Tru Nobility Apparel

Tru Nobility Apparel Bold designs, honoring Black culture, sparking conversations.

Family-owned brand creating culturally rooted apparel, classroom resources, and legacy-driven goods that help people teach the truth, wear the message, and keep our stories alive.

09/03/2026

Sun Ra is next on the Freedom Studies syllabus—and this one is going to get weird fast.

Before we even get to what he built, we’re going to have to talk about Saturn. 🪐

First lesson is next. Follow along if you want to see where this goes.

“Author” is true. It’s also incomplete.Maya Angelou organized. Toni Morrison built publishing pathways. Zora Neale Hurst...
09/01/2026

“Author” is true. It’s also incomplete.

Maya Angelou organized. Toni Morrison built publishing pathways. Zora Neale Hurston preserved Black stories, songs, and oral traditions. Alice Walker helped recover a neglected lineage. Octavia Butler treated imagination as rigorous intellectual work.

These women did not simply write books that entered the culture. They helped shape the conditions through which culture could be organized, published, preserved, recovered, and imagined.

Five writers. A much bigger inheritance.

Which of these forms of cultural work feels most urgent now—and which writer’s work are you returning to?

Wear the legacy. The Maya & Toni & Alice & Zora & Octavia tee is available at TruNobility

09/01/2026

Fred Hampton studied pre-law because he believed legal knowledge could help him challenge police brutality.

That detail tells us something about how he understood education: knowledge was supposed to be useful in the work of changing conditions.

That’s part of what Freedom Studies is asking too—not just what do you know, but what can you do with what you know?

Be honest: did you have B before the reveal? Drop a ✋ if you got it.

08/30/2026

A swimming pool can sound like a small issue—until you know the history.

As a teenager, Fred Hampton helped take Black children from Maywood to another suburb to swim because the nearby pool excluded them. He also organized for better recreation at home.

Pools and beaches across America have their own history of segregation. That context matters when stereotypes get repeated as if they appeared out of nowhere.

Follow Freedom Studies. We’re digging into the history underneath the stereotypes.

08/30/2026

I stopped teaching my kids Black History.

And even typing that feels wild, because knowing our history has always felt like a cultural responsibility to me.

I want my kids to know Marcus Garvey. Malcolm X. Zora Neale Hurston. Amos Wilson. I want them to know what happened before them and who fought to make their lives possible.

But I started noticing something that bothered me:

they were glazing over.

The names were becoming names.
The dates were becoming dates.
“Black History” was becoming another subject they were supposed to know because somebody told them it was important.

And I realized I might be recreating the exact problem I criticize in American education.

Knowing that Malcolm X existed isn’t the same as understanding what he was trying to solve.

Knowing a movement happened isn’t the same as understanding how people organized, why they succeeded, where they failed, and what any of it means for your life right now.

So I’m changing course.

I’m calling it Freedom Studies.

Some of the people will be the same. Some of the history will be the same. But the question we’re organizing it around is different—and it reaches beyond just the Black American struggle.

I explain what I mean in the video.

I don’t have this completely figured out. This is really me documenting what I’m learning while trying to educate my own kids better.

If that journey sounds useful to you, follow along. I think we’re going to learn a lot together.

What do you do when your country says your people’s voices don’t matter?You save them.Zora Neale Hurston is remembered a...
08/29/2026

What do you do when your country says your people’s voices don’t matter?

You save them.

Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as one of our great writers. But before we reduce her to Their Eyes Were Watching God, we should understand something else she spent her life doing:

Zora was deciding what would make it into the future.

She trained as an anthropologist and traveled through Black communities collecting the things traditional histories so often left out: stories and folktales, work songs and blues, sermons and prayers, jokes, games, ways of speaking, religious practices and the everyday knowledge people carried with them.

And she didn't only preserve the parts of Black culture that dominant society considered respectable.

Hurston immersed herself in African-derived spiritual traditions, studying Hoodoo in the American South and Vodou in Haiti. She crossed boundaries that a white Christian society had already marked for her: civilized and primitive, religion and superstition, respectable and shameful.

She refused to let those judgments decide what deserved to be taken seriously.

That matters.

Because domination has never been satisfied with controlling what people do. It reaches for how people understand themselves.

We can see the machinery clearly wherever one people has attempted to dominate another: attack the language. Demonize the religion. Rename the people. Separate children from cultural transmission. Mock the customs. Devalue the stories. Teach people that advancement means becoming more like the dominant society—and less like themselves.

The particulars change.

The mechanism does not.

And that changes how we should understand what Zora was doing.

She wasn't wandering around collecting interesting artifacts from an old Black world.

She was encountering living Black culture in her present and making choices about what would be available in ours.

Think about that.

A voice she helped record could outlive the person speaking.

A story passed orally from one generation to another could enter an archive and reach people not yet born.

A spiritual tradition dismissed as primitive could leave behind testimony from someone who actually entered the community, listened and took it seriously.

Zora died in 1960. Some of what she saved is still speaking to us.

That's why history cannot simply be the cataloging of old things.

Every generation is deciding what gets added to the record of human existence—and what disappears from it.

When you preserve something oppression has marked as worthless, you aren't merely protecting the past.

You are refusing to let somebody else decide what the future gets to inherit.

That is resistance.

That is why we study freedom.

And it means this work belongs to us, too.

