Echoes stretched across the Atlantic and settled as the sounds of the diaspora. Others arrive as posture. As breath. As the way a body remembers before the mind names anything at all.

A century ago, a seed was planted and called Negro History Week. It was an act of defiance disguised as remembrance. A narrowing of time that widened the soul. What began as a week became a month, and the month became a mirror, reflecting how much had been spoken and how much remained unsaid.

The echoes I hear do not live only in textbooks or February assemblies. They live in rhythm. In the swing of a walk. In the call and response of the Black church, and the whispers of women on the front porch and snapping peas around the kitchen table. In the way Black people know how to hum survival into being when language runs thin.

I hear the diaspora before I hear dates. I hear it in drum memory. I hear it in my bone marrow. I catch it in gospel moans braided with West African cadence, in Caribbean lilt folded into Southern drawl. I witness it in the way our stories travel by boat, by foot, by prayer, by refusal. The echoes stretch across oceans and centuries, refusing to stay where they were first spoken.

Carter G. Woodson understood this. He did not merely recover history. He honored memory as a living practice. He listened for what had been buried and trusted Black people to remember themselves aloud. His work did not close a chapter. It opened a door.

In my own life, these echoes live in my body. They live in how my tall stately Black essence enters rooms. In how I pray from that hum, that aroma that rises as nanchapa incense from my chest. In how the curve of my hips know joy even when my spirit is tired. Black history is not something I visit once a year. It is something I tarry with in my spine. It lives in the way my sister Atina and I laugh and drink while cooking together in the kitchen for the holidays, while my three-year-old niece Ava Lynn bosses around my doggie nephew Shaka, grounding us all with her playful, empathic spirit. It is a talisman hanging on my ears like Gold Bamboo Hoops the girls on the block rocked.

The Green Book holds the architecture of survival mapped onto highways and hope. SNCC carries the imprint of young people refusing silence, refusing to be moved, refusing to be denied. Katherine Jackson models steady Black mothering, holding a family, a legacy, while crafting complex mathematics to propel a nation into the future. America would’ve never made it without us.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie remains a living interruption to every closed door dressed as doctrine. bell hooks makes love a practice and liberation a discipline. The eloquent rage of Dr. Brittney Cooper sharpens truth into language that refuses domestication. Nikki Giovanni teaches a people how to speak with heat and tenderness in the same breath.

The stories we live today are layered and loud. Black history is celebrated in murals and challenged in legislation. It is honored in classrooms and contested in boardrooms. It lives in community rituals and is threatened by erasure disguised as neutrality.

In my work, in my art, in my spirit, Black history moves as tension between Biggie and Tupac, between celebration and exhaustion, between visibility and vulnerability. It asks how to be seen without being consumed. How to be remembered without being reduced.

The centennial does not feel like a finish line. It feels like a threshold. The chapters yet unwritten ask for more than ceremony. They ask for imagination. They ask for courage rooted in truth rather than nostalgia. They ask for Black history to move beyond a single month and into sustained practice, woven into how we teach, legislate, heal, and dream.

The next century demands stories that hold contradiction and beauty together. Stories that honor the sacred without sanitizing the struggle. Stories that refuse to flatten Black life into digestible moments.

The echoes we hear are not behind us. They are moving through us. They are asking what we will carry forward.

This is The Mother Codex, a living record of what crossed the Atlantic with us and still speaks through breath, body, ritual, and remembering.

We are not done with the Echos of History yet, even though “they” think its done with us.

We in this #FortheCulture.