Ninety-Two: The Silent Revolt No One Saw Coming | Part One: The Reckoning

Event organizers and documentary participants are identified by name throughout this piece. Members of the public who spoke during the audience discussion have been anonymized to protect their privacy.

The Room

Before Dr. Jade Singleton told us the truth about why she made this film, she warned us she might not get through it.

“I usually don’t read,” she said, standing at the front of the room, heels on, papers in hand. “But I might need to read through this one.”

What followed was not a director’s note. It was a confession. A reckoning. In its own devastatingly profound way, it was the entire film in miniature.

The screening of Ninety-Two: The Silent Revolt No One Saw Coming took place on a Sunday afternoon at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., a city that has never been short on declarations and has rarely been known for keeping them. It was held in its 291-seat auditorium, a room that had no business feeling as intimate as it did.

The film arrived during a period of significant displacement for Black women in the American workforce. In 2024 and 2025, federal agencies were restructured, DEI roles eliminated, and careers built over decades ended overnight.

There were women who had built careers in government offices now being dismantled around them. Women whose titles had been eliminated not because the work had stopped, but because someone decided the work was no longer worth protecting. Women who had come to this screening after days that would have broken someone not trained, since childhood, to absorb what institutions refuse to hold.

They sat with handwritten thank-you cards in their laps and grief in their bodies. They laughed at the right moments. They nodded at others. The call-and-response woven through Dr. Singleton’s introduction was indistinguishable from a good church service. And when Dr. Singleton began to really speak, not the investment-banking baritone she admitted she had learned to perform, the room went very still.

The Origin

Her name was Toni.

Dr. Singleton describes her as a voluptuous Willona from Good Times: fast-talking, bright, the kind of woman who sweeps you into her orbit before you realize you’ve been swept. They were young mothers together, broke, joyful, doing the most outrageous things on no budget because Toni simply refused to accept that broke was a reason to stay small. Fine dining on split entrées. Kids’ club nights with the lights off and a blue screen flickering on the TV, dancing like maniacs in the living room.

“Come on, J. Foxx, we ballin’,” Toni would say.

Then one day she wasn’t there.

Toni had lost her job at the VA. She had been carrying everything, her children, her schooling, her household, up a hill at Old Dominion University with a baby in a carrier, huffing and puffing into the phone. “Girl, yes, I’m dragging all this wagon up this hill,” she’d laugh. She had done all the right things. Every single one. And the stress had climbed so relentlessly inside her body that her blood pressure rose to proportions that killed her.

Aortic embolism. Here one day. Gone the next. Three children left behind.

“I felt like the American machine killed her. That’s how personally I took it.” —Dr. Singleton, Director, Ninety-Two

Dr. Singleton did not go to the funeral. She did not think she could hold herself together in front of the children. She stuffed the grief down instead, the way she had been trained, the way most of us have been trained, and she prayed for a way to process it that would not undo her completely. What came back was an instruction: “Show the other way to do it.”

That is how Ninety-Two: The Silent Revolt No One Saw Coming came to exist. Not from statistics, though statistics would later become part of the story. Not from a market opportunity. From grief. From a woman who believed the American machine had extracted everything from her friend and called it a life, and who refused to let that story disappear.

“This is a cultural movement,” Dr. Singleton told the room. “And if we didn’t take the time to document it, it just would have disappeared.”

The Film

To call Ninety-Two a documentary is technically accurate yet spiritually insufficient.

The film opens at the University of Richmond, where Dr. Singleton stands on a campus she once crossed as a night student fifteen years ago, unaware, as she was then, that she was walking over the Westham Burying Ground, the resting place of enslaved people whose graves had been disturbed, whose names had been forgotten, whose labor had been extracted from them even in death.

In recent years, the university has undertaken research, memorialization efforts, and public acknowledgment of the Westham Burying Ground and its history. For Dr. Singleton, learning that history transformed the way she understood the ground she had once walked across every day.

