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Knowledge is power — and history.

"In the fall of 1966, roughly 30 tenth-grade students in Rabun County, Georgia - a mountain community of just 8,000 people - walked out of their English classroom and into the hills of Appalachia. They weren't on a field trip. They were on a mission.

And most of them had no idea what they were about to find.

Fall 1966. Rabun County, Georgia. Appalachian Mountains.

The school sits in a valley hemmed in by ridgelines. The nearest city is hours away. Most of the students have spent their whole lives here - hunting, farming, attending the same small church their grandparents attended.

Their English class isn't going well. The standard curriculum means nothing to them.

Grammar exercises feel abstract. Literature feels imported from somewhere else.

So one afternoon, their teacher does something unusual. He stops the lesson. He asks them, plainly: What would actually make you want to learn?

The students talk it over. Someone suggests a magazine. Someone else says it should be about here - about the people right outside these windows, the old men and women who still know things the modern world has already forgotten.

The class votes yes.

They name their new project after a bioluminescent fungus that grows on rotting logs in these mountains - a fungus that glows blue-green in the dark, visible only if you know where to look.

They call it Foxfire.

March 1967. Volume 1, Issue 1.

The students raise $400 from parents and local donors. They sell advertising to nearby businesses. They teach themselves to use a reel-to-reel tape recorder. They learn photography from scratch.

And then, notebooks in hand, they fan out into the surrounding hills to sit with their grandparents, their neighbors, their elders - people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who still live without refrigerators, without running water, without telephones.

What the students find stops them cold.

They find a woman named Aunt Arie Carpenter, 80 years old, living alone in a hand-built cabin, churning butter the same way her mother taught her, growing her own food, preserving her own meat. She tells them stories. She shows them her hands. She asks them if they want some coffee.

They find men who know how to notch a log cabin so it will stand for 200 years without a single nail. Women who know which plants in the forest treat fever and which ones stop bleeding.

Families who have been making moonshine in copper stills since before their great-grandparents were born. Preachers who handle serpents as an act of faith. Quilters whose patterns carry the names of mountains and seasons.

Here's what makes it worse: almost none of it was written down anywhere.

These weren't just skills. They were an entire civilisation - one that had developed over 200 years in the isolation of the southern Appalachian range, shaped by hardship and self-reliance and a particular relationship to the land.

And it was disappearing. Not slowly. Fast. The elders were aging. The young were moving to cities. Within a generation, the knowledge would be gone - dissolved into history without a trace.

The students understood this before their parents did. Before anyone with a publishing contract did.

1967. The first issue sells out.

All 600 copies are gone within days. Letters start arriving from across Georgia, asking for more. Then from other states. Then from people who had grown up in Appalachia and moved away decades earlier, who read a description of the first issue in a local paper and wrote in trembling handwriting asking, Is Aunt Arie still alive? Can you ask her if she remembers my family?

The students publish a second issue. Then a third. They work weekends. Some of them spend their afternoons after school driving into the hills for more interviews, more photographs, more tape recordings. They are teenagers doing the work that professional folklorists and archivists had never bothered to do.

1972. Doubleday publishes The Foxfire Book.

A New York publisher sees the magazine and offers a book deal. The students' collected interviews — on log cabin building, hog dressing, planting by the signs, snake lore, faith healing, moonshining, wild plant foods — are compiled into a single volume.

It sells 2 million copies in its first decade. Then keeps selling.

By the time the 12-volume series is complete, the Foxfire books have sold over 9 million copies - making them one of the best-selling non-fiction series in American publishing history. Not because of clever marketing. Because the students had preserved something real that the rest of the country hadn't known it was losing.

What the students built with the money changes everything.

They don't pocket the royalties. They are teenagers - and they vote to put it back into the community.

They purchase land on Black Rock Mountain in Mountain City, Georgia. They disassemble historic log structures from across the region and rebuild them on the site. They create a 32-building museum and heritage centre, staffed by local people, demonstrating blacksmithing, basket weaving, butter churning, and traditional building methods to visitors from across the country.

The Foxfire Fund generates over $1 million in college scholarships for Rabun County students over the decades that follow. Dozens of similar oral history projects - modelled directly on Foxfire - spring up in schools from Texas to Maine, on Native American reservations in Montana and New Mexico, in Navajo communities in New Mexico and Eskimo communities in Alaska.

What no one mentions is the quiet revolution underneath all of it.

These were not exceptional students. They were bored teenagers in a rural county school who, by most metrics, were headed for an unremarkable year of forgotten grammar lessons. The elders they interviewed were not famous. They had no platforms, no recognition, no plaques on walls.

But the students saw what the world was about to lose — and they picked up tape recorders.
Maude Shope told a Foxfire student in 1972, I never did try to drive a car. My mule is the way I got around. That sentence exists today because a 15-year-old wrote it down. Because they showed up, sat across from her, and listened like it mattered.

