Editorial Standards — Heritage & Horizon: African American Legacy Project

This document governs every page of content on the site: historical entries, era/movement pages, place/institution pages, pre-colonial society pages, and supporting pages. It is a living document — changes should be proposed and approved before they take effect.

0. Editorial center of gravity

This site’s center of gravity is heritage, achievement, and resilience — not victimhood. The reason to include the era of enslavement at all is that African Americans embracing the full arc of their history, including the strength it took to survive and overcome that era, is itself a source of pride. Slavery is documented on this site as an obstacle that was faced and overcome, not as the defining subject of the project.

In practice, this means:

Pre-colonial African societies, kingdoms, art, science, philosophy, and governance get full, serious treatment as their own subject — not as mere backstory to slavery. A visitor should come away understanding the depth of African civilization before transatlantic contact, on its own terms.
Achievement is the default lens. For every era, entity, and person, lead with what was built, created, discovered, organized, won, or overcome. Contributions to arts, literature, science, civil rights, music, politics, business, and community-building get the most space and the most editorial attention on the site.
Enslavement is covered factually, proportionately, and without dwelling. Where it is necessary to understand a person’s or era’s story, state what happened plainly and move quickly to agency, resistance, family survival, and what came after. Do not let a biography’s word count on suffering exceed its word count on accomplishment.
Overcoming obstacles is framed as strength, not tragedy. Favor language and structure that shows what people built and achieved despite and in defiance of obstacles — enslavement, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination — rather than lingering on the obstacles themselves. The throughline across every era is resilience, ingenuity, and the through-line from African heritage to American achievement.
This is not historical erasure: facts about enslavement and discrimination are never minimized, softened into euphemism, or omitted where relevant (see §4). The shift is one of proportion and framing — how much space a subject gets and what it leads with — not one of accuracy.

0.1 Unsung heroes and overlooked contributors

A recurring, deliberate category on this site: people whose real, documented contributions were denied credit, buried, exploited, or overshadowed at the time, and are only now being properly recognized. Examples of the pattern worth actively seeking out across every era: Henrietta Lacks, whose cells (taken without her consent) became the foundation of decades of medical research that saved millions of lives, with her family denied credit and compensation for generations; Nathan “Nearest” Green, the enslaved and later free master distiller who taught Jack Daniel the whiskey-making process that built a global brand bearing someone else’s name. Look for this pattern in science, music, invention, business, sports, and the arts — collaborators, ghostwriters, uncredited inventors, session musicians, background scientists, and others whose work built something larger that they didn’t get to put their name on.

Treat these entries as a priority, not a footnote: they belong to the achievement/resilience thread of the site (§0), because the story is “this person’s work mattered and is finally being credited,” not primarily a story of exploitation.
Lead with what the person actually did — the skill, the discovery, the craft, the labor of invention — and be specific and technical where sources support it (e.g., what Nearest Green’s charcoal-mellowing process actually was, not just “he taught Jack Daniel”).
State plainly who profited, who was denied credit, and how recognition came later (a lawsuit, a journalist’s investigation, a company’s formal acknowledgment, a historical marker) — this is factual accountability, not editorializing, and needs the same sourcing rigor as any other claim (§2).
Where a subject’s descendants, estate, or community have an ongoing relationship to the story (living relatives, an active foundation, a company that has since acknowledged the debt), reflect the current state of that relationship as of the most recent reliable source, and flag it for periodic re-checking since these stories continue to develop.
This category applies across the full timeline — pre-colonial contributions later credited to others, enslaved craftsmen and technicians, Reconstruction-era inventors, Jim Crow-era scientists and musicians, and contemporary figures whose recognition is still catching up to their work.

