100 Years Ago:
What the past still whispers
INTRODUCTION — The Quiet Radicalism of Looking Back
While most people chase the 30-second now, I tend to chase the 100-year mirror.
There’s something erotically subversive about it—running your fingertips along the yellowing breath of another century, letting your mind sink backward into the bones of forgotten type. Not as an escape. Not as nostalgia. But as a kind of heretical invocaytion: show me who we were when no one was watching.
The modern world is obsessed with speed, performative presentness, and the illusion of “progress.” But I have always found the truest revelations in long-decayed timelines, in the pages that never trended, in the ink of a dead man’s sermon or the ad copy meant for the “colored elite.” While everyone else scrolls for dopamine, I go rummaging for ghosts.
Reading a 100-year-old newspaper doesn’t feel academic to me—it feels like astral projection. The air shifts. Language moves differently. There's a lace of dignity in the diction, a fire in the undercurrent, and sometimes an ache so raw it smells like blood. But there’s humor too. Strategy. Boldness hidden in the folds of “respectability.” And if you let it, it will hold up a mirror not just to the world as it was—but to the very soul of the world as it still is.
That’s what happened when I sat with the November 6, 1925 issue of The Monitor, a Black-owned weekly newspaper based in Omaha, Nebraska. A single page from that paper cracked something open in me. Not because it was loud. But because it was intimate. Sublimely coded. Both polite and ungovernable. And in its gentle columns and clipped lines, it offered something I rarely find in modern writing—soulful clarity wrapped in everyday struggle.
A few articles reached across time and grabbed me by the throat. But before we get there, you have to feel what I felt: the weight of perspective-shifting stillness. The wonder of language worn soft by time. The sacred deviance of looking backward, not to retreat—but to remember who was already blazing trails before we dared to speak fire.
SECTION I: THEN — “The World They Lived In”
∞ The first story that took hold of me wasn’t a headline at all—it was a metaphysical riddle disguised as rural folklore. In a quiet corner of Leesville, South Carolina, a 90-year-old former slave named Major Perry was puzzling the local psychologists. By day, he was a man who could not read. By night, or rather, in a self-summoned trance, he became something else entirely: a preacher fluent in perfect English, quoting full chapters of the Bible without hesitation, grammar, or flaw.
Let me say that again: an illiterate ex-slave became a biblical orator in a dream-state.
Some said it was split personality. Others claimed the Holy Ghost had chosen him as a reluctant vessel. A few thought it was performance. But those who listened closely swore the sermons were always different, never rehearsed. This wasn’t ventriloquism. This was possession—or perhaps, revelation.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
About how many Major Perrys have lived and died unknown.
About the ancestral genius buried beneath forced silence and bowed heads.
This is what I mean when I say “the 100-year mirror.” Perry was a man who lived through bondage, through Reconstruction, through the ghosts of lynch mobs and the mockery of freedom. In his waking hours, he was trained to be small—to stay in the dialect, to defer to white folks, to embody the “quaint.” But when no one could stop him—when asleep, in trance, or perhaps in defiance—the suppressed voice of his true self came roaring out. Educated. Commanding. Biblical. Unapologetic.
It made me ache.
Not just for him, but for the entire generation like him.
Those who carried encoded brilliance beneath layers of enforced silence.
Those whose tongues only loosened in dreams, in death, or in the margins.
Major Perry is not a freak phenomenon.
He is the symbol of a great truth the world still fears:
You cannot permanently suppress a sovereign voice.
You can delay it. Muzzle it. Mourn it. But it will find a way.
And sometimes, it waits exactly 100 years
for a stranger to read a quiet column in a yellowed paper
and whisper back: I hear you now.
∞ The second story that stirred me was quieter, but no less luminous. It was a brief write-up, easily missed by those who scan for drama, but radiant with significance to anyone who knows how to read beneath the ink.
Clyde R. Brannon, a native Nebraskan, had returned from the firepit of World War I—survived what so many did not—and rather than retreat into invisibility, he built. Not metaphors, but highways. He was part of the first civil engineering class to graduate from Howard University, and upon returning stateside, he claimed his place in a field where Black presence was not just underrepresented—it was often deliberately barred. He earned his degree, passed the state exam, and was swiftly appointed by the New York State Highways Commission, where he worked on survey and construction teams.
There’s something erotic in that kind of precision.
To lay asphalt where there was once only wild dirt.
