September is International Underground Railroad Month. And if you're looking for the blueprint on civil disobedience converged with social justice, look no further than the UGRR itself, a movement the Black church led.

In this candid conversation, Rev. Dr. Richard Hughes shares his poignant perspective on the social justice identity of the Black Church. We ask the question too many congregations are avoiding: what happened to the church that used to hide freedom seekers in its basement and now can't say the word "injustice" from the pulpit?

Somewhere between then and now, too many of our churches have adopted capitalistic mindset. Prosperity gospel replacing liberation gospel. Comfort replacing conviction. The same institution that once provided refuge for Freedom Seekers now hesitates to name injustices.

It's ABOUT TIME we call it what it is!

For generations, Black filmmakers have challenged the stories America reveals about itself, reclaiming narratives too often erased, distorted, or ignored. Every frame has the power to preserve memory, spark dialogue, and inspire movements that transcend the screen.

In this episode of GOT TIME with Christopher John, we talk with Donna Dabbs, founder and executive director of the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival (GCUFF), to explore how one of the nation's premier Black film festivals has become far more than a showcase for independent cinema. It has become a cultural institution where history, identity, creativity, and community converge.

Celebrating its fifteenth year, GCUFF continues to elevate filmmakers from across the African Diaspora, creating opportunities for emerging artists while connecting audiences to stories that educate, challenge, and transform. Together, we examine why authentic representation matters, how Black film functions as both historical record and cultural resistance, and why independent storytellers remain essential to preserving the richness and complexity of the Black experience.

Our conversation explores the responsibility of cultural institutions to invest in Black creative voices, the evolution of independent filmmaking, the importance of creating spaces where underrepresented stories can flourish, and the enduring relationship between cinema, social justice, and collective memory.

From documentaries that uncover forgotten histories to narrative films that imagine new futures, this episode reminds us that Black cinema is not simply entertainment. It is preservation, protest, and possibilities.

Link: Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival

What happens when the institution entrusted with the pursuit of truth becomes an instrument of suppression? What does ethical leadership look like when the policy is the problem? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Darryl B. Rice, the Richard T. Farmer Associate Professor of Management at Miami University and Associate Editor at the Journal of Managerial Psychology. An award-winning scholar whose research centers organizational justice, behavioral ethics, well-being, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Dr. Rice brings both intellectual firepower and lived experience to a conversation that is as urgent as it is clarifying.

Dr. Rice isn't just studying ethical leadership from a distance; he is living it in real time. In April 2025, Miami University began dismantling its DEI programs and initiatives in compliance with Ohio's Senate Bill 1, the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, which effectively prohibits DEI offices and training courses at public universities. Dr. Rice, who built a record of service through DEI committees, the Across-the-Divide Conference, the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion, and the Inclusive Excellence Faculty Fellows Program, filed a federal lawsuit against Miami University's Board of Trustees in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, arguing that the closures violated his First Amendment rights and his academic freedom as a tenured faculty member.

This episode doesn't just cover a lawsuit. It excavates the architecture of institutional power, the weaponization of legislation against protected speech, and what it costs a scholar, personally and professionally, to stand on the side of justice when the institution moves against it.

Hollywood's new civil rights thriller invents a mafia hitman to share the spotlight with a Black FBI agent hunting the killers of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi. The real story needs no invention. This episode tells the true account of Vernon Dahmer, a Black farmer and NAACP leader who was firebombed and murdered by the Klan for offering to pay poll taxes so his neighbors could vote and asks why the truth still isn't enough for the big screen.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Michael A. Battle, Sr., chaplain, scholar, and former U.S. Ambassador to both the African Union and Tanzania, for a conversation that refuses to stay small. We talk about foreign policy that serves people instead of politics. We talk about standing in rooms with Nelson Mandela and Ethiopian leadership, and what it means to represent a country that hasn't always represented you.

