The Truth Seekers Journal

By Lola Renegade | June 9, 2026

“The ultimate measure of a man (woman) is not where he (she) stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he (she) stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

 — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I watched Trevor Noah Netflix special Joy in the Trenches over the weekend. He posed a question that refuses to vacate my thoughts: Who will you be when history calls? I added “where.”

It is a simple question, yet it may be one of the most important questions any generation can answer. History is not merely a record of people, places, events, presidents, wars, elections, and legislation. History is a record of who stood up, who sat down, who spoke out, and who remained silent. Every generation eventually arrives at a moment when saying and doing nothing becomes impossible.

For people of color in America and our allies, that moment has arrived once again. Under the Trump Administration, hard-fought gains in civil rights, voting rights, diversity initiatives, economic opportunity, and equal protection are under unprecedented attack. The stakes are high and the consequences will be felt for generations. It is long past the time that each of us must decide whether to stand idly by watching and benefitting while others do all the heavy lifting. Or it is time to step up to do your part to help shape history and to deal the final deathblow to injustice in a way that this part will never need to be revisited again.

In 1961, a group of extraordinarily brave Americans – both Black and white, the Freedom Riders, boarded buses bound for the Deep South to challenge segregation and force this nation to confront its lack of conscience. Many were barely out of their teens. Some were college students. Some were clergy. Before departing, many wrote their wills and letters to loved ones, fully aware they might never return home alive.

They faced firebombs, beatings, imprisonment, and the very real possibility of death, not for personal gain, but for the promise of a more just America. They challenged segregated seats on buses, at lunch counters, and helped change the course of history. More than six decades later, the buses are different, but the destination for full equality remains the same.

Many others before us made tremendous sacrifices and answered the call and because of them, many of our lives are better.

History called Harriet Tubman, and she answered by risking her freedom and her life to lead others out of bondage. History called Ida B. Wells, and she answered by exposing the horrors of lynching when much of America preferred ignorance over truth. History called Frederick Douglass, and he answered by standing before a nation celebrating liberty and asking what the Fourth of July meant to millions who remained enslaved. History called Fannie Lou Hamer, and she answered by exposing before the nation the violence and terror inflicted upon Black citizens who dared to exercise their constitutional right to vote. History called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he answered from a Birmingham jail cell, reminding America that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and warning that the silence of good people often proves more dangerous than the actions of the openly wicked.

Every generation inherits unfinished work. Today, history is calling once again. It is calling in an era marked by fierce debates over voting rights, education, immigration, access to medical care, judicial power, economic inequality, and the future of democratic institutions. It is calling as election deniers and fake electors continue to seek and win positions of influence. It is calling as public trust in elections has eroded and facts themselves are increasingly filtered through partisan loyalties. It is calling amid debates surrounding Project 2025, presidential immunity, executive power, and the return of Donald Trump to the presidency despite felony convictions that, in previous eras, might have ended a political career. It is calling as participants in the January 6 insurrection are viewed by some as criminals and by others as patriots. It is calling as America wrestles once again with old questions about race, power, citizenship, and whose voices matter in a democracy.

Your children, grandchildren, and generations yet unborn will one day ask a question that no amount of wealth, status, influence, or self-justification will be able to avoid: Who were you, where were you, and what did you do when history called? They will not ask how many luxury vehicles, airplanes, and yachts you owned. They will not ask how many formerly colonized countries you visited, how many mansions you purchased, how many designer labels filled your closets, how many concerts or sporting events you attended, how many casinos you visited, how many strip clubs you visited, how many times you attended church as a false witness, how many violent and vulgar video games you played, how many degrading rap lyrics you wrote and produced, how many followers admired your social media accounts, or how many photographs documented your comfort and success. They will not care how much money you spent being entertained while the future of Black freedom and progress was on the line and being written around you.

