Who Gets To Tell The Story

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.

Issue No. 022

Friday, September 25, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

This week's issue kept circling back to the same question: who gets to tell the story, and who has to fight to be believed.

The Smithsonian just confirmed what Sally Hemings's descendants have said for two centuries, that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least two of her six children. It took fifteen years and a genome to catch up to what Black oral history already knew. That is not a science story. That is a story about whose testimony counts.

Christine and Elmore Wonsley are still waiting on theirs. A grand jury declined to charge anyone in their son Nolan's death, and they have not stopped asking why. Two curators at the Schomburg spent this year deciding which Black women artists' work gets preserved for the next hundred years of researchers to find. A White House tried to decide, by force, which journalists get to describe what happens inside it, until a judge, a fight, and Black women journalists who'd survived this before told it no.

Maya Angelou wrote it plainest of all: there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

None of these are separate fights. They are the same fight, in a courtroom, a museum, a newsroom, a mother's living room. Somebody decides what gets remembered. This week, more than a few of us decided it would not be them.

Stay rooted.
- LD

THE HEADLINE

The press just discovered press freedom matters.

Credit: ABC News

Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House last week. By Saturday, their reporters found their credentials confiscated on sight, starting with MS NOW's Akayla Gardner, a Black woman correspondent, denied entry before CNN's or Politico's reporters were stopped. The National Association of Black Journalists, led by Errin Haines, said it plainly: a free and independent press is not a privilege granted at the discretion of any president. The Justice Department argued the opposite in court, that White House access is a privilege, not a right, citing national security.

A federal judge paused it, not settled it. Judge Timothy Kelly, the same judge who restored CNN's Jim Acosta's credentials in 2018, granted a 14-day temporary restraining order overnight Wednesday into Thursday, finding the ban likely violated due process without adequate notice. The administration didn't immediately comply: several reporters, including MS NOW's Laura Barron-Lopez, were turned away and had passes confiscated Thursday morning despite the order. The outlets asked for an emergency hearing; Kelly ordered the administration to respond in writing by 12:30 p.m., then called the hearing request moot once access was restored around noon. That restoration didn't hold either: hours later that same evening, MS NOW and CNN journalists, Barron-Lopez among them, were blocked from a state dinner arrival ceremony for China's Xi Jinping. When she asked why, a White House staffer told her to "talk to Steven," an apparent reference to communications director Steven Cheung. A preliminary injunction ruling isn't expected until after Oct. 5.

What gets lost in the sudden unity among networks is the memory of who wasn't defended the same way. The Washington Post fired Black columnist Karen Attiah last year over her posts in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's killing. It had already killed its own Kamala Harris endorsement before that. April Ryan spent years absorbing exactly the kind of treatment CNN and Politico are now calling unprecedented, with far less solidarity behind her.

The Constitution doesn't apply differently depending on who's under attack. It took a lawsuit and a judge, and it still wasn't enough to make it through the night.

ABC News, CNN, MS NOW, PBS/AP, NBC News, TIME, Al Jazeera, NPR, theGrio, Washington Post

THE PROFILE

The Women Curating Black Women Into History

Simone Leigh, No Face, 2018. Credit: Matthew Marks Gallery

Today, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture opens its largest exhibition of contemporary Black women's art in the institution's history. "Forging Ahead: Recent Acquisitions of Black Women Artists" brings together new work from 21 artists including Simone Leigh, Tschabalala Self, Xenobia Bailey, and Barbara Jones-Hogu, running through March 2027. One of those artists, photographer Nona Faustine, died this year; her Mitochondria series enters the Schomburg's permanent collection as both acquisition and memorial.

The show exists because two women decided it should. La Tanya S. Autry, the Schomburg's associate curator of photographs and prints, and Tammi Lawson, curator of art and artifacts, built the exhibition to correct a specific, documented problem: a 2019 Williams College study found 85% of the art displayed by the country's top museums was made by white artists, 87% by men. Autry has spent nearly a decade naming that problem out loud. In 2017, she co-founded Museums Are Not Neutral with Mike Murawski, the campaign that turned "the museum has to be neutral" from an unquestioned excuse into a phrase institutions now have to defend.

"As they insist on Black life, these artists also contend with historical erasure," Autry said. "Having their artworks in our collection strengthens the institution's ability to support research of past, present, and future Black life." Lawson put it more simply: "Despite the disparity across museum collections, gallery representation, and auction showings, Black women press on, progress, and create. We see you and honor your work here."

Nobody profiles the curator. But someone has to decide what survives, and this week, two Black women made that call.

Schomburg Center/NYPL; Black PR Wire

THE FIVE

Guest curated by Rev. Shavon L. Arline-Bradley

President & CEO, NCNW · Founding Principal, REACH Beyond Solutions

This week's Five is guest curated by Rev. Shavon Arline-Bradley, leading the National Council of Negro Women into its next chapter of advocacy for Black women and their families.

01  The tears of a Black mother continue to fall.

The death of Nolan Wells continues to pull at the hearts of every Black family in this country. Christine and Elmore Wonsley's tears were evident after a grand jury ruled not to file any criminal charges in Wells' mysterious death in Mississippi. Another Black child loses their life with no answers. We may never know the full story, but their love as parents won't let them stop fighting until there is resolve.

