We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Sarahbeth Maney also known as SB, is a 2021-22 New York Times photography fellow covering politics in Washington D.C.
Originally from the California Bay Area, her personal work focuses on education, disability, and issues that disproportionately impact Black and brown communities. As a journalist, her goal is to further representation within the industry and portray each story as honestly as it exists.
Maney received a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from San Francisco State University in 2019, where she also served as The National Press Photographers Association chapter president. During that time, Maney interned at The San Francisco Chronicle, Flint Journal in Michigan and S.F. Examiner.
Most recently, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center and Diversify Photo to continue documenting a story about pregnancy and housing insecurity during the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, CNN, The Guardian, HuffPost, Bloomberg, Forbes, and among others. Inquiries and licensing: sbmaneyphoto@gmail.com+1 (925) 639-2654
Sarahbeth is covering the confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Even before taking office, President Joe Biden pledged to reshape the federal judiciary. In a December 2020 letter, during his presidential transition, he asked Democratic senators to recommend public defenders and civil rights lawyers, who have generally been underrepresented on the federal bench, for judgeships. If the president nominates Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, he will take his mission to diversify professional representation to the next level, putting a former federal public defender on the highest court in the land.
If nominated and confirmed, the 51-year-old Jackson would be the first Black woman on the court and also one of the youngest justices – second only to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who celebrated her 50th birthday on Friday. She would bring a wide range of experiences not only as a public defender but also a federal district judge and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Jackson has earned high praise from the justice she would replace if nominated: When she was under consideration for her previous job as a federal trial court judge, Breyer described her as “brilliant,” a “mix of common sense” and “thoughtfulness.” And she might enjoy an edge over other candidates because of the prospect that she would have a relatively smooth path to confirmation: She was confirmed to an appellate judgeship less than a year ago with support from three Republican senators, and she is a relative by marriage of former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who ran for vice president on the Republican ticket in 2012.
Early life and career
A native Washingtonian, Jackson moved to Florida as a young child with her parents, graduates of historically Black colleges and universities who worked as public schoolteachers. Her father then went to law school, eventually becoming the chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Her mother became an administrator and served as the principal at a public magnet school for 14 years.
Jackson attended Miami Palmetto High School, a public school whose other notable alumni include, according to the Miami Herald, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Vivek Murthy, the current U.S. surgeon general. While there, she was a stand-out debater and served as student body president.
She went on to Harvard College, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1992, and Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude in 1996. She spent the year between college and law school as a reporter and researcher at Time magazine in New York.
In the 17 years following her graduation from law school, Jackson held a variety of legal jobs. She attained three federal clerkships, worked at four elite law firms, and served two stints with the Sentencing Commission. While much of that experience is typical for a Supreme Court short-lister, one line on Jackson’s resume is not: her mid-career decision to spend two years as a public defender. In fact, the last justice with significant experience representing criminal defendants was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.
From 1996 to 1997, Jackson served as a clerk to U.S District Judge Patti Saris, a Massachusetts judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. She followed that clerkship with a second one, for Judge Bruce Selya, appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit by President Ronald Reagan, from 1997 to 1998.
Jackson then snagged a highly sought-after spot as an associate at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a Washington litigation boutique that later merged with Baker Botts, a Texas-based firm. Other prominent alumni of the firm include Seth Waxman, who served as the solicitor general in the Clinton administration, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, and Barrett, who arrived at the firm, fresh off a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia, shortly after Jackson left.
Jackson left Miller Cassidy after a year for a third clerkship, this time at the Supreme Court as a clerk for Breyer. During the 1999-2000 term, the court was (much as it is now) mired in the culture wars, but often with different results. In Stenberg v. Carhart, for example, the court – in an opinion by Breyer – struck down a Nebraska law that banned so-called “partial birth” abortions, while in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe the court ruled that a school district’s policy of allowing student-led and student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Constitution’s establishment clause. But in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the court agreed with the Scouts that New Jersey could not force the group to accept a gay man as a scoutmaster.