We illuminate Dr. Battle's 2024 article in Ambassadors Review, a publication of The Council of American Ambassadors, examining BRICS, the multilateral alliance among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and the shifting contest among nations to shape public opinion across the African continent. His argument is direct: the United States needs to pursue deeper trade and investment with African nations, not just extract from them. Dr. Battle makes the case that the United States should be partnering directly with African nations, both for supply and for value added production, recognizing Africa's global significance as an economic partner rather than a resource to compete over.

This is a candid conversation that challenges us to rethink what citizenship means when the world is our neighborhood. Dr. Battle has spent a lifetime proving that diplomacy isn't abstract. It's personal. It's urgent. And it starts long before anyone hands you a title.

What happens when history becomes a portal to the future? In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Sojourner Tru to explore Portals of Remembrance, a powerful solo exhibition that merges archival photographs with digital art to reimagine the Black experience across time.

Drawing from lesser-known histories of agricultural labor and migration, Sojourner Tru transforms historical fragments into expansive visual landscapes where memory and imagination coexist. Her work invites us to move beyond simply remembering the past and instead engage history as a living force that shapes new possibilities. Through each composition, she "time walks" across generations, constructing worlds that honor ancestral resilience while envisioning liberated Black futures.

Together, we examine the intersection of public history, contemporary art, and Afrofuturism, asking how artistic practice can recover overlooked narratives while creating new ones. This conversation challenges us to see archives not as static repositories of the past, but as portals that inspire innovation, identity, and collective imagination.

If Afrofuturism asks us to imagine what is possible, Portals of Remembrance reminds us that the blueprint for those futures is already embedded within the histories we choose to remember.

As America 250 continues, one question refuses to be drowned out by pageantry: What does this nation owe to the people it built itself upon?

In this installment of America Two-Fiddie, we examine the realities of reparatory justice: what it is, what it demands, and why the discomfort it produces is itself a form of evidence. Reparatory justice is not simply a check in the mail. It is a reckoning encompassing material, symbolic, and structural action aimed at restoring dignity, addressing inequalities rooted in enslavement and colonialism, and ensuring the machinery of harm is dismantled rather than rebranded.

No story makes that demand more vividly than what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921. In less than 24 hours, a White mob aided by official complicity killed as many as 300 Black Tulsans, displaced thousands, and destroyed hundreds of businesses, homes, churches, and schools.

What really sparked the violence? An interracial relationship. The fragility of white social order, threatened by proximity across the color line, ignited one of the deadliest acts of racial terror in American history.

We explore Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America by attorney and activist Damario Solomon-Simmons, a book that chronicles the legal and moral struggle to address the injustices inflicted on Greenwood and its survivors. Solomon-Simmons represented three centenarian survivors of the massacre, navigating courtrooms from Tulsa to the nation's capital in a pursuit of reparations that are equal parts legal brief and moral indictment.

Reparatory justice is not radical. It is what accountability looks like when the damage is this deep.

Some buildings are more than brick and mortar. They are testimonies of resistance. They are the physical evidence that we were here and that we built, gathered, worshipped, organized, and thrived.

In this installment, we explore the preservation of Black places and spaces: what it means to protect them, what we lose when we don't, and who is doing the sacred, unglamorous work of making sure our built environment survives the bulldozer of so-called progress.

Every time a Black historic site is saved, someone fought for it. Every time one falls, someone looked the other way. Memory has an agenda and so does erasure. The deliberate neglect of Black historic structures is itself a form of violence: slow, bureaucratic, and dressed up in the language of development. We examine how the fight to preserve Black places is inseparable from the fight for Black dignity and why the activism of memory is as urgent as any march, any ballot, any courtroom.

We illuminate the preservation of the historic Manse Hotel in the heart of Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, a landmark of Black social life, community gathering, and cultural dignity in a neighborhood that has weathered decades of disinvestment and displacement. The Manse is not just a building with a past. It is a call to the present.

Preservation is proclamation. Memory is mission. The places we protect tell the world who we believe deserves to be remembered and the places we abandon say the same thing, even louder.

Do the work. Save the places. Tell the stories.