What I've Been Up To

Looking for a path forward through the past

Run It Back offers carefully researched articles on lesser told parts of black history. But I’m only able to do this work with your help. Please consider getting a paid subscription to Run It Back to help me keep writing these stories and making them available to students, educators and lifelong learners. Subscribe now.

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It’s a strange time to be a writer. Sometimes I try to get on Bluesky or Substack Notes to recapture that illusion of a public commons (or freewheeling dive bar) that Twitter provided, but everyone is too committed to their bit now to feel like an actual person. I boot up ChatGPT and query “Write an article that sounds like Victor Luckerson” to get a check-in on the timeline for my obsolescence. I click on an article about how to salvage my shrinking attention span but get distracted halfway through. Going online feels tedious and compulsively habitual at the same time.

Hanging over it all is the looming sensation, beamed from news headlines, executive orders, and America First pre-roll ads on YouTube, that each day is a bit less free than the last.

It’s a strange time.

But I remind myself that I wrote before the rise of social media or AI or nightmare news in the palm of your hand. I wrote to try to figure things out about the world and myself, and for that pleasurable mental pop of a sentence sliding into place, a thought crystallizing from the ether of your mind into flesh and carbon on the page, where it can live forever, even if it’s not read by another single soul.

It’s hard to explain, but it’s the best feeling.

Sign of life photo from the Scrabble club my girlfriend and I joined recently

I’ve had a couple of false starts with relaunching Run It Back as a regular endeavor in the last couple of years, but I have some momentum behind me now (yes I’m counting two articles as “momentum”). And it feels more important than ever to have a space that is independent, where I can keep my mind limber amid a hall of political mirrors. This is a grounding space for me. Hopefully it can be for you too.

Every two weeks I’ll have another short narrative for you about a slice of black history–a person, a moment, an idea that’s slipped (or was jettisoned) out of the public consciousness. I don’t have an editorial schedule mapped out, exactly. I’ve enjoyed following one interesting tangent to another, which is how the best parts of Built From the Fire came together. Right now I’m writing about Philadelphia before the Civil War and how black people navigated freedom there for themselves and others. I want to write about Washington D.C. (where I now live) sometime soon and living under siege. But I also want to write about adventurers, inventors, unusual thinkers. If you know my work, you know there will be a balance between the dark and the light.

I’m also now a national correspondent for Smithsonian magazine. I’m writing a few in-depth pieces for them each year. The first was about the black daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman. The next, yet to be published, is about a man who was arrested for reading a book. All the stories will be in print as well as on the Smithsonian website.

I have a couple of public events coming up. Tonight (Wednesday, Aug. 27), I’m giving a public lecture about Greenwood in New York’s Bryant Park, sponsored by the New York Historical Society and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. On Sept. 11, I’ll be back in New York at the Brooklyn Public Library for a panel discussion with authors Gilbert King and Robert Samuels about the erasure of black history. Both events are free to the public.

I had been planning for many more public events this year—I’ve really enjoyed traveling to colleges and talking to students about my work and their own aspirations as writers. But federal budget cuts to higher ed and a broader pullback in funding for anything that smells like “diversity” has mostly killed that off.

I’m working on another book. It’s early stages but I hope to have something to share with you about it early next year.

It’s a strange time to be a writer, especially an independent one. A year ago I thought I had a good idea about how these puzzle pieces fit into a career–now I’m not so sure. But I’ll keep the lights on here until the power bill comes due. It’s a way to stay whole in a world splintering apart.

Thanks for your support.