Blog Archives
Love of the Community
Run traces the extraordinary story of Wilmot Collins, whose life carried him from the devastation of Liberia’s civil war to the mayor’s office in Helena, Montana. As both a writer and filmmaker, how did your background influence your approach to the book?
I came to this project without any direct connections to an extraordinary life such as Wilmot’s. But I DO have an abiding interest in stories about courage, resilience, and survival. And Wilmot’s is chock full of all those things. (I explored some of these themes in my feature documentary work, FEBRUARY ONE: THE STORY OF THE GREENSBORO FOUR, about the 4 young men who took on the entire racial order in the U.S. when they sat down for service at the Greensboro Woolworth Store on Feb 1, 1960, thus unleashing much of the youthful driving force behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s. So Wilmot’s treacherous journey from the Liberian civil war (which killed over 250k of his fellow countrymen, including two of his own brothers, one of whom was beheaded) was a powerful attraction to me: how could someone take on that much danger and not only survive an ocean way (in Helena, MT) but thrive, indeed LEAD an entire community? Incredible.
A recurring theme throughout the book is that leadership begins with service. How did you see that idea reflected in Wilmot Collins’s life? Why do you think so many people connected with his message?
People were attracted to him because over the course of more than 20 years living in Helena, they had come to know and respect, even admire, him. He demonstrated his love of the community and commitment to being an American citizen–by joining the US military; serving as a youth counselor, coaching youth soccer, even singing karaoke at local bars. To him, it was all about being a public servant–listening and learning what the community needed and wanted, and then serving those needs. NOT styling himself as some ideologue or professional politician. We could learn a lot today about his ‘politics of decency’, far healthier than our current polarized, hyper-partisan politics of destruction.
The book devotes considerable attention to the long process of immigration and family reunification. Why was that aspect of the story so important to include?
Family was and is a pivotal feature of Wilmot’s life–and that goes for his wife, Maddie, and their two kids (now grown), Jaymie and Bliss. Everything was done by majority vote in their household. The difficulty and long wait he had to endure (his own daughter, born two months after arriving with her mother, Maddie, was two years old before a patient, but long-suffering Wilmot, could join them in America for the first time. But being resilient, persistent, and pursuing education (which got Maddie over to the US in the first place–to pursue a nursing program at Carroll College in Helena, MT) were binding threads in their family tradition.
What do you hope readers will remember most about Wilmot Collins and his family?
I hope readers remember how love takes courage and resilience, and the Collins family epitomized those traits. Also, I hope people will see in their remarkable journey the essence of the American Dream at work – a fast-fading goal for many native born Americans, but on vivid and compelling display with Wilmot Collins!
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Run tells the inspiring story of Wilmot Collins, who fled the brutal and bloody Liberian Civil War in the early 1990s—where over 250,000 Liberians were killed, including two of Collins’s brothers—and managed to make it to Helena, Montana, one of the whitest places on the planet. Enduring and overcoming racism and xenophobia, he joined the Montana National Guard, became an active member of the Helena community, and in 2017 rose to become mayor of the capital city and the first Black mayor in Montana’s history.
Collins garnered a national reputation not only as a beloved Democratic politician in a ruby red state but also as a shining example of how being a racial and political outsider in a highly partisan society can be transformed into an effective and engaging form of political leadership.
Wilmot’s story highlights the tragic decision to abandon one’s homeland when it turns on its people. Collins came from a highly educated family and, when civil war erupted, he was fresh out of college working as a middle school teacher at Monrovia’s SOS Children’s Village School. He had recently found a great companion, Maddie Muna, whom he met after college graduation. They became fast friends and soon life partners in marriage. But they first had to negotiate forces threatening their very lives.
Through extensive interviews and his masterful command of storytelling, award-winning author and filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith tells how Wilmot and Maddie, through great perseverance, plenty of ingenuity, and inspiring displays of generosity, journeyed to the United States and have made their new home a better place for everyone. Run offers an emotional, inspiring, and deeply personal story of survival, racial injustice, political hope, and the challenges one family faced to realize the American dream.
Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow?