When her clerkship ended, Jackson became an associate in the Boston office of a large law firm, Goodwin Procter. In 2001, in McGuire v. Reilly, she was one of the lawyers on a “friend of the court” brief supporting a Massachusetts law that created a floating “buffer zone” around pedestrians and cars approaching abortion clinics. Jackson’s clients included the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, the League of Women Voters, the Abortion Access Project of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit allowed the law to take effect, reasoning that the state legislature was “making every effort to restrict as little speech as possible while combating the deleterious secondary effects of anti-abortion protests.”
Jackson left Goodwin Procter in 2002 to become an associate at the firm then known as the Feinberg Group, now known as Feinberg Rozen. In a questionnaire for her 2021 confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, Jackson wrote that she worked on mediations and arbitrations while at the Feinberg Group but did not appear in court.
Jackson spent a year at the Feinberg Group before going to work as a staffer at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency within the judiciary created by Congress in response to “widespread disparity in federal sentencing.” She spent two years there as assistant special counsel.
In 2005, Jackson became an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C. At her 2021 confirmation hearing, Jackson drew “a direct line” between her work as a public defender and her later work as a trial judge. She told senators that, during her time as a public defender, she was “struck” by how little her clients understood about the legal process, despite the obviously serious implications of criminal proceedings for their lives. As a result, Jackson said, as a trial judge she took “extra care” to make sure that defendants were aware of what was happening to them and why. “I think that’s really important for our entire justice system because it’s only if people understand what they’ve done, why it’s wrong, and what will happen to them if they do it again that they can really start to rehabilitate,” she emphasized. As a public defender, Jackson argued in the D.C. Circuit, including before some of the judges who would later become her colleagues.
Jackson also has a family member who was a defendant in the criminal justice system. As Ann Marimow and Aaron Davis reported for The Washington Post, while Jackson was working as a public defender she received a request for help from her distant uncle, Thomas Brown, who was serving a life sentence on federal drug charges. Jackson referred Brown to a Washington law firm, Wilmer Hale, which filed a clemency petition on Brown’s behalf. In 2016, President Barack Obama commuted Brown’s sentence, leading to his release at age 78 after over 25 years in prison.
In 2007, Jackson returned to private practice one last time. She became “of counsel” – a designation for lawyers who are neither associates nor partners – in the Washington office of Morrison & Foerster, a large San Francisco-based law firm. For three years, Jackson was part of the firm’s appellate litigation group, working on cases in the Supreme Court and in state and federal appeals courts around the country.
In 2010, she returned to the Sentencing Commission after Obama nominated her to serve as vice chair of the commission. The Senate confirmed her for the position by unanimous consent. During her tenure, the commission sought to alleviate harsh sentences for drug crimes by enacting several amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, including allowing some people with crack-cocaine convictions to seek lighter sentences.
A federal district judgeship
In September 2012, Obama nominated Jackson to serve as a U.S. district judge in Washington, D.C. Although the Senate held hearings in December, it did not act on her nomination before the 112th Congress adjourned at the beginning of January. Obama nominated Jackson again on Jan. 4, 2013, and the Senate confirmed her by a voice vote in March.
During her seven years as a district judge, Jackson issued several high-profile rulings on topics ranging from federal environmental law to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But none had a higher profile than her decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, in which she ruled that Don McGahn, the former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, was required to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s possible obstruction of justice, even after Trump had directed him not to do so. In a 118-page opinion, Jackson rejected the contention by Trump’s Department of Justice that federal courts lack the power to review disputes between the executive branch and Congress over subpoenas, as well as its argument that the president has the sole authority to decide whether he and his senior aides will comply with subpoenas to testify about possible wrongdoing in his administration. She stressed that “the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” White House employees, she continued, “work for the People of the United States,” and “take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”; the president cannot block them from appearing to testify. McGahn eventually testified before the committee in June 2021, after the DOJ (now under the Biden administration) and the committee reached an agreement for him to do so.
In April 2018, Jackson ruled against the Trump administration in a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions challenging three of the president’s executive orders on the collective bargaining rights of federal workers. The unions argued that the orders exceeded the president’s powers and conflicted with both federal labor laws and the employees’ constitutional rights.
