We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa has said that he was first alerted to the power of language through his grandparents, who were church people: “the sound of the Old Testament informed the cadences of their speech,” Komunyakaa has stated. “It was my first introduction to poetry.” Komunyakaa went on to serve in the Vietnam War as a correspondent; he was managing editor of the Southern Cross during the war, for which he received a Bronze Star. He earned a BA from the University of Colorado Springs on the GI Bill, an MA from Colorado State University, and an MFA from the University of California-Irvine.
In his poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa weaves together personal narrative, jazz rhythms, and vernacular language to create complex images of life in peace and in war. In the New York Times, Bruce Weber described Komunyakaa as “Wordsworthian,” adding that the poet has a “worldly, philosophic mind… His poems, many of which are built on fiercely autobiographical details—about his stint in Vietnam, about his childhood—deal with the stains that experience leaves on a life, and they are often achingly suggestive without resolution.”
Komunyakaa’s early work includes the poetry collections Dedications & Other Darkhorses (1977) and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979). Widespread recognition came with the publication of Copacetic (1984), which showcased what would become his distinctive style: vernacular speech layered with syncopated rhythms from jazz traditions. His next book I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986) won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), a book that treated his experience in the Vietnam War in stark and personal terms, won the Dark Room Poetry Prize. It is regularly described as one of the best books of war poetry from the Vietnam War. The title means “crazy” in Vietnamese and was used by locals to refer to American soldiers fighting in their country. The collection explores the experience of African American soldiers in the war as well as captures the embattled Southeast Asian landscape. In the New York Times Book Review, Wayne Koestenbaum remarked that Komunyakaa’s casual juxtaposition of nature and war belied the artistry at work. “Though his tersely-phrased chronicles, like documentary photographs, give us the illusion that we are facing unmediated reality, they rely on a predictable though powerful set of literary conventions.” Koestenbaum added, “The book works through accretion, not argument; the poems are all in the present tense, which furthers the illusion that we are receiving tokens of a reality untroubled by language.”
Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1994) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the collection, Komunyakaa pulls together all of the most powerful strands of his poetic vision. The images are those of the South and its culture, of Black resilience to white supremacy, of war in Southeast Asia, of urban experience, and of musical forms such as blues and jazz. The language is simple, laid out in short lines. As Robyn Selman put it in a Voice Literary Supplement review, “Most of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems rise to a crescendo, like that moment in songs one or two beats before the bridge, when everything is hooked-up, full-blown.”
Komunyakaa’s other works include Warhorses (2008); Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (2006); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); and Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent collections of poetry include The Chameleon Couch (2011), Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker (2013), Emperor of Water Clocks (2015), and Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth: New and Selected Poems (2021). He is the author of the verse play Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (2006) and in collaboration with composer T.J. Anderson the opera libretto Slip Knot.
In 2011 Komunyakaa was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999-2005. He has taught at numerous institutions including University of New Orleans, Indiana University, and Princeton University. Currently he serves as Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
One original song every week
Published: 2/21/2020 8:42:11 AM Modified: 2/21/2020 8:41:59 AM
Many of us make New Year’s resolutions, but we’ve usually given up on them by the time Groundhog Day arrives. That’s not been the case with the urban reggae group SayReal. The band vowed that in 2020 it would release a new song every Friday on Soundcloud and on its Facebook page. The group also vowed to make sure the song on Facebook would also have an accompanying video. That’s right: 52 original songs in one year.
It’s an ambitious project that is taking a lot of work, but it has paid off, as the band has found a new way to engage with its audience, all the while keeping the focus on the music and the messages within it.
Listeners will get a chance to hear some of these new songs played live when SayReal and Rebelle perform at the Perch at Hawks and Reed Performing Arts Center on 289 Main St. tomorrow night, Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m. (performance took place in 2020)
SayReal is based in Los Angeles but has roots are here in the Pioneer Valley, where the group has been visiting for the past couple of months. The group is led by Naia Kete, who was born in Northampton and lived in various parts of Western Massachusetts including Shutesbury and Leverett when she was growing up. She is the group’s lead vocalist, lyricist and bassist. She is joined in SayReal by her younger brother, Imani Elijah on keyboards and drums, and her longtime boyfriend, Lee John on drums and guitar.
The daughter of musicians, Kete has been making music with her family including Imani for as long as she can remember. She got her musical start singing with her family’s reggae band the Black Rebels, which became Rebelle and is led by her mother, Kalpana Devi and step-father, Emmanuel Manou. Kete later launched a solo career and started performing at various local venues. Her backing band included Imani and about 12 years ago, she met Lee John, who joined her band. Like Kete and her brother, John’s parents are musicians. His father is guitarist Earl Slick, best known for his work with David Bowie, and his mom is Jean Millington, who co-founded the band Fanny with her sister Institute for the Musical Arts co-founder June Millington.
Not long after John started working with Kete, the three musicians moved to California and started busking on the streets. Kete’s powerful, expressive voice landed her on the second season of The Voice, where she made it to the top 24 on Team Blake. The group continued to make music under her name, but after musician/ producer Randy Jackson confronted her after a gig and pointed out that the music was bigger than her, she got to thinking about forming a proper band.
“I asked Lee and Imani ‘how about would you feel about being a band?’” said Kete in a recent phone conversation. “Because the music never was about me. The music that I love to perform is sparking personal musical and cultural evolution, and we are all on board with that.”
Kete said the band works because they are a family, and theirs is an egoless collaboration where they give each other the freedom to express themselves however they want.
SayReal released its full-length debut “Unarmed and Ready” in September. The group released four singles from the project, prior to its official release, and noticed that with each songs release came a spark in activity – everything from increased plays on Spotify to more activity on Facebook. “So we thought the more we release the more we have the opportunity to gain more fans and grow our community,” said Kete about one of the ideas that sparked the 52 releases project.
The fact that this project would allow them to dig deeper into the content and message of the music also made it appealing. Kete said, however, that what really appealed to her most about the idea was that it was a way that SayReal could help combat all the hatred and division that is so prevalent these days, especially on social media.
