Tolagbe Ogunleye

I was born (1952) on Long Island in New York to parents from South Carolina and Georgia. I am now semi-retired. But for over thirty-years, I taught on the secondary and university levels in schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. I am currently engaged in fundraising to have my first screenplay, The Unconquered: The Gullah-Geechee Wars, made into a movie. This movie is about the autochthonous and African peoples who escaped their captors in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama and fought and won three successive wars against the United States government. The Gullah-Geechee people also built numerous autonomous settlements in Florida that thrived and existed for almost two hundred years. From Florida, the Gullah-Geechee people moved to Oklahoma and played a major role in building and enriching what became known as Black Wall Street.

Disenchanted by the incessant onslaught of debasing, stereotypical, and obsequious images, my goal is to write and produce movies that change the way melanated people are portrayed in movies.

The video I have provided is a trailer for the movie I will be producing. The trailer deals with the Gullah-Geechee men's role in the destruction of Washington, DC, alongside the British in 1814 for the enslavement and atrocities committed against melanated people. One of the issues that led to Francis Scott Key's writing the "Star Spangled Banner"Key was his anger with enslaved and free melanated people for their participation in the burning and destruction of the White House and other governmental buildings in Washington, DC as well as the role they played in the bombing of Fort McHenry.

The video also deal with Gullah-Geechee soldiers' actual rescue of 42 enslaved Africans held captive by the pedophile and enslaver Zephaniah Kingsley on his Laurel Grove Plantation in Florida. And as always, there was one enslaved African man who vehemently stated that he would rather die than to be free and leave the plantation.

Please spread the word.

Her publications are:

• The Unconquered: The Yamassee and Gullah-Geechee Wars (historical novel)

• “Àrokò, Mmomomme Twe, Nsibidi, Ogede, and Tusona: Africanisms in Florida's Self-Emancipated Africans' Resistance to Enslavement and War Stratagems” - Journal of Black Studies

• The African Roots of Jumping the Broom (book)

• “African American Folklore: Its Role in Reconstructing African American History” - Journal of Black Studies

• African American Names and their Meanings (book)

• The Role of Women in Ancient West Africa (chapter in Women's Roles in Ancient Civilizations, Bella Vivante, Editor)

• “Dr. Martin Robison Delany, 19Th-Century Africana Womanists: Reflections on His Avant-Garde Politics Concerning Gender, Colorism, and Nation Building” - Journal of Black Studies

• “The Self-Emancipated Africans of Florida: Pan-African Nationalists in the ‘New World’" - Journal of Black Studies