Look at how she moves through her field and the pattern jumps out fast. The young reporter who started out at the Raleigh News & Observer grew into a sports columnist, a national television anchor, a podcast host, a memoirist, and a media entrepreneur. Somewhere in there she picked up a microphone and helped build a whole company. Go on and try squeezing that onto a business card.

Here is what keeps pulling at me. When a Black woman shows real skill in one arena, the wider world tends to hand her a category and expect her to live there quietly. You are the sports girl. Or the political one. Maybe the culture writer who says the sharp thing on cable and then hushes. Pick your seat, sugar, and please don’t get up. Hill never accepted that arrangement, and her whole run proves the rest of us don’t have to either.

Begin where it began. Raleigh first, then Detroit, sports writing, a beat most people still picture as belonging to men who never learned to knock before entering a locker room. Hill joined the Detroit Free Press in 1999 and spent six years covering Michigan State football and basketball before becoming a columnist at the Orlando Sentinel. ESPN came next in 2006. She covered games the way a preacher works a difficult text. The final score was never simply the score. Underneath sat questions of race, money, power, and who gets cheered while somebody else gets punished for the very same behavior. She saw every bit of it and refused to play dumb.

Jemele columns became an even bigger part of her public voice, including her later work at The Undefeated. Her voice sharpened there into something you could quote back to your cousin over Sunday dinner. She could break down what happened in sports and, in the same breath, tell you what she believed it revealed about the country surrounding it. Precise. Never watered down simply to spare somebody’s comfort.

Then came 2017. Folks who had never watched a single highlight learned her name overnight, and not for anything she wrote about a game. Hill wrote on Twitter that President Donald Trump was a white supremacist, setting off a national controversy and drawing criticism from ESPN. The network did not suspend her for those tweets. Weeks later, ESPN suspended her for two weeks after another series of posts involving Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, anthem protests, and the team’s advertisers. ESPN described the episode as a second violation of its social media guidelines. The controversy changed the public conversation around Hill, but it did not make her retreat from subjects beyond sports.

She eventually left ESPN in September 2018 after more than a decade with the network. A staff writer’s position at The Atlantic followed the next month, and in 2019 she rolled out her own podcast, Jemele Hill is Unbothered. The show gave her room to move between sports, entertainment, politics, race, and culture while sitting down with filmmakers, athletes, comedians, entertainers, and other public figures.

When one chapter wrapped, she simply constructed the next. By 2026 Jemele was working across more than one show at a time, reunited with Cari Champion for Flagrant and Funny, a program that moves through women’s sports, culture, and whatever else the two feel deserves a conversation. Hill also hosts Image Unscripted, an NAACP Image Awards original series centered on the people shaping Black culture. This woman does not sit around waiting for permission to speak. She builds the space and waves you inside.

And mind you, she has helped build something she can call her own. Hill and longtime friend Kelley L. Carter co-founded Lodge Freeway Media, a production company created with an emphasis on telling stories about people of color, particularly women. That is the entrepreneur piece, and it carries real weight. Plenty of folks reach the summit and yank the ladder up after themselves. Hill’s work has repeatedly created room for voices that traditional media can overlook.

Somewhere in the thick of all that came a memoir. Uphill arrived in 2022 and told her story with the same candor she brings to nearly everything else. The book took readers through family, ambition, journalism, public controversy, and the personal experiences behind the woman millions knew from television. A book for children sits on the runway now too. Unapologetically You, illustrated by Jessica Gibson and scheduled for January 12, 2027, encourages young readers to embrace who they are without shrinking themselves for somebody else’s comfort. Author. Add another title to the pile.

Now here comes the part I want my Sistas to sit with a minute. Each of those arenas carries its own expectations. Sports journalism had one idea of who she ought to be. Television had another. Political commentary opened an entirely different set of arguments around her. Publishing asked audiences to encounter her outside the television screen altogether. Every new door carried another opportunity for somebody to decide where Jemele Hill supposedly belonged. She kept right on walking.

Why does this land on Black women harder than on almost anybody? Partly because range can make people uncomfortable. A person who can do six things well cannot be tidily managed, cannot be flattened into a single neat quote, cannot be waved off whenever she moves beyond the subject somebody assigned her. So the culture sometimes strains to shrink her back down to a manageable size. Stay in your lane becomes the mannerly version of sit down and behave yourself.

More than two decades in, her answer has not budged. No, thank you.

Lord, do I think about the ones rising up after her. The girls filing a first byline at some small paper nobody reads, or taping a first episode in a bedroom closet because the hanging clothes soak up the echo. They are absorbing something their grandmothers were rarely permitted to believe. You get to be more than a single thing. Be the reporter and the storyteller and the boss all at once. Your gifts owe nobody an apology for arriving plural.

There is quiet dignity in turning down the box, and there is shrewd strategy underneath it too. Every fresh arena she entered became a cushion for the next. When television changed, the writing remained. When one program ended, another platform could take shape. Diversifying was never merely vanity. It was survival wearing the costume of ambition, the very same arithmetic our mamas ran while holding two jobs plus a side hustle and somehow still making choir rehearsal.

So no, a sister does not need one trade and nothing more. My great Aunt was working with the world handed to her. The world Jemele helped pry open is far wider, and Black women can look at careers like hers and see proof that talent does not have to remain trapped inside the first room where somebody recognizes it.

Call her a sportswriter if that soothes you. Or a commentator, a memoirist, a founder, a host juggling several projects at once. The honest truth is she answers to all of it and belongs wholly to none of it. That right there is the entire point.

Stay in your one designated lane? The Sistas coming up behind her have a far better blueprint now. They watched one of our own drive down every road on the map and never once pull over to ask for directions.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

The object in question is called the Bey Keeper Collector’s Box, and the star behind it is exactly who you are picturing. Priced at $948.01, a figure that spells out her birthday, the fourth of September in 1981. The edition is limited to five hundred, each individually numbered with custom engraving. Solid pine, treated with beeswax oil, lined in deep green velvet, and fitted with gold hardware and a faux gator-skin strap. Handsome, by every account. What it does not hold is a single record. You buy the case. The music, you supply yourself.

Let me establish a thing or two before anyone reaches for the block button. My membership in the Hive predates the breathing years of half the folks currently defending this purchase. These feet ached through general admission while I sang until my throat quit. I bought the albums twice, once on release and again when the deluxe arrived, since that is what love looked like where I come from, showing up with your money as proof. So hear me clearly. The critique I am about to offer comes from within the family, not from some bitter corner outside it.

