A Note from the Publisher-Reclaiming the Narrative

Courtesy Photo-Yanice Y. Carter, Publisher of the Chronicle News

---

Black history is not something we dust off once a year.

It is contested. It is challenged. It is rewritten in real time.

And it is ours.

For generations, the story of Black America was told without us, about us, and often against us. Movements were simplified. Leaders were caricatured. Resistance was criminalized. Community protection was labeled aggression. Brilliance was minimized. Complexity was erased.

And still, we built.

We built railroads and recipes.We built movements and melodies.We built inventions that power your homes, your hospitals, your phones, your future.

We are not a sidebar in someone else’s textbook.

We are foundational.

Yet history has a habit of flattening us. It turns layered lives into headlines. It turns strategy into stereotype. It turns community defense into fear.

This month, as we examine figures like Huey P. Newton and revisit movements like the Black Panther Party, we are reminded that narrative is power. The Panthers were reduced to images of rifles, but far less discussed were the free breakfast programs, the health clinics, the community patrols meant to deter violence, and the political education initiatives that empowered neighborhoods.

Context matters.

The same system that resisted change also surveilled, infiltrated, and attempted to fracture movements from within. Those chapters are documented. They are real. And they are part of the story.

Reclaiming the narrative does not mean romanticizing the past. It means telling the full truth. The triumphs and the tensions. The discipline and the mistakes. The humanity.

Because when we tell the whole story, we teach our children how to think, not just what to memorize.

At The Chronicle, we hold the pen with intention.

We exist to document the leaders among us. The colonels who shattered ceilings. The attorneys shaping justice. The educators cultivating the next generation. The athletes carrying both expectation and excellence. The entrepreneurs building wealth where others saw abandonment.

We refuse reduction.

We refuse distortion.

We refuse to allow our identity to be defined by crisis clips and incomplete narratives.

We are intelligent.We are strategic.We are resilient.We are builders.

We are the descendants of people who created structure under pressure and dignity under duress. We are the architects of culture, even when history books hesitated to credit the design.

Reclaiming the narrative is not a slogan.

It is stewardship.

It is correction.

It is responsibility.

History is not behind us.

It is unfolding through us, through every institution we sustain, every business we grow, every vote we cast, every child we prepare, every truth we print.

As long as The Chronicle exists, the record will reflect who we truly are, not who someone else once attempted to portray.

The story was always ours.

We are simply making sure it is told correctly.

Yanice Y. Carter

Publisher, The Chronicle News