Happy King Day! On Blackness and Beauty

Don’t let anybody take your manhood. Be proud of our heritage; as somebody said earlier tonight, we don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything black, ugly and evil. Look in your dictionary and see the synonyms of the word ‘black.’ It’s always something degrading and low and sinister. Look at the word, ‘white.’ It’s always some pure, high and. I want to get the language so right that everybody here will cry out, ‘Yes I’m black and I’m proud of it. I’m black and I’m beautiful.’

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Morehouse  College ’48 | Human and Civil Rights Activist + Nobel Peace Prize Recipient | #HBCUSTORY

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Dr. Crystal A. deGregory is a historian, storyteller, and convener whose work centers the power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the lives of Black women and girls. She is the founder of HBCUstory and editor-in-chief of The Journal of HBCU Research + Culture, as well as Founding Director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University. A trusted architect of public history and cultural memory, she created the Bethune at 150 Syllabus and convened the 2025 Southern Association for Women Historians Triennial Meeting, where she was named the organization’s first-ever Honorary Lifetime Member. Through her forthcoming platform Her Due, deGregory advances overdue recognition for women’s labor, leadership, and legacy. Known for transforming history into strategy, she builds spaces where scholarship fuels equity, culture, and community. Follow her @HBCUstorian.

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