I did so deliberately. I believed it was time to make room for a new generation of Black talkers—to listen to new voices, new language, new ways of organizing thought and struggle.

But I did not lay down the microphone because the conversation was finished.

And I certainly did not lay it down because my generation of Black talkers had been wrong.

Quite the opposite.

For years, Black talk radio was sounding alarms while much of mainstream corporate media was still soft-pedaling the danger, normalizing the abnormal, and entertaining the comfort of disbelief.

Bob Law. Bernie McCain. Joe Madison. Dr. Wilmer Leon. Ambrose Lane.Mark Thompson. Bev Smith.The Power lineup. Carl Nelson. OUR COMMON GROUND. Tavis Smiley. Tom Joyner. Rickey Smiley. ony Washington. And so many others.

We were talking.

We talked about the steady erosion of voting rights. We talked about the courts. We talked about white nationalism and the radicalization of the American Right. We talked about attacks on public education, the criminalization of Black children, mass incarceration, economic dispossession, and the machinery being constructed to diminish Black political power.

We talked about power because our history had taught us to recognize it. Black people knew something about America. Not because we possessed some mystical ability to see into the future, but because our history had taught us what America was—and what America was not.

The election of Barack Obama was historic. It was extraordinary. But for many Black Americans, it was never proof that the old America had disappeared. It was also testimony to the extraordinary achievement of Black America despite that history.

We knew the difference.

And today we face an overwhelmingly frontal assault on our citizenship, our history and our agency—a campaign to erase from the American memory the enormous contributions Black people made despite enslavement, segregation, racial terror and exclusion, and to diminish the collective power we earned in tears and blood.

There is something America must remember:

We did not merely demand entry into American democracy. We helped force America to examine what democracy meant.

It was Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. Malcolm and Martin. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. Angela Davis and Fred Hampton. Maya Angelou and generations whose names will never appear in a history book. It was the format “Black Talk Radio” that reminded America every day that Black History was not an annual event; it was everyday. That slavery is not Black History; it is white history. Black History is all the contributions made by Black people to this country and the stories of our survival.

The children of American slavery stood at the helm of the great March on Washington—not simply asking what freedom would look like for Black people, but forcing an entire nation to confront what freedom and justice must mean for everybody. We called America to her own mirror. And we are being called to do it again.

That is why OUR COMMON GROUND is coming back. Not to recreate an old radio program.

Not because I need another microphone. And certainly not because I need something else to do.

We are returning because The Conversation still matters. On OUR COMMON GROUND, we talked with each other. We questioned. We argued. We listened. We remembered. We challenged one another. We brought scholars, activists, artists, organizers, clergy, political thinkers, and ordinary people onto common ground. And through that conversation, we became more confident about what we were seeing, what we knew—and what we needed to do.

That was Talk That Matters. That was #TrustYourStruggle.

And that is the work before us again.

At 76, I know I cannot do everything I once did. I don’t intend to. But there are moments when experience itself becomes an obligation. There are things we have seen before. Things we remember. Things we learned through struggle that cannot be surrendered to historical amnesia.

So I am picking up the microphone again. And I am picking up the pen. Scribbling Truth on OCG will be part of that return—a place for commentary, context, conversation, and commitment. A place to connect what is happening now with what came before it and to ask, always:

What do we know?

What does our history teach us?

And what are we prepared to do?