HOODOO HERITAGE MONTH — RECORD #001 | Hoodoo History Didn’t End 100 Years Ago
Hall of Records • Culture & Community Life
Hoodoo Heritage Month 2026
HOODOO HERITAGE MONTH — RECORD #001
Hoodoo history didn’t end 100 years ago.
Opening Record
Hoodoo Is Living History
Hoodoo did not stop becoming history when the old photographs ended.
What happened in a Black neighborhood in 1996 is history.
What your grandmother practiced in 2006 is history.
What Black people created to survive, protect their homes, make money and care for one another is part of the record.
This month, we’re documenting all of it.
The Record Is Still Being Written
Hoodoo History Didn’t End 100 Years Ago
Too often Hoodoo is presented as though it belongs only to plantations, Reconstruction, old photographs, dusty archives and sepia-colored history.
Those records matter.
But they are not the end of the story.
Hoodoo continued through apartment buildings, shotgun houses, housing projects, corner stores, church kitchens, beauty shops, family homes and Black neighborhoods across the United States.
A protection working passed between family members is history.
What happened inside a Black neighborhood is history.
What your grandmother practiced in her home is history.
Living people carry living archives.
Why This Year’s Archive Looks Different
History Can Look Like Jackson Streets, Brick Apartments and Modern Black Life
Hoodoo Heritage Month intentionally moves beyond the idea that Black spiritual history must always look ancient.
That’s why this year’s visual archive includes cracked walls, aging apartment buildings, neighborhood streets, modern clothing, city blocks and places that still look familiar to people living today.
History can be 100 years old. It can also be 30 years old. Or 20. Or 10.
The Hall of Records is documenting Hoodoo as something Black Americans inherited, adapted, practiced and continued inside modern life.
Community Archive
Your Family May Be Holding a Record
Some Hoodoo history will never be found inside a university archive.
It may still be sitting inside somebody’s family photo album, jewelry box, Bible, kitchen cabinet or memory.
The Hall is looking for records involving:
The goal is not to romanticize every memory.
The goal is to preserve the record before more of it disappears.
Heritage Participation
A Descendant Black American Cultural Archive
Hoodoo Heritage Month community submissions for this collection are reserved for members of the descendant Black American community, including people identifying as Foundational Black American, Soulaan or ADOS.
The purpose of this boundary is to document Hoodoo within the historical community that developed, inherited and carried these traditions across generations in the United States.
The Hall welcomes serious family documentation, community memory, photographs, testimony and historical evidence while preserving the cultural context of the tradition being recorded.
Add to the Hall
Help Us Record Hoodoo History
Does your family or neighborhood hold a piece of Hoodoo history that deserves to be preserved?
Records can include names, dates, places, photographs, objects, family testimony, newspaper references, neighborhood stories and other documentation that helps establish the historical record.
From the Haus
The Record Belongs to the People Who Lived It
The old books matter.
The famous workers matter.
The historic court records matter.
But so does what happened on your block.
So does the work your grandmother never wrote down.
So does the protection your uncle kept behind the door.
So does the woman everybody in the neighborhood quietly went to when somebody needed help.
If we don’t record living history, eventually somebody else will decide what our history was.
