Darec McDaniel

08/03/2023

Just some of the awesome classes and incredible groups of people I've had the fortune to teach at Smiley's Academy of Martial Arts.

06/24/2023

So much respect to these men.
Posted • This is beautiful! This is the news that deserves to go viral! Your past never defines you, but your future does💪🏾 Y’all here for this?

Marcus Harvin, Alpha Jalloh, Evan Holmes, and more students graduated from their Yale x University of New Haven program this week. Great news to see!

04/02/2023

First Degree received from professor at

03/28/2023

It's difficult to describe how it feels getting this after waiting for two years, but I can say it's rewarding to be recognized by my peers and seniors. In even better news, Professor Tom DeBlass already agreed to come back next year to give me the second degree on time, regaining the time lost waiting to get the first. Feeling very fortunate to be a part of Tom DeBlass association and team member at

12/01/2022

Inventions that would not exist without Black Women!

11/12/2022

Posted • To those who served and loved the country that did not love them back.

Happy !

11/01/2022

10/27/2022

Posted • The Igbo Landing is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St.
Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. It is the site of one of the largest mass su***des of enslaved people in history.
Historians say Igbo captives from modern-day Nigeria, purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding, arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer in 1803.
In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained slaves were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons. During the voyage, approximately 75 Igbo slaves rose in rebellion, took control of the ship, drowned their captors, and in the process caused the grounding of the ship in Dunbar Creek.
The sequence of events that occurred next remains unclear. It is known only that the Igbo marched ashore, singing, led by their high chief. Then at his direction, they walked into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek, committing mass su***de.
Roswell King, a white overseer on the nearby Pierce Butler plantation, wrote the first account of the incident. He and another man identified only as Captain Patterson recovered many of the drowned bodies. Apparently only a subset of the
75 Igbo rebels drowned. Thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing, and some may have survived the su***de episode, making the actual numbers of deaths uncertain.
Regardless of the numbers, the deaths signaled a powerful storv of resistance as these captives overwhelmed their captors in a strange land, and many took their own lives rather than remain enslaved in the New World. The Igbo Landing graduallv took on enormous svmbolic importance in local African American folklore. The mutiny and subsequent su***de by the lgbo people was called by many locals the first freedom march in the history of the United States.