People often ask where to begin learning Black history. Usually, they ask for the name of a book, as if the story begins somewhere “out there” on a shelf. But the story begins much closer. It begins with you—on The Day You Were Born.
Your birthday is more than a personal anniversary. It is an invitation to ask a different question: What world did I enter when I was born?
Before reaching for just any random book on history, stop and ask yourself: What history was I already born into? Who was creating, resisting, imagining, discovering, and teaching on the day I arrived? Or even, become inquisitive about your name.
One of the first ways that I discovered history was through my own name.
I was born Althea Loraine Welsh. In my family, the firstborn is always given a name beginning with the letter “A,” and as both the firstborn and my mother’s first daughter, I received the name Althea. My namesake is the formidable Althea Gibson, whose extraordinary achievements transformed the world of tennis and expanded the possibilities imagined for Black women everywhere. Before I understood her significance, I was entrusted from birth with a name that carried a legacy of greatness and the energy of a champion.
If one plays with the letters in their birth name, they can begin to discover hidden meanings and messages. The message in my birth name is: “she who heals,” and “she who writes.” “WRITER” is spelled out in my name—especially if I spell my middle name with double Rs, which I prefer to do, or use the single R twice. If not, “WRITE” is still right there, appearing as a powerful command, a quiet directive, almost like a magical incantation. Seen another way, it is my responsibility to use my energy to ensure “write” becomes “writer”.
The woman who shaped me most deeply as a young woman was Leonie Forbes, the actress and broadcaster, revered in Jamaica as the “First Lady of Theatre and Film.” Her first name can be found in my own. Have I read her biography? You can bet your last dollar that I have. As I grew older and began to find my way into African-American literature, I encountered the work of Alice Walker. She was the first female writer I resonated with simply because her initials were AW—my own initials—as if some quiet correspondence existed between us. There was even a time when I lived as an overstayer in the United Kingdom and worked under my aunt’s name, Alice. By reading Alice Walker’s novels and essays, I discovered Zora Neale Hurston, whose presence in our global history is profound.
Zora’s Tell My Horse drew me more deeply into Caribbean and Afrikan spiritual and cultural worlds, and her life, like Walker’s, spoke to me in uncanny ways. I began to notice striking resonances between these women and myself, echoes of their journeys in my own, and this recognition intensified my desire to be a writer. A friend once remarked, “Your name is in her name!”—pointing out that the letters of Althea could be found in Zora’s full name. Whether coincidence or quiet revelation, the observation confirmed that I was born into a rich and layered world of lives and events.
Your name can be a revelation; the same is true of birthdays. A birthday is not only personal time; it is historical time—layered with lives, struggles, creativity, and brilliance. It is a portal into the ongoing story of Africa’s people everywhere. To learn Black history on the day you were born is to locate yourself in historical memory.
This is the spirit behind Grand Rising Day. It is an invitation to see every date on the calendar as a portal into Black memory. Every day holds its own constellation of people, places, events, ideas, works of art, scientific discoveries, spiritual traditions, acts of resistance, and moments of joy. No single story stands alone. Each doorway leads naturally to another, revealing that Black history is not a collection of isolated biographies or historical events but a living network of relationships stretching across continents and centuries.
By asking what Black lives, stories, and events shaped the day of your birth, history ceases to feel distant or abstract. Your birthday becomes your most intimate archive. Rather than standing outside history looking in, you begin to recognize that you have always belonged within it.
This practice affirms that your life arrived in a world already shaped by Black educators, activists, artists, healers, visionaries, scientists, musicians, revolutionaries, and ancestors. It is a refusal of historical amnesia. It asks not simply, “What happened on this date?” but “What world did I inherit?” What dreams were already being imagined? What struggles were still unfolding? What victories had already been won? Whose footsteps am I unknowingly following?
