March 15, 2026
Vol. 2, Issue 7 | March 16, 2026 - March 22, 2026
CURATOR’S NOTE
Rosewood welcomed 1923 the way it always had.
The Seaboard Air Line Railway sounded its whistle that morning. It carried cedar from the mills. The music of a people whose hands had built something from nothing.
Before the week was out, Rosewood was burning.
On the sixth day, before dawn, the train came back for what was left. Mothers and children were carried into the dark, into a silence that would outlive all of them.
A score and three years earlier James Weldon Johnson had put a poem in the hands of five hundred school children in Jacksonville.
His brother Rosamond set it to music.
Jacksonville burned the following year. But the song. The song traveled with the children. Into places the fire would never reach. Into 1932. Into a juke joint nine years after Rosewood’s ashes.
Black hands gathered every art form into one room for one night. The blues and the gospel, grief and praise, the ancient and the yet unborn. Ryan Coogler set Sinners there.
He will wait twenty-five years to own what his hands made.
Prince had a name for that.
It was the same name given to Philip Reid, who cast Freedom, hoisted it atop the United States Capitol dome. His hands knew what they were making. And still it was never theirs.
From ashes we make beauty.
Asé.
Asé O.
—Khalilah L. Liptrot
Curator, The Black Third
FEATURED PORTRAIT
W. James Abbington believed Black people have always done their most serious theological work in song. [Read more]
Browse the full archive here.
From the ashes WE SHALL RISE!
Amen