Jacqueline Smith’s Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is a faith-centered memoir built from family stories, historical reflection, practical wisdom, and photographs. Smith traces her upbringing in segregated Port Arthur, Texas, where her parents ran several small businesses and raised her within a demanding culture of work, discipline, service, and Christian belief. Rather than treating Jim Crow only as a historical backdrop, she shows how it shaped the family’s ambitions, fears, responsibilities, and ideas about survival. Her central question receives a deeply personal answer: goodness appears in what people build, preserve, teach, and pass along despite oppressive circumstances.
The strongest presence in the book is Smith’s family. Her father, Jack, is a tireless entrepreneur and forceful storyteller whose repeated instructions teach her to prepare early, work harder, and never surrender her sense of possibility. Her mother, affectionately called Muh, embodies patient, sacrificial care, especially in tending to Smith’s two profoundly disabled siblings when support services were largely inaccessible to Black families. Their household feels vivid and lived-in, filled with customers, taxi calls, music, business lessons, church teachings, and constant activity. Smith’s affection for her parents gives the memoir warmth, while her willingness to describe disappointment, anger, pressure, and family sacrifice keeps that affection grounded.
Smith writes much as she seems to speak: directly, energetically, and with a teacher’s instinct for drawing a lesson from every experience. Biblical passages frame the chapters, and personal episodes often develop into reflections on marriage, patience, responsibility, loneliness, education, perseverance, and trusting God’s timing. Faith isn’t a decorative theme here. It’s the lens through which Smith interprets childhood segregation, a devastating surgical injury to her vocal cords, professional changes, her long wait for marriage, motherhood, and the life she eventually built with her husband and children. The final photographic chapter brings the argument into focus by presenting later generations, college graduates, an expanding family, and interracial friendships as visible continuations of a life that began under Jim Crow.
This book will resonate most with Christian readers who enjoy testimony-driven memoirs, as well as families interested in preserving stories across generations. It should also appeal to readers who want an intimate account of Black family life during segregation, particularly one centered on entrepreneurship, caregiving, education, and spiritual inheritance. Smith’s frequent repetition gives the book the feeling of sitting with an elder who wants to make absolutely certain the lesson stays with you. That conversational persistence is part of its character. The result is a sincere family record and devotional memoir that invites readers to examine not only what they’ve endured, but what their lives may allow them to give the next generation.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0H72LCQ52
The Blue Flame
The Blue Flame by Andy Cash is an illustrated poetry collection and unconventional Miles Davis biography that follows the musician from his Illinois childhood through bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, jazz fusion, the lost years, and his eventual comeback. Cash writes largely through an imagined first-person voice, giving the poems the bluntness, swagger, anger, humor, and vulnerability associated with Davis. This work of biographical poetry turns albums, performances, relationships, addictions, and personal losses into emotional scenes. The book’s structure makes the scale of Davis’s evolution especially clear, tracing how he moved among styles while continually assembling remarkable bands and searching for a new sound.
The strongest sections treat jazz history as something physical and lived. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and others enter the poems as mentors, collaborators, rivals, brothers, and ghosts. Cash’s jazz poetry often adopts short, percussive lines that feel closer to spoken word or improvised phrasing than traditional narrative verse. That approach works particularly well in pieces such as “Illinois Rap,” “Café Bohemia,” “So What,” and the compact “Fusion” sequence. The language can be abrasive, but it has energy, and its repeated references to breath, blood, blue light, electricity, rhythm, and silence create a musical vocabulary that holds the collection together.
This music biography also spends meaningful time with Davis’s family and romantic relationships. His parents emerge as foundational forces, with his father representing pride, education, independence, and discipline, while his mother brings music, beauty, and a fiercer emotional presence. The poems involving Irene, Juliette Gréco, Frances Taylor, Betty Davis, and Cicely Tyson explore affection, regret, possessiveness, racial pressure, addiction, and recovery. Cash doesn’t separate Davis’s artistic brilliance from the damage surrounding it. Poems such as “The Darkness of Porgy and Bess” directly confront his controlling treatment of Frances, while the lost-years poems move into paranoia, illness, isolation, and creative exhaustion.
