 square miles along the Rio Sabinas, they became Mexico's border army, fighting Texas Rangers and slave catchers who crossed to kidnap people like Mathilde Hennes in Reynosa. In 1857, Mexico wrote it into its Constitution, Article 2: slaves recover freedom by touching Mexican soil. Today, 300 Mascogo descendants still live in El Nacimiento, celebrating Juneteenth as Día de los Negros with capuyuye spirituals, tetapún and soske. If you thought the Rio Grande was a wall, this is the history Texas erased.

  6. 5d ago

    Land Was Citizenship. A House Was A Ballot.

    Black history podcast: Weeksville Brooklyn, the free Black town with land ownership, doctors & schools that America forgot. From James Weeks buying ballots with dirt to Susan Smith McKinney becoming New York's first Black woman doctor, we explore how 521 free Black people built an independent town in the 1830s—and how the 1863 Draft Riots nearly burned it all down. Then 1966: four wooden houses spotted from a plane proved Weeksville was real. Welcome to Sankofa Chronicles, where we go back and fetch what they erased. Subscribe for hidden Black history every week.

  7. 6d ago

    The Great Land Give-Back: How America Promised 40 Acres and Repossessed the Whole Deal

    Black history podcast exposes Forty Acres and a Mule, Special Field Order No. 15, and the Reconstruction land theft that launched the Black American wealth gap in 1865. This episode breaks down the federal betrayal behind sharecropping, land theft, and economic injustice in Black history.

  8. Aug 24

    The Black Surgeon Who Fixed America's Heart (And Got Written Out of the Recovery)

    Daniel Hale Williams, a black surgeon, performs one of the world's first successful open-heart surgeries in 1893, inside a Chicago hospital he built himself because no one else would let him operate. This episode uncovers the true story behind Provident Hospital, Black medical history, and the surgeon erased from American textbooks. A deep dive into Black excellence in medicine, Black history facts, and the fight for Black doctors' rights in the 19th century.

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Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast brings history back to the forefront through daily "This Day in Black History" episodes. From groundbreaking achievements and pivotal events in African American history to stories from Africa and the global African diaspora, each episode explores the people, movements, and moments that shaped Black America and influenced the world. Discover forgotten stories, celebrate enduring legacies, and reconnect with the past to better understand the present.

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