With African American genealogy, it's more about social justice, regaining a heritage denied

This is not a hobby. Look, for many white Americans, genealogy is a hobby, it gets them out of the house, gives them something to enjoy researching. With African American genealogy, it's more about social justice, regaining a heritage denied. Every African American living today is stolen African history embodied.

M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 85

It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping

The American plantation wasn't the quaint village community that you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping.

M.W. Twitty, The cooking gene (2017), 5

He follows this up with a hammer of a metaphor about his grandmother who left Alabama at the earliest opportunity she could: 'Once she left Alabama, she never went back to Alabama. The heart of Dixie was her Poland' (Ibid. 56) 

The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America

White woman in Mississippi claimed that a fourteen-year-old Black boy had said something suggestive to her, and then her husband and brother beat the boy, wrapped barbed wire around his neck, shot him in the head, and threw him over the bridge into the Little Tallahatchie. The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America. The killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-White jury.

P. Everett, The Trees (2022), loc 954

In the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities

Despite the crowded conditions, in the early 1950s the African-American sections of America’s inner cities were largely viable, stable communities; however, the subsequent three decades were quite destabilizing. Federal urban renewal and highway programs required land in inner cities, and African-American neighborhoods were often razed. Low-income African Americans were then relocated into publicly funded housing projects, while middle- and upper-class African Americans were forced to relocate elsewhere. Using a set of policies that both explicitly and implicitly discriminated against African Americans, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) then began to offer subsidized mortgages that enabled millions of Caucasians to purchase homes in the suburbs and flee the cities. Ironically, advances in the civil rights movement later reduced suburban housing discrimination, allowing middle- and upper-class African Americans to relocate to the suburbs as well. As a result of this suburban flight, the remaining inner-city, African-American communities lost leaders, role models, working families, and a solid economic base.

S. Corbett & B. Fikkert, When helping hurts: How to alleviate poverty without hurting the Poor (2014), 85