Emanuele Berry

And Nicole, being Nicole, ended up deep in online news archives and in backrooms of university libraries, looked at all the microfiches, tried to get her hands on any and every archival Black paper, from the Chicago Defender to the Detroit Tribune to the Washington Afro-American.

And this is where she got the answer to her question, and then what?

It was all in there.

The drama, the details, the lives.

Like this, from a 1938 paper.

Okay.

Almost every country everywhere has argued about its history at some point.

We are certainly in one of those moments right now.

A couple of months after Trump entered office, he issued an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

The order basically says, stop disparaging America.

Focus on its achievements, its greatness.

Or, as I read it, just get rid of all the mess.

So like George Washington, he's great, but maybe don't mention the black people he enslaved.

Personally, I want to know about that kind of mess.

Not just the fact that Washington enslaved black people.

I want to know who those people were and the details of their lives.

I want to know about all of our ancestors' mess.

So that's what we're going to do today.

And there's no one I'd rather do this with than Nicole Hill.

Detail hunter, amateur historian, renowned gossip.