Here is what has been pressing on my chest. A quiet expectation gets placed on Black women to open our purses every single time another sister wins. We call it solidarity, then dress it up as lifting while we climb. That instinct carries real beauty, born from generations of watching our labor enrich everyone but us. When one of our own builds an empire inside an industry that chewed up and spat out ladies who shared her complexion, the urge to guard it feels close to sacred.

Somewhere along the road, though, protection soured into obligation. Loyalty turned into a receipt. And the distance between honoring a sister and simply funding her grew hazy enough that a pine container holding nothing at all could be sold to us as a love language.

Allow me to speak plainly about numbers, since I am far too seasoned to pretend they do not count. The artist offering this collectible is herself a billionaire. Beyoncé is also married to Jay-Z, whose fortune Forbes estimates at roughly $2.8 billion. No light bill has ever made that household flinch. Bey’s success was never my concern. I cheer it loudly. What troubles me is the auntie on a fixed income feeling a pinch of guilt because the Hive is buzzing and she has not yet bought in. The young Sistas just a hard week from the edge worry me too, the ones telling themselves that a purchase like this counts as an investment, an heirloom, a way to stand beside greatness.

That guilt is manufactured, and grown folks ought to name it aloud.

Something ugly surfaced while the internet did its thing. Beneath the jokes, a familiar defense kept rising. This is memorabilia, they argued. It is a collector’s item. Plainly not meant for anyone who cannot afford it, others chimed in. Read that final idea again, slowly. The message tucked inside the message says your devotion gets measured by your account balance, and if the figure stings, you are the flaw. Such framing cuts cruelly into working sisters who have spent decades proving their love through sacrifice.

Consumerism has always been talented at wearing the costume of belonging. It murmurs that whatever you buy will finally seat you inside the circle. Nearness gets sold to people who crave closeness and hold few affordable routes to reach it. Black women understand that hunger down to the marrow, raised as we were to shrink, to wait our turn, to be twice as good for half the reward. So when a glittering object promises entry into a glamorous world that feels like ours, the pull turns real. An empty case costing close to a grand is built to catch exactly that pull.

None of this paints the singer as a villain. She runs a business, and a brilliant one. Luxury scarcity is a tactic older than all of us, and putting only five hundred numbered pieces into circulation creates exactly the kind of urgency collectors respond to. Some buyers may even see future resale value where the rest of us see an expensive wooden box. Markets behave as markets do. My quarrel is not with an artist who wrote her birthday into a keepsake. The real trouble sits with the story we keep telling ourselves about what we owe her.

We owe our people honesty long before we owe them our savings.

Genuine backing has texture. It looks like buying the record since the sound moved you, not out of fear that a crowd might shame your hesitation. Paying full fare for a seat and dancing without an ounce of apology counts too. So does teaching your daughter that this legend built something extraordinary through vision and discipline, and that admiring her never demanded you go without. Devotion that leaves you poorer and barely nudges her richer is not solidarity. It is a transaction wrapped in kente cloth.

Consider what nine hundred and forty eight dollars accomplishes elsewhere. A month of groceries. Car repairs that keep you driving to the job. The down payment on a course that redirects a whole life. A gift to a neighborhood bookstore run by us, or a niece’s tuition, money that actually multiplies within our community instead of drifting up toward a mansion already stocked with everything a person could name. If unity is truly the aim, let us point it where it circulates and comes home, not where it evaporates the moment it lands.

My affection for the singer stays intact. Nobody in my living room is canceling a soul. I will play that catalog on a slow Sunday as the coffee drips, feeling the swell of pride that arrives only from watching one of us reach the mountaintop and decline to apologize for the view. Pride is free. Admiration costs nothing. Those pieces of fandom were never up for sale, and they are the parts worth protecting fiercely.

The keeper itself can rest on the shelf without me. Paper bags have cradled my vinyl just fine for years, and my dignity has never asked for a strap pretending to be reptile.

So before I go, let me turn the mirror your way, Sistas. Are you in the Hive, wearing that badge with joy? Have you stood beneath those stadium lights, or worn down the grooves on the albums the way I have? And when that number appeared beside an empty wooden case, what rose up in you first, defensiveness or discomfort? Sit with whichever answer it was. What surfaces may reveal more about the weight so many Black women carry than about the item glowing on the screen.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

I keep returning to the pair of them here in the fall of 2026, because the culture whispers the opposite lesson in our ears all day long. Pick up your phone and there it sits. A ranking of who looks better, who earns more, whose husband stayed, whose children turned out right, whose kitchen got the marble island. The whole contraption runs on one rotten premise, that another lady’s shine somehow dims your own. These two looked at that premise and, without ever making a speech about it, declined to buy a single share.

Girls learn the scorekeeping early. Who is cuter. Who got asked to the dance. Who the teacher favored. That habit does not evaporate once we grow up and put on our good coats. It simply follows us into offices and sanctuaries and the church lot after service, dressed up now as ambition. Grown Sistas end up watching one another sideways, convinced the table only seats one of us and heaven help the sister who claims the chair first. Nobody has to teach Black women to guard money, looks, marriage, and title like they are the last cans on the shelf. The world already drilled it in.

Which is exactly why the arc of these two feels like medicine.

Start with what Winfrey accomplished, because the scope of it still stuns me. Gayle and Oprah first crossed paths in the seventies at a Baltimore station, one an anchor, one a young production assistant, neither dreaming of what waited ahead. Then came the show. Twenty five seasons of it, from 1986 straight through to 2011, eventually becoming the highest rated talk show in American television history, with a shelf sagging under Daytime Emmys. In 1996 came the book club, and just like that the entire publishing business got rearranged overnight, unknown authors turned into bestsellers off a single mention. Think on that power a moment. A woman telling the whole country what to read, and the country went and read it. Her company got the name Harpo, which is Oprah flipped backward, and she ran it as chairwoman. A magazine with her face on every cover flew off the racks month after month. Come 2011 there was a whole network with her initials stamped on it.

And I have not even touched the acting. Folks forget she was on a movie set before most of the country knew her voice. Sofia in The Color Purple, 1985, and right out the gate on her first try, she earns an Oscar nomination. That is not normal. More roles followed, Beloved and The Butler, and when Selma needed telling she put her own money behind it. Somewhere in there Forbes ran the math and called her the first Black woman billionaire, and I remember Sistas passing that news around like scripture. Obama put the Medal of Freedom on her. The Golden Globes handed her the Cecil B. DeMille honor, first Black woman they ever gave it to, and up there she preached until half the room was crying. Then a whole school for girls in South Africa, an ocean away, because she felt like it. Harvard gave her an honorary doctorate. And her philanthropy has run into the hundreds of millions.