Visually, The Blue Flame is as much an illustrated biography as a poetry book. Cash’s portraits and loose, neon-like figures have the spontaneous quality of drawings made while music is playing, and the recurring blacks, blues, white outlines, instruments, flames, and distorted faces complement the collection’s shifting moods. The background notes are a valuable closing section, explaining the historical events, recordings, and musical ideas behind each poem without interrupting the main sequence. Taken as a whole, this illustrated jazz poetry collection is an expressive tribute to Miles Davis’s restless creativity. It gives readers a lively route into his life and music, while longtime jazz listeners will recognize the albums, collaborators, transformations, and contradictions that kept his blue flame burning.
Pages: 102 | ASIN : B0H3814M8B
RUN–The Wilmot Collins Story: From Liberian Refugee to First Black Mayor in Montana
Daniel Blake Smith’s Run is a compelling political biography and refugee narrative about a life shaped by survival, family, public service, and the search for belonging. The book follows Wilmot Collins from the violence of Liberia’s civil war to his historic election as Helena, Montana’s first Black mayor. Smith opens with scenes of hunger, gunfire, and desperate escape, then carries that urgency into the long bureaucratic struggle that separated Collins from his wife, Maddie, and their young daughter. It’s an American immigrant biography with a remarkable trajectory, but its emotional center remains the bond between Wilmot and Maddie as they keep building a future through uncertainty.
The early chapters are the book’s most intense, placing Wilmot and Maddie inside a Liberia where ordinary routines have been overtaken by terror. Smith writes these passages with the momentum of narrative nonfiction, moving between historical context and intimate moments of fear, grief, humor, and devotion. Once the couple escapes, the story becomes an immigration history centered on waiting: waiting for paperwork, interviews, sponsors, approvals, and the chance to reunite. That slower stretch has its own tension because every administrative delay carries a human cost. Wilmot’s persistence gives these chapters warmth, while Maddie’s determination and practical intelligence make her much more than a supporting figure.
When the story reaches Montana, it expands into a thoughtful civic leadership biography. Wilmot takes whatever work he can find, joins the military, becomes active in his church, counsels young people, coaches soccer, advocates for human rights, and gradually becomes part of Helena’s public life. Smith doesn’t separate this community work from Collins’s later political success. He shows that the campaign was built through years of conversations, service, and personal trust. The book also addresses racism directly, including threats and vandalism against the Collins family, while paying equal attention to the neighbors and friends who stood beside them. That balance gives the account a conversational honesty and helps explain why voters eventually saw Collins as one of their own.
As a political biography, Run is especially engaging when it examines Collins’s idea of leadership as service. His mayoral years, policy priorities, public meetings, Senate campaign, and responses to national debates all grow naturally from the experiences that came before them. Smith’s admiration for Collins is clear, and the book sometimes states its lessons more directly than it needs to, but the wealth of family memories and community voices keeps the portrait grounded. Ultimately, this refugee success story is about how citizenship gets practiced in daily life. It presents Wilmot Collins as a gifted connector whose political achievements came from showing up, listening closely, and treating public office as another way to care for his community.
Pages: 168 | ASIN : B0GFPCY9R1:
Ripple Effect of Healing
In Mixtape, you share your experiences growing up as a mixed-race Black boy in Virginia, surviving abuse, battling confusion and loneliness, and overcoming the odds to find personal freedom. Why was this an important book for you to write?
You can’t move forward if you’re haunted by the past. Going back and exploring these stories (Sankofa) was necessary to my survival and healing. Furthermore, I believe our stories can have a ripple effect of healing when shared. I hope my story resonates with readers and makes them feel less alone. And as a father, I feel proud knowing my daughter will get to read this someday to see the work I did to create a better life for her than I had.
What role did music play in helping you process or remember different moments in your life?
I think musically. If I were filming the movie of my life, I’d be most concerned about the soundtrack. Music complements, drives, and speaks with and through my storytelling. Songs evoke memories and assure me I’ll never run out of things to write about.
How did your understanding of your parents and family change as you grew older?
