“We have been locked away from our history all these years.” Olayami Dabls’ journey into Detroit history begins long before the African Bead Museum became a landmark at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard. Arriving in Detroit in the 1960s, Dabls settled on 12th Street, worked at Grace Hospital, witnessed the 1967 Rebellion, and was arrested while simply trying to understand what was happening around him. Then came Vietnam, where a young Vietnamese boy challenged him: “This is not your war. You got a war back home.” That encounter helped turn Dabls toward books, African history, education at Northern High School and Highland Park Community College, and eventually 15 years of work with Detroit’s African American Museum. His search for knowledge became a search for cultural memory. In 1994, two strands of African beads opened another door, teaching him that beads carried histories, identities, protection, energy, and meanings far beyond decoration. That understanding grew into Dabls African Bead Museum and the monumental Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust installation. “The best way you can control a person is to keep them ignorant,” Dabls says, making this conversation more than one man’s biography. It is a lesson about who defines knowledge, what Black Detroit chooses to preserve, and why Dabls believes “value is determined by what do you have that your ancestors used.” Listen to hear how one Detroiter turned displacement, war, study, art, and African consciousness into a living institution asking future generations to remember who they were before somebody else told them.