Walter English's Mission To Illuminate Black Ancestry

Marriage and Martinis

Adam Silverstein

Unknown

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Walter English has always loved history, but was always told that his family's history didn't exist. In 2021, a historian friend offered to help Walter fill in his family tree. Eventually with their help, Walter saw a slave census with his second great grandfather’s name on it. After that, everything changed for him.

In this eye-opening, thought-provoking conversation, Danielle sat down with her friend Gina (who introduced her to The Blister English Project), and Walter English, a man on a mission to connect as many descendants of Chattel Slavery as possible with accurate family history. His mission is to uncover the stories and legacies that have been lost, burned, lied about or forgotten over time. And his stories and experiences are mesmerizing, gut-wrenching, and will hopefully make each of us better understand the ways in which we need to hold ourselves personally accountable to keep learning, listening, and doing our part to ensure that we progress as individuals and as a nation.

Check out The Brister Project and if possible, please donate to this incredible endeavor.

Follow Walter English on Instagram to stay up to date on the project and share his work far and wide!

Follow Gina on Instagram for all things resistance, joy, and creativity.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Weh-Hoo!
0:02.0	Woo!
0:03.0	Woo! Hey, guys.
0:27.8	Welcome to marriage and martinis.
0:29.3	This is Danielle.
0:31.3	I'm going to say that this episode you're about to hear, this interview, is one of the most
0:39.5	eye-opening I've done in a really long time.
0:44.9	And I don't say that lightly because I think sometimes I think that I have done so much work to try and be aware of different human
1:05.5	experiences, different histories, and to really value and appreciate, you know, all the perspectives of what it means
1:16.7	to live in this country today. And obviously, I will never be able to fully, by any means,
1:25.9	comprehend what it means to be a person of color or, you know,
1:31.6	someone who is in any marginalized community or group. But I especially in this interview had to
1:43.9	reflect a lot on how much I have not taken the time to really learn history
1:54.1	that I've never learned.
1:56.5	We've never been taught.
1:58.7	And I feel like I'm so privileged in the sense that I went to really good schools.
2:03.8	I did.
2:04.4	I, you know, education was always a huge priority in my family.
2:10.6	And I went to very progressive schools.
2:13.7	I went to NYU for college.
2:15.6	I majored in race relations. And still, I never, I never learned
2:22.9	even the tip of the iceberg of everything there is to try to comprehend about the history of this
	...

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