The Sweet History Behind Karyn Parsons’ New Book

Karyn Parsons speaks to a group of school children about her book Saving the Day, published in 2021. Photograph courtesy of Karyn Parsons

Karyn Parsons couldn’t believe her eyes. It was mid-December 2025, and a friend had sent her a screenshot of former President Barack Obama reading a children’s book about Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license, to students at a Chicago school.

What made it “the best early Christmas present ever” was that she authored the book, Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight.

“At first I was skeptical, because in this new age of AI, I wasn’t even sure if it was real,” she says. “But once I realized it was, I was so blown away and honored.”

Parsons, fifty-nine, is best remembered as the entitled Hilary Banks, the character she played on the popular 1990s sitcom, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” But she has been out of the Hollywood limelight for many years, forging a path as a successful author, public speaker and founder of Sweet Blackberry, a nonprofit that shares stories of African-
Americans whose achievements have shaped American
history.

“I mean, it’s history, right? It’s American history,” says Parsons, a California native who’s called Providence home for the past three years. “We only hear about this handful of people, like the Frederick Douglasses and the Barack Obamas. And while they are incredible, groundbreaking individuals, only hearing about a select few high achievers sends a message that only once in a while do Black people do anything — and that’s very dangerous.

“The truth of the matter is that so much of this country was built on the backs of Black people.”

Parsons has not only told stories about remarkable Black inventors and trailblazers — including Henry Box Brown, a slave from Virginia who in 1849 mailed himself in a wooden shipping crate to freedom in Philadelphia — but has enlisted her A-list Hollywood friends (including Laurence Fishburne, Chris Rock, Alfre Woodard and Queen Latifah) to narrate her short animated films.

Karyn Parsons’ new book. Photograph courtesy of Karyn Parsons

While telling these stories to all children is important, she says, it is especially “empowering and inspiring and important” for young Black people to see themselves in these pioneers and heroes.

“When you see people like you who did these amazing things, you stand taller,” she says. “It helps when you can see yourself and think: ‘Oh, that could be me. I can do that.’”

Keisha Blain, professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University, calls the work Parsons and her foundation are doing “extremely valuable and timely.

“African American history is still largely sidelined in our national story and it requires a lot of effort at the grassroots level to ensure that these stories are circulated widely,” Blain says. By offering programming and resources that center African American history, Sweet Blackberry is “not only expanding collective knowledge of the Black past,” she says, “but it’s also helping to develop a younger generation of informed and empathetic leaders of diverse backgrounds.”

In addition to her books for younger children, Parsons has written a middle-grade novel, How High the Moon, about a twelve-year-old girl living in the Jim Crow South in 1944, and Clouds Over California, about a girl coming of age in Los Angeles during the unrest and social changes of the 1970s.

“I love writing and bringing stories to kids in an organic and immersive way,” she says. “And I feel so lucky to be doing something that I love so much.” sweetblackberry.org