CBH Talk | The Erasure of Black History: Battling For America’s Narrative
This program is offered in partnership with The Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Black history is under siege. Recent political efforts to erase America’s deep-seated legacy of racial injustice have gained ground at an alarming rate. Many narratives of Black America are now being distorted, denied, and buried.
The Center for Brooklyn History and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize bring together three acclaimed writers who have powerfully illuminated undertold Black stories, for a discussion on what’s at stake as the deniers gain ground.
Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire documents the rise and destruction of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in the 1921 Greenwood Massacre. Robert Samuels is co-author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning His Name is George Floyd, a deeply reported biography that reveals the personal and structural forces behind Floyd’s life and death. And Gilbert King is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove.
Together, they explore the current backlash against racial justice narratives, how truth is being rewritten, and why it matters now more than ever.
Photos clockwise from top left: Victor Luckerson by Joseph Rushmore, Robert Samuels, Gilbert King by Olivia King
Participants
Gilbert King is the writer, producer, and host of Bone Valley, a multi-episode investigative podcast about two men at the center of a Florida murder case, and the justice system caught in between. His most recent book, published in 2025, is Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida. King is the author of Devil in the Grove, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. A New York Times bestseller, the book was also named runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and he was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. King’s earlier books include The Execution of Willie Francis (2008), and Beneath a Ruthless Sun (2018). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author who works to bring neglected black history to light. His recent book on the history of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Built From the Fire, was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Built From the Fire also received the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History, the Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History Award from the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Victor is currently based in Washington D.C. and working as a national correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine. His writing and research have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wired, and Time magazine. Victor also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of black history called Run It Back.
Robert Samuels is an award-winning author and journalist. Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa wrote His Name is George Floyd, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award. Robert’s homebase is at The Washington Post, where he writes in-depth stories about policy, people, and our evolving American identity. He has also worked as a staff writer at the Miami Herald and The New Yorker. Robert grew up in The Bronx and resides in Washington, DC.
About the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize honors writers whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding. Launched in 2006, it is recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious literary honors and is the only literary peace prize awarded in the United States. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards a $10,000 cash prize each year to one fiction and one nonfiction author whose work advances peace as a solution to conflict and leads readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.
