Serious people have done this work
Every claim in Unspoken came from someone who has spent years in the sources. These are the people who said it, one dossier each: who they are, the case they make, the clips where they make it, and what to read if you want to check them yourself.
20 dossiers · 191 interview clips · full dossiers included with the $5 Unspoken add-on
He holds a doctorate in the languages these documents are written in. He also runs a test on his church history students, and almost nobody passes it. What that test exposes is the whole reason this documentary exists.
He was raised by a Black Panther and a Nation of Islam stepfather, taught that Christianity was the white man's tool, and came out the other side. He is the one person here arguing against a position he actually held.
He has done this argument for thirty years in rooms with no referee. He can tell you why the men who say Christianity is the white man's religion get most of their own sources from white men.
He almost believed it. So he bought the slave narratives and read what the enslaved said about Christianity in their own words, and what he found was a slaveholder class fighting to keep the gospel away from them.
A Kongolese king sent his sons to Europe in 1491 to check whether the missionaries were telling the truth. By 1517 his kingdom had a school system teaching a thousand boys and girls, a century before the first African was landed in Virginia.
He pastors one of the three Chicago churches that defied the mayor and let King preach. When he tells you how the Black church failed King, he is telling you about the room he preaches in.
He wrote his doctorate on how Martin Luther King understood suffering. He can also tell you why King's father changed the family name after a trip to Germany, and why the gospel is a ticking time bomb in a slaveholder's hands.
She read every slave law passed in Barbados across eighty years and found the opposite of what everyone expects: slaveholders fought to keep the enslaved OUT of Christianity, because a Christian slave was a threat to the whole system.
He spends his professional life inside the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he can hand you a manuscript older than Christ that says God blessed Noah's sons. Which means the curse of Ham does not just misread the Bible. It contradicts the oldest commentary we have on it.
An Old Testament scholar on the passage that was used to justify slavery. Her answer is that the curse everyone argues about was never pronounced on the person everyone names, and that Noah could not have cursed him anyway.
His faith was, in his own word, critically damaged. What repaired it was not an argument but a reading list, and he can show you the exact question that stops every conversation cold.
He can name the three people who invented the claim that Christianity copied Egypt, give you their birth years, and point out that all three were white Europeans. Then he turns around and tells his own side to stop making bad arguments.
A New Testament scholar who makes a claim most scholars would not risk: that enslaved people who could not read were better interpreters of the Bible than the men who owned them. He can also tell you which seminar room made Jesus white.
He runs a test on live audiences with Genesis 9 open in front of them. Almost nobody passes it, and the answer is sitting in the text where it has always been.
He argues this in the rooms where the culture is actually made. When Killer Mike told him Black people should go back to Ethiopia, he agreed, and then told him why.
The shortest interview in the archive and the least defensive. She spends most of it saying the Black church has not answered this question well, and then explains why that is a failure of nerve rather than of evidence.
He was raised in the Nation of Islam and came to Christ at sixteen. He can tell you why Ethiopia became a Christian nation before the Council of Nicaea, and why the first Muslim refugees fled to a Christian king who gave them sanctuary.
He wrote the two-volume history of Black Christianity in America. Ask him why the Black church exists and he gives you a date, a church address, and the name of the usher.
She refuses the tidy answer that there were two Christianities. One faith was handed to both parties, she says, and the enslaved practiced it more consistently than the people who owned them.
The words the whole church uses to say who Jesus is were coined in North Africa, in Latin, by an African, a century before the council that made them official. He can show you the moment they arrived in the room.