In a 62-page opinion, Jackson ruled for the challengers. She agreed with them both that she had the power to review their claims and that Trump’s “directives undermine federal employees’ right to bargain collectively as protected by” federal law.
The D.C. Circuit reversed Jackson’s holding that she had the power to review the union’s claims. The unions, Judge Thomas Griffith reasoned, must first pursue their challenge through an administrative agency process and then, if necessary, in the courts of appeals.
Jackson ruled for the Trump administration in Center for Biological Diversity v. McAleenan, a challenge to a decision by the Department of Homeland Security to waive over two dozen laws in connection with the construction of a 20-mile segment in New Mexico of the border wall with Mexico. The challenger, an environmental group, argued that the waiver exceeded the agency’s power and would cause environmental damage.
Jackson dismissed the group’s complaint, ruling that federal courts do not have the power to consider the group’s non-constitutional claims. Moreover, she continued, the group had not alleged the kind of facts that would allow their constitutional claims to move forward. The group asked the Supreme Court to take up their case, but the justices denied its petition for review in June 2020.
In 2015, Jackson ruled that prison employees and contractors in the District of Columbia had discriminated against William Pierce, a deaf man serving a 51-day sentence for assault, when they never tried to determine what accommodations he would need to communicate with others and “largely ignored his repeated requests for an interpreter.” Instead, she wrote, the employees and contractors “figuratively shrugged and effectively sat on their hands with respect to this plainly hearing-disabled person in their custody, presumably content to rely on their own uninformed beliefs about how best to handle him and certainly failing to engage in any meaningful assessment of his needs.” Jackson did not resolve, however, Pierce’s claim that prison officials had retaliated against him for his requests for an interpreter by placing him in solitary confinement, explaining that Pierce and the city disagreed on the underlying facts of the dispute. A jury later awarded Pierce $70,000 in damages, and the city did not appeal.
In October 2018, Jackson issued an important ruling in favor of the U.S. territory of Guam in a dispute with the U.S. Navy. The Navy had created a landfill on the island that was used for the disposal of munitions and chemicals. Because pollution from the landfill was contaminating a nearby river, the government of Guam entered an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to shut it down and clean it up. The clean-up was expensive, so Guam went to federal court, seeking help from the Navy to recover some of the costs – which could reach as much as $160 million.
The federal government asked Jackson to dismiss the case, arguing that Guam could only seek money from the government under one provision of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act, and it was too late to do so. Jackson rejected the federal government’s argument, allowing the case to go forward.
A promotion to the country’s “second-highest court”
The D.C. Circuit is often dubbed the “second-highest court in the land” because of the many high-profile cases that it hears and because it has served as a launching pad for several Supreme Court justices. Among the current justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh all served on the D.C. Circuit before being nominated to the Supreme Court, as did the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The work is not entirely glamorous, however: The court’s docket also includes a steady diet of lower-profile (although still important) administrative-law cases, including appeals of orders issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
After Biden nominated Merrick Garland, then a judge on the D.C. Circuit, to be the attorney general, Jackson was quickly regarded as a leading contender to fill the vacancy left by Garland’s departure. And indeed, although she was not officially nominated until April 19, 2021, her responses to a questionnaire submitted before her confirmation indicated that White House Counsel Dana Remus contacted her on Jan. 26, 2021, about a possible nomination to the D.C. Circuit, and she met with the president in late February.
Jackson’s nomination for the D.C. Circuit enjoyed support from lawyers of all ideological stripes. Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush nominee who retired in 2020, wrote in a letter that although Jackson and he “have sometimes differed on the best outcome of a case,” he had “always respected her careful approach and agreeable manner.” And a letter signed by 23 lawyers who clerked at the Supreme Court at the same time as Jackson (for both liberal and conservative justices) emphasized the attorneys’ “great respect for her legal abilities, her work ethic, and her ability to work with colleagues of both like and differing views.” The letter also noted that Jackson “treated everyone who worked at the Court with respect and kindness.”
At her confirmation hearing in April 2021, Jackson faced questions about her service from 2010 to 2011 on the board of Montrose Christian School, a Maryland private school that has since closed. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., noted that the school’s statement of faith indicated that “[w]e should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death” and that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. Hawley noted that Barrett had been “attacked” for serving on the board of a Christian school with similar positions, and he asked Jackson whether, based on her service at Montrose Christian, she believed in “the principle, and the constitutional right, of religious liberty.”