“The thing that I love about music is that it inspires this feeling of awe and wonderment,” she said. “I really wholeheartedly feel that the right song has the opportunity to open a person’s heart and change a person’s mind in an instant. It really is a universal language, so for me, 52 songs is 52 opportunities to do just that: to open people’s hearts, and for all of us to be able to find common ground and speak a common language.” Support the Recorder. Subscribe Today
So far, the songs they have released is a diverse bunch that range from the love song “Take it Slow,” released last week in honor of Valentine’s Day, to “Photograph,” a tune that explores the current obsession with snapping pictures to post on social media. While all of RealSay’s music is rooted in reggae, rock, pop and soul sounds can be heard in their work, all the while the message remains positive and life-affirming.
In the accompanying videos, the band shares a behind-the-scenes look at their songwriting process and the meaning behind some of the songs.
Some of the songs were written before the start of the year and others they are writing now specifically for this series.
“I’ve been working harder than I ever have before, but it’s a welcomed challenge and the kind of work I believe in,” said Kete, adding that at only two months in, she’s not sure where the project will ultimately go. “Who knows? It could be a new business model for us. It is all an experiment.”
SayReal is also in the midst of running a GoFundMe campaign to help finance a new tour van. And, Kete has other side projects: she works as a life coach supporting women in weight loss, fitness, relationship goals and more. She’s also launched an online project through which she is encouraging women to play bass and posts a video online every Monday of her playing the bass lines of the new songs.
“It started when I was vocal coaching at IMA (the Institute for the Musical Arts in Goshen) last summer,” Kete said. “I was so inspired by female musicians, and would like to see more of them, particularly in reggae music, so it became my mission to encourage more women to play bass.”
But SayReal’s greatest passion remains playing live and inspiring fans with messages of empowerment and positivity.
“It’s about being honest and transparent about all the emotions and feelings and experiences that life has to offer — whether that is on a personal level, in a relationship or something happening in politics or in our culture,” Kete said. “It is just being real and honest about sharing your perspective and sharing your heart — so that is what I try and do in my music.”
Sheryl Hunter is a music writer who lives in Easthampton. Her work has appeared in various regional and national magazines. You can contact her at soundslocal@yahoo.com.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
This is part a series of features from All Things Considered on first-time Grammy nominees, ahead of the April 3 awards.You can read and listen to profiles on Saweetie, Arooj Aftab and Barlow & Bear.
Amid the thunderous echo of pins colliding, Jimmie Allen unspools his professional ambitions.
He has already created his own production company, written a children’s book and been the executive music producer for a Netflix show, but he wants to do a stint on Broadway as Aaron Burr. He wants to start his own clothing line. He wants to open a charter music school with a curriculum that doesn’t revolve around testing. He wants to do a reality TV show with his wife. He wants to train as a WWE wrestler. And he has this idea for a sitcom.
“In my head, it’s kind of about me moving from Delaware to Nashville,” Allen says. “It’s kind of like a comedy, and it plays on racial stereotypes a lot. It’s pretty much saying what everybody is thinking, but afraid to say.”
The 36-year-old country musician, nominated for Best New Artist at this year’s Grammy Awards, is sitting down in Tusculum Strike & Spare in Nashville, Tenn. Over the last few years, he’s become something of a regular, dropping by several times a week for a few hours with his kids, or the friends he conscripted into a bowling league. “It’s cool here to just hang out and be around real people,” he says.
For Allen, bowling is a break from music: Both his own work and Nashville’s social scene of striving artists, which he admits he finds frustrating.
“I would just meet other people that wanted to be artists that were just mad that nothing was happening, but yet they weren’t doing anything to make anything happen, either,” he says. “They would just go get drunk at night, work during the day, go get drunk — so you don’t want it.”
Even at bowling, Allen puts in the work. He says his average has jumped steadily: 110 to 125 to 130, 160 after joining a few leagues, now around 190.
“Once I start something, I get obsessed with it to where I want to get better,” he says. “I’m super competitive.”
Turns out, so is his 7-year-old son, who loves bowling even if his dad won’t let him put up the bumpers like other kids.
“Ain’t no bumpers in life,” Allen says. Instead, he’s been teaching his son that if you don’t want your bowl to end up in the gutter, you have to put in the work and learn to control where the ball goes.
It’s easy to trace Allen’s competitive nature and self-assuredness to the influence of his parents, who he says “never hit me with the whole, ‘Well, you should have a backup plan.'” The Allen household didn’t believe in them.
“I told my mom when I was 5 years old I was going to be an entertainer,” he says. “And she said, ‘Yeah, you will.'”
Even if Allen’s professional ambitions stretch across film, television and theatre, music has always come first. “The goal was to do music and then, the older you get, you figure out who you are,” he says.
Who Allen is — his solid work ethic, his straightforward demeanor, his desire for something real — has been irrevocably shaped by his hometown of Milton, Del., which he calls “a little redneck town,” the kind of place surrounded by chicken plants and soybean fields, where people pick up their groceries directly from the farm. You can imagine how radio has the power to transform the many hours spent driving from one isolated locale to another from quotidian activity into a pastime.
Allen says less than a thousand people lived in Milton in the ’90s when he was growing up and “everybody listened to country music,” including his father. He remembers getting in trouble for repeatedly changing the radio station in his father’s truck every time the latter got out to buy cigarettes.
“Country music’s all my father listened to,” he says. “Nothing else.”
Allen was exposed to other genres at school, where kids played music from their Walkmans and he taught himself the vocal styles of Christian music, R&B, rock and the blues. As he got older, he says he “continued to fall in love with other genres of music but then I realized, OK, for me and who I am as a person, a country music world is for me.”
He talks about genres of music as their own languages, with unique storytelling histories and idioms. For Allen, country’s lyricism — its emphasis on family and small town life, with songs about drinking and songs about the freedom of an open road — was the language that best expressed his own life and experiences.
When he sings about rolling out to his “favorite fishin’ hole” in “Get Country,” he can name the spot — the Moose Lodge, where they’ll make him a specialty “Jimmie burger” (two patties with cheese, ketchup and Miracle Whip on each, and an egg over easy in the middle, with lettuce and extra raw onions). And he does name the spot in “Home Sweet Hometown,” an ode to Milton in which he lovingly describes its “handful of red lights down main” with its “courthouse clock not tickin'”, and he name checks real convenience store Quick Stop, where “the same old lady” makes his breakfast favorites.
“Everything that I write, I somehow tie it back into who I am and how I grew up,” he says.