And do not go filing Gayle under Oprah’s name like she is some footnote in another woman’s book. Eighteen years she spent reading the news in Hartford, Connecticut, back when nobody outside the state knew her face. Yes, there was the magazine. But she also sat down at the CBS morning desk in 2012 and has been holding that chair ever since, right through the name change and all. You remember the R. Kelly mess in 2019? He came apart on camera, up out his seat, hollering and pointing at the ceiling, and Gayle just sat there. Calm as a Sunday. Kept putting her questions to him in that same steady voice while he lost the entire plot. You do not pull that off on nerve. That is what thirty years of doing the work gets you. The Cronkite honor followed in 2023. And then, seventy years old, mind you, she climbed into a Blue Origin rocket and let them fire her past the sky with a whole crew of women.

Here is the detail that tells you everything. Before King said yes to that flight, she checked with her two kids and she checked with Oprah. She figured her friend would beg her not to go. Instead Winfrey told her she would kick herself forever if she let the chance slip by. Counsel, not rivalry. A push toward the sky, not a hand on the ankle.

That is the whole thing, right there.

The money makes it plainer still. Oprah is worth billions while Gayle has built an enormously successful career of her own, yet the difference in their financial lives has never appeared to crack the foundation. They laugh about it out loud. Gayle ribs her about the private planes. Oprah leans on Gayle for the kind of plain talk no amount of money can purchase. How many friendships collapse the moment one person’s fortune outruns the other’s? Ours are supposed to teach us that a real bond survives the arithmetic.

Our mamas and grandmamas loved big, but the world they came up in kept setting them against one another over scraps. Over which one a man looked at twice. Over the single promotion a company decided to spare a Black woman that year, if it spared one at all. When you are raised believing there is barely enough, you start eyeing the next sister like she showed up to take something off your plate. It is a hard thing to unlearn. Plenty of us never do.

Younger Sistas coming up behind us need to see this clearly. You do not have to marry to be whole. You do not have to run the identical race as your closest girlfriend to count for something. Beauty rankings, relationship status, the corner office, none of it is the real scoreboard. A good life does not come in one flavor. Yours is not worth a nickel less because somebody down the block got a version that photographs better.

Black women have been holding each other up like this since forever, in kitchens and on folding chairs and down in church basements, long before there was a camera around to catch any of it. Oprah has said it plain, that Gayle is the mother she never got and the sister everybody ought to have. Read that slow. She set her closest friend on the same tier as blood. These two simply did it where the whole planet could watch, which finally gave the rest of us permission to name what was already true.

So here is what I want every one of us to carry out of their story. Cheer the next lady’s dream as loud as you would cheer your own. Turn down the trap that swears only one of us gets to eat. Understand that when a single Black woman rises, she lifts the reputation of all of us a notch higher, and that lift belongs to everybody.

Neither one ever had to make the other smaller to get where she was headed. They both won. Both of them, same lifetime, still picking up the phone to check on one another after all these years. The lesson sitting underneath it is not complicated, though Lord knows it is hard to live out. Quit treating the next sister like she is the thing standing between you and yours. There is room. There has always been room. Their crown never needed to balance on one head, and neither does whatever it is you are reaching for.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Start with the trick the data plays on us. This past summer the reports showed our jobless rate dropping from 7.07 percent to 5.73 percent. Sounds like sunshine, right? Look closer and the floor gives way. Over that same stretch, employment among us fell by 212,000. Our labor force shrank by 387,000. The count of us no longer even searching climbed by 454,000. That is not the kind of comeback anybody should celebrate. Economist Katica Roy called it statistical exclusion, which is a polite way of saying women disappeared from the unemployment tally not necessarily because they found work, but because they were no longer counted as part of the labor force.

Let me talk plain, Sistas.

Back in January the jobless rate for us sat at 6.3 percent, up from 5.4 percent a year earlier, running nearly double the 3.4 percent white women were carrying. By the close of 2025 it had touched 7.3 percent, the ugliest mark in roughly four years. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research put numbers behind a trend that ought to stop you cold. Across 2025, Black women suffered disproportionate losses in professional and service occupations and ended the year with 113,000 fewer employed women than when it began.

Now here is where it stings the educated among us most.

Everybody assumes a degree is a shield. It is not. The Economic Policy Institute found that the losses from 2024 into 2025 landed especially hard on Black women with bachelor’s degrees. Their employment-to-population ratio fell 3.5 percentage points while their labor force participation rate dropped 2.3 points. Read that twice. The very sisters who did everything the playbook demanded, the diploma, the certifications, the fifteen and twenty year resumes, were among those taking the hardest hit. IWPR’s Barriers, Not Bootstraps report also documented the obstacles confronting Black women searching for work, while other analysts have estimated that roughly 600,000 Black women were economically sidelined during the broader downturn.

The federal purge did a lot of the damage. Sisters made up about 12 percent of the federal workforce while accounting for roughly 7 percent of workers nationwide, so when hundreds of thousands of federal employees departed and the federal workforce shrank by roughly a quarter million positions, we absorbed a punishment heavier than our share. Whole departments that leaned on our labor, education chief among them, took some of the sharpest blades. And the pain may not be finished. More than one in five Black women in the labor force works in health care, a field vulnerable to Medicaid reductions that some estimates say could ultimately contribute to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs across health care and the broader economy.

Let me sit with what all of this actually does to a person.

A job is never only a paycheck. It is the mortgage, the tuition envelope, the retirement account we were finally building for the first time in our family line. When it disappears, the ripple hits the whole household, since so many of us are the anchor keeping everybody afloat. Long stretches of unemployment are climbing too, with people out of work more than half a year making up roughly a quarter of the unemployed by the summer of 2026. That kind of drought wears on the spirit. Long-term unemployment can deepen anxiety, stress and depression, and you cannot separate a broken labor market from the emotional toll carried by the people trying to survive it.

Which is exactly why so many are done waiting for the boardroom to grow a conscience.

