“If we don’t know our history, we don’t know nothing,” said Stone, the Alabama advocate, stressing that the voting rights of many marginalized groups — not only Black Americans — are at risk.

She leads B-REAL Academy in Kansas City, a freedom school focused on Black resistance, education, and leadership.

Marginality, mass death—these are just a few of the reasons why the oeuvre of Essex Hemphill, who died of the virus in 1995, ...