Somewhere in early nineteenth-century Newtown, a clerk dipped his pen and reduced a free Black family to a single tally mark under “Free Colored.” No names. No story. Just a number for the federal ledger. But across town, in a church basement or a meeting hall lit by candle and conviction, that same family appeared in a different kind of record—names spelled out in full, relationships honored, contributions acknowledged. Two archives. Two visions of who these people were. One imposed by the state; the other claimed by the community itself.
Kujichagulia—self-determination—calls on a people to define themselves, speak for themselves, and name themselves. For Newtown’s free Black residents, this was no abstract philosophy. It was a daily act of resistance waged with pen and ink, inscribed in church registers and mutual aid society minutes, recorded in burial ledgers—quiet but deliberate defiance of the racial categories the state sought to impose.
Naming as Power and The Census as Erasure…