Some things you carry in your bones before you ever learn them in a book.
Mound Bayou, Mississippi is my family’s hometown. My people owned land there. My grandmother, my grandfather, my mother and her siblings. When my mother passed, we laid her ashes to rest on that land. So when I talk about Mound Bayou, I am not throwing out facts. I am telling you where my roots live. And knowing where you come from has a way of settling something inside you that nothing else can touch.
I think a lot of us are walking around insecure about who we are and our place in this country. I understand it because nobody handed us our history. We had to go digging for it. But when you find it, it will change you.
Because our people were never sitting around feeling sorry for themselves.
In 1887, just 22 years after the end of the Civil War, two formerly enslaved cousins named Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green purchased 840 acres of Mississippi swampland and decided to build a world. Not beg for one. Build one. They called it Mound Bayou, the Jewel of the Delta. Banks, schools, a hospital, a library, six churches, over 40 Black-owned businesses. Booker T. Washington called it the crown jewel of Black self-determination. President Theodore Roosevelt came to see it for himself.
And Mound Bayou was not alone.
In Eatonville, Florida, 27 Black men incorporated the first all-Black municipality in the United States in 1887 and governed themselves on their own terms. In Boley, Oklahoma, Black settlers built a town so extraordinary it had 4,000 residents, two banks, and two colleges by 1911. In Langston, Oklahoma, a community born from the desire for freedom gave birth to Langston University in 1897, still producing doctors, lawyers, and leaders today.
These people chased the American dream through terrorism, through lynchings, through towns being burned and flooded. And they still got up. They still built. They looked up and said we are Americans and this dream belongs to us too.
That is not a reason for insecurity. That is a reason for unshakeable confidence in who you are.
Mound Bayou is still standing. Eatonville is still standing. Boley is still standing. Langston University is still producing greatness. Nobody could burn it, flood it, or bulldoze it out of existence because it was built on something deeper than land.
So the next time someone tries to make you feel like you are less than, remember where you come from. Your insecurity is a lie that your history already disproved.
We come from builders. Act like it.
This is not Black history. This is American history. And it is time we started living like we know it.
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