Writing in ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’, Josh Myers, building on the thought of Fred Moten, opens with this: “the history of Blackness in D.C. is a testament to the fact that a sound can and did resist. Myers article is derived from a conversation he had with Maurice Jackson where they explored his work titled, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. In it, Maurice Jackson explores what he calls “Great Black Music” and sports in both the history of Washington, DC and the larger history of opposition to racism. Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience is a portion of Jackson’s ongoing research into the people that have shaped Washington, D.C. And is a prequel to his larger work, Halfway to Freedom, forthcoming from Duke University Press. It is the research of research, the figurative rich soil that birthed this forthcoming work. Jackson opens Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience with this line: “The ideas for this book were polyrhythmic, describing many circular currents” [1]. Polyrhythmic, indeed. Africana histories are an ocean of experiences that flow continuously across the known and unknown temporal lines that connect human history. What also must be noted, is that it also takes one who is able to move up and down, in and out, above and below these rhythms, mapping, connecting, and reconnecting, unpacking, repacking the narratives, the experiences, the ideas, the words, the emotion in order that we can make sense of the past that has informed our present, yet open to the possibilities of the future. Maurice Jackson is clearly one of these memory keepers and story tellers. Today, you will hear the full conversation that informed Josh Myers article, ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’. This conversation is based on Maurice Jackson’s recently published, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. Maurice Jackson is an Associate Professor who teaches in the History and African American Studies Departments and is an Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown University. Before coming to academia, he worked as a longshoreman, shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is author of a range of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism; co-editor of African Americans and The Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents; Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause,1754-1808; and DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. He has lectured in France, Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, Qatar, served on Georgetown University Slavery Working Group, and is a 2009 inductee into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame. He was appointed the Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs (2013-16) where he presented “An Analysis of African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” [2017]. He has completed Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC to be released by Duke University Press soon. His next projects will be We Knew No Other Way: The Many-Sided Struggle for Freedom and Black Radicalism: A Very Short Introduction. Josh Myers, in addition to being part of the AWNP collective, is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.