Allen is coming off a banner year: He won both New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards (CMAs) and New Male Artist of the Year at the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards, the latter of which he hosted this year alongside Dolly Parton and Gabby Barrett. He released his sophomore album, Bettie James Gold Edition, and toured with Brad Paisley.
But Allen remembers his early years in Nashville when he’d play showcases for unsigned artists and watch other people who performed at half his level walk away with a deal at the end of the night.
“I had this one guy tell me straight up, he was like, ‘Jimmie, I like you, but I’m not sure how someone that looks like you will go over well in country music,'” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Bro, you got Charley Pride!'”
He says at the time, Pride was the only Black country artist working at a national level, the exception that proved the rule in the minds of industry gatekeepers. “It pisses me off just the way he said it,” Allen says.
“A lot of people still think that if you’re a Black person, you shouldn’t wear a certain thing or sing a certain type of music because it might not be appealing to the white listener,” he says, “Even though white artists wear the same thing and they’ve said nothing to them.”
It can be exhausting to justify your existence in a place where you belong, and Allen is candid about still fielding not-so-subtle questions about what exactly a Black man is doing in country music 15 years on. His strategy? Staring interviewers down until they either rephrase the question or move on. This is not a man who loses a game of chicken. But in 2022, there are now too many exceptions — artists like Mickey Guyton, Kane Brown, Darius Rucker, Blanco Brown, Breland, Willie Jones and Reyna Roberts — to prove the rule that country music can’t be a Black artist’s game. And the sound and scope of commercial country itself is changing to keep up, with slicker production and sonic elements like hi-hats and stuttering beat drops that nod to hip-hop’s new reign as the dominant genre in the U.S.
Ultimately, Allen, who has songs with artists like Babyface, Nelly and Pitbull alongside country mainstays Keith Urban and Tim McGraw on his album, isn’t interested in splitting hairs about genre. “What makes a country artist a country artist? It ain’t about how many fiddles and mandolins you got in your song,” he says. “It’s that you’re a country woman or country boy.”
Allen built his career through the apparatus of the country music industry, and hopes that others who look like him will see his success and know that they can do it, too.
“I tell people all the time: Come on over to country music. There’s Black people in the industry over here at record labels, radio promotion, marketing, management,” he says. “We get more people of color over here by more people of color coming.”
Allen sincerely believes that country is “a genre of music that is for everyone,” and although it shouldn’t be his responsibility to change anyone’s mind, his success and nomination as a the only country artist in a general music Grammy category might help tear some stuffing out of the strawman of the white country listener.
“Music is the best thing to expand your brain and help you learn to accept that people are different, that things are different, and what you might be afraid of because it’s different might actually be something you might love,” he says.
There’s still so much Allen wants to do, with his aspirational list of collaborators stretching far beyond the gates of Nashville. His heart, after all, has always belonged a little closer to home.
You can leave your hometown, but it never leaves you. For Allen, music may be a universal language that transcends backgrounds, but country music has its own private magic.
“I wish I could go back to those days, when the town was the whole world,” he sings on the rose-tinted single “Freedom Was A Highway.”
In that song’s music video, Allen finds a glowing guitar on the side of a wooded road; he uses it to breathe a band into existence and reminisce about the youthful opportunism of his teenage years in Milton.
“When you’re seventeen and drivin’, you don’t think about the road runnin’ out,” he sings.
Allen’s road in Nashville is a long way from running out, but what they don’t tell you when you spend your youth dreaming of the road that takes you away is that the highway runs both ways. One day when all those small town memories are golden, a song will have the power to take you home.
The audio for this story was produced by Jonaki Mehta and edited by Christopher Intagliata. The article was written by Cyrena Touros.
Neuroscience student Charleese Williams remembers the anxiety she felt last summer as she prepared to present research at a conference. Standing at the podium, in front of an audience of 60 people, her nerves got the better of her.
“I froze and I had a panic attack in front of everyone,” Williams said. “I remember just shaking. It was really rough.”
Williams, a junior, said she’s worked hard to overcome her anxiety. And today, she’s feeling a sense of affirmation after recently being named the 2021 Rising Black Scientist in the undergraduate category by the scientific journal Cell Press.
The award is meant to break down barriers and create opportunities for minority students by providing funds to support professional development.
In her winning essay, Williams reflects on trying to be a role model for her 4-year-old twin sisters.
“They look at their little anatomy books with adoration and think of me as a scientist,” Williams wrote. “I look down at them, and I feel like one. Then, I look up at the scientists around me, and I don’t. I’ve never been one to take heed in any stereotypes, but they loom over me constantly in my professional journey.”
Williams will receive a cash award from the journal and scientific supplies from Cell Signaling Technology to support her education.
A graduate of Grayson High School, Williams works as a research assistant in the lab of Dan Cox, director of Georgia State University’s Neuroscience Institute. The Cox lab’s research involves studying sensory systems in fruit flies.
Williams often spends her day in the lab on precision work, such as sorting male flies from female flies for reproduction and placing larvae on a cold metal plate or rubbing a small brush against their backs to observe and record their reactions.
“I was so happy when Dr. Cox said I could join the lab,” Williams said. “A lot of people don’t know the extent that scientists are pushing the borders of our knowledge and I want to be a part of that community and contribute to the field of neuroscience.”
Cox said it’s unusual for an undergraduate student to be as engaged in research as Williams is. Reading her essay reinforced the importance of training a new generation of scientists from all backgrounds, he said.
“It reminded me why I love my career and why I relish supporting and mentoring talented young minds who, through their daily actions, large and small, make the world a better place,” Cox said.
Williams, who also serves on the Neuroscience Institute’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, hopes to create a science-based media platform for younger children of marginalized groups so they can see themselves represented in scientific fields.
“Creating safe spaces and support systems for members of the scientific community and the younger generation, as well as consistently framing my thinking in a socially conscious way, are my ultimate goals, no matter what specific area of research I decide to focus on,” Williams said.
Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1899, Young soon moved with her family to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. The family was poor and much time and resources were expended in the care of her disabled mother.