While the office keeps stalling, we are building. Roughly 2.9 million businesses now belong to Black women, about 18 percent of women-owned firms nationwide, and their numbers rose roughly 13 percent in 2025. Still, let me keep it honest. Ownership is no cushion. Black women-owned businesses averaged only around 41,000 dollars in annual revenue, compared with roughly 179,000 dollars for women-owned firms overall. Among the smaller group of companies employing workers, Black women-owned firms averaged around 650,000 dollars in revenue, still the lowest among the demographic groups measured. The culprit is not brains or hustle. Access to capital, lending gaps and investor networks remain major barriers. Many founders are still juggling the dream beside another source of income. So this migration reads less like triumph and more like survival with a business license.

Who owns this mess?

Let me spread it fairly. Companies that hung belonging banners in 2020, then quietly shredded those vows once the political weather turned, carry real guilt. So do executives who treated diversity like a press release instead of a promise. Policy earns a large slice, since gutting whole agencies and rolling back fairness initiatives changed the employment landscape for workers who had long found opportunity in government. And a culture that still calls a self assured sister aggressive, then turns around and praises a loud man for the very same energy, keeps the whole machine humming. Black women have propped up these institutions for generations, often doing the inclusion labor free of charge, and this is the thanks.

What needs to happen?

Start with the federal side, because government work was one of the few ladders that ever paid us square. Stop the bleeding, reconsider positions eliminated without a clear public benefit, and rebuild the agencies that served communities while providing stable pathways into the middle class. Enforce the anti bias laws already sitting on the books instead of letting them collect dust. Protect access to Medicaid too, because deep cuts do not stop with patients. They can reach hospitals, clinics, caregivers and the workers whose paychecks depend on the health care system.

Corporate America has homework too. Fix the first broken rung, publish promotion data by race and gender, and turn hollow mentorship into real sponsorship with money and consequences attached. Pay us what the role is worth, then defend our record the way the golf buddies get defended. Retention is cheaper than the talent hemorrhage they are pretending not to see.

For us, Sistas, the strategy shifts. Build the network you were shut out of, on purpose and without apology. Stack savings, clients and skills before you ever surrender a badge, because leaving ready beats leaving wrecked. Learn the money game, the grants and credit lines and pitch rooms, so the capital wall becomes a hurdle instead of a locked gate. And guard the sisterhood fiercely, because isolation is exactly how they win.

I am not preaching that anybody quit tomorrow. Some will stay and force change from the inside, and that is holy work. Others will walk, and that deserves respect, not a sermon about loyalty to places that showed them none.

What I will not do is call any of this quiet. Hundreds of thousands of Black women pushed to the economic sidelines is not a whisper. It is a verdict on a country that keeps announcing recovery while many of the women who built its households, staffed its agencies and earned every credential they were told to earn slip through a hole nobody wants to name. The only question left is whether anyone in charge reads the verdict before the best of us are gone for good, running our own shops and signing our own checks.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

Keke Palmer said something recently that stuck with me. On the August 18 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, she named a lesson picked up from Queen Latifah, and it had nothing to do with a big sit-down speech. A director once turned to the Queen and asked her to suggest an actress for a part. The answer was Keke, and that was the whole thing. No lecture, no inspirational quote fit for a coffee mug. Just a name, spoken in a place where real decisions were being made while the young talent herself sat nowhere in sight.

Sit with that for a second. The distance between those two acts is bigger than it looks.

Most mentoring dumps the entire gamble onto the person being mentored. You give her what you know, she runs off to use it, and if the door stays shut anyway, hey, you tried. Sponsorship flips that arrangement. When Latifah put Keke forward, she was staking her personal credibility on the result. Had that young actress shown up unprepared or acting a fool, it would have bounced right back on the person who vouched. Being willing to be wrong in public on somebody else’s account is a whole other level of faith, and hardly any of us get near it.

Here is what makes it land even harder. The two of them had worked together years earlier, going all the way back to Barbershop 2: Back in Business in 2004, then reuniting for Joyful Noise and Ice Age: Continental Drift in 2012. Latifah had watched her over a long stretch. Over all that time she clocked how the girl carried herself when the cameras cut off, whether the job got done right, whether there was drama or a professional at the table. That was not a favor handed to a stranger. Years of showing up had built something real, and it finally cashed out.

Palmer put it plain. Folks clock you when you least expect it, and the effort you sink in winds up doing your talking for you.

What stays with me is how little noise any of it made. There was no public spectacle around it. There was no press release about Sistas lifting each other. It happened inside the ordinary machinery of a working day, one professional telling a decision-maker, go with her. Those are the exact instances that move careers, and they almost never make the highlight reel.

Which brings me around to us. To you, reading this right now.

Have you ever put a sister’s name in a room she could not walk into herself? I do not mean encouraged her. Sending her a link to some job posting and wishing her luck does not count either. I mean spoke up for her where it mattered, when your reputation was riding on the result. There is a wide canyon between those two things, and if we are honest with ourselves, most of us live on the comfortable side of it.

Advice is the thing we give out freely, precisely because it asks nothing of us. We love handing the younger Sistas in our orbit a good talking-to about staying ready and keeping their reputations clean. All of that matters. Notice, though, how it keeps our skin out of the game. We get to feel like elders without ever risking a thing. Sponsorship demands more. It asks whether you will speak up for her to your boss, forward her portfolio to the client who trusts your taste, tell the hiring committee you would stake your standing on this woman.

I think about the gifted Black women I have watched claw their way up with talent to spare and nobody willing to speak for them. Passed over, not because they came up short, but because the folks already inside the door stayed silent. We love pointing at the gatekeepers. Fair enough. What we dodge is that a few of them wear our own faces, and keeping quiet is its own kind of decision.

A lot of us haul around a scarcity thing, quiet as it stays, the fear that only one seat exists and her getting it means mine is gone. The Queen works from the opposite place. Someone that settled can vouch for another woman, coach her, hand over part of the spotlight, and never once feel robbed. The pair are lined up to work together again on The Voice: Celebrity in spring 2027, with Palmer hosting and Queen Latifah serving as one of the coaches.

You cannot fake that. It only turns up in someone who quit believing the lie about the single chair.

None of this requires fame or a fat Hollywood Rolodex. The principle scales all the way down to your job, your church, your block, your group chat. Maybe a friend runs a little catering hustle from her kitchen, and all it takes is you naming her when the office asks who cooked. The cousin launching a boutique needs you tagging her online, not just telling her in private how proud you are. Another up for a promotion needs you in that meeting insisting the credit is earned, especially during the seconds when nobody else will say it.

I have had to check myself on this. There were stretches where I offered plenty of encouragement and precious little sponsorship, where I called a woman gifted and then went mute the instant my footing was on the line. That is not the elder I hope to become. How Latifah moved with Keke, quiet about it, not fishing for a bit of credit, taught me plenty. Most of the labor that actually holds a community together happens where no eyes reach.