To define the literal structure of movement, of connection, of progress.
He didn’t have to speak from a trance like Major Perry.
He spoke through elevation, through blueprint, through road.
And perhaps more importantly—he didn't build only for Black people. He was building the skeleton of a nation that still pretended men like him didn’t exist. Or didn’t matter. And yet, there he was: black boots in the dirt, compass in hand, pouring concrete over the assumptions of the American caste system.
To me, Brannon is infrastructure in every sense.
Literal: He laid the physical roads others walked on.
Symbolic: He made the future harder to deny.
Every brick, every beam of measurement, every hard-won state contract was a kind of love letter to those who would come after him. He was building a country that hadn’t earned him yet. A republic that could barely imagine his competence—let alone his clarity.
That’s what this newspaper gives me:
a new pantheon.
Not of kings and generals. But of builders and dreamers and sleep-preachers and quietly defiant engineers with degrees from Howard who refused to be left out of the map.
∞ Lastly, a story that struck me with a different kind of voltage—legal, racial, prophetic. And this one was front-page news. It had to be. The tension crackled off the columns.
Clarence Darrow, the legendary defense attorney, had arrived in Detroit to defend Dr. Ossian Sweet, a Black physician charged with murder after a white mob attacked his newly purchased home. The “crime”? Buying property in a white neighborhood. The standoff left a white man dead, and the legal system—as always—was eager to blame the Black homeowner, not the mob with bricks in their hands.
The trial electrified the city. Darrow knew what he was walking into: not a case of criminal law, but of existential precedent. The jury pool was riddled with Klansmen and polite bigots in three-piece suits. Darrow spent days meticulously questioning each potential juror—examining them not for competence, but for ideology. For hidden rot.
He was trying to purge the jury the way you’d purge poison from a wound.
What stopped me cold as I read this piece was not just the power of the moment, but its placement. This wasn’t buried in some tucked-away corner. It was front-page news.
That’s how basic the stakes were in 1925:
Home ownership.
Just living where you paid to live.
That was enough to summon mobs and call forth the country’s most famous defense attorney.
And what haunted me more than anything?
How familiar it still feels.
Nearly a century later, the battleground has shifted but not dissolved. The architecture of exclusion still holds. Red lines became coded zoning. Mob violence became mortgage discrimination.
But the war? Oh, the war simply put on a different uniform.
And yet—this paper from a century ago reminds me that people did fight.
That Sweet stood his ground. That Darrow showed up. That the courtroom filled.
That truth and dignity were defended, in real time, with legal fire and fearless oratory.
They weren't hashtags. They were headlines.
And the battle to simply be—to live, love, buy, breathe—was sacred enough to open the morning news with.
This story is not a relic.
It’s a flare.
SECTION II: NOW — “The New Trance We’re In”
We no longer need to enter a trance to speak powerfully.
But how many of us still do?
Major Perry’s midnight sermons were born of necessity—his brilliance had no welcome in the waking world. The dream realm became his pulpit because the waking realm made him small. But now, we can speak in full sentences. We can record, publish, perform, rise. So why do so few of us use that gift with the clarity, daring, or holiness it demands?
Instead of trances of spirit, we’ve fallen into something far more insidious: the trance of the feed.
Scroll. Swipe. React. Forget.
A numbing, seductive rhythm that keeps us endlessly present—and completely unmoored from depth.
Most people don’t know what happened in their own town 100 years ago.
Hell, most don’t know what happened ten years ago.
Ask someone what trials shook their city in 1925, what battles were being fought on their very streets, which voices risked everything to be heard—and you’ll likely get a shrug. As if the past were some distant abstraction, rather than the bones under the sidewalk they walk every day.
And here’s the part that really sears:
This paper—The Monitor—cost five cents.
And yet it held more thought, more faith, more fire, more vision, than entire days of modern content consumption.
It held labor demands and spiritual mysteries. Sermons and lawsuits. Veterans and engineers. Women forming political clubs and servants inheriting twenty grand. It held grief and glamour and grassroots rebellion—all without flattening itself for clicks or treating the reader like a dopamine-drunk idiot.
We’re told that we’re more “connected” than ever. But are we?
To what? To whom?
To history? To our ancestors?
To the people who lived in our zip codes before we existed?
Or just to the algorithm’s infinite now?
I read this paper and I felt the spell crack.