They will ask where you stood. They will ask whether you defended democracy when democracy was being tested. They will ask whether you defended truth when lies became profitable. They will ask whether you defended the vulnerable when doing so was unpopular. They will ask whether you challenged injustice or accommodated it. They will ask whether you spent your resources merely pursuing comfort, consumption, and entertainment while future generations inherited the consequences of your indifference. They will ask whether you invested in education, justice, opportunity, and freedom or whether you invested only in yourself. They will ask whether your faith transformed communities or merely sustained institutions. They will ask whether you sought proximity to power or whether you spoke truth to power.

I am reminded of a simple truth: I eat fruit from trees I did not plant. I enjoy freedoms secured by sacrifices I did not make. I benefit from struggles, beatings, and deaths that I did not endure. The question before us is whether we will do the same. Will we plant trees from which we may never eat or enjoy their shade? Will we defend freedoms whose full benefits we may never see? Will we invest in a democracy that our children, grandchildren, and generations yet unborn will inherit?

Remember, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” — Frederick Douglass

Who and where will you be when history calls?

Join Communities United for Justice in the fight for freedom and full equality!  

By Lola Renegade | Atlanta, GA | May 30, 2026 |

A couple of days ago, while visiting the Atlanta History Center with my great niece and nephew – my proxy grandchildren –  I noticed something that stayed with me long after I left.

Everywhere I turned, I saw several Black women caring for little white children.

Some carried babies on their hips. Others pushed strollers through the museum corridors and gardens. Some held tiny white hands as curious toddlers wandered through exhibits laughing, pointing, and exploring the world with complete innocence and trust.

At first, seeing one Black nanny seemed unremarkable.

But after witnessing it again and again, I felt history pressing against and piercing my spirit. I found myself thinking, “I know this story personally.”

I recall my mother,  along with several of my aunts, and countless other Black women, worked as domestics in Mississippi during the brutal decades of Jim and Jane Crow throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They cared for white children whose parents were often half their age or younger, and eventually the children themselves, called them by their first names, as though these grown Black women were perpetual children themselves, undeserving of the dignity and respect automatically granted to white adults.

In the South of that era, Black women and men were rarely addressed with basic respect. White children were taught early that Black adults – even elderly Black adults – did not deserve titles such as “Miss,” “Mrs.,”  or “Mr.”

Imagine the psychological violence and trauma of that. Imagine helping to raise a child, pouring love, patience, and tenderness into their life, only to see many grow into adults who embraced the same prejudices, racial hatred, and moral corrosion that had been passed down to them for generations by grandparents, parents, institutions, and an America determined to preserve racial hierarchy.

What greater tragedy is there than witnessing a child’s humanity slowly poisoned by the very parents entrusted to nurture it?

We have Child Protective Services (CPS) to rescue children from physical abuse, neglect, and dangerous homes. But who rescues children from inherited hatred? Who intervenes when racism, bigotry, and dehumanization become family heirlooms passed from one generation to the next?

Where is CPS when a child’s conscience is being corrupted, their empathy diminished, and their humanity stolen by the very parents, grandparents, and trusted adults charged with shaping their moral character?

Shouldn’t society be equally concerned and ready to remove children from their homes when they are taught to hate, fear, and to devalue the humanity of others?

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of racism is not only the damage it inflicts upon its victims, but the moral injury it inflicts upon the children taught to carry it forward. Teaching a child to hate another human being, not only diminishes the humanity of the hated, but also the humanity of the hater.

It was witnessing my mother and other Black women navigate those humiliations that shaped me in ways I did not fully understand at the time. Even as a child,  I made a vow to myself: no matter how poor, hungry, or desperate I might ever become, I would never become a domestic worker for white America. In the words of singer Lou Rawls, “I’d rather drink muddy water and sleep out in a hollow log.”

The relationship between Black women and white children in America did not begin with modern-day nannies or domestic workers. Its roots stretch back into slavery itself, when kidnapped, enslaved Black women were often forced to nurse white babies from their breasts while their own children waited nearby, sometimes hungry, neglected, or handed off to others. Few images capture the emotional and moral contradictions of America more painfully than a Black mother coerced to using her body to nourish the child of those who claimed ownership over her body, her humanity.