That image: buried contributions, unnamed labor, a foundation built on bodies never credited. It is the film’s governing thesis. Everything that follows is an elaboration of what it means when a nation builds itself on work it refuses to honor.

“I think about all the buried contributions,” Dr. Singleton says in the film’s opening moments. “Everything built on Black labor that was never acknowledged, never credited, never honored.”

The film argues that what is happening among the Black women workforce does not resemble traditional images of labor unrest. There are no picket lines, no national strikes, no singular moment of rupture. Instead, the documentary points to quieter forms of withdrawal, boundary-setting, relocation, reinvention, and refusal.

At its core, Ninety-Two makes a specific and clinical claim: that the labor extraction Black women have absorbed across generations does not simply exhaust. It accumulates in the body. The film presents evidence that fifty percent of Black women over the age of twenty in the United States carry some form of cardiovascular condition. Chronic stress, the kind produced by holding institutions together while being systematically underprotected within them, accelerates cellular aging, depletes nutrients, and triggers the inflammation that sits at the biological root of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and PTSD.

The film rejects the idea that these experiences can be understood primarily as a wellness problem.

The Washington Declaration on Black Women’s Labor pushes the argument further, framing burnout among Black women as a labor issue rather than an individual wellness concern. It belongs not in self-help sections but in labor law, in HR policy, in institutional accountability frameworks.

Tara Jaye Frank, the film’s executive producer and author of You Are Before the World, describes the moment she decided to invest: she had seen the early images Dr. Singleton was posting on LinkedIn and felt something shift. She had just completed her own book. She was, by her own account, still finding her way out of the darkness that settled after the 2024 election.

“This felt like it was going to require a deconstruction of sorts,” Frank said. “There were things we would need to stop doing. Things we would need to let go, to erase, in order to rebuild in a new way. The feeling was that Ninety-Two would be a tool to help us do that.”

Dr. Singleton recruited Japanese cinematographer Ku Nakagawa, whose work she had long admired for the way he photographed women, with a gaze that was feminine, unhurried, luminous. She asked him twice before he agreed.

“I’ve never seen Black women shot this way,” she told him. “The kind of eye that you have. Could you please reconsider?”

Nakagawa reconsidered, then flew in from Japan for a three-day shoot.

That insistence, on a gaze that holds Black women with tenderness rather than utility, is itself an argument. The film’s visual language refuses the same extractive logic it is interrogating.

The Women

The women featured in Ninety-Two span leadership, healing, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and public service. To catalog their credentials is to make a point: these are not women who failed to navigate American institutions. These are women who navigated them exceptionally well, and paid for it with their bodies, their rest, their sense of self.

Crystle Johnson ran diversity, equity and inclusion for global retail at Nike. Let that sit for a moment. One of the most visible DEI roles at one of the most visible companies in the world. And still: platinum handcuffs.

“Platinum handcuffs are still handcuffs.” —Crystle Johnson, Founder & CEO, Kinory

“I would always say, ‘I just feel like I have on platinum handcuffs,’” Johnson recalled. “And I was having this conversation with someone and they said, ‘Platinum handcuffs are still handcuffs.’ And I said, ‘Wow, they really are. I am actually trapped.’”

She left. She built Kinory, a space for high-achieving Black women who are, in her words, done with survival mode and ready to soften into liberation.

Dr. Tana Session built a career spanning more than two decades in human resources, including a decade as the top HR executive for multiple organizations. She wrote the book, literally, on what Black women experience along the corporate career track. Her book Working While Black offers strategies for owning your power, truth, healing, worth, and destiny.

She now lives in Rwanda.

The catalyst was November 5, 2024. Once her husband understood that what happened pierced her to her soul and there was no going back, they put their house on the market. The LA fires came in January. Their son had to evacuate. They could see and smell and taste the smoke. For a moment, Dr. Session wondered if it was a sign to stay.

Then someone who had lost everything in the fires came to see their house.

“They came and saw our house and they said it felt like home,” Dr. Session said. “And I said, ‘When we leave, I want this home to go to someone who feels that way about it the same way we did.’”

