When America celebrates its 250th anniversary, I will celebrate with mixed emotions.
Like millions of Americans, I am grateful to live in a country that has endured for two and a half centuries. I have benefited from opportunities that my ancestors could never have imagined. I have reported from the White House as a journalist. I have flown aboard Air Force Two with Vice President Kamala Harris. I have stood before the United Nations and spoken about justice. Through my work as publisher of The Black Wall Street Times, I have spent years documenting Black history that too often goes untold.
If my ancestors could see me today, I believe they would be proud.
But I also believe they would ask America a difficult question.
Has this nation truly done the work to repair the harm it has done to Black people?
For me, America’s 250th anniversary cannot be separated from my own family’s history. Long before my ancestors became Americans, they were enslaved in French Louisiana. Their lives changed not because they chose a new nation, but because the Louisiana Purchase transferred them from one empire to another. They did not become citizens. They became enslaved people under a different flag.
That distinction matters.
Researching my family’s history has taught me that America’s story is far more complicated than the version I learned in school. Some of my family’s records are written in French. Others are written in English. Some ancestors appear in church registers. Others disappear into slave schedules where they are counted but never named.
That absence is one of slavery’s greatest cruelties.
I know the given name recorded for one of my earliest known ancestors who crossed the Atlantic: François Ajos. But I do not know the name his mother called him before he was forced onto the La Diane, the slave ship that would carry him through the Middle Passage. I never will. Millions of Black Americans live with the same loss. We inherit silence where our family names should have been.
For decades, my relatives and I have pieced together our family’s history through DNA, church records, oral tradition, and fading documents. Recently, I interviewed my 97-year-old great-aunt Francis, who spoke to me and sang in French—a language passed down through generations that survived slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and migration. History was not sitting in an archive that day. It was sitting across from me. I had tears in my eyes and chills in my bones.
No classroom ever taught me the full history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade or slavery in the American south. No textbook explained how deeply intertwined Black and White families became in Louisiana, or how many Americans share bloodlines shaped by slavery, coercion, and survival. We often tell slavery as though it produced two separate histories. It did not. It bound together families who still struggle to understand one another because we have never fully confronted how connected we really are.
The deeper I traced my family, the more I realized that America never completed the work it promised after slavery ended.
Reconstruction failed.
The promise of forty acres and a mule never came.
Land was taken and stolen. Opportunity was denied. Black Codes gave way to Jim Crow. Redlining replaced old systems with new ones. The descendants of enslaved people were told to compete in a race after generations of being held at the starting line.
Repair never came.
Today, many Americans hear the word “reparations” and immediately think about a check.
I think about something much larger.
Repair.
Repair means investing in the descendants of enslaved people through education because education was deliberately denied to generations of our families.
Repair means accessible mental health care because trauma does not disappear simply because a law changes. The effects of racism and exclusion continue to shape lives long after the policies that created them have ended.
Repair means preserving archives, funding genealogy, and making it possible for Black families to recover names, relationships, and histories that slavery intentionally obscured.
Repair means telling the truth.
That is why I find this moment so troubling.
As America marks 250 years, we are also witnessing renewed battles over how Black history is taught, remembered, and displayed. Museums become political battlegrounds. Programs that acknowledge inequality are challenged. Juneteenth is too often treated as an inconvenience rather than a defining chapter of the American story.
But Black history is not separate from American history.
It is American history.
The story of enslaved people is not a footnote to the nation’s founding. It is part of the foundation itself.
People often ask why I feel such a responsibility to preserve Black history through The Black Wall Street Times.
The answer is simple.
If we do not tell our stories, someone else will decide which parts are worth remembering and which parts are worth forgetting.
That responsibility is not a burden.
The burden is knowing that every generation seems to inherit the responsibility of defending truths that should have already been settled.
If I could speak to my earliest ancestors today, I would tell them that we made it. I would tell them that their descendants are free. I would tell them that we never forgot them and that we are actively searching for their names in the American archives.
I would tell François that I wish I knew the name his mother gave him before someone else decided he no longer deserved it. I have given myself permission to name him Kokou because we know he came from the Ewe people in West Africa.
Most of all, I would tell them that I and other relatives have dedicated our lives to making sure they are remembered—not only in our family, but in the history of this country.
America at 250 is a remarkable achievement. But birthdays are not only opportunities to celebrate. They are opportunities to reflect.
A mature nation should possess the courage to examine the injuries it has never fully healed.
As America looks toward its 300th anniversary, my hope is not simply that it grows older. My hope is that it grows wiser. I hope it becomes a country that tells the whole truth about its past. A country that invests in repair rather than denial. A country that understands reconciliation requires more than remembrance. It requires restitution. It requires repair.
Because the work that began 250 years ago is still unfinished.
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