Perpetual Blackness is a podcast that tells the stories of Black DC, Maryland and Virginia while telling my own family story over 9 generations through my research with the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County. It traces my maternal family line from enslavement in Fredricksburg, Virginia down to the life of my 10-year-old daughter in the Washington, DC suburbs. While telling my own family story, I highlight the intersections of the Black Diaspora of DC, Maryland and Virginia and beyond. It is a curated archive of Black family rooms worldwide. Perpetual Blackness brings the archive in conversation across time and space in one of the country’s most diversely Black parts of the Diaspora.

About the Host:

Nichelle Calhoun builds on her experience working, traveling and researching in the African Diaspora to interrogate the disconnects and connects of the Black experience over time and space. Through her podcast Perpetual Blackness, a WAMU Podshop Participant, the Washington DC affiliate of NPR, she shares and parallels the voices of the Washington, DC area’s many layers of Blackness as she traces her own family story over 9 generations from enslavement in rural Virginia to contemporary life in the Washington, DC area. Nichelle is a native Washingtonian, but formerly lived in Miami for 12 years where she attended both the University of Miami and Florida International University, taught ESOL and did extensive community outreach. She is the editor of Songs of Yemaya, an anthology hailing Black women’s voices, and the mother of one clever, little woke daughter, Emma-Seles Baptiste.

Nichelle Calhoun now researches and works with the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County.