“I do believe in religious liberty,” Jackson told Hawley. It is, she said, a “foundational tenet of our entire government.” But Jackson distanced herself from the Montrose Christian statement of faith, telling Hawley that she had “served on many boards” and did not “necessarily agree with all of the statements … that those boards might have in their materials.” And in this case, she added, she “was not aware of” the statement of beliefs.
Jackson was confirmed on June 14, 2021, by a vote of 53-44. Three Republicans – Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – joined all Democrats in voting for her.
In her short tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Jackson has already been involved in one high-profile case: Trump’s efforts to block the release of documents related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The special House of Representatives committee investigating the riot asked the National Archives to turn over presidential records relating to the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
When the archivist notified Trump that he would turn over records, Trump claimed executive privilege over some of the documents, including diaries, schedules, and visitor and call logs. But Biden countered that the documents should not be shielded by executive privilege, prompting Trump to go to court. A federal district judge in Washington rejected Trump’s request to block the disclosure of the documents, and the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Patricia Millett that Jackson joined, upheld that ruling. Trump then went to the Supreme Court, which on Jan. 19 turned down Trump’s request to stop the release of the documents. Only Justice Clarence Thomas indicated that he disagreed with the court’s decision.
Personal life
Jackson met her husband, a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, while both were students at Harvard. The couple married in 1996, and they have two daughters – one a senior in high school and the other in college.
Jackson was introduced at her 2012 confirmation hearing by Paul Ryan, then a member of the House of Representatives and Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential campaign. Ryan is a relative of Jackson by marriage: His wife’s sister, Dana, is married to William Jackson, the twin brother of Jackson’s husband, Patrick Jackson. Ryan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, although “our politics may differ,” his “praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal.”
During Jackson’s 2012 confirmation hearing, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked her whether, as a district court judge, she planned “to follow Justice Breyer’s very awesome style of questioning [at] oral argument in your court.” After the laughter subsided, Jackson responded that she did not think anyone could match Breyer’s style, and she didn’t know whether she would “even attempt to try.” Although Breyer’s unique approach to oral arguments may not have been well suited to the district court, if nominated to succeed him on the Supreme Court Jackson could decide whether to imitate him there – or, is as more likely, bring her own style, reflecting her own personality and experiences.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown was a medical pioneer, educator, and community leader. In 1948-1949 Brown became the first African American female appointed to a general surgery residency in the de jure racially segregated South. In 1956 Brown became the first unmarried woman in Tennessee authorized to be an adoptive parent, and in 1966 she became the first black woman representative to the state legislature in Tennessee.
Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 7, 1919. Within weeks after she was born, Brown’s unmarried mother Edna Brown moved to upstate New York and placed her five-month-old baby daughter in the predominantly white Troy Orphan Asylum (later renamed Vanderhyden Hall) in Troy, New York. Brown was a demonstrably bright child, and became interested in medicine after she had a tonsillectomy at age five.
When Brown was 13 years old her estranged mother reclaimed her. Subsequently, however, Brown would run away from her mother five times, returning to the orphanage each time. During her teenage years Brown worked at a Chinese laundry, and also as a mother’s helper for Mrs. W.F. Jarrett, who encouraged her desire to become a physician. At age 15, the last time Brown ran away from her mother, she enrolled herself at Troy High School. Realizing that Brown had no place to stay, the principal arranged for Brown to live with Lola and Samuel Wesley Redmon, foster parents who became a major influence in her life and from whom Brown received the security and support she needed until she graduated at the top of her high school class in 1937. Awarded a four-year scholarship by the Troy Conference Methodist Women, in 1941 Brown graduated second in her class from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina.
During World War II Brown worked as an inspector for the Army Ordnance Department in Rochester, New York. In 1944 Brown began studying medicine at the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, receiving her Medical Degree in 1948. After serving a year-long residency internship at Harlem Hospital in New York City, Brown returned to Meharry’s George Hubbard Hospital in 1949 for her five-year residency, becoming Professor of Surgery in 1955.