I didn’t buy the lie that “We did the best we could.” They didn’t, and it shows. This is magnified by the reality that I’m a parent, and I’m successful at it by primarily doing the opposite of what my parents did. Parenting is a big responsibility. Our kids didn’t ask to be here. It is the parent’s job to be the best they can be so that their kids can thrive.
What conversations do you hope your book inspires in your readers?
I hope they recognize the need for reciprocity in relationships and that they leave feeling loved, liked, and/or understood.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In Mixtape: A Memoir, therapist and storyteller Johnzelle Anderson weaves a raw, lyrical portrait of resilience, identity, and healing.
Born to a disengaged West African father and a volatile white mother, Anderson grows up mixed race in 1990s Roanoke, Virginia—feeling like an outsider in every room. Amid childhood abuse, neglect, and racism, he clings to the safety of his grandmother’s love and his inner voice’s promise of a better future.
Told in tracks rather than chapters, Mixtape charts Anderson’s journey from trauma to triumph—from being body-shamed and silenced to building a career in mental health and forming a family of his own. Along the way, he confronts the legacy of generational pain, redefines his sense of belonging, and takes a life-changing trip to Ghana in search of the roots his father never shared.
Honest, at times humorous, and unflinching in its vulnerability, Mixtape: A Memoir is a coming-of-age story for anyone unlearning and daring to rewrite the soundtrack of their life.
Mixtape: A Memoir
Mixtape: A Memoir, by Johnzelle Anderson, is a raw, music-shaped life story about growing up as a mixed-race Black boy in Roanoke, Virginia, inside a home marked by abuse, fear, religion, confusion, and deep loneliness, then fighting his way toward self-knowledge, healing, and freedom as an adult. The book moves track by track, using songs as chapter markers, and that choice fits the material so well because memory here does not unfold in a neat line. It hits in waves. Anderson begins with family history and childhood trauma, then carries the reader through questions of race, faith, masculinity, love, work, fatherhood, and identity, all the way to a hard-won sense of peace tied to Sankofa, the act of going back to retrieve what was lost.
The voice is sharp, funny, bruised, and very alive. Anderson can make you laugh on one page and wince on the next, and that emotional swing felt authentic. I admired how plainspoken the writing is. He does not hide behind fancy wording. He just says it. That gives the book a pulse. It also gives the pain nowhere to hide. Some scenes made me angry, especially the childhood sections, because the neglect and cruelty are laid out so clearly. Still, the book never felt stuck in misery. It keeps moving. The track-by-track setup gives the memoir rhythm, shape, and personality. It feels less like a polished performance and more like someone finally telling the truth out loud.
I also found the ideas in the book strong and worth sitting with. The memoir keeps asking who gets to shape a child’s sense of self, and what it costs when that shaping is driven by racism, silence, religion, fear, and other people’s brokenness. I thought the sections on being raised in whiteness while carrying Blackness in his body were especially powerful, and so were the pages where he looks back and sees how adults around him warped his view of his father and of himself. That kind of reflection gave the book depth. It’s not just a record of what happened. It’s an argument for telling the truth about family systems, for naming harm, and for choosing yourself without apology. By the time the memoir reaches Ghana and the word freedom becomes a real personal goal, I felt the emotional release with him. That ending resonated with me.
I would highly recommend Mixtape to readers who like memoirs that are candid, emotionally intense, and full of voice. I think it would be especially good for people interested in stories about survival, race, family trauma, queer self-making, faith, and healing after a rough start in life. More than anything, I came away feeling that Anderson wrote this book because he had to, and that urgency is all over the page. I think that is a big part of why it works so well.
Pages: 392 | ASIN : B0GGDC1GDL
A Blueprint
The Bequest of John T. Ward uncovers the forgotten legacy of a formerly enslaved man who became an Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist. The word “bequest” carries weight. What did John T. Ward leave behind that felt most urgent to preserve?
What felt most urgent to preserve was not just what John T. Ward did, but what he proved. He left behind evidence that a formerly enslaved man could navigate legal systems, acquire land, fund institutions, advocate publicly, and move people toward freedom with intention and precision. His bequest is proof of lineage, continuity, and ownership, including the legacy of what is recognized as the oldest Black-owned business still in operation today. Preserving that truth matters because it challenges the false narrative that Black progress was rare, accidental, or undocumented. It was intentional, and it endured.