They closed in 15 days. She landed in Rwanda on her birthday in February.

“We didn’t run away from anything. We ran toward something.” —Dr. Tana Session, Author, Working While Black

“People see us in the months that we’ve been here, and they say we look younger, we look healthier, we look thinner, we look so relaxed,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘All those things are true.’ And it wasn’t something that we sought out. It just happened.”

Dr. Session was careful to acknowledge the privilege required to leave. But she was equally clear about what she found on the other side: in Rwanda, people say “Welcome home.” She is celebrated, not tolerated.

“I have heard people say, ‘Now’s not the time to leave. Stay and fight.’ ‘Why are you leaving us now? We need you,’” Dr. Session said. “But I needed me.”

And then there is Kimberly Bargassé.

Bargassé is a shamanic healer, Reiki master, and certified end-of-life death doula whose practice in energy medicine grew from her own unraveling, her own grief, her own questions the church told her she was not supposed to ask.

Among the documentary’s most profound sequences is the account of a session Bargassé conducted with her cousin, Tara Jaye Frank, the film’s own executive producer. Frank came to her scattered and unclear, not entirely certain what kind of session she needed. “I just want you to look at me,” she told Bargassé, “and do the session you think I need.”

What Bargassé saw: a woman alone in a forest, writhing. Frantic. Lost. Then an eagle sweeping down, and the woman and the eagle becoming one, and soaring.

Frank had written a poem at 21 called I Am an Eagle. Her mother had once woken from a dream, during the most difficult period of Frank’s life, and described seeing the most beautiful silver and iridescent wings she had ever seen, wrapped around her daughter.

“That experience with Kimberly reminded me who I am,” Frank said. “And I needed that.”

Bargassé described what she witnessed after: “I literally saw her heart break wide open, and all that hopelessness—some despair, the darkness—it came flooding out. And then I saw light come flooding in, and I saw hope in her face.”

That is not therapy in the traditional sense. It is something older. Something the Declaration gestures toward when it speaks of intergenerational labor, the inheritance not only of work, but of the exhaustion that work has accumulated across generations, carried in the body, passed forward.

“All of the exhaustion that we feel,” Bargassé said, “it’s ancestral, it’s energetic. So what I do is I help clear the layers of that exhaustion so that people can find rest.”

The Declaration

Before the afternoon ended, Dr. Singleton told the room where she was taking this.

“What I didn’t wanna do was walk into that situation saying, ‘Hey, here’s this cool documentary, I hope you enjoy it and give me some hugs,’” Dr. Singleton said. “I wanted to walk into that room saying: this has to change. There needs to be a new contract between American labor and Black women.”

Dr. Singleton is taking that demand to one of the country’s most prominent public forums, and she is not going to ask for hugs. That new contract has a name.

The Washington Declaration on Black Women’s Labor is, by its own description, a living framework: part historical accounting, part demand, part organizing anchor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. It names the period of 2024 and 2025 “the Great Firings,” one of the most significant workforce displacements affecting Black women in recent American history.

The Declaration frames this not primarily as a diversity issue, but as a labor issue, one its authors trace across centuries of Black women’s work in America.

The nation has relied upon Black women’s labor while refusing to guarantee the dignity, security, and reciprocity that such labor deserves. —The Washington Declaration on Black Women’s Labor

The film advances the argument through testimony. The Declaration advances it through policy demands. Throughout the afternoon, audience members reinforced many of the same themes through their own experiences. Together, those voices created a striking convergence between documentary, declaration, and lived reality.

The Declaration’s demands are not aspirations. The document is explicit: they are conditions. Transparent labor practices. Protection from retaliation. Equitable advancement. Recognition and compensation of invisible labor. Investment in community repair. Intergenerational commitment to workforce equity.

“Unless you’re talking to me about repair,” Dr. Singleton told the room, “I’m not interested.”

