Labor Day 2025
Before the cookouts and campaign slogans, there was labor. Not just the kind that builds bridges and balances budgets—but the type that stitches memory into the seams of our society. This Labor Day, I’m reflecting on the work beneath the work. The kind done in silence, in archives, in ancestral whispers. The kind that doesn’t clock out.
Labor Day often arrives as a pause—a sanctioned breath between the beats of productivity. But for those of us who labor in the realm of memory, authorship, and cultural reclamation, this day is not merely a break. It is a reckoning.
This year, I’m thinking about the work that doesn’t show up on payrolls or in policy briefs. The work of documenting the undocumented. Of archiving the overlooked. Of amplifying voices that were never meant to be heard in the boardroom or the ballot box.
In Macon, Georgia, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the first five Black members elected to the City Council. Their labor was not just political—it was spiritual. It was the work of showing up, of being counted, of reshaping a civic landscape that had long denied their presence. Their legacy reminds us that labor, when rooted in justice, becomes a form of love.
This Labor Day, I honor not just the laborers, but the labor of remembrance. The janitor who mentored generations. The coach who archived Black college baseball with no institutional support. The elder who told stories that stitched together fractured histories. These are the rhythm keepers—the unsung architects of our cultural infrastructure.
Let us teach. Let us build. Let us write liner notes that sing the names of those who labored in silence because the work beneath the work—the labor of memory—is what makes the future possible.