In the mid-1950s an unmarried patient of Brown’s pleaded with her to adopt her newborn daughter, and in 1956 Brown became the first known single woman to adopt a child in the state of Tennessee. As a tribute to her foster mother, Brown named her daughter Lola Denise Brown.
From 1966 to 1968 Brown served in the Tennessee House of Representatives, where she introduced a controversial bill to reform the state’s abortion law to allow legalized abortions in cases of incest and rape. Brown also co-sponsored legislation that recognized Negro History Week, which later expanded to Black History Month.
Brown served as Nashville Riverside Hospital’s Chief of Surgery and as Meharry’s Clinical Professor of Surgery from 1959 until 1983. In 1982 Brown also consulted for the National Institutes of Health.
In 1970 the Dorothy L. Brown Women’s Residence at Meharry Medical College was named in her honor. In 1993 Brown received a humanitarian award from the Carnegie Foundation for her work on behalf of women, children, and health. In 1994 Brown received the prestigious Horatio Alger Award.
On June 13, 2004, in Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. Dorothy L. Brown died of congestive heart failure. She was 85 years old.
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Atlantans is a first-person account of the familiar strangers who make the city tick. This month’s is Sterling Davis, the founder of TrapKing Humane Cat Solutions, as told to Heather Buckner.
Nine or 10 years ago, I was about to go on tour with [the rapper] Tech N9ne when I saw an ad on Craigslist for scooping litter at the shelter. I was like, Ooh, this will be easy: I just play with cats, scoop some litter, get paid. Then, I go on tour. That was the plan, but I dove in heart-first. I was renting a seven-bedroom house in Stone Mountain and had a cat in every room. I was reading anything I could get my hands on about bottle babies, fostering. I worked with the LifeLine Animal Project for about five years before I started my own nonprofit in 2017, [TrapKing Humane Cat Solutions].
TNR—trap, neuter, return—is the alternative for death and euthanasia for stray and feral cats. I catch cats in traps, have them spayed, neutered, vaccinated, and then return them to their colonies. When you see a cat with their left ear tipped, that cat has been through TNR. A cat can reproduce as young as four months. At unkept colonies, they’re going to overpopulate and fight over food and mates. They’ll get these open gashes, bites—no way to go to the doctor. They fight, they get diseases.
The negative meaning of “trap king” is drug dealer. One of the first times I trapped, we were at the police station. A lot of my friends have rapped about selling drugs, “trapping.” I texted my friends saying, I’m trapping at the police station. That helped me think of the trap king thing. I was like, How did no one think of this before?I’m the king of trap-neuter-return? Trap King? Oh my god, this is too much! I’m trying to turn a negative into a positive, and I’m grabbing other demographics’ attention with this. Black and brown communities are underrepresented in cat rescue. Most of my cat ladies are middle-aged white women; we get our nails done together.
I was born in Detroit; my family was gutter-poor. My mom got with a guy that beat her, beat me. When I was a kid, I didn’t want to go home; I’d be out as late as possible, playing with the stray cats. I’m all about headbutts and slow blinks. I was in 10th grade when I came to Atlanta. I went into the Navy after I graduated from North Clayton High School. After the military, I started working [in] Corporate America. I wore a shirt and tie to cover up my tattoos, stopped painting my nails, hid my tongue ring. Eventually, I got fired. I started managing a friend’s [music] tour.
I don’t have any children, and I wanted to leave a legacy. For a while, I couldn’t afford rent and [TNR], so I lived out of a 1997 conversion van. One of my sponsors helped me get an RV. Now, I can park somewhere, set a bunch of traps, go inside, work while I’m waiting. (I help run a dating app for cat people, called Tabby.) I’m like a turtle: My house is on my back. I’m doing what I want to do 24/7. I want to have a positive impact on every living creature whose path I cross. I still do music. Me and Cat Man in West Oakland, California, made a music video called “All Day I Dream About Spayin’.”