In 1916, Young enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. to study music. She wrote in the yearbook: “Not failure, but low aim is a crime.”[3] She did not take her first science course until 1921.[4] Though her grades were poor at the beginning of her college career, some of her teachers saw promise in her. One of these was Ernest Everett Just, a prominent black biologist and head of the Zoology department at Howard. Young graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1923. Just tried unsuccessfully to help her to gain funding for graduate school,[3] but in 1924 Young began studying for her master’s degree at the University of Chicago, which she received in 1926.[1]
Young worked with Ernest Everett Just for many years, teaching as an assistant professor at Howard University from 1923 to 1935.[5] Research was done during the summers. Young assisted Just in his research from 1927 through 1930, but although her assistance was noted in his grant applications, her name does not appear as a coauthor in the resulting publications.[5]
While studying at Chicago, she was asked to join Sigma Xi, a scientific research society, which was an unusual honor for a master’s student. In 1924 her first article, “On the excretory apparatus in Paramecium” was published in the journal Science,[6] making her the first African American woman to research and professionally publish in this field.
Career
Ernest Everett Just invited Young to work with him during summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts beginning in 1927. While there, they worked on researching the fertilization process in marine organisms, as well as the process of hydration and dehydration in living cells. In 1929, Young became interim department head for the zoology department at Howard University for the time while Just was in Europe seeking grant money. Young’s eyes were permanently damaged by the ultraviolet rays used in the experiments conducted at Howard for Just.[3]
In the fall of 1929, Young returned to the University of Chicago to begin her doctorate degree under the direction of Frank Rattray Lillie. Lillie had been a mentor of Just while both were involved with the Marine Biological Laboratory. However, in 1930 she failed to pass her qualifying exams, and for a time, disappeared from the scientific community. She returned to Howard University to teach and continued working with Just at the Marine Biological Laboratory during the summers.
However, around 1935, rumors started circulating that there was a romance between Just and Young, and in 1936 they had a huge confrontation. Later that year she was fired, ostensibly because she missed classes. In her words, “The situation here is so cruel and cowardly that every spark of sentiment that I have held for Howard is cold.”[3] She used this setback as an opportunity to try again to obtain a Ph.D. In June 1937, she went to the University of Pennsylvania, studying with Lewis Victor Heilbrunn (another scientist she met at the Marine Biological Laboratory) and graduated with her doctorate in 1940.
Young contributed a great deal of work to science. She studied the effects of direct and indirect radiation on sea urchin eggs, on the structures that control the salt concentration in paramecium, as well as hydration and dehydration of living cells.
Personal life
Young was never married. In addition to the occupation-related damage to her eyes, she had financial struggles, and was the sole support for her ill mother, Lillie Young, until she died.[3] Away from Howard, her options as an African-American woman scientist were limited to teaching positions without access to research facilities and support.[3] In the 1950s, she hospitalized herself for mental health problems.[3] Roger Arliner Young died on November 9, 1964[1] in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Honors
Roger Arliner Young was recognized in 2005 in a Congressional Resolution along with four other African American women “who have broken through many barriers to achieve greatness in science.”[7] The others honored were Ruth Ella Moore (“who in 1933 became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in natural science from the Ohio State University“), Euphemia Lofton Haynes (“who in 1943 became the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Catholic University of America“), Shirley Ann Jackson (“who in 1973 became the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology“), and Mae Jemison (“a physician and the first African American woman in space”).
A group of environmental and conservation groups established the Roger Arliner Young (RAY) Marine Conservation Diversity Fellowship in Young’s honor, to support young African Americans who want to become involved in marine environmental conservation work.[8]
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Ira Wallace ambles around the butcher block countertop in the kitchen she shares with a community of farmers in central Virginia. She has separated a single leaf from the large baskets of unusual, parti-colored collard greens she got from a friend’s farm. Its creamy-white veins stretch upward across the green leaf, narrowing as they reach purple-tinged tips.
“Purple is a color that develops in the winter much more strongly,” Wallace explains, as she probes the frost-damaged leaf. “But look at that color! And that’s anthocyanins. They’re supposed to make you healthier.”
These aren’t commercially produced collard greens typically sold in supermarkets or restaurants. Many of the heirloom varieties Wallace and her friends grow are rare, some once teetering on extinction. Other types can likely be found in backroad gardens of aging stewards, but countless varieties have vanished in the U.S.
There was once a kaleidoscope of diversity in collards, as people diligently collected and replanted seeds, passing them from one generation to the next to preserve the qualities they found most important. Collards — an inexpensive, nutrient-rich vegetable — became a staple for many Southern families, especially African Americans trying to feed their families healthy food year-round.
“Where I grew up, if you didn’t eat greens at least five days a week, you were funny — ya know?” Wallace joked. “Like, what is wrong with you?”
Wallace pulled a lot of those greens from her grandmother’s Florida garden, but fewer and fewer Americans cultivate home vegetable gardens these days. There are fewer small farms, too. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the U.S. has shrunk from about 6 million to 2 million over the past 75 years, while the average size of farms has doubled. As farms and gardens vanished, so too did the heirloom collards.
Now the race is on to preserve what remains.
These collards have names: Meet “Big Daddy Greasy Green” and “Granny Hobbs”
Wallace, 73, is doing a lot of the work as part of a group of seed savers, farmers, activists and academics, known collectively as the Heirloom Collard Project. They want to preserve and reintroduce people to rarer collard varieties and connect with older seed stewards before their stories are lost to time.
“If you want to save a seed, it’s good for it to be a good and tasty and productive seed,” Wallace says. “But a seed with the story endures.”
Collards like “Fuzzy’s Cabbage Collard,” “Big Daddy Greasy Green Collard,” “Granny Hobbs” and “Tabitha Dykes” have been preserved by the Heirloom Collard Project, and each tells an evocative story of stewards who faithfully saved and shaped their collard variety over a lifetime.
Aside from quirky names, many have unusual colors or textures. They tend to be sweeter or spicier, more tender or more disease- and cold-resistant than regular greens.
“When you grow your own food, when you save your own seeds, that’s an ancient tradition that’s been passed down,” says Amirah Mitchell, who grew up eating collards in Boston but had never tasted the “Green Glaze” variety until she met Wallace.
Amirah Mitchell, founder of Sistah Seeds, stands in the greenhouse at the incubator farm where she runs her Black heirloom seed business in Emmaus, Pa. Kriston Jae Bethel for NPR
“Oh my goodness,” says Mitchell, who recently launched Sistah Seeds, a Pennsylvania farm that specializes in producing seed, rather than produce. “It was so good. I absolutely adored them because they were a little bit more tender than the other varieties. They looked prettier even when they had a little bit of bug damage on them.”