It did matter. It still does.

The Foxfire Magazine continues to be published today, still produced by high school students in Rabun County each summer. The museum still stands. The recordings still exist. The voices of those elders - the quilters, the moonshiners, the herbalists, the preachers, the cabin builders - are still audible on tape.

Because 30 teenagers in 1966 decided that the people right outside their classroom windows were worth remembering.

Share this with someone who needs to know - that ordinary people, paying attention, can preserve what the world is about to forget."
Let this story reach more hearts.....
Follow us: Paths To Go

These are the stories we need to fight to know, remember, honor, teach.

This is the Black Holocaust story many classrooms skipped: Gert Schramm was 15 when N**i Germany locked him away.

The first thing to understand is that Gert Schramm was still a child when the state decided his skin made him dangerous.

He was not arrested for stealing, fighting, or plotting against anyone; he was taken because N**i Germany had built a world where Blackness itself could be treated like a crime.

Gert was born in Erfurt, Germany, in 1928, to Marianne Schramm, a German woman, and Jack Brankson, an African American engineer who had come to Thuringia for work.

That one fact already tells a bigger story than most classrooms ever gave us, because Black life was present in Germany long before many people were taught to imagine it.

He was not a symbol when he came into the world.

He was a baby with a mother, a family, a hometown, and a future that should have been allowed to unfold without the weight of a government measuring his worth by race.

But the Germany he grew up in was changing into something colder and more dangerous.

After the N**is came to power, their obsession with so-called racial purity shaped schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, laws, and everyday life.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Black people in N**i Germany faced harassment, discrimination, limited social and economic opportunity, and in some cases forced sterilization under N**i racial policy.

For Black readers, that part lands with a familiar ache.

Different country, different century, different uniforms, but the same old lie was at work: that a Black body needed to be watched, restricted, explained, or removed.

Gert’s childhood did not unfold in peace.

He grew up in Witterda and Bad Langensalza, and after finishing school he worked as a helper in an auto repair shop, but N**i racial rules blocked him from the full vocational training that might have helped him build a stable life.

That is one of the quiet cruelties of racism.

Before it locks a door, it often shrinks the hallway, taking away the ordinary chances that help a young person become independent, skilled, and secure.

Gert was being taught by the world around him that his future would come with limits.

Not because he lacked ability, not because he lacked discipline, but because a racist system had already decided what kind of life it wanted to deny him.

Then came 1944.

The war was turning against N**i Germany, cities were under pressure, and the regime’s cruelty was not loosening; it was tightening.

In May 1944, the Gestapo arrested Gert Schramm.

He was 15 years old, and the language used against him was the language of the state, the kind that tries to make violence sound clean and official.

He was held in what N**i authorities called “protective custody,” a phrase that should trouble anyone who understands how often oppression hides behind polite words.

There was nothing protective about taking a Black teenager away from his life.

There was nothing protective about pushing a child into a system where names were reduced, bodies were exploited, and fear was part of the daily routine.

On July 20, 1944, Gert was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp.

At Buchenwald, he was registered as prisoner number 49489, a number meant to place him inside a machine that counted people more easily than it recognized their humanity.

That correction matters.

History is already painful enough without adding what we cannot firmly prove, and the truth by itself is devastating: a Black child was processed into Buchenwald because the N**i state saw his existence as a violation of its racial order.

Buchenwald was not a distant idea.

It was a real camp of forced labor, hunger, punishment, disease, fear, and death, holding political prisoners, Jewish prisoners, Roma and Sinti prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, prisoners of war, and others targeted by the N**i regime.

Gert entered that place as one of the few Black prisoners there.

Accounts describe him as the youngest of six Black prisoners at Buchenwald, which makes his survival even more extraordinary and his erasure from common memory even more painful.

Imagine being 15 and standing out in a place where standing out could cost you your life.

Imagine being hungry, watched, numbered, and surrounded by a system built to make people disappear.

Gert was assigned to forced labor in the stone quarry, one of the hardest and most dangerous forms of work in the camp.

The quarry was not simply labor; it was punishment through exhaustion, where prisoners were worn down by weight, cold, hunger, beatings, and the constant nearness of death.

This is where the story becomes more than a story of one boy’s endurance.

It becomes a story about how survival sometimes depends on the courage of people who refuse to let another human being be swallowed whole.

Gert later credited political prisoners inside Buchenwald with helping save his life.

He was placed among political prisoners, and he believed that placement mattered because some of those men protected him, including Communist prisoners Willi Bleicher and Otto Grosse.

They helped move him away from the quarry and into less deadly work.

Accounts also describe prisoners shielding him during roll calls, when weakness, illness, or simply being noticed could bring terrible consequences.