So let me leave you with this, and I want a real answer, not a skim past it. Whose name did you actually say out loud this year, out where it counted? And whose are you still sitting on, promising yourself you will speak up next time?

Black women have always survived on that kind of behind-the-scenes lifting, generations of it, most never written down anywhere. Somebody spoke for you somewhere once. You may never learn who, or exactly when. That debt cannot be paid backward. It gets carried forward, to the next one coming, into rooms she has not yet learned exist.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Understand what happened here. Jones did not petition the league for a courtesy chair at the far end of the room. She and Feliciano jointly lead the ownership group that acquired control of the club, along with the leverage stitched to it. That distinction matters more than any headline can hold, because there is a wide gulf between being welcomed as a guest and holding the keys to the building.

For generations, the relationship between us and pro sports ran one direction. We filled the stands. Caps went on our heads, rosters memorized cold, lineups argued over at the barbershop, paychecks vanished into jerseys and playoff seats. Our labor built these leagues too, our athletes carrying entire franchises on their backs while somebody else counted the receipts upstairs. Loyalty flowed up. The profit drifted elsewhere.

Kwanza reversed the direction of that flow.

Consider the road for a second. Back at Princeton she entered Amateur Night at the Apollo and took the top prize, which says plenty about her nerve long before any of the rest showed up. Music came next. Nine appearances on the Billboard charts followed, including a Top 10 dance hit, with records that moved bodies in clubs across the country. Track and field ran right beside it, with the 800 meters as her specialty at the NCAA Division I level, legs and lungs tested against the best. Law school followed, then work as a mediator in the New York City court system and as an adjunct professor teaching negotiation at New York University. A Miss Baltimore crown got picked up somewhere along the way. None of it arrived by accident or by anyone’s charity. A woman assembles a life this full only by refusing, again and again, to shrink, and every piece of it walked into a boardroom that rarely hears a voice pitched this loud.

Money has flowed out of those hands as freely as it flowed in. The couple’s initiative says it has committed more than $250 million toward education, entrepreneurship, equity and empowerment, including a $20 million gift to Princeton that stood as the largest ever given to that school by Black and Latino donors. A person built that way does not walk into a franchise hunting for a photo opportunity. She walks in with a plan.

My mind keeps drifting to the little girls who will grow up treating this story as ordinary fact. Some kid flipping past the sports page, barely paying attention, glances up and sees a woman who could pass for somebody in her own household running the top of a multibillion dollar operation. Such an image settles in deep. The ceiling a young mind quietly draws for itself shifts a few feet higher. You cannot slap a price on it, though the deal behind it still carried one.

Some folks will want to file this under magic and keep it moving. I understand the impulse, and the phrase carries real affection. Still, magic undersells the truth of what took place. Magic sounds like something that simply appears, sparkles, then vanishes. What she pulled off was strategy, patience, capital and plain nerve. Sistas have always possessed those qualities. We rarely got handed the room where they could compound into this species of power.

Here sits the deeper shift worth chewing on. Cheering and controlling are not cousins. They live on separate streets entirely. When you cheer, you hope the people in charge share your values and spend wisely and treat your city with care. You hold opinions and zero leverage. When you control, your values can shape policy. You help choose the people who run the operation, set spending priorities and influence how the surrounding community gets treated on a random Tuesday when no cameras are rolling. Influence stops being a feeling and hardens into a name written on a document.

That very gap is where so many of us have been stuck for such a long stretch. We supplied the heart of American culture, the taste, the rhythm, the reason a thing catches fire, while the paperwork of holding stayed in other hands. Musicians know this ache intimately. Ballplayers know it. Anybody who has watched their contribution generate a fortune they never got to touch knows it down in the marrow.

Now let me be fair about the full picture. Feliciano was named the control person under league rules, giving him the club’s formal voice in MLB matters. Cynics will wave that around like it erases the moment. It does not. Major League Baseball says Jones and Feliciano jointly lead the ownership group, and the Padres officially list Jones as a principal owner. The pair built this whole life as partners in business and at home. Watching two people pool their brilliance and buy their way into a room that never expected either of them is its own quiet testimony.

Something else I love. A refusal to dim her shine for the occasion. At the introductory press conference she entered to an upbeat Padres song she had written and performed herself, hollered that the squad was going to win it all, then stood up and snapped a photo of the reporters gathered to cover the moment. No shrinking into some muted, apologetic version of herself to seem palatable to the old guard. A grown woman strolled into the most exclusive fraternity in American sports and stayed fully who she is, thank you very much. Such freedom is the reward for every year spent earning the right to be present.

Black women have carried this country’s cultural weight without the deed to the house for a very long time. We styled the hair, wrote the hooks, coined the slang, set trends the entire planet later copied and watched the proprietor class collect the checks. So when one of us crosses from the bleachers to the boardroom, from admirer to owner, that is no small human interest item to skim past over coffee. That marks a structural crack in a very old wall, and Black women everywhere felt it.

The Padres themselves deserve a mention, still chasing a championship they have never claimed. As of August 25, they had 71-61 record, holding the final National League Wild Card spot with an edge of two games over Arizona as the handoff unfolded. Should the ring finally reach San Diego under this new leadership, the picture turns even sweeter. Picture the trophy hoisted while a sister stands among the people who control the franchise’s future.

Money is the tongue power speaks, and too often we were asked to whisper it. Kwanza did not whisper. She helped assemble the capital, signed the papers and settled into her seat as somebody who belongs there, not somebody granted temporary access that evaporates when the mood shifts.

My prayer is that the young ones treat her not as an exception but as a template. The point underneath all the celebration reads plain enough. Applause feels nice, and applause is cheap. Control is the piece that endures. Every sister reading this deserves to know that the table was never truly meant to stay closed to her, and that a few Sistas have already proven the chairs can be bought outright.

Kwanza Jones understood the assignment. Nothing at all got asked of baseball. She arrived with her partner, the capital and a winning ownership group, and made herself an owner.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

On Amy Poehler’s podcast over the summer, she put it without flinching. The crying happens alone and on purpose, not to recover after some collapse but as upkeep. Holding room for the tears is the point, a way to carry off stored sadness, some of it fresh and some going back years. A release. Then it was right back to the regularly scheduled madness.

