Twenty years ago, a man sat down and decided to do something most publishers said couldn’t sell.

He wanted to put Black history in the hands of Black families — not as a school assignment, not as a museum exhibit, but as something you could hold at the kitchen table, pass to your grandmother, show your kids before dinner.

That man is Freddie Taylor. And if you’ve found your way to Urban Intellectuals, you’ve already felt his work — even if you didn’t know his name.

Who Is Freddie Taylor?

Freddie Taylor is the founder of Urban Intellectuals and the creator of the Black History Flashcard series — a collection of educational card decks covering everything from pre-1492 African history to the untold stories of Black women in science and academia.

But who he is can’t be reduced to a job title. Freddie is someone who grew up knowing something was missing from what he was being taught. That the history of Black people in America and across the diaspora was being sanitized, erased, or quietly removed from classrooms and curriculums.

He decided to do something about it. Not with a petition. With a product.

Why He Built What He Built

The flashcard series started with a simple premise: what if every Black household in America had 52 cards that told the truth about who we are and where we came from?

Each volume contains 52 cards. That’s 52 entry points into history that the school system never gave us. Volume 1 covers the broad sweep of Black history and achievement. For the written companion, see 50 Truths They Tried to Erase: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. Volume 2 is dedicated entirely to Black women — the ones who don’t make it into the textbooks. Volume 3 digs into S.T.E.A.M. contributions. Volume 4 centers the Afro-Latino and Caribbean diaspora.

This wasn’t an accident. It was a mission with a plan.

“We built these to combat the miseducation and suppression of Black achievements around the globe,” Freddie has said. That’s not marketing language. That’s a purpose statement.

What Urban Intellectuals Actually Is

Want to understand the legal systems designed to suppress Black progress? Read our deep dive: Black Codes: Definition and Their Role in U.S. History.

People stumble onto Urban Intellectuals in different ways. Some come through a Facebook share. Some find us through a search. Some get a flashcard deck as a gift and then go looking for who made it.

What they find is a company built on one conviction: that knowing your history isn’t optional if you want your children to know who they are.

Urban Intellectuals isn’t a bookstore. It’s not a curriculum company. It’s something closer to a cultural infrastructure project — building the tools that Black families need to have the conversations that matter.

The flashcard decks. The wall calendars. The books. Freddie’s writing. All of it is connected to that same thread: telling the truth, in formats you can actually use.

The 50 Truths That Changed Everything

Freddie recently released 50 Truths They Tried to Erase — a book that does exactly what the title promises. It goes into the history that got buried, the leaders who were erased, the resistance movements that never made it into mainstream accounts.

This is the kind of work that only gets made by someone who’s been thinking about this for decades. Not a researcher collecting facts for a dissertation, but someone who has lived with the urgency of this history and believes deeply that you deserve to know it too.

The book has been flying off the digital shelves. If you haven’t picked it up yet, that’s worth fixing.

Why People Keep Coming Back

Here’s what I notice about this community: people don’t just buy once and disappear. They come back. They bring their mothers. They order extra decks for grandparents. They share posts in group chats.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s what happens when something is actually built for you — not for a test market, not for a trend cycle, but for the specific need you’ve been carrying your whole life.

Freddie built Urban Intellectuals for people who already knew the deal. Who already felt the weight of what was missing. Who just needed someone to show up and say: here it is. Here’s the real history. Here are the names. Here are the tools.

How to Get Started

If you’re new here, start with the flashcards. Browse the full collection here — there are volumes for different focuses and bundles that let you build out a complete home library of Black history at a fraction of what individual decks would cost.

If you want to go deeper, pick up 50 Truths They Tried to Erase. Read it yourself first. Then give it to the young people in your life and watch their understanding of who they are shift.

And if you’ve been here a while — welcome back. You already know why this matters. The question now is who else in your circle needs to find this community.

We’re here. We’ve been building. And we’re just getting started.

What brought you to Urban Intellectuals? Drop it in the comments — I’d love to know.

Love, peace, and power to the people.
— Freddie

And if you’ve already ordered the flashcards, we wrote something just for you: what it means when a Black family invests in Black history — and what comes next.