Historians trace the roots of collards to the gardens of enslaved African Americans in the South. Collards were “superfood powerhouses for the enslaved and poor whites,” said Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian and James Beard Award winner, during the Project’s 2020 Collard Week festival. The leafy vegetable, he said, provided much-needed nutrients in a diet that typically included hominy, corn, salt fish and pork.
Collards continue to be a staple in Soul Food restaurants and many Black households — enjoyed throughout the year and especially as part of holiday meals. “They remind me of Thanksgiving at my grandma’s house,” says Mitchell. “That is a time when we would never go without them.”
Researchers logged 12,000 miles to find America’s “Collard Belt”
Mitchell, 29, and her generation will be crucial to ensuring that the mission continues as it’s passed on by an aging generation of gardeners and seed savers.
“That’s a piece of this struggle,” says Edward Davis, a professor at Emory & Henry College in southwest Virginia. “It would be great if a whole lot of these seed savers were still doing it, but they’re mostly dead [now].”
Davis studies cultural geography, and in 2000 he embarked on a project to define what made the American South unique and cohesive. He figured collards would be a good place to start. He quickly learned that the origins of the modern plant are difficult to trace, and collards are not as ubiquitous as he first thought.
“People will look at the South and say, ‘One thing that tells you you’re in the South is collards,'” says Davis. “But that’s not true. There’s lots of places in the South that don’t [grow] collards.”
Davis and his colleague John T. Morgan scoured yellowed garden logs from the 18th and 19th centuries, searching for clues to the collards’ origins. They wanted to define the American “Collard Belt” and found a kindred soul in the USDA’s Mark Farnham. He was a research geneticist at the time, in charge of the agency’s collection of Brassica oleracea seed — a wildly diverse species of vegetable that includes kale, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and, yes, collards.
Farnham had already noticed a decline in the availability of heirloom collard seeds and began collecting some from savers around his home in Charleston, S.C., as early as 1992. With Farnham’s help, Davis and Morgan got a USDA grant to search the backroads of the South, looking for collard growers — particularly gardeners who saved and shared heirloom seeds. Heirloom vegetables are plants with a lineage that goes back at least several decades and can reproduce without human hybridizing or intervention. Together with Farnham and a Clemson University researcher named Powell Smith, Davis and Morgan hit the road.
“I got to where I could pretty much tell it was an heirloom collard patch from the road,” Davis said. “Then you’d go to the door … and you’d say, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ve got some pretty good collards. Are you a seed saver?'” Davis said he was always greeted with a wide grin, “and man, would they open up — Black or white person.”
The researchers often traveled in January and February, when winter-hardy collard plants were the only green in gardens, making them visible from the road. But the limited daylight hours posed problems. “You’re driving as fast as you can on these country roads to find a collard garden before dark,” Davis says.
They collected samples from 78 seed savers during the trips, which covered more than 12,000 miles across 10 Southern states. What they found was a tight grouping of collard seed savers in the eastern half of North Carolina and the low country of South Carolina. Outside these areas, they were surprised to find hardly anyone saving collard seeds, though there are commercial farmers and home gardeners growing the few conventional varieties that exist.
The samples are stored at the USDA’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit, where they can be kept indefinitely and regrown periodically to maintain the genetics. Their work is chronicled in a book published in 2015.
The team’s itineraries were thorough, but they didn’t get to every collard seed saver out there. On a later, solo trip — after the USDA grant had expired — Davis found a man whose collards are the stuff of local legend, grown from a seed whose pedigree goes back well over 100 years.
A dying man passes on his family heirloom
Deep in the deepest southeastern county of North Carolina, among the swamps and tobacco fields, Levi Grissett has just planted collards for the 48th season. For all but a few of his 73 years, he has lived in Brunswick County, on his grandfather’s land.
Grissett did a tour in Vietnam after high school before he found a good manufacturing job back home in nearby Wilmington and married a beautiful girl named Frances. After Grissett’s grandfather and father passed away, the couple bought a parcel of the family farm in 1973, and he’s been there ever since. Grissett never farmed professionally like his grandfather and namesake uncle, but he’s always been a gardener.
“I know this sounds crazy,” he says with a deep chuckle, “but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I say, ‘Oh Lord — please hurry up and let it get daylight so I can get in my garden.’ “
Funny thing is, Grissett never acquired a taste for the vegetable that has made him something of a local legend. “The first year I got married, I was living in a mobile home and had a garden behind the house, and my wife was standing there in the kitchen,” he says. “She come out, and she said, ‘Old boy, why don’t you plant some collards? I love collards.’ And from that year on, I never missed a year from planting collards until my wife passed.”
Grissett acquired his first seeds from an older woman who lived nearby, and they were an immediate success. “They looked like a work of art,” he says. People admired those early crops, especially the older folks who appreciated the flavor and texture of heirloom varieties.
Grissett wasn’t saving his own seeds yet and couldn’t find any more heirloom collard seeds to plant after his neighbor died. “Most the old folks died out. And when they died out, the old timey collards went with ’em,” Grissett said.
He continued to plant conventional collards until finally, in 2008, he acquired some “old timey” seeds again — this time from his friend A.D. Munn. These seeds were good, but they also had a story.
As Grissett tells it, many years ago, Munn’s stepfather, Quincy Harvey, was friends with a man who grew gorgeous, tall collards. Harvey always coveted these collards, but his friend never shared the seeds. They were a family treasure, passed down for over a hundred years. When that man was on his deathbed, he called Harvey to the house and finally shared the precious seeds. Harvey grew the seeds, and then Munn, before Grissett got his hands on some.
The first year, Grissett said, the plants grew so tall that even Munn was shocked. “We went out there and measured that collard, it was 54 inches tall. And it kept right on growing till it grew …8 feet tall,” Grissett says proudly.
Grissett’s wife — who encouraged him to plant collards in the first place — died the following year, in the spring of 2009. “After my wife passed, for three years it took me so far down the tube I didn’t even plant anything,” he says.
It wasn’t until 2013, what would have been Grissett’s 40th wedding anniversary, that he decided to garden again and planted Munn’s seeds. By August of that year, you could spot the collards from the road. That’s exactly what happened when Davis, the professor, was on one of his coastal Carolina seed-searching expeditions. As he’d done so many times, Davis got out of his car and knocked on a stranger’s door.
“I think you have some very special collards back there,” Davis told Grissett.