I am reminded of a letter that Miriam Makeba wrote to the editor of Time magazine in February 1960, because the magazine had made an error with her name and wished to correct it:
“Zenzile Makeba Qgwashu Nguvama Yiketheli Nxgowa Bantana Balomzi Xa Ufun Ubajabulisa Mbiza Yotshwala Sithi Xa Saku Qgiba Ukutja Sithathe Izitsha Sizi Khabe Singamalawu Singama Qgwashu Singama Nqamia Nqgithi.”
Makeba explained that the remarkable length of her name reflected an African tradition in which every child carries the names of his male ancestors, making a true African name “somewhat like a story.”
In much the same way, a birth date is also somewhat like a story.
Each date carries the memory of countless lives that have already passed through it. It holds the names of those who challenged oppression, composed music, wrote books, nurtured communities, expanded knowledge, defended freedom, and imagined futures beyond the limits of their own time. Every year, that same date returns, bearing not only our celebration of another birthday but also the accumulated weight and wonder of those who came before.
Take, for example, May 19, which I call a constellation day, because it is marked by a remarkable number of influential birthdays. Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Tom Feelings, and Queen Charlotte Sophia were all born on this day. A single date unlocks an entire intellectual and cultural universe.
To read Malcolm X is to encounter Black nationalism, self-transformation, and a pan-African consciousness. Through Malcolm, you will meet Marcus Garvey, Jim Crow, and the Nation of Islam. Lorraine Hansberry draws you into Harlem, into the political and emotional interior of Black life through theatre. Tom Feelings carries you into the depths of the Middle Passage, rendering history through image and feeling.
From there, the inquiry expands. The Middle Passage by Feelings may lead you to Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage. Following Johnson, you encounter critical works such as “The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri,” which raise philosophical questions about identity, memory, and the narrative of captivity.
That pathway does not end—it branches. It can lead you to the Olmec, to James Baldwin, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
Queen Charlotte Sophia will lead you to the Black British historical landscape and perhaps to the Sons of Africa, to Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. If you choose to travel further, Cugoano carries you to Grenada, where you encounter the Fedon Uprising of 1795 and the fierce resistance it represents. From there, you may decide to take the ship back across the Atlantic to meet the Fante and the Igbo, returning to the very shores from which so many were taken. Suddenly, you have embarked on a full Black Atlantic journey.
All of this emerges from a single date.
Every day is a doorway.
Every doorway opens into another.
Every birth date is an entrance into an unbroken archive.
To trace the biographies and events associated with your birth date is therefore more than an exercise in historical curiosity. It is an act of historical orientation. It is a way of locating yourself within an unbroken continuum shaped by the struggle against captivity, colonialism, capitalism, and erasure, and sustained by enduring traditions of spirituality, scholarship, artistry, love, resilience, and collective imagination.
We are all born into history.
Our birthdays do not stand outside the Black past; they are woven into it. Each one is a doorway through which we may enter a vast, living archive—an archive that reminds us we are not arriving at the beginning of the story, but joining one that has always been unfolding.
By focusing on your birth date, you uncover a rich literary and intellectual field intimately tied to your own arrival in history. These are the books you begin with, the documentaries you seek out—not as random recommendations, but as pathways toward awakening the revolution within you.
To honor Black history in this way is to treat your date of birth as an annual portal for study and remembrance. Each year, returning to that date becomes a ritual of self-education and gratitude. You learn the names of those who came before and measure your path alongside the unfinished work they left behind.
A birthday marks the day the world records your arrival. A Grand Rising Day declares that your life belongs to a lineage, a struggle, and a future larger than yourself. You do not enter history as an isolated individual; you rise into a living continuum of Black experience, memory, and resistance.
We rise because others resisted.
We rise because we choose to remember and never forget.
We rise so that those yet to be born will find us standing for something.
Still we rise.
Thank you for reading
Ancestral Blessings',
Meserette Kentake
This gives a whole other take on Ubuntu, the concept that I am because we are. What a lovely inquiry. Thank you for sharing! 🙏🏾