Today’s Love Goes to Black Future Month

Writer Chinaka Hodge celebrates black pasts, presents, and futures.

By Jamilah King Feb 21, 2011

We’ve written before about the broader goal of our celebrate love series, but really it all boils down to us shining the spotlight on things we think are incredible, adorable, or brave. A good embodiment of at least two things on that list is ThickWit.com‘s celebration of Black Future Month. It’s a project with a fairly simple mission: to use each day of Black History Month to highlight a young, creative black thinker and put them in historical conversation with other black visionaries. The project’s being curated by Oakland-born writer Chinaka Hodge, who wrote by way of explanation:

Basically, I’m quite certain that my people, my immediate circle of friends is going to run the country in the rather near future. Collectively we’re academics, engineers, artists, filmmakers, activists, tastemakers, artisans, attorneys, industry heads and even a few fledgling bankers. In short, in the future, we’ll make significant impact on our chosen fields, like ASAP.

To date, Hodge has celebrated fathers, emcees, photographers, poetsanimators, and future neuroscientists, just to name a few. A recent post on Colorlines fave Bryant Terry recalled that his approach to food justice is rooted in the work of the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children programs in West Oakland during the late 60’s. I promise you, it’s good stuff. And there’s still about a week to go, so check it out. And if Tumblr’s your thing, go follow it on there, too.

So today’s love goes to black pasts, presents, and futures. We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to [email protected], and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve got the rights to share any media you send.

To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.