There are phrases people treat like decoration.
Like background noise. Like something you say when you don’t know what else to say.
“Never forget” is not one of those phrases.
“Never forget” is a command. Not to the world, because the world will do what it always does but to us. To our own nervous systems. To our families. To our art. To the way we move through a country that keeps asking for our excellence and keeps acting surprised when we carry grief in the same hands.
On the back of this new E.N.D. tee, it reads: 1501–1867.
And underneath it, in big, undeniable letters: NEVER FORGET.
I didn’t want a clever sentence.
I wanted something that stands up straight.
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Because I’m sitting with a truth that has never left me: we are not far from it. We act like we’re far from it because distance makes it easier to breathe. But we are not far. Not spiritually. Not emotionally. Not historically.
My grandparents were born in 1910’s.
My namesake was born in 1905 and killed in 1930, lynched by a white mob.
And while my grandparents were still alive, they remembered vividly the stories of their enslaved parents and relatives. Not as a chapter in a textbook. As family talk. As warning. As memory that lived in the body. In the way elders looked at you before you left the house. In the way they watched roads at night. In the way they prayed, hard.
That means we are two generations removed from one of the most atrocious and impactful times in human history.
Two.
That’s the part people don’t want to sit with.
Because if it’s only two generations, then it isn’t ancient.
It isn’t “back then.”
It’s still in the room.
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And once you admit it’s still in the room, you have to admit something else:
A nation was built on the backs of our ancestors.
A nation was fed by their hands.
A nation was financed by their stolen time.
And in that forced suffering, inside that cruelty… Our people still made songs, still made food, still made language, still made tenderness, still made ways to laugh without permission.
That’s genius. That’s love. That’s survival that deserves a altar.
So when I say never forget, I’m not talking about staying stuck in pain.
I’m talking about refusing to let the world rename what happened.
Because that’s what the erasing always does. It doesn’t come at you like a villain. It comes dressed as “move on.” It comes dressed as “why are you still talking about that.” It comes as policy. Curriculum. Cleaned-up language. Softened edges. It comes as people pretending a wound closed when it simply got covered.
But our elders didn’t live like that.
They carried stories the way you carry a candle through a dark house… slow, protective, intentional, because the point wasn’t to burn the place down. The point was to see.
That’s what this shirt is.