1. Language and tone

Write with dignity. Use “enslaved people” / “enslaved African” / “person who was enslaved,” never “slaves.” Use “enslaver” rather than “master” where practical. Use “freedom seeker” alongside “escaped” when referring to people who self-emancipated, and avoid the passive framing that erases their agency (prefer “she freed herself and her children” over “she was freed”).
Refer to people by name and personhood first, not solely by their status or suffering.
Lead biographies and era essays with identity, achievement, and context (who they were, what they built or accomplished, their African or diasporic roots where known) before any discussion of hardship. Hardship, when relevant, is framed as something met and overcome, in service of the larger story of strength — not as the opening or organizing idea of the page.
Avoid stereotypes, sensationalism, tragedy-only narratives, deficit framing, and “white savior” framing. Center the agency, intellect, creativity, and achievements of Black historical actors at every turn.
Do not use racial slurs even in historical quotation without a content note and clear pedagogical purpose; when unavoidable in a direct quotation from a primary source, render as “[slur]” with a footnote explaining the redaction and linking to the unredacted primary source for researchers.
Use “African American” for U.S.-specific subjects; use “Black” as the broader adjective for diaspora-wide subjects; use specific national/ethnic identifiers (e.g., “Yoruba,” “Haitian,” “Jamaican Maroon,” “Asante,” “Kongo”) whenever known, rather than defaulting to broad terms — this specificity is part of honoring African heritage rather than flattening it.
Write in the present tense for enduring facts (“The novel explores…”) and past tense for events and biography.
Confident, celebratory language about real, documented achievement is encouraged and is not “hero-worship” — the standard is that every strong claim still traces to a cited source (§2), not that praise must be muted. Avoid only unsupported superlatives (“the greatest,” “changed everything”) where no source backs the claim.

2. Sourcing requirements

Every page must cite at least one reputable source; two or more wherever possible.
Prefer, in order: (1) primary sources (letters, government records, contemporaneous newspapers, oral histories, archival photographs with institutional provenance); (2) recognized scholarly sources (university presses, peer-reviewed journals, academic biographies); (3) major cultural/historical institutions (Smithsonian NMAAHC, Library of Congress, National Archives, National Park Service, Schomburg Center, university archives); (4) high-quality encyclopedic or journalistic sources only to fill gaps, never as the sole source for a contested claim.
Every factual claim (dates, quotes, achievements, relationships) must trace to a source URL stored in the entity’s data record. No claim is published without a stored source URL.
Never invent facts, quotes, dates, or images. If a fact cannot be sourced, it is omitted or marked “unconfirmed” rather than asserted.
When sources disagree (e.g., disputed birth year, disputed authorship, disputed circumstances of death), state the disagreement openly on the page rather than silently picking one version. Example: “Sources differ on her birth year: the 1850 census lists 1822; her later interviews state 1820.”

3. Pre-colonial Africa and the wider diaspora

Pre-colonial African societies, kingdoms, and cultures are a priority subject in their own right, not preamble to a slavery narrative. These pages should receive the same editorial investment — length, sourcing effort, imagery, artwork commissions — as any major era on the site, because they establish the depth of the heritage the rest of the site builds on.
Content on pre-colonial African societies, kingdoms, and cultures must rely on scholarly sources (academic historians, archaeologists, African studies programs, institutional museum scholarship) — not tourism sites, popular blogs, or unsourced encyclopedic summaries.
Do not flatten distinct societies, empires, ethnic groups, or regions into a single undifferentiated narrative. Name the specific society, kingdom, era, and region for every claim (e.g., “the Kingdom of Kongo, 14th–19th century Central Africa,” not “ancient Africa”).
Emphasize what these societies built and achieved on their own terms — governance, trade networks, art, metallurgy, architecture, scholarship, religion, military organization — as the primary content of these pages.
Where relevant and sourced, draw explicit throughlines from specific African societies/regions to specific diaspora communities and cultural practices (naming conventions, artistic traditions, foodways, spiritual practices, craft techniques), so the “African” in African American reads as a living inheritance, not a lost prehistory.
Where the scholarly record is thin, contested, or reconstructed from oral tradition, say so explicitly rather than presenting reconstruction as settled fact.
Do not fill historical or cultural gaps with speculation, generalization from unrelated regions/periods, or invented detail.