Record your grandmother telling the story everybody in the family knows.

Ask your uncle where that saying came from.

Write down the recipe nobody measures.

Put names and dates on those old photographs.

Document the neighborhood before it changes.

Record the song.

Ask about the tradition nobody ever thought needed explaining.

Add something to the future.

One day, you will be the ancestor.

And somebody you will never meet may understand who they are because you decided something was worth saving.

Freedom needs a memory. Preserve it. Pass it on.

We've been watching this wall come alive almost every day as we pass through Stone Mountain.What strikes me now is that ...
08/28/2026

We've been watching this wall come alive almost every day as we pass through Stone Mountain.

What strikes me now is that before the art was there, I don't think I ever really noticed the wall at all. It was just a blank part of the landscape.

Now people stop.

Kids look up.

Neighbors talk.

Color spills across the block.

That's what it means to us to bring life to a space. Not just to make something prettier, but to change how a place feels.

Charity Hamidullah told us she spent about 120 hours creating the piece. She called it “We Met in the Middle.” It portrays six young people standing together, surrounded by color, flowers, movement, and possibility.

Our kids felt that energy immediately. And when we got the chance to meet Charity, they felt her energy too. Her whole vibe matched the work — warm, joyful, open, alive.

So we had to show her some love.

And I also want to give the City of Stone Mountain and its Downtown Development Authority credit here, because this didn't just happen by accident.

Stone Mountain's Village Forward downtown plan has treated murals and public-space improvements as part of the city's revitalization vision for years. In 2026 the DDA again identified mural projects, downtown landscaping, and beautification as priorities. In April, the DDA formally approved Charity Hamidullah as the finalist artist for this site and approved $20,000 in funding for the mural.

That's the kind of public investment you can actually feel when you walk by it.

It gave an amazing artist the opportunity to transform a wall that most of us probably passed without a second thought into a place people now stop to experience.

To Charity: we hope the joy you put into this space — and into the countless people who will see it long after the paint dried — comes back to you through the people who love you, the opportunities that find you, and the communities that keep saying your name.

And to the City of Stone Mountain - Government: keep doing this. Keep making room for artists to help us imagine what our public spaces can feel like.

Stone Mountain feels a little more alive because this wall is alive now.

08/28/2026

Before the Black Panthers, before the beret, Fred Hampton was already organizing.

As a teenager, Hampton led the West Suburban NAACP Youth Council and helped grow it to more than 500 young people. That matters because it changes the way we tell his story: leadership didn’t suddenly arrive with the image most people recognize.

He was practicing it early.

Send this to somebody who still thinks young people have to wait their turn to lead.

We’re done teaching Black history.That may sound like a rejection, but it isn’t. This has been an organic evolution in o...
08/28/2026

We’re done teaching Black history.

That may sound like a rejection, but it isn’t. This has been an organic evolution in our home—and I want to be honest: we do not have all of it figured out.

It began with our effort to teach our children the things left out of the standard American curriculum. The more I tried to teach them, the more I realized how much I was still learning too.

For a long time, we called what we were teaching Black history. But as my own education expanded, I began wrestling with both of those words.

I love my Blackness. It gives me community, memory, political language, and a way to recognize patterns this country continues to repeat. It is a treasure.

But Blackness is not the beginning of our children’s story, and it cannot contain the whole of who they are. They are African by ancestry and American by political circumstance.

When our people are centered rather than treated as an exception, our history does not need to be qualified as “Black history.” It is simply our history.

Even the word “history” began to feel limiting. I do not want our children merely memorizing what happened. I want them asking:

What were people fighting for?
What did they build?
What worked?
What failed?
What remains for us to do?

Fred Hampton’s approach to political education has stayed with me: learning should help people understand their conditions and prepare them to act.

When I stripped everything else away, I realized that what I want most for our children is freedom. I want them to be freer than we are—free to travel, work, rest, create, collaborate, and become fully themselves.

That is how we arrived at Freedom Studies.

Not because Black history no longer matters. It matters deeply. But we want to teach it as part of an ongoing human struggle for freedom—not as a subject isolated in the past.

We are not presenting a finished philosophy or claiming to have every answer. We are parents trying to give our children better tools than the ones we inherited.

We are building this as we go. We will learn, revise, and sometimes get things wrong.

Help us build it.

Tell us what we are missing. Share the people, experiences, family histories, books, and lessons that taught you something about freedom. Question us. Correct us. Build with us.

Welcome to Freedom Studies.

We are learning together how freedom gets built.

08/02/2026

Today is James Baldwin’s birthday.

Instead of giving you another list of facts, here’s something you can use tomorrow.

Baldwin believed education wasn’t just about giving people answers—it was about helping them ask better questions.

Try one of these with your students, your children, or even around the dinner table.

Questions Inspired by James Baldwin

📖 What story about your family or community deserves to be told?

💭 When have you realized your first impression of someone was wrong?

🏡 What makes someone feel like they truly belong?

🤝 Why is it important to hear everyone’s story—not just the most popular one?

❤️ Can you care about your community and still want it to change?

🌎 How can learning someone else’s story help us understand our own?

✍️ If you could write one page that future students would read about today, what would you want them to know?

The best lessons don’t always end with answers.

Sometimes they begin with a really good question.

Follow for more classroom-ready Black history resources, lesson ideas, and meaningful conversations.

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