@CathyBikesBook welcome! It’s nice to see this post boosted so widely, and with so many replies.
Unfortunately that also specifically highlights one of the major problems of the Mastodon/Fediverse and a very good reason Black people don’t have a large public presence here: the lists that eager people helpfully add in reply here can easily become lists for targeted harassment of those Black folks, in DMs or public messages, and there’s no recourse but to individually block the messaging accounts every time, or (sometimes) the entire server.
I was one of those “helpful” naïve white people a few years back when this same question came up then, cheerfully opting in folks who may have had very good reasons to not reply to threads like this. My response was up for a few hours before someone did the emotional work of explaining to me why this was dangerous, and that’s a task Black folks (and women, and other historic minorities) have to do continuously with clueless white people like me on here who think there’s no racism and the Fediverse is such a welcoming place.
Honestly I think the best way is going to be using hashtags in your profile or posts (like you already did), moving to a different server (mastodon.social has such bad moderation that many servers see limited or no posts from them), and then having posts decently boosted so that people who want to connect with you will, on their own terms.
I really hope this place can become a great community space for you and that better tools continue to be developed on Fedi for that purpose. 
️