Stories from the OG Black Twitter

In each episode of Our Ancestors Were Messy, host Nichole Hill tells the story of a scandal as reported in the gossip columns and society pages of the nation’s most popular pre-Civil rights era Black newspapers. Stories of elaborate revenge plots, passionate love affairs, friendship fallouts, and more. She invites her guests to put themselves in their ancestors’ shoes and share what they would do if they were in the situations she describes. Over the course of an episode, Hill and her guests explore the surprising ways in which we’ve changed from our ancestors and all the ways in which we’ve remained the same.

Hill was inspired to create the show in 2020 while living in Washington, DC and researching the city’s historic U Street Corridor known as Black Broadway. It was then that she stumbled across online archives of Black newspapers detailing everyday life in segregated communities in pre-Civil Rights era America.