Chaos is the honest word for that calendar. Keke is 32 and moving like the rent is overdue. During 2026 alone she hosted the Billboard Women in Music Awards, starred in I Love Boosters, which premiered at South by Southwest, kept a podcast rolling, and grew her sketch character Lady Miss Jacqueline into a full audio project. The ’Burbs has been renewed for a second season, with filming expected to resume in the fall, and there is a young son at home. Looking at that, you would never picture a person who schedules a real cry. Which is the whole point.

Most of us grew up on the opposite lesson. You keep moving no matter what lands on you, and if the tears come, you let them fall in the shower where the water covers for you. My Aunt Gloria buried a husband on a Saturday and taught Sunday school the next morning like the world had not cracked open, and got nothing but praise for it. That steel had roots I respect. Black women built a way of living out of not flinching, through years that would have folded anyone with softer landings. My problem is not the armor. It is that the stuff fuses to your skin, and one day you cannot recall the last time it came off.

The applause is the sneaky part. Get told enough times that you are the strong one and it becomes an assignment nobody remembers handing you. People quit checking on you because your fine is assumed. Before long you are the family backup plan, the one they call when the lights are about to get cut, while your own needs sit at the bottom of a list you never reach.

What Palmer does cuts against all of that. Rather than wait for the ache to announce itself, she goes looking, in a room set aside for the purpose, and lets it out before it sours into something meaner. Anybody who has ignored a slow leak under the sink knows how that story ends, with a warped cabinet and a bill nobody planned for. Tears read as coming apart to a lot of folks. To me it looks like a woman keeping her own house from rotting underneath.

There is a difference between the toughness that will not bend and the kind that knows how to set the load down at night. The first photographs beautifully. It also wears the body out on the inside while everybody claps. My mama’s generation ran on it because the times left no other choice, and plenty paid the bill in high blood pressure and swallowed words. The other kind is not weaker. It just intends to last.

Rest belongs in the same conversation. So does the word no, which some of us can barely push past our teeth, and getting up from a table where you are always refilling plates and never the one being served. Sistas learn to hear those choices as selfish, like minding yourself betrays the people leaning on you. Palmer even talked about picturing a cord to a draining relationship and cutting it over and over until it quit growing back. Call it cold if you want. That reads to me as a grown woman guarding her peace.

I came to this late. For years I picked up every call on the first ring and drove clear across town for people who would not have crossed the street for me, wearing the tiredness as proof that I mattered. The first time I let a phone buzz itself quiet and stayed put with my book, the guilt sat on me for the better part of a week. What followed the guilt was something a lot closer to relief.

None of it shrinks you. Weeping does not undo the years you held the line, and a nap does not erase the miles already behind you. A well that goes unrefilled runs dry, and then the whole household goes thirsty, you first in line.

What gets me is the timing. This is landing at the height of everything, not as a lesson pulled out of some low season. Younger Black women watching can absorb something their elders mostly learned the hard way, when they got to learn it at all. You are allowed to feel the thing. Coming apart in private and putting yourself back together takes nothing away from you.

I keep thinking about the Sista reading this who cannot recall her last real exhale, the one everybody assumes is good because she always is. Good is a costume, and it gets heavier the longer you keep it zipped. Nobody is handing out a ribbon for suffering the quietest.

Keke decided her tears rated a spot on the calendar, same as a meeting or a workout. If a sister moving at that pace can stop long enough to feel her life, the rest of us can find ten minutes. Holding it all together was never the whole assignment. Setting it down without calling yourself a failure, that is the part most of us are still working on.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Kamala Harris knows this silence now. Stood on the biggest stage this nation offers, reached for the highest seat in the land, came up short in front of the entire planet. Cameras everywhere. Millions studying that face for the crack. What Harris did in the weeks after that November night matters more to me than any speech from the trail, and plenty of us have been slow to notice why.

Rewind a minute, though. That fall means nothing unless you clock the height she dropped from. Prosecutor in Alameda County to start, then San Francisco. District attorney of San Francisco came next, followed by attorney general of California, a statewide seat with real teeth. A spot in the United States Senate by 2017. None of it held her, so in 2019 she reached for the presidency, and the run fell apart before Iowa even voted. Money ran dry. Polls sagged. Quit the race before the early states could embarrass her. Plenty of folks would have read that as the ceiling and made peace with it. Not her.

Then Biden tapped her for the number two slot, and she spent four years riding shotgun, doing the kind of work that stays invisible until the day somebody needs a scapegoat. Summer of 2024 wrecked the plan. One debate went sideways on the president, bad enough that his own side quit pretending, and the knives came out fast. Within a few weeks the old man was out and she was the pick. No new primary vote from Democratic voters, none of the usual runway or ceremony. Suddenly the nominee inherited a machine already rolling and had just 107 days to convince a divided country she should be running it.

Sit with the size of that. Just 107 days to do what usually eats up 2 years. Money poured in at a record breaking pace, arenas filled, a coalition took shape, and for a stretch there it looked as if history might actually turn. First woman president. First Black woman president. A daughter of immigrants reaching for a place no woman had ever held. Sistas across the country felt it in their chest, that maybe, just maybe.

And then November came, and it broke the other way.

We love a climbing story. Give us a sister on the rise and we will shout her name until our throats give out. Corner office. Book deal. A ring, finally. That clean scan after the scare, a diploma with her name in script. We know how to celebrate ascent because it feels good and it feels safe. Nobody ever taught us the harder lesson, though. Few people sat us down and walked us through what to do when the thing simply does not come. When the job goes to someone else. Or a marriage folds, or a business you bled for shuts its doors on a Tuesday like it meant nothing.

That silence is where Kamala has been living, out in the open where all of us can see.

Here is what pulls me back. Kamala did not vanish. Refused to paste on some phony grin for the cameras either, pretending nothing had cracked underneath. Made it real instead. Turns out you can carry grief and steel in the same body. Flattened by a defeat on a Tuesday, then standing up straight in a packed room by Wednesday, both true at once. Watching that play out has schooled me harder than any lecture ever did.

Alpha Kappa Alpha claimed her back at Howard, the first Black Greek letter sorority among the Divine Nine, founded there in 1908. She was barely grown, still sorting out the woman she wanted to become. A bond like that leaves marks a person carries for life. Pledging those letters was never about the parties and the pretty colors. Sisters get in your business. They do not let you fold in on yourself when the load turns heavy, and they will not stand for you skipping the work on the mornings you would rather stay buried under the covers. A vote count going against you does not touch a bit of that. If anything, it hands you a floor to stand on when the rest gives way.

