Last episode we stood in the home they took us from. Now meet the men who came to take it. West Africans had a word for them: toubob. This episode asks one question — did they stumble into evil, or did they choose it? We follow the record: twelve people seized in 1441, then 235 sold in the open at Lagos in 1444; the Pope's 1452 order granting permission "to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude" — slavery with no end date; Elmina Castle, built in 1482 for gold, not people; São Tomé, the island rehearsal where the plantation machine was invented; John Hawkins sailing with the Queen of England's own ships and her crest bearing a bound man; the Royal African Company, which Britain's National Archives says carried more enslaved people than any other single institution; and the asiento — 144,000 human beings written into a peace treaty. We close with the count from the Slave Voyages database — 12.5 million forced onto ships, 1.8 million dead in the crossing — and Walter Rodney's verdict: underdevelopment was made, not born. They were not blown off course. They chose. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

Thirty-five episodes, and we do not start with the ships. We start with home. Before the taking, there was a continent of two thousand languages: Mansa Musa crashing the price of gold in Cairo in 1324, Timbuktu's scholars paid for by the king, hundreds of thousands of books smuggled to safety in 2012, Benin's walls called the largest earthworks ever built by hand, Ife's bronze heads so lifelike Europeans said Greeks made them, the Oyo Empire's courts and taxes, the Asante Golden Stool that holds a nation's soul, Kongo's two million people choosing Christianity as strategy, Igbo towns with no kings at all, Akan families running through the mother's line, and iron smelted from rock two thousand years ago by African hands alone. Named kingdoms, real trades, real families — so everything after lands as loss, not just violence. The series premiere of The Taking. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

Before Episode One, meet the man telling the story. Mr. Black History took a DNA test, and what Ancestry sent back wasn't a pie chart — it was the map of this entire series. Eighty-eight percent African across twenty-two peoples: Igboland (16%), the Gbe peoples of Benin (9%), Western Bantu and forest peoples (9%), Hausa and Fulani, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Yorubaland, the Mandé world of Mali and Senegal, Cameroon, Liberia, Zimbabwe, the Luba of Congo. His blood covers nearly every coast the slave ships loaded from — the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, the Windward Coast, Kongo and Angola. His Gbe nine percent comes from Dahomey's coast — where some sold, and some were sold, and he comes from that ground either way. And twelve percent of him is England and Ireland — in his blood through the plantation world this series exists to name. "I am not a tour guide. I am a descendant, reading his own file out loud." This is Episode 0 of The Taking, a 35-episode series on the slave system. Start here, then go straight to Episode 1: Home. Follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send this to one neighbor whose blood might be a map too.

How do you travel with dignity through a country whose laws say you are less than human? We start with the terror on the road: sundown towns, legally refused service, police hunting Black drivers — and families driving straight through the night on food packed at home. Then the answer: Victor Hugo Green, a Black mailman from Harlem, who built the Negro Motorist Green Book on nights and weekends starting in 1936. Black postal workers mailed him listings, travelers sent in their own, strangers opened their homes to strangers — and Esso stations, Black churches, and the Urban League put the book in people's hands. This was not a secret book; it was openly sold, and what it documented was the terror that made it necessary. We follow the book from a 15-page New York directory to a 99-page international edition, hear the prayer Green wrote in 1948, and face the honest cost: desegregation helped kill the Black businesses the book had mapped, and driving while Black did not end when the book ended. The mindset survives the book: when the state will not protect you, you protect each other. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

They said our speech was broken English. The proof says otherwise. We start in West Africa with the jali — the keepers of the word — who carried the Epic of Sundiata for seven hundred years by voice alone, and follow what the ships could not kill: the African words Lorenzo Dow Turner found alive on the Sea Islands in the 1930s, the ring shout's call and response, the spirituals that said two things at once, and the hush harbors — church, hidden in the trees. Then the fight over the written word: a boy named Frederick Douglass trading bread for reading lessons in Baltimore, because teaching an enslaved person to read was against the law — and hearing his master say reading "would forever unfit him to be a slave." Then the verbal arts: signifying, the Signifying Monkey, and the dozens — an insult game with rules older than America. Then the grammar trial: the "be" that means always, the dropped "is" that follows rules, the 1979 courtroom where Geneva Smitherman stood for Black children, and the 1997 verdict from America's top language scholars. We close with Ebonics — "Black sounds" — and the Oakland fight of 1996. It was never broken. It was built. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

The Great Dismal Swamp hid people who vanished without a trace. The Louisiana bayou hid people who refused to vanish at all. In the 1780s, in the wetlands below New Orleans, free Black people built hidden towns in the marsh: a camp on the edge of a plantation and a deep-swamp town on high, dry ground, about twenty-one people from fifteen plantations, led by the man the records call Jean Saint Malo. They farmed, fished, carved big wooden tubs from cypress trees, wove baskets the Chitimacha taught them, and ran a trade chain from the deep swamp to the plantations to the Sunday market at Congo Square, with the money coming back to the marsh. Dr. Sylviane Diouf calls it a network of complicity: a secret chain of people helping each other. Spain answered with soldiers, and in June of 1784 Saint Malo was hanged in front of the cathedral as a warning. Act II: Internal Nations continues. If this episode moved you, follow Sankofa Chronicles — and send it to one neighbor who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this porch.

The Chef Who Got Away: Hercules Posey — Food Origins

He was America's first celebrity chef. He ran George Washington's kitchen, fed presidents and diplomats, wore fine clothes, and made $200 a year selling leftovers — more than the white overseers.

And he was enslaved.

From a ferry on the Potomac to the bluffs of Mount Vernon to the President's House on High Street in Philadelphia — then the nation's capital — this is the true story of Hercules Posey. How Pennsylvania's 1780 freedom law almost freed him, how Washington rotated his enslaved staff to keep them in bondage, and why Hercules chose Washington's 65th birthday — February 22, 1797 — to walk away and never come back.

His daughter said it best: "No sir, I'm very glad, for he is free now."

Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast. Food Origins, Episode 2.

Satchmo in Ghana — Black People in Music

What happens when the trumpet that invented American music goes home?

May 1956. Louis Armstrong — Satchmo, the genius from New Orleans who taught the world how to swing — lands in Accra. Thirteen bands on the tarmac. A hundred thousand people at the Polo Grounds. A song that left Louisiana generations ago and made it back before he did.

This isn't just a concert. This is Cold War America trying to use Black music as a weapon, a future African president in the crowd, and a grandson of slavery standing on African soil saying, "This is my country too."

From highlife to brass, from Accra to New Orleans — the sound they tried to bury came home.

Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast. Black People in Music, Episode 2.

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