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The Meek-Eaton Black Archives Research Center and Museum at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee. Photo: Florida A&M University. 

This preservation story begins at the Delaware. A 12-year-old boy holds a lantern through the bitter winter night as the Continental Army crosses the river between New Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1776. The boy, Jocko Graves, freezes to death.

George Washington is so moved that he commissions a statue to honor Jocko. Over time, though, someone, somewhere, strips the honor out, bends the image into mockery. He becomes a lawn jockey – a debasing symbol of minstrelsy. The archive didn’t just neglect Jocko. It inverts him.

The story, passed down through generations, may be legend. But its meaning is not. Which is why this Jocko is now in Tallahassee, upstairs in plexiglass at Florida A&M University (FAMU), a historically Black institution. Beside him, there’s a lit lantern on a stand.

Autumn Heatrice, the registrar at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives Research Center and Museum, put the boy and lantern there. Heatrice found Jocko in a separate Jim Crow exhibit, learned more about his story, and rescued him. As the person through whom every donated artifact first passes into Meek-Eaton, she knows what disappears when figures like Jocko are distorted: “You lose the story. You lose the plot. You lose the experience of Black people.”

In the 250th year of the Declaration of Independence, institutions and communities across America are re-examining who the founding narrative included and who it left out.

But in Tallahassee, preserving Black history too often falls to local residents who refuse to let the record be lost or misremembered. They include a radio and YouTube host with a decade’s worth of recorded conversations; a retired sergeant major who created a slideshow about forgotten soldiers; children learning about civil rights era figures and placing flowers on military gravesites; and descendants recalling the movements their grandparents led.

Sometimes, when people remember, retrieve, and retell these stories, institutions learn to do so as well. In Tallahassee, at a former plantation that became a museum, the executive director pledges to memorialize the names of people once enslaved there.

The Declaration’s ideals—including liberty, equality, the right to resist an unjust order—didn’t arrive in Tallahassee fully on July 4, 1776. Or on May 20, 1865, when freedom for all was declared in Florida (the anniversary of which is observed as ), more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the enslaved.

For Black Tallahasseeans, those promises arrived only after organized resistance.

Their collections, ceremonies, films and exhibits don’t merely document this history. These archives—both personal and public—make a compelling argument about what the Declaration left unfinished: That those whom it excluded were always a part of the story. That the work of including them is still underway. Not as nostalgia, but as evidence of an ongoing negotiation with a founding document that named them last, if at all.

Urgent Conversations

In 2016, Nicole Everett didn’t set out to build an archive. She set out to have conversations.

Ten years later, her local radio show (heard Sunday mornings at WHBX-FM on iHeart Radio) and hundreds of episodes on Facebook and YouTube—all titled “”—offer hour after hour of recorded dialogue with neighbors, healers, educators, and community builders whose lives and passions might otherwise go undocumented.

Everett’s mantra: “We all have gifts and talents that the world is waiting on.” Her platform delivers them in broadcast, digital, and social media formats that neither the Declaration’s signers nor even her grandparents could ever have imagined.

Everett also was a co-executive producer of “Soul of TLH: Southside Stories,” a 23-minute documentary in which more than 20 senior citizens talk about growing up in 10 of Tallahassee’s Southside neighborhoods.

Shot in 2021 and shown at that year’s “Soul of Southside” community festival, it captures the elders reminiscing about pecan trees, their schools and teachers, Black-owned store owners giving credit when families couldn’t pay, and the ugliness of segregation.

One of the participants, Connie McCaskill, who grew up in the Elberta Empire neighborhood, recalled the tension associated with white people not wanting to sit beside African Americans on buses.

“But for the most part, I think, most of the ugliness, my parents tried to shield us from as much of that as they could,” McCaskill said. “I appreciate that. But then, you know, it’s also good to know what is the real truth. What it’s like out there for real.”

For Everett, a public health and housing advocate before January 2026, when she turned to running “Conversations” full time, the goal is to ensure that these stories are told—especially, she said, as history is “being whitewashed” nationally to avoid hurting the feelings of those whose ancestors enslaved people.

“It’s almost as if we don’t matter, and our lives don’t matter, and our stories don’t matter—and we know that to not be true,” Everett added. “So we’ve got to be bold. We’ve got to be intentional. And we’ve got to share our stories.”

Asked whether her decade of conversations connects to what the Declaration’s signers intended—however imperfectly—for American civic life, Everett paused.

The question, she said, was one she had never been asked quite that way. Then: “I feel the urgency of collecting more stories and putting them out into the world—and letting people know that Black people have contributed to this community in meaningful ways.”

Keeping the Names

Jarvis Rosier also didn’t wait for an institution to tell the story that matters most to him.

The retired U.S. Army sergeant major built it himself—a homemade slideshow of 27 Black soldiers, covering the span from the American Revolution to Afghanistan. Each profile and photograph was assembled from federal archives, private collections, and his own research.

Jarvis Rosier speaks during a program held by the John C. Riley Center and Museum in Tallahassee. Photo: Herbert Lowe. 

Speaking to a room of Tallahassee elders, including several military veterans, on May 19, Rosier recalled, among many others, Crispus Attucks, the first colonist killed in the struggle against British tyranny; William Carney, who retrieved the U.S. flag during the Civil War assault on Fort Wagner; the Harlem Hellfighters, one of the first all-Black regiments to earn a victory parade; and James Polkinghorne Jr., who left FAMU after three years to enlist in the Army, where he became a flight leader with the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

Rosier said his slideshow bore witness to “the wilderness years of our ancestors”—whose military service the Declaration’s promise of liberty required, even though their history was rarely honored.