I have watched too many of my own girlfriends come apart after a setback and confuse the event with a verdict on their entire existence. Divorce papers arrive and a friend decides she is unlovable. A promotion skips past her a third go round, and doubt creeps in that the talent was ever there. One closed door, and a whole identity caves in. That collapse is the real tragedy.

Kamala is modeling another road, whether by design or not. You can lose the race and refuse to lose yourself. Two separate things, and mixing them up has swallowed more brilliant Black women than I could count in a sitting.

Consider what people expected once the votes were counted. Vanish. Go write your memoir, teach somewhere far from the cameras, watch the whole mess curdle into a cautionary tale folks whisper at dinner parties. Instead the candidate keeps her name in the conversation, keeps talking, keeps refusing the smallness others tried to hand over. Has not begged a soul for sympathy, which I respect down to my bones. Pity is a trap dressed up as kindness, and that trap got sidestepped clean.

A particular pressure rides on Black women in these moments, and I would be lying to skip past it. When one of us stumbles on a big stage, some corner of the world treats it as evidence about all of us. See, they were not ready. Told you it was too much. So the demand to be flawless turns suffocating, and the room to simply be human in your disappointment gets stolen right out of your hands. Watching her reclaim that space, a person who lost something enormous and kept breathing anyway, felt like air to me.

My great aunt buried 2 husbands and a son. Lost the little house she had scraped and saved for when the bank did what banks do. And that old girl rose every single morning, put on good earrings for no reason on earth, and brewed coffee like the day owed her something worth savoring. I did not understand it back then. Figured denial had set in. Now I know better. My aunt had worked out the very thing Harris is showing the rest of us on a national scale. Your circumstances can crumble without any permission to crumble you along with them.

Grief is allowed. Let me say that plainly, since some of us try to skip it. You are permitted to be furious about what you did not get. Cry in your car in the Kroger lot. Go quiet for a stretch and let the people who love you sit in it with you. What you cannot do, what will cost you everything you have, is hand your sense of self to a single bad outcome. A setback gets to visit. It does not get to move in and rearrange your furniture.

Where these politics travel from here, I honestly cannot say, and that is not the part I keep chewing on anyway. What she left us, with no press release at all, is a picture of dignity after the fall. A woman standing in the wreckage of the biggest disappointment of a long career, not crushed, not faking, just present and upright and still herself. That picture is worth more to my nieces than any office a ballot could have handed over.

So the next time life slams something shut on you, and it will, hold onto the distinction on display here. Losing a thing is not the same as being a loss. Grieve hard. Make it honest. Then wash your face, fasten those good earrings, and let the world watch you keep moving.

Sistas, look at what she is showing us, the chapter nobody ever wanted to narrate. And thank God the telling is out loud, because a whole lot of us needed to hear exactly this.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

Her path ran through the University of Oklahoma law program, degree in hand by 2015. Early on, security guards at team hotels mistook her for somebody’s girlfriend and asked her to leave. Think about that. A trained attorney, sharp enough to read the fine print buried in these agreements, and grown men treated her like a lost fan. Returning anyway became the whole answer.

The year 2019 brought a milestone, as Lynn became the first Black woman to represent a top-three NFL draft pick when Quinnen Williams went third overall to the New York Jets. Four years after that came a $255 million extension for Jalen Hurts that briefly made him the highest-paid player in NFL history by average annual value. Lynn later became the first Black woman to represent a quarterback in the Super Bowl, and Hurts eventually went on to win a championship and Super Bowl MVP honors. Now look at 2026. Across one offseason she stacked up 4 major agreements worth nearly $377 million in reported contract value for her clients. Bijan Robinson briefly reset the running back market as the highest-paid player at his position. Quinnen Williams pulled down roughly $106 million from Dallas. After each victory the same grinning note lands online, asking whether anybody happens to have a Brinks truck handy.

Here is the part I want us to actually chew on.

Lynn does not succeed by asking nicely. Victory comes because she enters the room already certain of what her client is owed, homework finished, proof in the folder. Market comparisons. Timing. Leverage nobody else bothered to notice. Hoping the other side feels generous is not the strategy. Building a case they cannot easily refuse is.

Now let me talk to my Sistas for a second.

How many of us were raised on the gospel of keep your head down and grind? Do the job, do it twice as well as everybody else, and eventually somebody up top will see you and reward you. Our mothers meant well. Their world sometimes ran that way, or at least they needed it to. That quiet approach has cost too many of us real income, real promotions, real years we will never get back.

I have watched brilliant women accept the first figure thrown at them because pushing felt rude. I have watched them thank a boss for a 2% bump while a less qualified coworker cleared 15% by simply opening his mouth. Nobody hands you your value on a silver tray. You have to name it, out loud, in a space where the temperature might drop the second you do.

That is the lesson sitting inside her climb. Study the market thoroughly enough and confidence stops being a performance. Hers rested on facts. When the claim was 9 figures, the receipts behind every dollar were already lined up.

Most of us are not haggling over football salaries. We are teachers, nurses, analysts, shop owners, managers, freelancers trying to raise a rate we set 3 years ago and never touched since. The scale differs. The principle does not.

Begin with knowing what you bring. Really knowing it. Sit down and list every skill you carry, every problem you solve that would cost the company dearly if you walked out tomorrow. Put it on paper. Read it back to yourself until you stop flinching.

Then go find out what that talent actually pays. Ask around. Comb the salary sites. Reach out to a former colleague who left for greener grass and ask, gently, what greener looked like on the paycheck. Information is the whole ballgame here. You cannot bargain for a number you never learned existed.

And when the moment arrives, resist the urge to soften yourself into nothing. So many of us apologize before the request even leaves our mouths. The ask shrinks. A nervous laugh sneaks in. We hand them an exit before anybody thought to say no. Lynn refuses that reflex. Silence does the labor. The figure gets named, and then comes the wait.

I am not pretending any of this feels natural. For women who look like we do, assertiveness gets read differently, and we all know it. Confident becomes difficult. Direct becomes cold. That double standard is real, and I will not insult anyone by acting like it isn’t. But letting it mute you only guarantees the outcome you already feared. You end up underpaid and still misjudged. So you might as well be paid correctly and let them adjust their assumptions on their own time.

There is something else worth sitting with. Nicole built her reputation representing men, operating in spaces where nobody expected her to hold the pen. Permission to belong was never something she waited on. Acting as though it already existed did the work, and eventually the room caught up to reality.

