White America tried to silence black knowledge but what happened Shocked the world

Añadido: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Did you know about this guy, John Barry Meechum? He ran a floating school because the law said he could not teach black people on land. They shut his school down. So, he moved onto a boat in the middle of the Mississippi River.

[00:00:21]This guy was born enslaved in 1789 in the United States. Of course, he bought his own freedom, but he used his money to purchase freedom for family members and other people.

[00:00:37]That alone is a great story about a great man. But this guy kept going. He became a preacher. He opened a school in St. Louis for black children. And then Missouri passed a law banning education for black people.

[00:00:56]There's references in the video notes.

[00:00:58]So Meechum pivoted.

[00:01:02]He got a steamboat and anchored it in federal waters in the middle of the Mississippi River outside Missouri's jurisdiction and he kept teaching. It became known as the floating freedom school.

[00:01:24]I'm Kelly Snyder. I'm a behavior analyst and author studying how white people are unfairly advantaged in the United States.

[00:01:32]When a system blocks access to learning, that is a restriction by design, a barrier.

[00:01:42]By design, Michechum understood something powerful though. He he knew that behavior changes when access changes. So he changed the environment.

[00:01:57]He worked around it.

[00:02:01]He built a new situation where learning could happen anyway. That's what real resistance looks like when it's strategic. Marches, protests, they're all great. But things like this, creating new systems where the old ones have failed us, that's resistance.

[00:02:25]Mijum died in 1854, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. But he left behind something so important. He left behind a model.

[00:02:39]If access is blocked, change the boundary. move. He made a classroom the law could not [ __ ] with.

[00:02:49]Get curious.

[00:02:52]>> Hello. Well, the story I'm going to present to you is a story of one man.

[00:02:59]Allow me to read that. Uh, one man, the name was John Barry Mitchum.

[00:03:06]And uh, he was born enslaved in 1789 and later bought his own freedom. He then used his resources to help free family members and other enslaved people. He become a preacher and educator in St. Louis. After Mori laws restricted education for black people, authorities shut down his educational efforts on land. Instead of giving up, he found a legal workound. He placed a school on a steamboat in in the Mississippi River where Missouri state law had less reach and that became the floating freedom school. They both had desk chairs and library and educated hundreds of black childrens. That is the story I'm going to talk about in real sense. I will say this without any contradiction. They tried to ban black knowledge. They tried to stop black people from getting the knowledge.

[00:04:08]But this was beyond what they can do.

[00:04:12]Black people head ways. And that's why I say black adaptability is one of the miracles that we have as black people is a superpower. Nobody has that. This guy adapted. We're going to talk about that.

[00:04:23]But before I talk about that, I want to just to play some videos of reactors who are talking about this. And I'm coming back. So, I had a meeting last week with someone who brought to my attention that black authors and black books have been banned in a school in Manchester. A school librarian in Greater Manchester did her job. She built a library and she stopped books that reflected the students who walked through the door, their identities, their questions, and their lives. And she lost her career for it. More than 130 books were pulled from the school's library shelves. Nearly 200 if you count individual volumes. Among them were Dean Ata's Black Flamingo, Renie Odo Lodges, Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Race, Bernardine Aravisto's Girl, Woman, and Other, Michelle Obama's Becoming, Chim Dana Engi, Adichi's We Should All Be Feminist. These are not random books.

[00:05:13]This is a selective specific archive being removed. Black women's voices, books that say to children who need to hear it, you exist. Your experience has a name and you are not alone. The librarian, who we'll call Emily, described how a specific group of students used the library daily. Young people, new or divergent young people, children for whom the library was their safe space, and that safe space was removed. So, let me tell you something about the process. The school admitted in its own documents that the categorizations of books flagged for removal were generated using AI writing, an algorithm deciding which books are safe for children. In a British secondary school in 2026, reasons for removal included race discrimination for Renie Edo Lodge's book. And I want you to hear this one. Michelle Obama's becoming was flagged for racism and political themes. And this is not one rogue headteer. This is a pattern. We are watching a coordinated cultural roll back happening in British institutions, often without headlines, often without accountability that is targeting the same categories of knowledge over and over. Books about race, books that say power is not neutral, books that say history was not fair, books that say somebody's have been treated as disposable. Those are the books being taken off shelves. And I don't want us to have a conversation about process and policy. I want us to have a conversation about what we're telling young black children when we remove every book that says they matter.

[00:06:42]>> An educated black woman is a threat to anyone who benefits from her lack of education.

[00:06:49]God said, "And the last shall be first."

[00:06:52]Black women were the demographic that were last to be granted access to higher education. Black women are now the number one demographic to obtain college degrees. Black women are also the number one demographic to buy homes and start businesses all because of higher education.