ABC News

02  They say fraud, Black women say system failed, again.

The Trump Administration Task Force on Fraud, led by JD Vance, is set to remove over 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act, citing fraudulent use of subsidies. One of the most crucial issues for Black women and families is access to affordable healthcare. Brad Woodhouse, president of advocacy group Protect Our Care, said that the task force is "a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers' money." We must watch closely to ensure that Black women are not disproportionately impacted.

The Hill, Protect Our Care

03  It is time to return to Hillman honey!

This week, Netflix launches the sequel series to the critically acclaimed "A Different World." This generation of streaming TV viewers will have the opportunity to witness a cultural explosion of HBCU campus life in these turbulent times. Families will gather as television matriarch Debbie Allen recreates the vision from the 80s into a 21st century continuation of a love story for culture and community that will keep Black women talking for a while!

Netflix Tudum

04  The women gathered.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Annual Legislative Conference became a beacon of hope for Black women in the fight for justice. The Black Women's Roundtable and NCNW hosted sessions featuring the voices of Black women working to get out the vote. In partnership with the Black Women's Leadership Collective, we are working toward a goal of 1 million new Black voters. When we fight and when we vote, we win. NCNW also received the Maxine Waters Non-Profit Award for voter activation at this year's conference. Bethune's legacy lives in all of us.

@ncnw_hq and @ncbcp

05  And I approve this message.

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio stood toe to toe with the President of the United States. Rep. Beatty is the sole plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging Trump's plans for the Kennedy Center, and she has now won twice in federal court. She joins a growing list of Black women leading the legal fight against this administration, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has sued and won against the administration's tactics repeatedly this year. This display of Black woman leadership stands as a standard for all of us to follow. Where we stand up and fight back!

Huffington Post

THE LEGENDS

Dr. Maya Angelou

The Authority to Tell Your Own Story

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Credit: Zinn Education Project (youth); © Dwight Carter (later years)

Dr. Maya Angelou represents another dimension of Black women's power: the ownership of one's voice.

Her extraordinary life encompassed literature, performance, teaching and activism. She worked with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, connecting her directly to the freedom struggles waged by other legendary Black women.

But perhaps her greatest lesson for women is authorship, not merely writing books, but refusing to allow other people to have the final word about who you are.

Angelou wrote about trauma, sexuality, racism, motherhood, dignity, love, disappointment and triumph without requiring Black womanhood to be either sanitized or pitied.

For generations of Black women, that was revolutionary.

Her life says:

You may inherit a history, but you retain the right to narrate your own life.

THE WIN

Spelman: 20 Years at No. 1

Credit: Spelman College

Spelman College has been ranked the No. 1 HBCU in the country by U.S. News & World Report for the 20th consecutive year, every single year since the rankings began. The college also landed at No. 2 nationally for social mobility and climbed three spots to No. 34 among all national liberal arts colleges. Under its new president, Dr. Ayanna Howard, an AI pioneer and former NASA engineer named to the role in June, the answer to who does this best was the same as it's been for two decades. Twenty years of proof that a school built to educate Black women is doing it better than anyone else in the country. That's not a ranking. That's a record.

U.S. News & World Report; Spelman College

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

Voter engagement groups are sounding the alarm on funding, not turnout. America Votes, the coordinating hub for 400-plus progressive organizing groups, has raised nearly 40% less at this point than it had in 2018 or 2022, according to executive director Daria Dawson. Esosa Osa of Onyx Impact put it bluntly: watching the donor pullback in a year with no Voting Rights Act protection left standing isn't strategy, it's surrender. Gutted federal protections and a defunded ground game compound each other. Neither has to fail alone for the damage to show up at the polls.

AP

The Fed raised rates a quarter point last week, its first hike since 2023, driven by an oil price shock rather than an overheating economy. That distinction won't soften where it lands. Black women already carry the highest average credit card balances of any racial group tracked, already face a homeownership gap wider than in 1960, and just watched their unemployment rate climb to 5.6% in August while the overall rate held flat. None of that started with this hike. It just got more expensive to survive.

Federal Reserve; BLS; Century Foundation; NAREB

Angie Nixon's case just ended, and it never got the admission Florida wanted. The Jacksonville Democrat, now the party's U.S. Senate nominee, settled the charges from her May sit-in at DeSantis's office: a $250 fine, 15 hours of community service, no guilty plea entered. The charges get dismissed once she completes it. Her sit-in was a protest of the congressional map Republicans passed to dilute Black voting power, the same fight still playing out in courts nationwide. She heads into her Senate race against Ashley Moody with the case closed and the point made anyway.

Florida Phoenix

ONE THING TO READ

The Smithsonian just delivered its most definitive answer yet on Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

A new book by Smithsonian curator Richard Kurin, built on 15 years of genomic testing against a lock of Jefferson's hair, calls it extraordinary proof that he fathered at least two of Hemings's six children. It isn't news to her descendants, who have said this for two centuries and were dismissed as unreliable narrators of their own family history. The science just caught up. One complication worth sitting with: Hemings's oldest living descendant says the process cost her her trust in the institution that just vindicated her family.

New York Times; Smithsonian; Chronicle of Higher Education

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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