Khalilah L. Liptrot

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) They told Abbey Lincoln she’d ruined her voice. After We Insist!, after Straight Ahead. Three years of screaming instead of singing. Making her voice guttural, raw—sounding like the streets, like wha...

They told Abbey Lincoln she’d ruined her voice.

She stopped recording for 30 years.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Tongues Untied opens with voices chanting. Brother to brother. Brother to brother. Rhythmic. Insistent. A call. Then: snap. Gospel. Vogueing. Men dancing in a club. Men in church clothes. The same ...

Marlon Riggs filmed Black gay men voguing in the club and testifying in church.

Marginalia Vol. 1, Small Business Saturday Issue | November 29, 2025 – A woman spent decades clipping Black wedding announcements so we'd remember. Books do this work too.

She wrote their names in the margins so we’d remember.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Queen Nanny led the Windward Maroons in Jamaica's Blue Mountains. She and her people—formerly enslaved Africans—held the high ground through the 1720s and beyond. They built Nanny Town. Fortified it...

Jamaica put a guerrilla warfare genius on the $500 bill.

His Name Was Nathaniel Vol. 1, Thanksgiving Day Issue | November 27, 2025 – A meditation on loss, where a grandmother's apron and a dying man's hands created a language of love that transcended fear.

My grandmother gave him her apron. The one no one else could touch. It was 1985. His last Thanksgiving.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's grandmother cooked by vibration. The feel of a meal. The smell. The instinct. Grosvenor learned the same way. 1970. She published Vibration Cooking: or, the Travel Notes ...

“Cookbooks ain’t nothing but a racist hustle.” — Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) George Washington Carver's fingernails were always black. Other professors at Tuskegee wore gloves in the laboratory. Carver put his hands in the dirt. He wasn't testing soil. He was listening to it...

George Washington Carver put his hands in Alabama’s red earth and listened…

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Black children started disappearing in Atlanta the Summer of 1979. By 1981, 28 children dead. At least. The real number? Nobody with power wanted to say. Police called them runaways. Accidents. Not ...

Atlanta, 1981. Twenty-eight Black children dead. Cade Bambara investigated for years. Died writing the truth. Toni Morrison made sure it was published.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Christmas 1966. M.L. needed someone he could trust with the most dangerous speech of his life. He asked Vincent Harding. Vietnam. Militarism. The United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence ...

Christmas 1966. Martin Luther King Jr. asked Vincent Harding to write the words that would cost him everything.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Cambridge, Maryland. Summer 1963. Gloria Richardson had been organizing for two years. Sit-ins. Protests. Economic boycotts that broke white businesses. The National Guard occupied her city. Bayonet...

“A first-class citizen does not beg for freedom.” — Gloria Richardson

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Lorraine Hansberry walked into a Central Park apartment in 1963, saw political theater and walked out. The Attorney General had summoned famous Black artists: Hansberry, James Baldwin, Harry Belafont...

Lorraine Hansberry walked into a Central Park apartment in 1963, saw political theater and walked out.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) In 1957, Robert F. Williams stood on Dr. Albert Perry's porch in Monroe, North Carolina. Rifle in hand. Sixty Black veterans stood with him. Perry was vice president of the local NAACP. Williams was ...

1957. Robert F. Williams and 60 armed Black veterans stopped the Klan in Monroe, NC.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) A. Philip Randolph threatened to march 100,000 Black workers on Washington in 1941. The White House panicked. They sent everyone to stop him: the First Lady, his friends, his allies. He refused them...

A. Philip Randolph threatened to march 100,000 Black workers on Washington in 1941.

He was bluffing.

Six days later, the President signed an executive order.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) February 18, 1977. One thousand soldiers stood at the gates of Kalakuta Republic. Fela Kuti had built the commune on Agege Motor Road in Lagos. Recording studio, free health clinic, housing for his b...

Fela Kuti carried a coffin to
Nigerian military barracks.

And left it at the gates.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) January 18, 1968. Old Family Dining Room at the White House. Fifty women discussing youth crime. The First Lady kept calling on others. Eartha Kitt kept her hand raised. She stood. "You send the be...

Eartha Kitt raised her hand at a 1968 White House lunch and told the First Lady the truth about Vietnam. Days later, the CIA called her a “sadistic nymphomaniac.”

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) West Indian Gazette. Brixton basement, 1958. Claudia Jones wrote the stories, laid out the pages, sold the ads, walked the papers to the stands herself. Rent strikes, political meetings, weddings, ...

The U.S. deported her on Christmas Eve 1955.

Four years later, she created Britain’s biggest street festival.

Who Puts the Babies in the Baskets Vol. 1, Issue 37 | November 3, 2025 - November 9, 2025

She'll drink water so her children can eat. This is America.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Wole Soyinka spent more than a year in solitary confinement writing on toilet paper. He made ink from dirt and water, sharpened bones from his prison meals into pens. Visitors smuggled the pages out....

“A tiger does not shout its tigritude.”

Wole Soyinka wrote that after 15 months in solitary confinement.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Spring 1975. Ella Fitzgerald Auditorium — 1,200 students, faculty, staff packed in. Kwame Ture arrived with Mukasa Dada. Mukasa warmed up the crowd for twenty mi...

Spring 1975. 1,200 students jumping in their seats at a Maryland HBcU. Days later, the organizing meeting: almost nobody showed.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Yesterday I wrote about how Jet moved through hands that would never meet. This afternoon: a Fellow Travelers character saying he’s going to work for the magazine. As if naming it summoned the proof.

I wrote about Jet yesterday. This afternoon? Proof.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) April 27, 1994. Ohlange High School, Inanda, a green, hilly township north of Durban. Nelson Mandela arrived to vote for the first time in his life. Before entering the school, he walked to the gra...

1994. Nelson Mandela arrived to vote for the first time.

Gay McDougall walked beside him, his hand on her arm.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) On stage, Anna Deavere Smith is a Black mother whose son was killed by police. She's the grandmother raising his children. She's a teacher who saw him in class the day before. She's a community organi...

On stage, Anna Deavere Smith is four different people.

A mother. A grandmother. A teacher. An organizer.

One body holding four truths.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Misty Copeland walks into the studio. Wraps her feet, tapes her toes, slides into pointe shoes.  She stretches at the barre—plié, tendu, développé. Then rehearsal. Hours refining pirouettes, perfecti...

Misty Copeland made baller do something it never did before.

Leave the theater.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Ruth E. Carter opens archives. Studies photographs of how people dressed: Harlem in the 1920s, Boston in the 1940s, Brooklyn in the 1980s. She sources fabric that matches the period, the culture, the ...

Before Ruth Carter: Hollywood guessed.

After: meticulous research.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) Oakland. 1971. Black Panther Party health workers knocked on doors in the Acorn housing projects. They carried coolers with test tubes packed in ice, consent forms, pamphlets explaining sickle cell a...

One in 12 Black Americans carried the sickle cell trait in 1971. Most didn’t know. There was no screening program.

The Black Panther Party built one.

Khalilah L. Liptrot (@khalilahliptrot) "Did anyone you love ever make a mistake?" Desmond Meade stood on porches across Florida asking that question. 799 miles. Pensacola to Key West.  Everyone said yes. Then: "Should they lose their vo...

“Did anyone you love ever make a mistake? Should they lose their vote forever?”

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, ...

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

Hughes. Cullen. Toomer. McKay. Larsen.

The Harlem Renaissance.

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 ...

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.

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

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

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...

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