Ancestral Message To the Architects of Erased Empires

Hear this, children of the diaspora. Hear this, seeds of a future yet to be fully born. Before the lies of emptiness, before the myth of beginning with nothing, there was us. Not as scraps, not as cargo, but as architects.

We are the echoes of the Mansa’s court in Mali, where gold was so plentiful it destabilized continents. We are the memory of the Kongo’s thriving markets, of the intricate trade routes of Timbuktu. This is not a fable. This is your bedrock.

But know this, specifically: in the very lands where they later claimed we were only worth our chains, we first built fortunes that cast shadows over their arriving ships.

We speak of Anthony Johnson in 17th-century Virginia, a man who arrived indentured, fought for and won his freedom, and built an estate so vast he enslaved others to work it—a bitter, complex testament to Black agency in a system he helped shape before it fully hardened to crush him.

We speak of William “Free Frank” McWorter, who bought his own freedom with a silver mine he discovered, then founded the town of New Philadelphia, Illinois—a thriving, integrated community decades before the Civil War. He purchased the freedom of sixteen family members, his wealth measured in land, enterprise, and liberated souls.

We speak of Marie Thérèse Metoyer, “Coincoin”, of Louisiana. Born enslaved, freed by a French planter, she became a master businesswoman—trading in livestock, textiles, and land. She founded the Isle Brevelle community, building a dynasty of Creole planters, her children amassing thousands of acres and hundreds of enslaved people, their wealth rivaling any white settler in the region.

We speak of the Ellison family of South Carolina. William Ellison, born into slavery, trained as a master cotton gin maker. He bought his freedom and his family’s, and grew into one of the state’s largest cotton gin manufacturers, owning more slaves than 99% of white southerners. His wealth was a stark, uncomfortable pillar in the antebellum economy.

We speak of Robert Reed Church in post-Civil War Memphis. After the yellow fever epidemics ruined the city, he was the one who bought the forsaken land. He built its first Black-owned bank, its premier theater, parks, and subdivisions, becoming the South’s first Black millionaire and rebuilding a city others had fled.

Hear the Truth in Their Silence:

They were not exceptions. They were evidence.

Evidence that the mind they tried to shackle could master their systems, out-plan their plunder, and build empires on the very soil meant to be our grave. And that was the greater threat. A subjugated people is useful. A prosperous, independent, land-owning, bank-founding Black dynasty is terrifying to the myth of white supremacy.

So what did they do?

They did not just tax or compete. They erased.

They passed laws—Black Codes, grandfather clauses, restrictive deeds. They unleashed violence—Night Riders, lynchings, the burning of Black Wall Streets. They wove narratives—that we were lazy, incapable, perpetually needing guidance. They systematically severed the roots of our economic trees and then pointed to the stumps as proof the forest never existed.

They made Anthony Johnson’s legacy a footnote of irony, not a chapter on enterprise.
They let New Philadelphia be plowed under by racial hostility and neglect.
They labeled the Metoyers a curious anomaly, not a matriarchal empire.
They buried William Ellison’s success under the sole narrative of his slave-holding.
They memory-holed Robert Church’s rebuilding of Memphis.

This is the second theft: the theft of our legacy of abundance.

So This Is the Charge We Place Upon You:

1. Dig for Your True Foundation. Your history did not start at the auction block. It stretches back to kingdoms and forward to these builders. Find them. Say their names. Claim their ingenuity as your inheritance.
2. Understand the Erasure as Proof of Your Power. They do not erase the weak. They erase the potent. The fact they worked so hard to blot this out is the ultimate testimony to its threatening brilliance.
3. Re-define Wealth. For us, wealth was never just coin. It was family freedom, like Free Frank’s. It was community creation, like Coincoin’s and Robert Church’s. It was self-determination in a world hell-bent on denying it. Let your economics be rooted in liberation.
4. Build Again, But Build Guarded. Build your businesses, your land, your credit, your art. But build with the wisdom of the scar. Build collective, build resilient, build with an eye to the storm you know will come, because it always comes for the tree that grows too tall in the wrong forest.

You are not descendants of beggars. You are the scions of sovereigns, of magnates, of builders whose blueprints were stolen.

We were not just richer.
We were foundational.
And a foundation, even buried, remains to be built upon.

Now, rise. Remember. And rebuild with the memory of what was, and the vision of what must be.

The Ancestors, The Builders, The Erased & Unforgotten.