I just turned in the final chapter of my fourth book, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children. And I feel empty. I feel numb.

Because I’ve spent years digging through the bones of murdered children, only to know their killers’ descendants are all around us. Because writing this history in this political moment feels like screaming into a country that already knows the ugly truth and is primed to lynch us again.

Writing about these unpunished crimes means living with those children in your head and body, day after day. Carrying their ghosts as if they were your own kin. And when you step back, you realize the conditions that made their deaths possible never really ended.

That’s where the emptiness comes in. I wasn't just documenting the past, I was staring down the continuum.

Their killers’ descendants are still here, living under the same flag, passing down the same hatreds. I can see the present political climate: book bans, racist violence, white backlash, MAGA, Trump, "ghetto Black bitches," threats against HBCUs, and it feels like history is not just echoing, but rehearsing.

So the numbness, I think, is survival.

Maybe it is my spirit’s way of keeping me upright. The sadness is love for the children who were snatched from the future, who never got to grow up, for the families like mine who are still haunted by loved ones who were lynched, and for the future generations who may face the same terror.

This book won’t undo the violence. It won't yield justice. But the reason I feel so heavy is also the reason I had to write it. I carried the weight so those children wouldn’t stay buried in the archive. I hope all of them come for me gently after I take my last quiet breath.

This book is not a plea to White America, to the reviewers, to the gatekeepers of the history profession. I wrote this for the ancestors. It is a record for my people. A ledger of our dead. A refusal to let silence be the final word.

And this will be the last book I write about child abuse. Because I cannot keep tearing open my own wounds to prove what this country already damn well knows. Because I refuse to let my life’s work be defined only by child abuse and death, while our children deserve to be imagined in joy, in power, and in futures unbroken.

Because Black children are godlings. They are our brightest testimony of love itself. They are pure, radiant, and deserving of a world that protects their joy as fiercely as it has tried for centuries to steal their breath.

Strung Up

Beacon Press

October 2026