The Conversation

The discussion that followed the screening was not a Q&A in any conventional sense. It was a continuation of the film by other means.

A woman in the audience rose and said she could count on one hand the number of times she had felt so seen. She had cried for the first hour. The room understood.

Another woman identified herself as a professional working in Fortune 100 technology. She said she turned 43 the previous January and something in her body broke. Chest pains. Tinnitus. Aches she had never felt before. Urgent care on weekends because there was no time for a doctor’s appointment during the week. Her primary care physician’s verdict: stress and anxiety.

“I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she said. “What has happened now?”

She described seventeen years of absorbing, her household, her workplace, everything routed inward and held. When she finally set a boundary, it was met with violence. She came to this screening anyway. She brought her whole self into that room.

That is what the film is documenting. That is what the Declaration is demanding protection for.

Among the responses from the panel, one passage settled over the room with particular weight. Frank had spoken these words on camera in the film itself. Heard again in the living air of a room full of women who recognized every syllable, they landed differently:

We have to redefine our relationship with helping. This is not about not helping anymore. I don’t think we could if we tried. It’s not in our spirit, it’s not in our nature, it’s not in our blood to completely take our hands off of everything and walk away. But you don’t have to give until you’re empty. You don’t have to do until you’re undone. —Tara Jaye Frank, Executive Producer, Ninety-Two

The room responded with something quieter than applause and more telling: recognition. Soft murmurs. The particular sound of people hearing their own interior lives spoken back to them in a public space for the first time.

Frank, answering a question about how to hold onto optimism when the losses keep arriving, said she finds it in rooms like this one.

“For me, the optimism is the fuel that feeds my creativity,” Frank said. “I cannot sacrifice it for any reason at any time. But these are the spaces where it gets reignited.”

She had been at her 30th college reunion at Spelman the weekend before. “I have a reserve of optimism if anybody needs any,” she said, laughing.

The room laughed with her. That laughter, too, was evidence.

The Reckoning

Dr. Singleton has a framework for what she witnessed in every woman she interviewed for this film. She calls it stoicism, and she distinguishes it carefully from apathy:

“This is not apathy. With apathy, it’s like if you don’t care either way it goes. I’m not hearing that. What we’re experiencing is: I can’t necessarily control what’s happening externally. I’m giving up on that fight. But I’m not going to give up on what needs to take place within me and within my community. That’s warrior energy. That’s not apathy.” —Dr. Singleton

Every woman she spoke to, she said, cares deeply about where this country is heading. But there is, finally, a feeling that has settled. “I have to save myself.”

Dr. Singleton is a ninth-generation American. She frames what Black women are doing right now as ushering in something the country has never experienced: an enlightenment period. A Dutch mentor told her once that America skipped it, moved straight from brutal barbarism to industrialized superpower without the reckoning that transformation requires.

“What we’re witnessing is Black women saying: if you’re not willing to go through the enlightenment with me, then I will go through this enlightenment alone,” she said. “And our hope is that our countrymen and women will join us, finally. But if not, we’re done. Either way, we’re done.”

Kia Croom, founder of the Croom Institute for Fund Development and Social Change and one of the country’s foremost frontline fundraisers, having raised over a billion dollars across her career in service of equity-driven causes, closed the afternoon by asking for the room’s support. Not only financial support, though that was part of it. She was asking for something larger: for people to show up for what this film is trying to become.

“This story has to be told,” Croom said. “History is being rewritten. Narratives like what we saw here are being buried and silenced. And we will not.”

The Washington Declaration ends with a line that is less a conclusion than a beginning:

We have carried this country for generations. We are not asking for charity. We are demanding accountability. And we are offering this declaration as a foundation for a labor contract with America that finally holds.

That is what Ninety-Two: The Silent Revolt No One Saw Coming is asking its audience to sit with.

Not are Black women exhausted? But what has it cost them to become indispensable? And what does repair actually look like when the people who have been holding everything together finally set it down?

Toni never got to ask those questions. She was too busy dragging her wagon up the hill.