Woman Who Recorded 300,000 Hours of TV to Stop History Rewrite Was Right
And she was right.
Text content
This woman recorded over 300,000 hours of TV over 35 years because she was scared people would try to rewrite history
Overview
The meme opens with text stating that a woman recorded over 300,000 hours of television content across 35 years, motivated by fear that people would attempt to rewrite historical events. Below this text is a split visual: the left side shows a portrait of the woman, Marion Stokes, a Black woman with an afro wearing an orange top, looking earnest. The right side displays an enormous wall of neatly stacked VHS tapes containing all her recorded content. Under the image is a screenshot of an X (formerly Twitter) post from verified user @Kneon, which adds the punchline: 'And she was right.', implying that widespread modern attempts to rewrite or misrepresent historical events have proven her seemingly extreme choice to archive TV content completely justified.
Origin notes
This meme is based on the real life story of Marion Stokes, an activist who spent 35 years archiving television news to preserve an unaltered record of historical events. The specific iteration shown was first shared as a viral post on X/Twitter by user @Kneon, then reposted to 9GAG as part of a user's ongoing numbered series of memes found on their smartphone, listed as entry #1579 in the series.