Black women have been the safety net of families, churches, and jobs forever. Showing up early is the norm. Staying late comes standard too. We repair what other people broke and rarely send an invoice for it. Somewhere along the line, a lot of us learned to measure ourselves by how much we could haul for free. Nicole reverses that arrangement completely. Her entire livelihood is making sure talent gets compensated fully, and her own fee carries the exact same seriousness.

So what does knowing your value look like on an ordinary Tuesday, for a sister who will never sit across from a team owner?

On an ordinary Tuesday it might mean sending the full bill instead of the discounted friend price. Maybe the moment calls for telling a client, I can start that project once we settle my rate. Sometimes the move is declining a promotion that piles on responsibility while the pay stays frozen. Other times the answer is walking out on an employer who keeps promising to appreciate you next quarter, next year, next never.

None of that is ego. Ego is claiming what you did not earn. What I am describing is accuracy. You are allowed to be accurate about your own price.

My beautiful Sistas, hear me clearly. The professional who negotiated all those millions was once escorted out of a hotel because a stranger could not picture her power. Convincing him was never where her energy went. Becoming undeniable is what got the investment instead.

Do the homework. Learn the market. Rehearse the ask until your voice quits shaking. Then walk in like the figure you deserve is already yours, because on paper, if you truly did the work, it is.

Somebody out there needs your particular brilliance badly enough to pay for it. Go and make them.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

She did not fold.

The Omaha native bought WOL 1450 with her then-husband, Dewey Hughes, a struggling outfit that had been through a payola mess and was going for close to a million dollars they absolutely did not have lying around. Bank after bank refused to finance the deal. It took a Puerto Rican woman at Chemical Bank, the 33rd institution they approached, to finally look at the plan and say yes. And even then, the thing nearly ate her alive.

Here is the part I want my Sistas to really absorb.

That station struggled financially for nearly 7 straight years. Cathy lost her house. The car went too. At one point she and her boy were sleeping on the floor of the very office she had risked nearly everything to purchase. Picture that. An accomplished professional who had already run somebody else’s station with real success, now curled up on studio carpet because the dream cost more than the bank account could carry. By her own telling, she was willing to let almost everything go except two things, her child and her company, in that order.

Most people hear a story like this and skip straight to the trophy at the end. Urban One today. The empire. A media company that reaches around 80 million unique consumers every single month across radio, television, and digital. Radio One now operates 74 broadcast stations in 13 major Black consumer markets. TV One came in 2004. In 1999 the founder became the first Black woman in this nation to head a publicly traded corporation, and she has been widely described as the second richest Black woman in America, sitting behind only Oprah. Fine. Worth celebrating.

But that is not the lesson.

The lesson lives inside that cold little building where she started with one signal and a tank full of stubborn faith. See, before WOL, Hughes had already proven she could work. In 1969 she landed her first radio job in her hometown. Then Howard called her to teach. Somewhere in there she wound up running sales at the campus station, and in her first year as general sales manager, revenue jumped from about $250,000 to $3 million. That slow, grown, late night sound folks still call the Quiet Storm? She helped create and develop the format at WHUR, with Melvin Lindsey becoming its defining on-air voice. So this was not somebody who lacked talent or a track record. Both were already in the bag.

What she did not have was permission. Or capital. Or anybody in a suit telling her the vision was reasonable.

And that gap right there, between the scale of the calling and the size of the resources, is exactly where so many of us get stuck and stay stuck. We look at the one thing we can afford to start with and we decide the whole idea must be too big for our tiny bank balance. We shrink the dream down to match the checking account. Cathy did the opposite. She kept the vision enormous and let the resources catch up.

I keep coming back to that single station. One. Not a network. Not a portfolio. A modest, wounded, unglamorous AM frequency that plenty of smarter money had already given up on. Hughes looked at that and saw a whole future in it, a place where our politics and our money and our own unfiltered voices could finally run the board. She eventually transformed WOL around talk from a Black perspective, with “Information is Power” becoming the theme. For 11 years she hosted the morning show herself, on air, in the trenches, learning the whole operation from the inside out because she had no choice but to live at the office anyway.

There is something in that willingness that I wish more of us carried. Not the suffering. Nobody is glorifying the empty refrigerator or the repossessed car. The point is the refusal to let a small starting line define the finish. Sistas, hear me on this. Your beginning does not get to write your ending unless you hand it the pen.

I think about the sister with one folding table at the flea market who keeps picturing a real storefront. The auntie doing hair in her kitchen who can already smell the salon. There is a teacher out there scribbling curriculum on her lunch break, dead sure it belongs in schools she may never even visit. A nurse somewhere is drawing up an app on the back of a patient chart between rounds. All of them are sitting right where Cathy sat, hands wrapped around something that looks way too small for the thing tugging at them.

The world will absolutely tell you the math does not work. The world told her 32 times.

What made the difference was not that Cathy Hughes had more than the rest of us. Early on she had less than a lot of folks reading this. A former teen mother, married young and later divorced, raising a son while the industry treated her ownership dreams like a cute little hobby. What she refused to do was let the modesty of her resources shrink the scope of her ambition. That is the entire secret, if you even want to call it a secret.

And notice she did not wait to feel ready. There was no pause for 5 stations worth of confidence before buying the first. She grabbed what was in front of her and guarded it like air. Then came the grind, one brutal year stacked on the next, until that little AM signal turned into a national voice for our people.

So when your own beginning looks too small and that old embarrassment starts creeping in, when the voice pipes up asking who do you think you are, go back to the carpet Cathy slept on. Remember that the largest Black owned multimedia company in this country eventually became publicly traded because one exhausted mama would not quit a station that was bleeding her dry.

Black women have always been asked to make cathedrals out of scraps. Cathy Hughes just did it out loud, on the radio, where all of us could eventually hear it.

And here is what gets me in 2026. That woman is 79 years old and remains Chairwoman of Urban One. This past July, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser handed her a Key to the City, the District’s highest civic honor, recognizing a career spanning more than five decades of creating jobs, opening doors and amplifying Black voices. Cathy stood there with the same message that has followed her through this entire journey. The opportunity Washington gave her allowed a belief in the value of Black voices, Black music and Black stories to become her life’s work. At an age when nobody would question her decision to disappear into retirement, she remains connected to the company and the mission she started with one struggling AM station.

So begin with whatever is sitting in front of you right now. That one wounded little thing nobody else wanted might turn out to be the exact foundation you were praying for. Just don’t you dare talk yourself into shrinking the dream down until it fits.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.