The next morning, May 20, Rosier was at Old City Cemetery, leading a Civil War-era color guard dressed in Union blue, at a gravesite ceremony honoring 31 U.S. Colored Troops—soldiers of the 2nd USCT Infantry Regiment who fought at the Battle of Natural Bridge about eight miles from where they lie, beneath headstones that say only: U.S. SOLDIER.

No names. No faces. No photographs.

“These are the forgotten soldiers,” Rosier, president of an association devoted to preserving the infantry regiment’s legacy, told the crowd looking on. “We are making sure that they are not forgotten.”

When he finished his remarks, students from the Avant School of Excellence and Bethel Christian Academy in Tallahassee and the Malone School from 90 minutes away in Jackson County placed flowers at each gravesite. Civil War-era mourners—reenactors all dressed in black—guided them through the ritual.

Naming the Unnamed

After 12 middle schoolers spent two days at Maclay School researching the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956, the 10 essays and poster boards they produced were showcased as part of an exhibition inside the  at .

One student opened her essay by writing that she didn’t know a civil rights boycott had happened in Tallahassee. Another wrote about Edwin F. Norwood Sr.—an unsung FAMU educator and local NAACP president—and ended with a call to think of him whenever boarding a public bus.

According to Jason Frazier, a Maclay counselor who helped lead the project, among the details that stopped the students cold: John Melton Boardman, a white Florida State University student, was expelled during that same period simply for inviting FAMU students to a Christmas party.

Near the Carriage House entrance, a framed mixed-media collage by another class of Maclay students also set the tone: torn paper, layered photos, imagery of a crowd of women waiting for car rides, all circling a sketched city bus. History rendered fragile and alive at the same time.

The exhibition preceded a 70^th anniversary boycott commemoration held May 21 at Goodwood. 

Mary Bedford, executive director of the property—itself the site of a former 2,000-acre plantation, where 251 people were enslaved between 1832 and 1865—welcomed the gathering.

Rev. C. K. Steele (center left) and Rev. H. McNeal Harris (center right) protesting segregated bus seating in Tallahassee. Photo: State Archives of Florida.

Bedford , in a memorial that she pledged would have its groundbreaking in 2027.

“We are trying to change the dialogue,” she said, “to change the interpretive framework, and to become honest and transparent with the history that we have experienced here.”

Shauna Smith, a daughter of Charles U. Smith—a FAMU sociologist and civil rights leader whose portrait appears on one of the student poster boards—read aloud names from the Inter-Civic Council, the key group that had coordinated the boycott. Then Smith, herself a retired Tallahassee State College professor and community activist, paused to announce that Inez Virginia Johnson Williams, the last surviving ICC member, had died three weeks earlier at age 96.

“Let us honor the Tallahassee Bus Boycott,” Smith told the crowd, as a portrait of her father passed by on a looping slideshow displayed on a large screen above the podium, “by renewing our commitment to equal rights, civic participation, and community unity.”

The scene—the student’s work and the descendants’ reflections, all naming the people history had obscured—was, in its way, the Declaration’s unfinished argument made personal: The right to be named, remembered, and counted, extended to those the document originally excluded.

James Davis Jr., grandson of the Rev. C.K. Steele—the late pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church and the de facto boycott leader—knows something about that.

Davis told the audience that while his grandfather was not a large man in stature, and that in private he was quiet in voice and gentle in manner, when he rose to speak publicly, the authority that came out of him was like a lion’s roar. Davis also spoke of Steele’s coin collection, the westerns they watched together, the silver dollars his grandfather slipped to him before school.

The grandson does have one regret from the relationship. He doesn’t know what Steele and Muhammad Ali talked about behind a closed door in the minister’s home, during the heavyweight champion’s visit when Davis was nine years old. 

“To this day, I really wish I knew what they talked about,” Davis said.

History’s record has its closed doors. What matters is that someone is keeping that record.

The Light Still Burning

Autumn Heatrice is doing her part. Along with rescuing Jocko Graves, the Meek-Eaton museum registrar created and scripted a three-minute video imagining his life and legacy.

As the narrator, she put words in his mouth that no one—not Washington or any Continental soldier—ever recorded, most likely because no one thought to do so.

And she told what came next: “They changed my face, painted me in ways that mocked me ... turned me into a story, something small and cruel.”

This community has been undoing that, one archive at a time. 

Heatrice reclaiming a boy’s inverted history through a lit lantern and a video. Everett collecting voices unnoticed by any institution. Rosier including faces and names left out of too many official histories. The Maclay students putting their city’s history on poster boards. Bedford reaffirming 251 names to stone. Smith reading the names of the Inter-Civic Council aloud, even as the last person who had attended those meetings slipped from the record. Davis carrying what his grandfather gave him—and still wishing he knew more of what’s behind history’s door.

Each, in their own way, is arguing that the Declaration was left unfinished—that the people it excluded were always part of the story. In the video Heatrice made, Jocko speaks his own ending: “Maybe every time someone sees a lantern shining through the dark, it’s my light that they’re seeing—still burning. Still waiting. Still guiding the way home.”

© 2026 Herbert Lowe

is a senior lecturer at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, a former daily newspaper reporter, a past president of the National Association of Black Journalists, and the creator of , an independent editorial project.