Grissett vividly remembers that day as the sweet fulfillment of something akin to a prophecy. “I would tell my wife all down through the years: I hope that one day a researcher would come by and look at my collards,” Grissett says. “I told her that the first year. … After 40 long years, he came — 40 years since I told my wife that.”
Lessons from the civil rights movement inspire a seed saver
Stella Brown raised Wallace after the child’s mother died. Wallace often tagged along as her Grandma Stella worked to register Black voters around Tampa, Fla. When they got discouraged, the older woman would urge perseverance: “We do this because we need change. … And if we don’t try, that [change] won’t happen.”
Collards have to vernalize — experience the cold of winter — to produce seeds. Here, Ira Wallace inspects a small patch of collards that have entered the seed-producing stage of life at Acorn Community Farm in central Virginia. Eze Amos for NPR
Wallace said those words still resonate when she thinks about the modern seed saving movement. “So, if that was true about voting and civil rights, I think it’s true about changing what foods are available to all the communities that are underserved and sold not-good-for-you food.”
Wallace said she sometimes gets a lukewarm reception about seed saving from some African American communities. But when she introduced the Heirloom Collard Project, the enthusiasm was noticeably different.
“People who aren’t your usual suspects are like, ‘Let’s try it. I care about collards. It brings me back memories of home and family and community, and I want to carry that on.'”
Over the years, Wallace’s pioneering work has become widely known. The seed saving movement is defined by its collaborative rather than competitive nature, an ethos to which she’s contributed greatly. Philip Kauth, the former director of seed preservation at Seed Savers Exchange, calls Wallace “a legend in the seed saving world.”
She is a regular at festivals and conferences. In 2007, she spearheaded the founding of the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, a festival showcasing heritage vegetables from the Colonial period. It was there, in 2016, that Wallace met with Davis, Farnham and representatives from several seed saving organizations to create the Heirloom Collard Project.
Together, Seed Savers Exchange and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange requested more than 60 heirloom collard varieties from the USDA’s collection of Davis and Morgan’s seeds and began adding the seeds to their yearly offerings. In 2020, Wallace and the Heirloom Collard Project held a virtual Collard Week festival. That’s when she asked Mitchell, the up-and-coming seed steward, to do a workshop on saving collard seed.
“I was in the middle of finals for my last semester at school,” recalls Mitchell, a Temple University graduate. “But I couldn’t say no to her — you know, no one says no to Ira Wallace,” Mitchell says with a laugh.
Last year she joined Davis, Wallace and others at a meeting about the Heirloom Collard Project’s future. Mitchell now plans to grow several varieties from the project — including one she’s especially excited about. The “Moses Smith Yellow Cabbage Collard” is an African American stewarded heirloom that hails from the same region of North Carolina as Mitchell’s ancestors. She plans to sell the seeds next year, once they’ve matured. This is key to the project’s vision of finding new, energetic seed stewards to revive heirloom varieties.
The Heirloom Collard Project is hoping to find grants to help finance their work. The project also wants to identify varieties best suited for commercial use, such as the “Miss Annie Pearl Counselman Collard,” which Seed Savers Exchange added to its catalog in 2021.
“They don’t have to be the next kale, the next superfood,” Mitchell says about collards. “Because they’re special — and they’re special to me.”
Correction April 25, 2022
A previous version of this story incorrectly said that seed samples are stored at the USDA’s National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation. In fact, they’re stored at the USDA’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
The Journey of Black Male Teachers in Early Childhood Classrooms
by Dr. Robert Simmons
I am from a place where being home before the streetlights came on meant just that. I am from a neighborhood in Detroit where drugs and guns were more common than schoolbooks. I am from a place where milkcrate basketball hoops brought out the best in us. I am from a place where my past informed my “why” for becoming a Black male teacher. I am a Black male teacher from here to eternity.
On a fall day in 1997, I walked into a classroom with 25 eight-year-old Black children from the same neighborhood in Detroit. Their eyes looked like mine. Their hair looked like mine. Their potential looked like mine. Yet — I was the first Black male teacher they had ever experienced. Those moments as a Black male teacher in the classroom will live forever in my heart. My students taught me lessons about resilience and faith and demonstrated daily that their brilliance was more than a standardized test performance — something deeply rooted in their eternal optimism, despite tremendous odds. Now, years later as a Black male educator, I have found myself talking to a new generation of Black male teachers who teach in early childhood classrooms. I find myself talking as a friend, mentor, advisor, and researcher. Certainly, some things have changed since 1997, however, the profound need for Black male educators has not.
Recent discussions in K-12 and teacher preparation programs have highlighted the need for more Black male educators in schools and communities. It is worth acknowledging this new sense of urgency because Black male teachers only represent two percent of teachers in the classroom. Furthermore, we must acknowledge both the and the community-based efforts — the Griot Program in Detroit, Call Me Mister in South Carolina, and Men Equipped to Nurture in Maryland, to name a few — that addressed this issue without the funding now pumped into various non-profits founded by white leaders. While critics of these initiatives have suggested that the rationale for this renewed interest is a desire to improve the academic outcomes of Black children and enhancing students’ sense of belonging — there is little attention given to the sense of belonging Black male teachers in early childhood classrooms may or may not be experiencing.
Isolation and alienation is part of our journey
The desks were small. The classrooms had lots of colors. The walls were plastered with all sorts of images of Black leaders and images of Africa. At the front of these early childhood classrooms were Black male teachers. Their deep voices echoed through the hallways when the doors opened. Their compassion for students — all Black children — was palpable from wiping tears from students’ eyes that struggled with the content, and hugging those who needed a warm embrace. That is how we as Black male teachers ensured a sense of belonging for students. During my visits to their classrooms and conversations over coffee, I realized these Black men did their work in the spirit of bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress, 1994) — their work was about the freedom and liberation of Black children.