I try to talk to homeowners’ associations and apartment complex managers before I go because I want people to know what I’m doing. I’ve had a gun pulled on me before. Once, I was in a predominantly white neighborhood. I’m a bald, tattooed Black dude. It’s two in the morning. I’m near your yard saying, I’m just here for the cats! People are like, Sure you are! Honey, get my gun. Look at the logo on my shirt. My RV looks ridiculous; it’s purple and blue with cats all over it.
People ask me, What is TNR? Is it a dance? Is it a drug? I’ve got a lot of work to do. It should be as common as recycling. If you go to somebody’s house, you ask, Where’s the recycling? If they don’t do it, you’re like, Wow, really? I want to make it to where, if you go to somebody’s house and you see a cat that’s not ear-tipped, you say, Wow, you don’t TNR?
I know, among my friends, I’m the weird guy, but I didn’t know how taboo it was for a Black man to deal with cats. And TNR—one guy was like, I don’t want my cat to lose his balls, his masculinity. I’m like, Stop projecting yourself onto the cat. That hypermasculinity is one of the reasons why it’s difficult to get my message across. That’s why I always say: You don’t lose cool points for compassion.
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Michael W. Twitty (born 1977) is an African-American Jewish writer, culinary historian,[1] and educator. He is the author of The Cooking Gene, published by HarperCollins/Amistad, which won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Book of the Year as well as the category for writing. The book was also a finalist for The Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, the Art of Eating Prize and a Barnes and Noble New Discoveries finalist in nonfiction.
In 2010, he launched Afroculinaria, a culinary history blog that covers African and African-American foodways.[6] In 2010, Twitty worked with the D. Landreth Seed Company to compile the African American Heritage Collection of heirloom seeds for the company’s 225th anniversary. The collection features roughly 30 plants, including the long-handled dipper gourd and the fish pepper, showcasing how instrumental they were to African-American survival and independence.[7][8] In 2011, he began his “Cooking Gene” project, which would form the basis for his 2017 James Beard Award-winning book The Cooking Gene.[9] He is writing another book slated to come out in 2020, titled Kosher Soul.[10]
Twitty founded and oversees the Southern Discomfort Tour, a journey through the American South designed to raise awareness about the impact racism had on Southern cuisine.[11] As part of this project, Twitty recreates the experiences of his slave ancestors, picking cotton, chopping wood, working in fields, and cooking in plantation kitchens.[4]
In 2013, Twitty gained greater media attention when he published an open letter to Paula Deen after she was fired from the Food Network.[12] That same year he spoke at the MAD symposium in Copenhagen after being invited by Rene Redzepi, owner of NOMA. In 2016, he traveled to Vancouver to give a TED talk entitled “Gastronomy and the social justice reality of food”.[13] In 2016, Twitty received the inaugural Culinary Pioneer Award from Tastetalks and won both readers choice and editors choice for his letter to chef Sean Brock on Afroculinaria from Saveur. In January 2017, Colonial Williamsburg named Twitty its first Revolutionary in Residence.[14][15]
Twitty has become an icon in his efforts to change food and culinary injustices that have been a prevalent problem in African American communities and traces to African roots to help the public understand how African-American food shaped American cuisine.[4]
Twitty is openly gay.[16] He was raised nominally Christian and converted to Judaism at age 25.[17] He married Taylor Keith on October 1, 2020.
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Elle Lett, MBiostat, MA, PhD, is a Black transgender woman, statistician-epidemiologist and MD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in statistical epidemiology at the Penn Medicine Palliative and Advanced Illness and Research (PAIR) Center. She has three active research arms: 1) intersectional approaches to health for ethnoracial minoritized subpopulations within the transgender community 2) structural racism and the health impacts of state-sanctioned violence and the carceral system on Black Americans and 3) statistical methods for missing data, evidence synthesis, and prediction modeling. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard College, master’s degrees in Biostatistics and Statistics from Duke University and the Wharton School, respectively, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania. She plans to pursue residency training in Emergency Medicine and use health services research and social epidemiology to motivate policy changes that help achieve health equity in the United States.
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Akiea “Ki” Gross (they/them) is an abolitionist early educator, consultant, cultural organizer and creative entrepreneur currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten. Woke Kindergarten is a global, abolitionist early learning community, creative expanse and consultancy supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-Black and LGBTQIA+ liberation.
