Recording Your Family History

09/09/2026

09/06/2026

09/06/2026

James West was born in a house, not a hospital Virginia's segregated hospitals wouldn't admit his family. That was the world he grew up in. Drafted into the Korean War, he was wounded in combat and awarded the Purple Heart, fighting for a country that still refused him basic dignity at home.

His own parents begged him not to study electronics. They knew what he was up against. No Black man, they warned him, would ever get hired in that field. So they stopped paying his tuition. James switched majors anyway.

He interned at Bell Labs, and in 1962, alongside Gerhard Sessler, he co invented the foil electret microphone smaller, cheaper, and more reliable than anything before it. Today, that invention is inside roughly 9 out of every 10 microphones made on Earth: your phone, your laptop, your hearing aid, your baby monitor.

He didn't stop at the microphone. West spent his career opening doors for others, co founding an organization to fight for Black employees at Bell Labs and mentoring hundreds of young scientists who came after him.

They told him he had no future. He built the future anyone with a phone uses every single day.

09/03/2026

In 1914, a group of Afro Creole professional men in New Orleans's Seventh Ward founded the Autocrat Club, and more than a century later it is still standing on Elysian Fields Avenue, one of the oldest continuously operating Black social clubs in the country. 🏛️

The Autocrat Club came out of a long New Orleans tradition of Black and Creole mutual aid and social organizations, groups that gave their members a place to gather, do business, and hold formal social events at a time when most white owned venues in the city barred them entirely. Through the Jim Crow decades, clubs like the Autocrat hosted debutante presentations, dances, and community meetings, and they became fixtures of Green Book era Black social life, the kind of address a traveling family could trust would welcome them.

What makes the Autocrat Club unusual is simple longevity. Plenty of similar clubs from that era have closed or lost their buildings, but the Autocrat has kept its doors open through more than a hundred years of change in the Seventh Ward, still run by its own membership, still hosting the kinds of gatherings it was founded for.

Did your family belong to a social club, benevolent society, or fraternal organization that mattered to your community, and does it still exist today?