What aspects of his character stood out most to you while writing his bravery, his strategy, his compassion, or his vision?
What stood out most was his strategy. Bravery is often highlighted in abolitionist narratives, but strategy is what sustained survival. John T. Ward understood timing, geography, alliances, and the power of paperwork. He knew when to move quietly and when to speak publicly. His compassion fueled his work, but his vision ensured its longevity. He wasn’t reacting to oppression; he was planning beyond it.
How did uncovering your family’s history change the way you understand inheritance, beyond land or property?
It changed inheritance from something purely material into something instructional. I inherited methods for documenting, challenging power, and protecting legacy when systems are hostile. I inherited the understanding that survival itself can be a skill passed down. This history taught me that inheritance can be knowledge, foresight, and responsibility. What was passed to me was not just what was owned, but how to hold it with tools. This book is deeply rooted in the past, yet it feels urgent today.
What connections do you see between Ward’s fight and current struggles for justice?
The connection is documentation. John T. Ward lived in a time when Black existence had to be repeatedly proven through documents, witnesses, and records. Today, we see similar struggles around voting rights, land claims, citizenship, and whose stories are believed. The fight hasn’t changed as much as the language has. His work reminds us that justice is rarely handed down; it is built, recorded, defended, and revisited. That is why The Bequest of John T. Ward is not just history. It is a blueprint.
Author Website
In this deeply researched account, author Shanna Ward breathes life into her ancestor’s journey—an unsung legend whose story is brimming with courage, resilience, and unwavering dedication to justice. Each page reveals the clandestine routes, perilous escapes, and quiet triumphs that defined John T. Ward’s fight against oppression. More than a historical recount, this book invites readers to reflect on human endurance, the transformative power of hope, and the enduring impact one determined individual can have on the pursuit of freedom.
Filled with vivid storytelling, The Bequest of John T. Ward is a must-read for history enthusiasts, social justice advocates, and anyone looking for an inspirational tale of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. Uncover the hidden legacy of this forgotten hero and discover why his life’s work remains a beacon of empowerment, community, and the belief that true liberation comes from standing up for what is right—no matter the cost.
The Bequest of John T Ward: Uncovering A Hidden Legacy in Black American History, Exploring Stories of Antebellum Resistance
The Bequest of John T. Ward traces the long arc of a family’s history from the violent beginnings of colonial Virginia to the fierce resistance of one man who chose courage over silence. The book follows John T. Ward’s journey from enslavement to manumission, then into his work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Alongside his story, the author weaves the deeper roots of the Ward lineage, exposing land grabs, plantation brutality, survival strategies, and the generational spirit that shaped a family determined to rise despite every force working against them. The narrative blends historical records with vivid storytelling that brings the past into sharp focus.
As I moved through the chapters, I felt pulled in by the immediacy of the writing. The author has a way of shifting from personal reflection to historical detail with a rhythm that feels alive. Sometimes the prose hit me hard, especially in sections that explored the emotional landscape of enslaved families. I found myself pausing, letting the weight of those moments settle before reading on. The writing shows how memory, trauma, love, and resistance lived in the same breath for people who had so little room to exist freely.
The voice jumps between past and present, and it carries a raw, personal tone that makes the history feel close and human. I liked that. It felt like someone talking directly to me about their family, not a distant academic piece. The intensity of the language sometimes crowded the quieter insights, and I wished for more calm pauses to let the facts open up on their own. Even then, the author’s passion gave the book a heartbeat. The ideas about inheritance, responsibility, and the duty to remember left me thinking long after I closed the file.
The book gave me a clearer picture of how individual lives fit into the larger struggle for freedom and how resistance did not start or end with famous names in textbooks. I would recommend this book to readers who want a deeply personal look at Black American history and to anyone who appreciates stories that mix truth-telling with emotional depth. It is especially fitting for people who enjoy family histories, hidden legacies, and accounts of courage that echo into the present.
Pages: 582 | ASIN : B0FBT3HTL8