Not just the one they were under—but the one we are.
And I found myself asking:
What are we afraid of remembering?
And who profits from our amnesia?
SECTION III: THE WEIGHT & THE LIGHT
Let’s be clear: some things have changed.
There has been movement—both tectonic and tender.
A century ago, a Black engineer was a marvel worth printing. Today, his brilliance would (hopefully) be assumed. A hundred years ago, interracial cooperation was a defiant ideal whispered in the sanctuaries of Congregational churches. Now, it’s printed in corporate mission statements, expected in institutions, enshrined—at least on paper—in law and culture.
University gates are wider now.
Legal defense is no longer reserved for the white and wealthy.
We are—by many measurable standards—freer to speak, to vote, to publish, to rise.
The trance has lifted in some rooms.
That’s the light.
But the weight remains.
Disparity still dogs every system.
The streets built by men like Clyde R. Brannon often bypass the communities they came from.
Surveillance hasn’t vanished—it’s just changed clothes. The white mob outside Dr. Sweet’s house is now a quiet bank algorithm, a targeted ad profile, a zoning board with friendly smiles and deadly intent.
Coded elitism thrives in boardrooms and yoga studios and curated circles of “conscious” thought leaders who preach equality while preserving exclusivity.
And most dangerous of all:
The mimics.
The mimics are people who copy the appearance of virtue, depth, or progress without doing the real work it requires.
They speak the “right” language, post the “right” causes, wear the “right” symbols—
but underneath, nothing has changed.
No risk. No courage. No transformation.
Only performance.
Mimics of progress.
Mimics of justice.
Mimics of soul.
A TikTok video with righteous music doesn’t make you an activist.
A diversity panel without power redistribution is theater.
An apology issued by a brand is not repentance.
This is the modern trance: the illusion of progress without its cost.
And I say that not with cynicism, but with reverence for the truth.
Because I’ve seen what real progress costs—in ink, in sweat, in silence, in fire.
It looked like sermons spoken in sleep.
It looked like bricklayers and engineers.
It looked like trials and protests and front-page cries for dignity.
We carry the weight. But we also carry the light.
And we dishonor both when we settle for holograms of liberation in place of the real thing.
SECTION IV: WHY IT MATTERS TO REMEMBER
Because culture is not made in real time—it is grown through lineage, layered like sediment, sung like a song with too many verses to hear in one lifetime. The present isn’t a solo act. It’s a call-and-response with the dead, and forgetting that makes us tone-deaf to both warning and wonder.
Because you can’t recognize forward movement unless you know where you were standing.
The arc doesn’t bend unless you’re watching it. And if you’re too lost in the now, too high on the drip-feed of fleeting drama, you’ll miss the quiet revolutions already underfoot.
Because there are Major Perrys everywhere, right now.
People walking among us with sermons stuck in their throats—genius behind guarded grammar, vision dressed in code-switching camouflage.
Voices trapped inside the wrong tongue, the wrong platform, the wrong century—waiting for someone, anyone, to hear what lives beneath the surface.
And when we remember, truly remember, we become those listeners.
We tune the air differently.
We make space for the trance-breakers, the blueprint scribes, the silent architects of our soul.
To remember is not to look back.
It is to open the door for what’s still unfinished.
CONCLUSION — “Ink That Outlasts Time”
The paper yellows. The font fades. The names curl at the edges like ash.
But truth?
That ink never dries.
You can feel it, even now—a century later—reaching up from the page with steady hands, whispering in a voice older than grief: Look closely. We were here. We burned. We built. We dreamed.
Reading a single issue of The Monitor from 1925 didn’t just teach me history.
It unlocked something.
A deeper rhythm. A quieter kind of knowing. A lineage of flame-keepers who never waited for permission to matter.
So I’ll say this:
Go find a newspaper from 100 years ago.
Not a textbook. Not a documentary.
A real, living relic.
Let your fingers graze the past and feel its heat.
Because remembrance is not passive.
It is resistance.
It is reclamation.
It is how we recover the voices trapped beneath the scroll—
and become, at last, the kind of listeners the future is aching for.
The trance is breaking.
Will you hear them now?
Summoning ghosts for a fresh perspective,
Majeye
◙ Want to read it yourself? ◙
This issue of The Monitor comes from the Library of Congress digital archives. You can view or download the original PDF using the link below. If you choose to download, take care—the download button is small and easy to miss.