That contradiction has echoed through generations of Black women in America. What struck me most at the museum was not simply the presence of Black nannies caring for white children. It was the realization that, despite all America’s claims about progress, its incestuous kinship to slavery still exists in painfully familiar ways.

At The Gathering Spot in Atlanta, I have met several young Black women – brilliant, highly educated, accomplished women with advanced degrees – who lost professional opportunities during the chaos, instability, and cruelty unleashed within the early months of President Donald Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In fact, it is stated that more than 300,000 Black women lost their jobs within the first few months under this racist, tyrannical administration. One can safely bet that if America stated that number, double it. This nation has long suffered from a pathology of lies – sanitizing and erasing its history, minimizing its crimes, and demanding the oppressed to forget what these modern-day robber barons would rather not remember.

Some of these young women now work as nannies for affluent white families, not because they lack intelligence, ambition, or qualifications, but because survival leaves little room for pride. Mortgages and rents still have to be paid, car notes still arrive, and student loans still demand payment.

I understand that for many survival does not and cannot wait for justice. It never has and it never will. Especially, if you are waiting for justice to live in America with any chance of longevity. And so these women, extraordinarily gifted beyond measure, have found themselves stepping into one of the oldest labor roles historically assigned to Black women in America: caring for white children.

That reality forced me to think differently about one of Trump’s most infamous statements during the presidential campaign when he warned Black Americans about immigrants “taking your Black jobs.” At the time, many dismissed the statement as ignorance, racism, or political theater from the man who would soon become one of America’s most corrupt, greedy, heartless, stupid, ignorant, morally and intellectually bankrupt presidents. But perhaps there was an uncomfortable historical truth buried inside that language. Because throughout American history, some of the “Black jobs” this country has consistently reserved for Black women have involved caregiving, domestic labor, emotional labor, and service to white families.

America’s and Trump’s replacements for our best and brightest have been mediocre to less-than mediocre white men and women. Amazingly, it took Trump less than ten years to turn America into a truly “shithole country” – the very name he has given to countries of color who refuse to be exploited by him and will not bribe him, his family, colleagues, and administration.

Black women have long been expected to nurture America while America simultaneously withholds full dignity from us. And what makes this history even more painful is the emotional intimacy involved. These are not distant transactions. These women rock white babies to sleep, celebrate first words, first steps, prepare meals, read bedtime stories, soothe nightmares, wipe tears, snot, and asses.

They become trusted figures in the emotional development of children who oftentimes grow up absorbing the same racial animus and systemic biases that diminishes the very women caring for them. How do Black women continue loving the soon to be unlovable under those conditions? How do you pour tenderness into children who may, more than likely, eventually inherit a worldview that sees you as inferior, threatening, or invisible?

Perhaps the answer lies in something both heartbreaking and extraordinary about Black women in America: despite centuries of degradation, exploitation, exclusion, and disrespect, many have refused to surrender their humanity and capacity to love unconditionally.

We all know that babies are not born racist. No infant instinctively hates Black people. Hatred is learned carefully and intentionally over time. It comes through family attitudes, political rhetoric, segregated systems, coded language, media imagery, fear, silence, and societal conditioning.

For a brief and innocent season of life, many white children experience unconditional safety, affection, and nurturing through Black hands before the world begins teaching them racial hierarchy and hate.

That truth sat heavily with me as I walked through the museum with my late sister’s grandchildren, thinking about her boundless capacity to love. She was a hospital executive and registered nurse. She, too, belonged to a long line of Black women who gave of themselves freely to family, work, community, and often to a nation that rarely returned the favor. Her capacity to love the unlovable was so much greater than mine. I can count on one hand, with fingers remaining, the number of white people I can or have called “friend” in my sixty-nine years on the planet.

In the movie, The Help, I am constantly reminded of a nation that never grows tired of exploiting the labor of Black women who are still carrying America’s children and America itself on our hips and our backs.

And if this America truly is the greatest country in the world – the very best the planet has to offer – then Lord knows the world is in desperate need of a better alternative.

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