Monologue: Life of Albert Morris

 Monologue: Life of Albert Morris


“If you want the truth about who you are, you must walk toward it.”


People ask me why I spent all those years gathering stories, digging through history, writing my book at a little wooden table in Harlem. The answer is simple: I was searching for the pieces of us that had been scattered across continents and centuries. And once I found them, I wanted to place them back into the hands of our children.


I didn’t do that work alone.

For years, I stood alongside elders, scholars, and cultural workers who kept the flame burning. One of the great influences in my life was the Ghana Nkwanta Project here in New York City, founded by Elder Adunni Oshupa Tabasi. Elder Tabasi was a visionary—someone who understood that Africa was not a memory, not a myth, but a living inheritance. Through that project we studied, traveled, prayed, strategized. We built bridges where the world had tried to build walls.


Those gatherings changed me. They gave me a language for something I had felt all my life:

that Africa is not distant.

Africa is within us, waiting to be remembered.


When I coached young people in boxing or basketball, when I tutored them in math or science, I wasn’t just teaching technique—I was teaching lineage. I was teaching them that they came from inventors and astronomers, kings and craft-workers, philosophers and engineers. I wanted them to know they were heirs to something vast.


My book was never meant to make me famous. It was meant to make our story visible. I put it together piece by piece because I didn’t want our children to grow up thinking they came from nothing. And if the world didn’t want to publish it, well, I would publish it myself. Our history does not need permission to exist.


When I finally built a home in Ghana, it felt like completing a circle. The soil knew me. The air felt like memory. I didn’t go there to escape America—I went to honor the truth Elder Tabasi always spoke: We are a people whose story began long before our sorrow.


Listen to me now:

If you do not see your story written… write it.

If you do not see your history taught… teach it.

If you do not see your legacy honored… honor it yourself.


That is what I tried to do.

That is what we tried to do.


Because the truth of who we are is too precious to leave in someone else’s hands.






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