Since arriving in bondage, Black families have carried their history in recipes, songs, and stories passed down through generations. Too often, those histories go unrecorded, left vulnerable to time, circumstance — or erasure.
From slavery to Jim Crow to redlining, the nation has long tried to silence Black people and the truths they carry in their bones. Present-day America is no different: President Donald Trump and his conservative allies are pushing to remove Black history from schools, libraries, and even the Smithsonian. Preserving and protecting their stories has never been more critical.
That’s where Black Storytelling Week comes in.
Ensuring Our Stories Endure
Founded by journalist and cultural advocate Martina Abrahams Ilunga, the event uses workshops and a free online toolkit to help Black families begin recording oral histories. But the project is also about agency: giving Black families control of their own narratives and ensuring those voices will not be erased.
Word In Black interviewed Ilinga about the origins of Black Storytelling Week, why it matters, and how it takes just one relative — and perhaps a sinkful of dishes — to get started. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Word In Black: This is a terrific idea. How did it start? What inspired you?
Martina Abrahams Ilunga: I was in my 30s, and I really wanted to connect with my own grandmother, because I was just curious about who she was as a woman. Like, I know her as grandma. I know her a little bit as mommy through my aunts, and my dad, and my uncles. But I wanted to know: who were you when you were my age, raising six kids, and working, and just living your life? So I started to ask her some questions.
I was staying at her house over Thanksgiving one year, and my grandpa was very chatty, but she was not for me asking all these questions, like: ‘What are you getting after?’ When I told some of my friends about trying to interview my grandma, they were, like, ‘You know, I can’t get my mom to talk,’ or, ‘I can’t get my so-and-so to open up.’ We felt like there was this barrier around getting some of the more personal details, or some of these stories, out of our elders.
WIB: So that’s the seed of Black Storytelling Week. How did it become a holiday?
MAI: The idea came to me in early 2023, and we celebrated the first Black storytelling week in September of 2023. We had 34 families say, ‘We commit to celebrating [Black stories.] They had their conversation guides, and they gave us feedback. And from there, we’ve just been growing the holiday. And out of some of that feedback, we decided, ‘Why don’t we actually meet on a regular basis?’ And the people who are most engaged in this kind of stuff can come along, and we can support each other and help each other out.
WIB: Talk about what Black storytelling means and why it is so important, especially given the ongoing efforts on the right to rewrite Black history.
MAI: The more that I spend time in the past and learning about the past, the more I realize that everything is just being repeated. Some of the answers to how we address and respond to this current moment can be found in understanding how people addressed and responded to similar moments in the past.
I think that there’s a really big opportunity for us to learn how those moments feel. How did people overcome the feeling of helplessness, of fear, of anxiety? How do people come together and support each other in community? What are those codes that allowed people to find joy, that allowed people to build new things, that allowed people to fight back and resist?
WIB: That description makes me think about how history often consists of small moments — ordinary people and ordinary moments that collectively make change.
MAI: Covering up history, I think, takes away some of the humanity of all of these figures that we learn about. They were human beings that were faced with challenges. We have all the context of what came behind us, but that’s all they had, too. They didn’t know what they were doing either. And so they’re just making the decisions based on what they had available to their time, at their time, and they and they were doing what they thought was best, and that’s all that we can do today.
WIB: What’s been the reaction to Black Storytelling Week?
MAI: I haven’t yet met someone who’s like, ‘Why are you doing that?’ Everyone gets it. People are really curious about their family’s history, where they come from. The first year, just 34 families participated. It has grown steadily since then.
Part of the reason why I claimed a week and made it a holiday is like, how do we find the time [to talk to elders] when you think about Thanksgiving and the winter holidays? There’s so much hoopla, there’s so many other activities, it can be hard to really find the time to sit down and have conversations, to ask questions.
WIB: One of the things I noticed is that the guide is very simple and user-friendly.
MAI: We wanted it to be really simple and just something that people can plug in and play. The simplicity is meant to make it so that someone can be, like, ‘I can do this with my family today, I don’t need to do all this planning. I can find one family member that wants to do this with me [and] that’s enough to start a conversation.’ We’re saying you don’t have to go down to such-and-such archives, because our homes can be our archives. The person in your family that has the gallery wall with everybody’s photos — you can start there.
WIB: What are some of the tips you’d give to help people get started?
MAI: Start where you can. It might be tough to get the whole family to sit down and have the oldest person in the room share their whole life story. Just start with one family member: call them up, visit them, engage them in a hobby or something that they love to do, and just start to ask them questions about things that they liked, and maybe share a little bit about your life or what you’re going through.
Then, engage in an activity. In our conversation guide, we have a line that says, ‘Do the dishes with the person in your life that you’re trying to learn more about.’ But it can be a hobby or an activity. You want to meet them where they are, and use that as an opportunity to get them to open up and build that relationship and build that intimacy.
With my grandparents, I play spades with them. That’s how I learned how to play. You have to sit down at that table, and that’s where you’re gonna get, like, talk to them.
And then the last one is, it’s slow work. You have to realize that you’re not going to get everything you want in one conversation. More likely, it’s going to be pieces of things that you’re pulling together from different conversations. And so having that patience, realizing it could take years until you kind of piece together the picture that you might be trying to paint, and know that that’s normal, and that’s OK. Because really, at the end of the day, I think it’s about relationships.
We’re not just collecting history to connect history. We want to have strong relationships. We want to have these strong bonds. We want people to be able to show up in different ways with their loved ones in different ways. And patience is the watchword.