A former instructional coach and infant/toddler, preschool and Kindergarten teacher, Ki was recently selected as the Early Childhood Education Assembly’s 2020 Social Justice Award Recipient and has received grants from Abolitionist Teaching Network and VELA fund to create an early childhood curricular zine to support young children and their families as they learn from home.
It was their experiences with the carceral state of schooling and the trauma enacted upon Black children in these systems, that galvanized them to create #BlackTeachersMatter, Black Teachers Mentor and Equitable Schools years ago. As their ideologies and experiences with abolition evolved, they dissolved Equitable Schools and created @WhyAbolition.
Their commitment to creating safe, inclusive and liberatory spaces for BIPOC queer & trans artists also led them to create Sisters Unsigned, an intimate concert series that amplifies the voices of independent queer, trans, gender and genre expansive BIPOC artists and creators.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Exploring Food & Culture Through a Black Lens
At BLACK FOODIE, we’re focused on telling diverse Black stories through showcasing and celebrating the people, places, and plates that represent the diaspora.
Whether we’re creating social content or developing a TV show, you can be sure that our content is engaging, informative, and above all, authentic. Join us!
In 2009, Griner was named the nation’s No. 1 high school women’s basketball player by Rivals.com.[5] She was selected to the 2009 Phoenix MercuryAll-American basketball team.[6] In 2012, she received the Best Female Athlete ESPY Award. In 2013, Griner signed an endorsement deal with Nike.[7] Standing 6 ft 9 in (206 cm) tall, Griner wears a men’s US size 17 shoe and has an arm span of 87.5 in (222 cm).[8][5]
Griner was on the United States women’s Olympic team in 2016, and led them to victory at the Rio Olympics.[9] In 2021, Griner was named to the United States women’s national team for the 2020 Olympics, where she won her second gold medal.[10]
On February 17, 2022, Griner was detained for allegedly bringing vape cartridges containing hashish oil into Sheremetyevo International Airport and is currently in Russian custody.[11] Some US officials have expressed concern that Russia may be using her as leverage in response to the Western sanctions imposed against Russia during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[12][13]
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Demarre McGill has gained international recognition as a soloist, recitalist, chamber and orchestral musician. Winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, he has appeared as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Seattle, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Grant Park, San Diego and Baltimore symphony orchestras and, at age 15, the Chicago Symphony.
Now principal flute of the Seattle Symphony, he previously served as principal flute of the Dallas Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Florida Orchestra, and Santa Fe Opera Orchestra. He recently served as acting principal flute of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and earlier with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
As an educator, Demarre has performed, coached and presented master classes in South Africa, Korea, Japan, Quebec and throughout the United States. With his brother Anthony, he was a speaker and performer at the 2018 League of American Orchestras Conference. He has also served on the faculties of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States, the National Orchestral Institute (NOI) at the University of Maryland, the Orford Music Festival, and participated in Summerfests at the Curtis Institute of Music. In August of 2019, he was named Associate Professor of Flute at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and is an artist-faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival and School.
A founding member of The Myriad Trio, and former member of Chamber Music Society Two, Demarre has participated in the Santa Fe, Marlboro, Seattle and Stellenbosch chamber music festivals, to name a few. He is the co-founder of The Art of Élan and, along with clarinetist Anthony McGill and pianist Michael McHale, founded the McGill/McHale Trio in 2014. Their first CD, “Portraits,” released in August 2017, has received rave reviews, as has “Winged Creatures,”his recording with Anthony McGill and the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. In 2019-20 the McGill/McHale Trio performs at New York City’s 92nd Street Y, as well as in Washington D.C. and on chamber music series throughout the Midwest.
Media credits include appearances on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center, A & E Network’s The Gifted Ones, NBC’s Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, with his brother Anthony when they were teenagers, on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
A native of Chicago, Demarre McGill began studying the flute at age 7 and attended the Merit School of Music. In the years that followed, until he left Chicago, he studied with Susan Levitin. Demarre received his Bachelor’s degree from The Curtis Institute of Music and a Master’s degree at The Juilliard School.
