Haunted History: Take a Walk on the Black Side

05/28/2026

05/22/2026

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04/30/2026

Between the 1930s and 1970s, over 60,000 Black women across the United States were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.

They went in for appendectomies. For childbirth. For routine checkups.

They came out sterile.

Doctors didn't ask. They didn't explain. They just cut. Tied tubes. Removed uteruses. Ended bloodlines.

In the South, it was so common they called it the "Mississippi appendectomy." In California, it was policy. In North Carolina, it was law.

These weren't rogue surgeries. This was systemic. State-funded. Approved by eugenics boards that decided who deserved to reproduce and who didn't.

Black women. Poor women. Women labeled "feebleminded" or "unfit." Women who had too many children. Women who had none. It didn't matter.

The goal was control. Population control. Racial control. Social control.

Some women didn't find out for years. Only when they tried to have children and couldn't. Only when a doctor casually mentioned a procedure they never agreed to.

Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights icon, was one of them. Sterilized in 1961 during surgery to remove a tumor. She called it a "planned genocide."

And she wasn't exaggerating.

By 1970, one-third of Puerto Rican women and tens of thousands of Indigenous and Black women had been sterilized under similar programs.

This wasn't ancient history. Some survivors are still alive today.

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References:
• Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body (1997)
• Fannie Lou Hamer testimony, 1964
• North Carolina eugenics records; Relf v. Weinberger (1974)

04/15/2026

This is an awesome pic!

“Myself, Frederick Douglass’ great great great great granddaughter, pictured with Maya, Harriet Tubman’s great great great great niece in 2018.”

They both have royalty inside their DNA. These two women are descended from two of the most important abolitionists in history; they are a part of a beautiful legacy.

03/03/2026

💜✨ Happy Women’s History Month!

Today we honor — the first Black woman to publish a book (1770). 📖✍🏾

Born in West Africa and brought to America through the transatlantic slave trade, Phillis spent most of her life enslaved. Yet by just 14 years old, she began writing poetry that would make history. Her work was influenced by the poets of her time, but deeply rooted in her African heritage and her faith. 🙏🏾🌍

Her pen became power. Her words became legacy. And her courage still inspires generations. 💫

Let’s continue celebrating the Black women who paved the way and shaped history with brilliance and resilience.

02/25/2026

Nashville, Tennessee, 1930.
Vivien Thomas was born into the Jim Crow South. He was Black in a world that told him what he could and could not become.

He wanted to be a doctor.

He worked as a carpenter and saved every dollar to attend the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College. He planned to go to medical school.

Then the Great Depression hit.

The bank where he kept his savings collapsed. His money was gone. So were his plans.

At 19, Vivien took a job at Vanderbilt University Hospital. He earned 12 dollars a week as a laboratory assistant. He worked in the lab of Dr. Alfred Blalock.

He was expected to clean, care for animals, and stay quiet.

Instead, he watched.
He listened.
He asked smart questions.
He understood what the experiments were trying to do.

Dr. Blalock noticed. He began teaching Vivien surgical skills.

Vivien had never been to medical school. He had no degree. But he had sharp eyes, a strong memory, and steady hands. Soon, he was performing complex surgeries on lab animals. His stitching was careful and exact. His knowledge of anatomy was deep.

By 1933, he was no longer just an assistant in practice. He was Blalock’s research partner. But officially, he was still paid and treated far below his real role.

In 1941, Dr. Blalock moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital to become Chief of Surgery. He agreed to go only if Vivien came with him. The hospital allowed it. But they gave Vivien a lower-status technical title.

Then came their biggest challenge.

Babies were dying from a heart defect called ‘tetralogy of Fallot’. People called it ‘Blue Baby Syndrome’. The babies’ skin turned blue because their bodies were not getting enough oxygen. Most did not live long.

Dr. Helen Taussig asked if a surgery could increase blood flow to the lungs.

Blalock turned to Vivien.
“Can you figure this out?”

Vivien went to work.
For months, he practiced on dogs. He tried again and again. He had to create new methods. He had to design tools. No one had ever done this before.

Finally, he developed a way to connect the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery. The new path lets more blood reach the lungs.

It was bold.
It was risky.
It had never been tried on a human.

On November 29, 1944, they operated on a baby girl named Eileen Saxon. She was 15 months old and weighed only nine pounds. She was dying.

Dr. Blalock performed the surgery. Vivien stood behind him on a step stool. He quietly guided every move.

“Deeper.”
“A little to the left.”
“Use smaller sutures there.”

Blalock held the tools. Vivien directed the operation.

After four and a half hours, it was over. Eileen’s blue lips turned pink. Her fingers turned pink. Oxygen was finally reaching her body.

The surgery worked.

The procedure became known as the Blalock-Taussig Shunt. It changed medicine. It saved thousands of children. It helped create the field of pediatric heart surgery.

Dr. Blalock became famous.
Vivien did not.

For 22 years, Vivien trained surgical residents at Johns Hopkins. Many of them became leaders in heart surgery. They learned their skills from him.

But he was not called Doctor. He was not listed as faculty. He ate with the maintenance staff.
His name appeared on no papers.

In 1971, after four decades of work, Johns Hopkins promoted him to Instructor of Surgery. Not Professor. Instructor.
By then, the surgeons he had trained knew the truth.

In 1976, the hospital honored him with a portrait. It was placed beside Blalock’s. At the ceremony, former students stood and applauded. Some cried.

They knew who had taught them. They knew who had built the foundation.

That same year, Johns Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate. At last, he was officially Dr. Vivien Thomas.
He was 66 years old.
He had been doing the work of a surgeon for 46 years.

Dr. Vivien Thomas died in 1985 at age 75.
In 2004, HBO released a film about his life called Something the Lord Made.

Today, students study his work. Scholarships carry his name. The surgery he created is still saving lives more than 80 years later.

For most of his career, he was paid and treated far below his true ability.
He stood on a step stool so others could stand in the spotlight.

He kept working.
He kept teaching.
He kept saving lives.

They called him a janitor.
History calls him a hero.

02/11/2026

02/07/2026

In 1960s, young civil rights activists were trained to endure abuse without reacting.

This photograph shows a girl participating in nonviolent resistance training, where activists—many of them teenagers and children—were taught how to remain calm while facing physical and verbal harassment. The goal was preparation for sit-ins, marches, and protests where hostility was expected.

Hair pulling, insults, and smoke blown into faces were not random acts. They were realities activists would face in public spaces simply for demanding equal rights. Nonviolence was not passive—it required discipline, emotional control, and immense courage.

This image is a reminder that the civil rights movement was not only fought in the streets. It was practiced, taught, and passed down, often at a very young age.

02/06/2026

👀

This is Black history.

02/06/2026

Medgar Evers was only 37 when he was assassinated in 1963. By that age, he was already the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, organizing voter registration drives, investigating racial terror, and challenging segregation in one of the most violent states in the country for Black activism.

Malcolm X was killed in 1965 at 39. In barely a decade of public life, he transformed himself from a street hustler into one of the most powerful and globally recognized Black voices of the 20th century. His thinking was still evolving. His politics were still changing. He was just beginning to broaden his vision beyond the United States.

Martin Luther King Jr. was also 39 when he was assassinated in 1968. By that age, he had already led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and played a central role in the passage of landmark civil rights legislation.

None of them reached 40.

They are often remembered as finished figures, as if their work was complete. It wasn’t. They were young men still growing, still debating strategy, still imagining what freedom could look like in a country that resisted it at every turn.

What they accomplished in such short lives is extraordinary. What was taken from them—and from the movements they were shaping—is just as important to remember.

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