One of the most poignant conversations I had with the three Black men was about their struggle to find a sense of belonging, not only in their schools but in the school district. They were the only Black male teachers in the building and felt isolated in faculty and staff meetings. Yet — their white colleagues decided that they were the caretakers of all the “naughty” Black male students and, when needed, sent these kids to their classrooms, even in the middle of their instructional time. Understandably, these men were outraged, not just at the assertion that they could support and mentor Black students, but with the ways in which their white colleagues framed the behaviors of Black students. With tears in his eyes, Malcolm, the youngest educator in the group, told me, “Black kids need to be loved. They don’t need to be fixed; they need to be loved. They need hugs at moments of crisis, and to be celebrated at moments of triumph.” Malcolm’s sentiments were echoed among the other Black men along with their frustrations about being the lone Black teacher in their buildings. Despite the overwhelming sense of isolation, they were resolute in their desire to remain in the classroom. Healing the bruises is tough, as one suggested, but they were assured knowing that their ancestors went through far worse.
Embracing the next generation of Black male early childhood teachers
Numerous efforts have emerged over the last five years to support the growth and development of Black men teaching early childhood education. While some are hyperlocal and delivering significant impact, others have taken their work nationally. One of the most significant efforts has been “a grow your own” strategy in Washington DC. The Leading Men Fellowship, hosted by The Literacy Lab, began as a partnership with the Office of Innovation and Research and the Empowering Males of Color Initiative (District of Columbia Public Schools) in 2017. With funding from the Kellogg Foundation, the Leading Men Fellowship was designed to address a significant gap in the DC Public Schools considering only 20 male teachers of color worked in early childhood classrooms in 2017. Utilizing deep training in early literacy instruction, Leading Men Fellows provide one-on-one instruction and serve as role models for many children who have never interacted with a Black man in an instructional capacity within a school setting. The program targets high school graduates one to two years out of high school but also embraces the opportunity for college graduates. With significant success including increasing the number of black male teachers in early childhood, the Leading Men Fellowship has expanded beyond DC and now operates in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Richmond, and Kansas City. Both Torren Cooper (kindergarten teacher in DC) and Kenvin Lacayo (dean of students in DC) are shining examples of targeted efforts to recruit and retain Black male educators in early childhood classrooms.
My memory of wanting to become a teacher goes back to my senior in high school. My passion for teaching can be traced to my deep belief in equity and justice. Despite my passion and deep-seeded desire to be a teacher, Black male teachers in early childhood classrooms remain absent in the lives of far too many youths. This invisibility of Black teachers reminds me of the numbing thoughts Ralph Ellison wrote in the classic 1952 novel, Invisible Man:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who hunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (p. 3)
With thoughts of the Invisible Man on my mind, as well as my lived experience as a Black early childhood teacher, I challenge everyone to embrace their “visibility.” How can we support Black male teachers? How can we recruit Black male teachers? How can we help retain Black male teachers? Let’s start by acknowledging the experiences of those who are currently standing in front of children in early childhood classrooms.
Robert Simmons, EdD began his career as a middle school STEM teacher in the Detroit Public Schools where he was nominated twice as the Walt Disney National Teacher of the Year. Robert currently serves as a senior professorial lecturer of education policy and leadership in the School of Education at American University. Dr. Simmons’ research seeks to illuminate the lived realities of historically marginalized communities across multiple K-12 contexts. Dr. Simmons’ work has been published in several national refereed journals including Urban Education; Journal of African American Males in Urban Education; and the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Mari is a Western Mass based artist, activist and empowered embodied awareness coach. Being a queer BIPOC as well as having privilege from their up bringing, Mari recognizes having access to healing, allies, and education is a birthright and is deeply lacking in a lot of our society. In their work, Mari holds 1:1 and community containers with “Compassion, care, [while] creating sacred space for messy authenticity.” Through the spaces they hold, Mari hopes to spark the intuitive complex of participants as they navigate their daily lives so they can grow towards their desires.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Rav Tiferet Berenbaum is a busy woman these days, but she will absolutely and happily find time to slot you in for a phone call while she runs out to get coffee for herself and her fellow rabbis. The pandemic has not slowed her duties: In addition to her usual work as a clergy member for Temple Beth Zion (TBZ) in Brookline, Berenbaum, who is Black, has been helping lead anti-racism trainings for Jewish communities across the country. Recently, she headed up one held by the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis that also featured Rabbi Ayelet Cohen and noted anti-racism activist Yavilah McCoy. Never miss the best stories and events! Get JewishBoston This Week. Subscribe
So, how did it go?
“You know, it’s hard to read things on Zoom,” Berenbaum said. “When we’re in person you can see people’s body language shifting, you can read the room. On Zoom, not so much. I don’t know if the majority of people are coming for a lesson and then just saying, ‘Oh, that was nice,’ and then going on with their lives in an unexamined way.”
Berenbaum isn’t a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) consultant, but as a prominent Jew of color and a Black rabbi, she said she is nonetheless happy to comment and tell her story.
Berenbaum’s journey toward Judaism started when she was 11, according to a 2019 profile of her in JewishBoston. She grew up in a family that is Southern Baptist, but who were “not regular churchgoers,” she said at the time. Berenbaum officially converted to Judaism her sophomore year of college, and was ordained as a rabbi in 2013. She joined the staff of TBZ in August 2019 as the director of congregational learning and programming.
It’s now been more than 20 years since she converted, and Berenbaum said she still regularly gets treated as an outsider in Jewish spaces.
“People will talk to me and ask me how I know what ‘mazel tov’ means,” she said. “They find out I’m Jewish and say something like, ‘Well…welcome!’ And I’ll think, ‘Well, I’ve been Jewish longer than I haven’t been Jewish, so, thank you?’ I understand it’s coming from people not really knowing what to say, but I really don’t need to be welcomed to Judaism 20 years later.”
She said she still has to assume that whenever she walks into a Jewish space, it’s going to be a white space.
The Massachusetts Board of Rabbis and the New England Council of Rabbis said they don’t keep track of demographic data like race among their membership. Berenbaum said she’s not surprised. “Them not keeping track reinforces the idea that race is not an issue, and this colorblindness erases the experiences of Jews of color,” she said. She pointed to a study conducted by the Jews of Color Initiative in 2019 that one in seven Jews is a Jew of color. “That’s one in every minyan!” Berenbaum said.
In the seminars she has led, Berenbaum said she has “absolutely” faced pushback from community members who seem to believe that there is no racism among Jews.
“It starts with people asking the question of, ‘How are you Jewish?,’” she said, “as if everyone doesn’t have a Jewish journey. Everyone is a Jew by choice. We could all choose to not be Jewish; it’s easy to do these days. But we’re all choosing to be Jews.”