[00:07:16]You see, they didn't think that black women would make the connection between higher education and being above the poverty line. Education for a black woman changes her perspective of herself and her view of the world around her. It shifts her mind and it makes her believe that she is exactly who she thinks she is. It builds her self-esteem. It builds her self-worth and it also gives her access to resources that changes her life. That is why we see the narrative being pushed that black women are getting too many degrees because they've realized what is happening. We are no longer at the bottom of the totem pole.

[00:08:04]>> Hi, I'm Dr. Marvin Dunn.

[00:08:09]I was born in Dand, Florida.

[00:08:11]I'm currently 82 years old.

[00:08:14]I was brought up in Florida during the Jim Crow era. I sat on the back of the bus. I entered white people's houses through the back door.

[00:08:24]I attended segregated schools.

[00:08:27]I was a bright student uh in high school. I was one of the students that was sent over to the white school to get their used textbooks to bring back to our school. This happened in Dand Belosia County. It was also going on in in Dade County at that time. Uh doing that made me feel uh uh less than white students. Uh getting their used science science equipment made me feel less than white students. So I was uh convinced as a child that being black in Florida came at a price.

[00:09:02]I joined the Navy. I served until about 1966 or 67.

[00:09:08]uh most of that time on aircraft carriers.

[00:09:12]I um left the Navy and uh I made the application to go to the psychology graduate program at UF and received a letter from the university advising me that they did not accept Negro students and offering me a chance to go to another university outside of Florida with the state of Florida paying my tuition. I declined that offer and went to Tennessee instead.

[00:09:36]>> It's racism. I think we have to call it exactly what it is. This is cultural eraser. We've seen it happen before.

[00:09:44]When black people were brought from Africa over here, forced to be here, they erased our culture from us. They took our religion away. They took our names away. They took our heritage, everything that related us to Africa.

[00:09:56]They took it away and replaced it with Western culture. That's what you're doing right now in education. When you look at the AP classes that are taught right now in the state of Florida, you have Chinese language and culture, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish. But you can't have African-American studies. I have a huge problem with this. And this is a course that was created and cultivated with certain expertise and experience. Henry Lewis Gates Jr. was a part of this. This isn't just some thing that they threw together at the last minute. It is put together to teach you about us and who we are through arts and literature as you were saying, science, civil rights, political science, geography. There's so much more to it. And if every other culture can be taught except for black culture, that's racism.

[00:10:43]>> Yeah. And >> Yep. Up until the civil rights movement, black people could literally be denied from medical school just because their race. And to prove that, I always think about this letter right here. In 1959, Marian Hood applied to Emory University School of Medicine. They received his application, but then rejected him, saying, quote, "We are not authorized to consider for admission a member of the Negro race." But at least they returned his $5 application fee. But thankfully, that applicant, Marian Hood, went on to still become a doctor. He ended up becoming an OBGYn, delivered thousands of babies, and saved countless numbers of lives, and he actually still continues to practice even today.

[00:11:20]>> Hey, beautiful people. So, for a long time, this thing has been bugging me, right? I'm asking myself these questions. Why is it that a black man who has a pen and a paper in hand, meaning a a well-educated black man is a threat to the western society, whereas a black man with billions is never a threat to society. Now, I'll give you context. When Malcolm X was struggling to pay his rent, when he was struggling to take care of his family, you had people like Jesse Owens and rich black men in America, but they were not a threat to the western society. I mean, the American uh society. Why? Now through thinking and you know looking at the society and how things are moving right now I'm starting to to believe that when a black man is well educated he holds so much power to emancipate other black men whereas a black man with just billions chances are they they're thinking okay you are rich but three generation max four generations after you is also um is going to come back being poor anyway so what's the point of us targeting you but a black man who has plan and is well educated and understand his roots is going to be a threat.

[00:12:32]Because you see, when you know where you're coming from and you actually know who you are, you pose more threat, right, than not knowing um who you are with millions. Because at the end of the day, guess what? Those uh digits that they say you're worth is because someone actually sat there and wrote that or you are this person in society, so you're worth this amount of money. But if this that same person decides to take that numbers down, I mean those numbers down, then you're not worth that money anymore. But if you're, you know, you are well educated and you're loud about emancipating your people, then you become a threat. Think about it. Since it's Black History Month, whether or not the Trump administration wants to acknowledge it, um, do you guys want to talk about how the only reason that we have extremely expensive colleges in the US and everyone's in student loan debt is because Reagan was racist and wanted a way to keep black students out of higher education. Feel free to go look into this if you want to, but yeah, um, Reagan was racist. He wanted black students to not have the same access to higher education because obviously if people have education then they can fight back against the system um and have social mobility and move up in society. So he basically when he was the senator of California he made the California public education system no longer free for public universities or highly subsidized. And then he did the exact same thing on a national scale when he became president. And what's actually crazy is that it makes more sense from an economic standpoint to just have free or highly subsidized public universities because when people have a college degree, they're able to make more money throughout their life because they have more advanced education. And when people are making more money, you can tax them more because they're now in a higher tax bracket. And people aren't in insane amounts of student loan debt, so they have more money, more spendable income.

