The work our grandparents began and could not finish.
My name is Rasheid Scarlett. I am building newBWS because the work our grandparents started is not finished.
Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society in 1787. Mary Church Terrell co-founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the NAACP in 1909. The men who would become the 100 Black Men of America sat down together in 1963. Every generation built what its moment required. Greenwood proved what was possible when Black people owned the ground beneath their work. In 1921, an eighteen-hour mob proved how vulnerable owned ground could be when the ground was physical.
Every one of these began the same way: a small group of Black people deciding to build the institution no one would build for them. newBWS is the next one.
Greenwood, the Tulsa district known as Black Wall Street, was a thriving Black-owned economy until it was destroyed by a white mob in 1921. The lesson we took: own something that cannot be burned down.
A community-owned digital network cannot be burned. The code is ours. The data is ours. The feed serves us. Not a shareholder. Not an algorithm tuned for someone else’s ad revenue. Not a future acquirer.
I am not building a product. I am building an institution. I have structured it so it cannot be sold against you, advertised on, or redirected by any amount of capital that might come later. Those protections are written into the company’s legal DNA. They cannot be unwritten.
If you believe this community already has the answer (and it does), you are not a customer of newBWS. You are the village. You are the inheritance.
The founding 100 is being assembled now toward January 1, 2027. I hope your name is among them.