Questions of whiteness and race are difficult conversations for Jews to have, Berenbaum acknowledges. In the U.S. at least, Jews weren’t considered really “white” until relatively recently and the heavy discrimination that many faced for being Jewish is still a living memory.
“Race is new for white people, and that’s part of the problem. Jewish whiteness and the Jewish relationship to racism is different [from a non-Jewish white person’s],” Berenbaum said. “But having these conversations is really important, because racism is prevalent and systemic in our country. And synagogues are starting to have them.”
In talking to JewishBoston.com when she first started the job at TBZ in 2019, Berenbaum had said that Jewish institutions need to recognize that Jews of color often don’t feel safe within them, even if they’re claiming to be an open and inclusive congregation. Simple things that might not register in a white person’s mind as aggressive—like posting a police officer outside a synagogue or subjecting a fellow congregant to “extra questioning,” as she put it, about their background—can signal to a person of color that they are not fully welcome in the space.
Racism is not a good/bad binary, or an on/off switch. “Racism is an ongoing event,” Berenbaum said. “It’s a reality in the lives of Jews of color, and really in everyone’s life; that’s how race works,” she said. “It manifests with micro aggressions and coded language. It’s very present in the Jewish community and needs to be dealt with.”
On the positive side, Berenbaum said that she has seen improvement in the synagogues and communities with which she engages. And she said she’s very proud of the work TBZ has done in terms of anti-racism activism, which she said started long before she even joined the congregation.
“These conversations were already happening,” she said. “They were already conscious of racial justice as a Jewish priority, and I was happy to jump in and support the community.”
TBZ has been engaging in various educational projects around what Berenbaum calls “racial tikkun olam,” such as working on gun violence prevention and housing equality and equity. “All those wounds we’re working to heal are a part of the system of racism,” she said.
And as a result of COVID-19, Berenbaum said she’s noticed that there are more Jews of color who are participating in TBZ’s services. She thinks that’s in part because when they sign into Zoom, they don’t have to encounter anyone else who might question whether they really belong there.
“They don’t have to talk to anybody; there are no micro aggressions,” she said. “There’s safety in attending virtually. I can come in, I can turn my camera off and be fully present in my thoughts and not have to share my Jewish journey or be interrogated. I can just come as a Jewish person in a Jewish space, and then close my computer and go about my day.”
Does she think these numbers will stay up once services can be in person again?
“There’s a lot of work to do. Synagogues really have to do this work of understanding that it’s about saying, ‘You belong here. We’re expecting you. We want you. This is your home too.’”
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Black Electrician Opens Shop In Waltham, Hopes To Set Example
WALTHAM, MA July 9, 2021— Edson Hilaire didn’t always know he would own his own electrical company, but he got the spark back about 17 years ago. He was called to help a woman who wanted a three-way switch in her dining room. She left him to it, and when she came home to exactly what she wanted, she was over the moon.
“It was a good feeling,” he said. “And I thought, ‘let me put a smile on another customer’s face.'”
In May, nearly two decades after becoming an electrician and a decade after starting his business EH Electric and HVAC from his kitchen table and running it there, he opened a brick and mortar in Waltham. He’s one of only a handful of Black-owned electrical companies in the commonwealth, according to a listing in BlackBoston.com.
The backstory
Hilaire was born in Haiti and came to the US with his dad when he was about 8 years old. They landed in Brockton, but after an abusive relationship with his stepmother, he moved to Dorchester to get away from “that madness” and lived with a family member for a couple of years in a part of town that wasn’t considered a safe as a place. By the time he was 11 his dad got divorced, and they moved to Arlington to start a new life. It wasn’t perfect, and he spent time with social services, and institutions before being adopted by a friend’s family, but he credits the move with setting him on the path to owning his own business.
“It was a completely different environment, from the school, the education, the people,” he said.
He was sometimes the only Black kid in his classes, but he doesn’t remember thinking much of it.
“Throughout my life, I never considered myself a minority, I just didn’t really care that I was the only Black kid in my classes, it was just about making friends and chugging along,” he said.
That’s not to say he didn’t encounter racism along the way, he said.
“I hate to talk that way, it’s always around me, being a Black person,” he said. “But I never really dwell, once I have a mission I put my best foot forward and keep going.”
In high school he worked for a friend’s dad’s electrician company, learned pieces of the craft, then went to work for different companies after high school and tried to better himself, put himself through school to get his license.
In 2005, he created the business from side work and word of mouth. He prided himself on being thorough and thoughtful. He named his business EH Electric, and he was the sole employee, and worked nights while he worked his 40-hour day job. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home until 11 p.m.
“I had to make sacrifices,” he said,”because I just knew the company would get to this point.”
He put his money aside, hoping to start his own business one day. Every three years or so, he was able to add employees. And then, earlier this year, his side business got so big that he was able to open a brick and mortar with 10 employees in the city where he’s lived for the past four years with his wife, and now two young children.
Lack of diversity
Only some 8.9 percent of the 700,646 businesses in the state are owned by people of color, according to a new report by business.org
He joined the electricians union in 2015 and noticed right away that there was not a lack of diversity in union workers, but there was in top leaders.
“I’m not blind to what’s out there and the color of my skin,” he said. “I know from some of the studies, there’s just not a lot of minority electricians or tradesmen that are out there trying to build the business.”
When he goes on calls, he often encounters people who express surprise that their electrician is Black.
“You’d be surprised how many people call for service, but when I do show up, they’ll say —without realizing what they’re saying — will say something like ‘we didn’t expect someone like you,'” he said.
He estimates he gets that about four times a week. Most of the time he will gently maneuver that question, perhaps asking them what they expected, or brush past it. He said getting defensive or angry wouldn’t be productive.
“They’re not used to seeing Black-person owned business, it’s different,” he said.
And he wants to help change that.
“I want to give back to the youth with outreach programs,” he said. “I never had a playbook, I pretty much crafted this and created it on my own.”
No one gave him a gift of money to start his business, he said. And he wants to show young people, especially people of color, that it is possible to go into the trades and succeed and become a business owner.
“I could have given up a long time ago, with so much stacked against me – not having money, being a minority,” he said. “Racism is no joke, it is out there. But it’s about just not giving up. If you truly believe in yourself and what you’re capable of in your craft, no matter what it is, I guarantee you will succeed. I’m living proof.”
Aug. 29 he’s planning a ribbon cutting, and the mayor will be present, he said.
