For many years, Blacks like the ones in Conroe and Livingston—all over the country, really—have had their stories written out of history. The tyranny of ideas about “the archive,” or what constitutes the official record, all too often, has buried their knowledge and rendered it suspect. This is so despite the fact that it is well known that such people were operating under an oppression that deliberately prevented them from creating parts of the archive or making official records. What is the morality that would say that the oppressors’ version of historical events should naturally take
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