Latest / Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast
The Word: Griots, Signifying, the Dozens & AAVE
They said our speech was broken English. The proof says otherwise. We start in West Africa with the jali — the keepers of the word — who carried the Epic of Sundiata for seven hundred years by voice alone, and follow what the ships could not kill: the African words Lorenzo Dow Turner found alive on the Sea Islands in the 1930s, the ring shout's call and response, the spirituals that said two things at once, and the hush harbors — church, hidden in the trees. Then the fight over the written word: a boy named Frederick Douglass trading bread for reading lessons in Baltimore, because teaching an…
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