4. Sensitive subject matter

Enslavement, racial violence, and systemic discrimination are documented factually wherever they are necessary to understand a person, place, or era — this site does not soften, euphemize, or omit historical fact. But they are covered in proportion: stated plainly, sourced, and then the page moves to what the person or community built, achieved, resisted, or overcame. These subjects should not dominate a page’s length or its opening framing (see §0).
Pages substantively covering enslavement, racial violence (lynching, massacres, riots), or systemic discrimination include a short, factual content note near the top, e.g.: “This page discusses the enslavement of African people and its lasting consequences” or “This page describes racial violence, including a documented lynching.” Content notes are factual, not alarmist.
Describe violence factually and with restraint — enough for historical clarity and accountability, without gratuitous or sensationalized detail. No graphic imagery of violence against real people.
Center the humanity, agency, and resistance of those affected; do not let perpetrators dominate the narrative framing. Wherever a subject resisted, survived, rebuilt, or achieved something in the aftermath, that belongs in the same page, given at least as much space as the harm itself — the arc of the page should bend toward strength.

5. Living and recently deceased public figures

For living people: publicly documented, cited facts only. No private information (home address, health details not self-disclosed, family details not publicly documented, unverified rumors). No speculation about motives, beliefs, or future plans.
No photograph of a living person is published unless it is properly rights-cleared AND the site owner (Corey) explicitly approves its use for this purpose.
An original portrait of a living person may only be published after Corey’s explicit approval, separate from the general artwork-approval workflow — even though Corey created it himself, publishing it on a page about a living person needs a second, page-specific sign-off given privacy/right-of-publicity sensitivity.
For recently deceased figures, apply the same rigor: cited facts only, no speculation, and note the date of death with a source.

6. Original artwork labeling (see also Phase 2B pipeline)

Every illustration/portrait created by Corey Barksdale is labeled, e.g., “Illustration by Corey Barksdale.”
Where no authentic likeness of a historical figure survives in the record, the label makes this explicit and avoids presenting the piece as a portrait from life — e.g., “Artist’s interpretation by Corey Barksdale. No verified photograph or portrait of [Name] is known to survive; this image is an interpretive illustration, not a historical likeness.”
Each artwork’s record notes what reference material was used (public domain, CC0, or the artist’s own reference only — never copyrighted third-party photos as unlicensed reference for a published derivative work).

7. Image and media rights

No image, font, icon, audio, or video is used unless it is public domain, CC0, or carries an open license that explicitly allows commercial use (e.g., CC BY, with credit shown on the page) — because the site may eventually run ads.
No paid stock imagery, ever. No Unsplash/Pexels/Pixabay-type “free” custom-license sources unless Corey separately approves after reviewing the specific terms.
Every image on the site is logged in ASSETS.md with source, license, commercial-use status, and required credit line before it is used.
If no rights-cleared image exists for a page, the page publishes text-only using the text-first template. A missing image is never a reason to lower sourcing standards or use an unrigorous image.
Never generate AI images of real people, living or historical. This applies to entity/portrait imagery site-wide, not only to Corey’s original artwork.

8. Minimum publication bar

A page does not go live unless it meets the minimum content rules defined in the Phase 0 plan (approved status, at least one cited source, a minimum amount of unique written content, and full compliance with image-rights rules). Pages that fail these checks are not built, not published as stubs, and not silently lowered in quality to hit a deadline.

9. Corrections and feedback

The site includes a visible corrections/feedback path (a contact/corrections page and a per-page “Suggest a correction” link) so readers, descendants, and subject-matter experts can flag errors.
Corrections are reviewed against sources before being applied. Substantive corrections should be tracked (what changed, why, when) rather than silently overwritten.

10. Review workflow

New and edited content enters as “draft,” moves to “needs_review” once a first pass is source-checked, and only publishes at “approved” — approval is Corey’s, page by page.
AI-drafted text (Phase 4) is always entered as “needs_review,” is written strictly from the facts provided in the record, and must flag anything uncertain rather than smoothing over gaps.