[00:14:30]and our workforce is more educated and thus more skilled and thus we can be more of an innovator on the global stage. There's literally like no point to us not having free education other than Reagan was racist and he wanted to keep black people out of higher education. And somehow throughout the years this has been spun as like a crazy like left-wing idea to make education free in the United States. But it's really not that crazy. Europe does it.

[00:15:01]Um, and from an economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. And if the Republicans are the party of like economics and business and whatever, you would think they would be for free education because like from a financial standpoint, it makes sense. Um, but they're not. So, it makes you wonder why. Is it just that they are racist? I don't know. Food for thought.

[00:15:23]>> Welcome back. Now, John Bry was not teaching children how to read words on paper. He was teaching something much larger. He was teaching people how to think. And history shows us that systems built on control often become nervous.

[00:15:41]When people begin thinking independently, most importantly, when black people start thinking independently without using their brain, they get raged.

[00:15:51]Because once people learn to read, they begin asking questions. And those questions is the one that is making the system to get nervous. Because if you ask a question like where did I come from? Who is my father? Who is my what is my identity?

[00:16:10]That's where the system start getting nervous. If you start asking questions like why are things this way? Who wrote these rules? Who wrote this history? who benefit from this system. Do you you started to create a lot of headache to the system because questions challenge system questions challenge civilization questions create revolutions and that's why once upon a time in Kenya the Kenyans they started asking questions on financial bill and what happened it was sha sha you get me information or knowledge is so much powerful And most times I always advise at the end of the of the video, black people, we need to get knowledge. We need to be knowledgeable. We need to continue getting the knowledge about our history, about our culture, about our identity so that we do. We are not supposed to be lied. Now I want to think you think about this. America spoke about freedom and spoke about opportunity. But for many people it looked differently because how can people fully experience freedom if they are denied education?

[00:17:23]Black people were denied education and this was in Mississippi state and John Berry was very determined to make sure that black people, black kids they get this knowledge. So they banned. But this did not stop John Barry from getting what he get he wanted to get. So he he he build a floating school. This was to tell them that we are not backing up. This was to tell the wife system that whatever you do in which case we will find ways to solve this problem and that's what John B did.

[00:18:03]Just what John Berry did. So I I I sit down and wor about this story. I said, "Let me talk to you." How can a system just sit down and tell you not to teach these kids if that is not evil? And they will tell that black people are inferior. They'll tell black people are evil. They tell black people are like this and that. But this is happening to their country. Okay? Imagine children wanting a future and someone trying to close that door just because that children is black, just because that children is minority. On that situation, a lot of people will just will just give up. Okay, people could just given up.

[00:18:39]Yeah, many people could have said system is too strong. There's nothing we can do. But this guy John Berry looked at the situation differently and he did not simply ask why is this happening? He asked how do we keep moving forward and that is the mindset that black people need to have because mindset matters a lot. Sometimes obstacles become permanent only when people stop searching for solutions. And let me tell you history repeated shows that something very interesting. Sometimes the most creative ideas come from difficult time and that's why black people can adapt everywhere because they have this different idea to come over to come out with solutions here and there.

[00:19:20]You get that? So John Berry was about to do something that nobody expected something that sound almost impossible.

[00:19:28]Something that will become part of history and right now he's part of history. And he did that. He did that.

[00:19:34]Okay. During slavery, a lot of our folks were going through hell, through [ __ ] And people today hear floating school and immediately they imagine modern technology or giant floating. But I'm talking about the 1800s where there was no internet, where there was no YouTube, where there was no phones, where there was no modern technology. And yet someone, a man who was born into slavery found a way to keep educating alive. No, no, no. that can happen. That's what they did. That's what they did. Because I'm so sure that the world fear black people getting educated. The world fear the knowledge of black people. The world is raged. The white system is raged when black people understand things. The world is raged when black people get knowledge of their history. When black people get knowledge of their identity, when black people starting to get knowledge of who they really are. And that's why each and every time where black Americans say they want to go back to the motherland, they will come up with the crazy ideas that Africa is poor, Africa this, Africa was, Africa diseases, Africa that because they don't want black Americans to go back to the motherland and how they have they know that once black Americans step on the soil of motherland, their antenna will raise, they will start understanding the world better. Life is sweet. The reason why I'm saying that is that I'm living in a world that I'm seeing shift is happening. I'm seeing changing. I'm seeing social media exposing the lies and every the stereotypes the mean myths. We are seeing the real time. It is good that I'm living here today and I can't imagine the world next where our children will be now the bosses of the world where black people have the majority where our Africans black African countries will be controlling their own resources where superpower will be Africa where black Americans will be doing business with Africans. I love to see the day if I will not be here I think I'll just see from the heavens and smile this is very awesome.

[00:21:39]Okay, tell me what you think in the comment section. Until next episode, peace out.