Storytelling has played a crucial role in Black American history. Andrea Collier, a Black author and multimedia journalist from Lansing, Michigan, spoke recently on the importance of storytelling within the Black community.
“Stories, including the razor-edged ones of lynchings and segregation, are the ties that bind us. So are the stories of being brought up in segregated neighborhoods, traveling through the South knowing where you could and couldn’t go. There is no question that storytelling for black America is a way of saying I am here and I matter,” she wrote for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine.
Recounting the stories told by marginalized members of the Black community to get even the smallest glimpse of their historical and present-day struggles is one piece of an infinitely complex puzzle, but it is an imperative one.
Before we can take action, we need to…