Hold that image carefully.

Not as a movie scene, not as something invented for drama, but as a historical truth with spiritual weight: in a place built to strip people of compassion, some prisoners still chose to protect a Black child.

That does not soften Buchenwald.

It shows how fiercely human beings sometimes fight to remain human when every surrounding power is trying to make them cruel, afraid, or numb.

Gert’s Blackness made him visible, but another kind of seeing helped keep him alive.

The N**is saw a racial category; the prisoners who helped him saw a boy.

That difference is the line between erasure and survival.

For Black people, this part of the story touches something deep in our own memory.

We know that survival has often meant being hidden at the right time, warned at the right time, fed by someone who had little, taught by someone who risked much, or protected by people whose names history did not always preserve.

In April 1945, Buchenwald was liberated.

Gert Schramm walked out alive, still a teenager, but no longer carrying the innocence that should have belonged to a boy his age.

Freedom opened the gate, but it could not return what had been taken.

It could not hand him back the peaceful years he lost, the safety he was denied, or the childhood that had been interrupted by a government determined to make race into destiny.

After the war, Gert went back to his mother.

He worked, rebuilt, and continued living in a Germany that had to face what it had done, even if not everyone wanted to remember every victim clearly.

That is another part of Black history we must hold close.

Our story is not only about the wound; it is also about what people do after the wound, how they rise, work, love, raise families, speak truth, and build meaning from ruins.

Gert eventually became a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

A boy once reduced to a camp number lived long enough to become an elder, and that alone is a kind of victory the N**is never intended to see.

Later in life, he chose not to let silence have the final word.

He spoke publicly about his experience, visited schools, and warned younger generations about racism, fascism, and the danger of allowing hatred to become normal.

He also told his story in the memoir “Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann. Mein Leben in Deutschland,” often translated as “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man. My Life in Germany.”

Even that title carries a question history still has not fully answered.

Who taught societies to fear Blackness, and how many laws, prisons, borders, classrooms, and graves have been built from that fear?

Gert Schramm died in 2016, but his name continues to return through remembrance work, memorial efforts, and people determined to teach what was once overlooked.

That matters because history does not vanish all at once.

Sometimes it disappears by being left out, softened, shortened, or treated like a footnote instead of a life.

This story should not be used to compete with the central truth of the Holocaust, which was the N**i genocide of Jewish people.

It should be taught as part of the wider N**i system of persecution, where many targeted groups, including Black people, were harassed, excluded, imprisoned, sterilized, exploited, and in some cases killed under a racial order that treated human difference as a threat.

That distinction gives the history more power, not less.

It allows us to honor Jewish suffering with clarity while also refusing to erase Black lives that were caught in the same machinery of hatred.

Gert Schramm’s story belongs in the classroom because it forces the map of Black history to grow wider.

It reminds us that Black life has always crossed borders, languages, and continents, and that anti-Black racism did too.

He was not just a Black child in Germany.

He was part of a global Black story, one that includes migration, family, labor, exclusion, survival, and the stubborn refusal to disappear from the record.

When we say his name, we are not only remembering what N**i Germany did to him.

We are returning dignity to a boy they tried to number, a teenager they tried to bury inside paperwork, and an elder who lived long enough to make the truth speak back.

Gert Schramm survived Buchenwald, but his survival asks something from us.

I spend hours making sure these stories are researched and shared responsibly. If you’d like to support the work, you can do so here:
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Hope springs …

Robert Allbritton was on a ski lift in Aspen, Colo., when he learned that many of the Washington Post’s top journalists were considering leaving the storied but troubled outlet.

“Take em all,” the billionaire co-founder of Politico texted to the editor of his news startup, Notus.

Allbritton canceled a Caribbean cruise, flew his jet home to Washington, D.C., and started planning. He and his editor, Tim Grieve, joined a video call with about 15 disgruntled Post reporters in mid-February, trading thoughts about filling a void after the Post gutted its local-news and sports desks.

His plan: Expand his two-year-old publication, Notus, by hiring big-name reporters to cover topics relevant to Washington’s powerful residents. (Notus stands for News of the United States.)

He is renaming the publication the Star, a nod to the Washington Star, a former D.C. paper that his father once owned.

“We are a factory town. Detroit makes cars, we make government,” Allbritton said in a recent interview at a cafe near his Georgetown home. “There needs to be a paper around here that is focused on what we do.”

He plans to invest about $10 million into the Star this year. With revenue from subscriptions and advertisements, he expects the operation to break even by 2029.

With the Star, Allbritton said, a sale isn’t the endgame.

“I don’t need the damn money,” he said. “This time, let’s do it for the purity of the mission.”

🔗 Read more: https://on.wsj.com/48RfrDZ