057 | Black Women - Silent. Seen. Still Carrying It: The Weight We Never Dropped w/ Dr. Rikesha Fry Brown

Movements don’t start in meetings. They start with lived experiences—the kind we normalize, dismiss, or bury until someone dares to say it out loud.

In this foundational conversation, Felicia Ford and Dr. Rikesha Fry Brown return to the moment they knew this work—National Black Girl Month™—had to exist. Not just as a celebration, but as structure. As strategy. As response.

“Our tired didn’t start in 2022. Our tired had a history.”

“We’re not anomalies—we’re the fabric. And our stories don’t begin in boardrooms. They begin in kindergarten.”

Together, they trace the threads from Silent Dangers of Black Girls in Education to the present moment, where visibility alone is no longer enough. This episode names what we’ve been carrying—as daughters, as mothers, as leaders, as women who were never supposed to carry it all—and sets the tone for a month of truth-telling, healing, and collective power.

“If we don’t name the dangers, how do we ever dismantle them?”

“The danger is in being silent and being silenced.”

They speak to the weight of advocacy work. The grief in realizing school was built for someone else’s success. The guilt in having had good experiences while watching others be pushed out. And the sacred power of claiming space in systems designed to erase you.

This is the kind of conversation you feel before you understand it—and once you do, you can’t unsee it.

“You belong here. Even if you’ve been hurt by other Black women. Even if you’re mothering through grief. You still belong.”

“Everyone operates in the space of mothering at some point. And everyone has been mothered—whether well or not.”

Whether you’re leading change, recovering from the systems you’ve survived, or simply listening in, this is your invitation to sit down with us, right here, and remember what you’ve known all along.

Join us as we kick off National Black Girl Month™ 2025. 

Next Steps: 

Get Your National Black Girl Month Toolkit: https://nationalblackgirlmonth.com 

Join the National Black Girl Month™ Community: https://facebook.com/groups/nationalblackgirlmonth 

Access Silent Dangers of Black Girls in Education: https://silentdangers.com 

Shop National Black Girl Month™: https://silentdangers.com/shop 

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