An award-winning young scholar explores how Black women have remade—and continue to remake—our understanding of the past.

Across centuries, Black women have invented means to preserve what official history could not: friendship albums, kitchen-table philosophy, blogs, playlists, oral histories, and archives held in the mind. In The Light Keepers, Jessica Marie Johnson traces this radical tradition through the centuries-long prism of American empire, from the holds of slave ships to contemporary digital worlds, showing that there is nothing finished or settled about how Black women understand time, trauma, and survival.

Blending personal narrative, archival fragments, and ancestral wisdom, Johnson reframes Black women not as subjects of history but as archivists and historians. Against erasure, against shame, against death itself, Black women have transformed the bitterest waters of history into tools for living, loving, and imagining freedom. The Light Keepers offers readers a daring new way to think about the past—and a powerful lesson in how knowledge is made when survival demands it.

About the Author: 

Jessica Marie Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora, and is also the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.