Category: Racial Justice

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

     – Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen

Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.

The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room–jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white–and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: “Colooooooor Struuckkkk!” Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could.

Gamely accepting such offers–and employing her own talent and scrappiness–Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.

Born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.

Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation’s first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.”

In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town’s two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.

Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to “squinch” her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to “jump at de sun.” Hurston explained, “We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”

Hurston’s idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old. “That hour began my wanderings,” she later wrote. “Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.”

After Lucy Hurston’s death, Zora’s father remarried quickly–to a young woman whom the hotheaded Zora almost killed in a fistfight–and seemed to have little time or money for his children. “Bare and bony of comfort and love,” Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling, and eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was 26 years old and still hadn’t finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped 10 years off her life–giving her age as 16 and the year of her birth as 1901. Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least 10 years younger than she actually was. Apparently, she had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth that was never without expression.

Zora also had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and “the gift,” as one friend put it, “of walking into hearts.” Zora used these talents–and dozens more–to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters. Though Hurston rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, “When Zora was there, she was the party.” Another friend remembered Hurston’s apartment–furnished by donations she solicited from friends–as a spirited “open house” for artists. All this socializing didn’t keep Hurston from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.

By 1935, Hurston–who’d graduated from Barnard College in 1928–had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah’s Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early ’40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.

Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960–at age 69, after suffering a stroke–her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn’t yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.

That summer, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds.

Back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money–and she’d proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she called the “Dean of American Negro Artists,” Hurston suggested “a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead” on 100 acres of land in Florida. Citing practical complications, Du Bois wrote a curt reply discounting Hurston’s persuasive argument. “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she’d urged. “We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored.”

As if impelled by those words, Walker bravely entered the snake-infested cemetery where Hurston’s remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston’s grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted–a tall, majestic black stone called “Ebony Mist”–Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”

— By Valerie Boyd

https://www.zoranealehurston.com/about/

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

When Colin Kaepernick was five years old, his kindergarten teacher gave his class an assignment: Draw a picture of your family.

Kaepernick colored his entire family yellow. When he got to himself, he used the brown crayon.

“What I realized in drawing my family was that in my entire class, I was the only one who didn’t look like the rest of my family,” says Kaepernick, who is Black and adopted into a white family.

That simple-seeming assignment turned out to be a pivotal moment for how Kaepernick viewed his identity. It also became the inspiration, many years later, for his first children’s book, I Color Myself Different.

In the book, a little boy named Colin reads on the floor, throws a football in the park, and in general thinks it’s “supercool” that not many people look like him. “I have supercool skin, supercool hair, and a supercool family,” Kaepernick writes. “Sometimes it’s not easy, but being one of a kind sure is amazing.”

When the kindergarten class gets the assignment, young Colin can’t wait to show off his drawing. Until his classmates ask him:

“Why are you the only brown one in your family?”

“Why did you color yourself different?”

Colin freezes — at first — because he realizes his normal registers as “different” for other people. But then he tells his class:

“I’m brown. I color myself different! I’m me, and I’m magnificent!”

“I love the fact that we have an anthem in there,” says Kaepernick, “or a hook. Because it feels like something that young kids can walk away with and can use.”

It’s a positive, affirming moment, especially when Colin’s classmates and Black teacher chime in to support him. Kaepernick says it felt like that for him in real life, too.

“It’s the first documented instance that I have in my life of definitively identifying as brown,” says Kaepernick. “And laying the foundation for my identity as Black.”

Colin Kaepernick is most well-known for being a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, where he played from 2011 until 2016. He has been the most vocal protester within the NFL when it comes to police brutality and racial inequality in the U.S., and he’s also worked in community organizing. He founded Kaepernick Publishing in 2019, and announced a multi-book publishing deal with Scholastic. I Color Myself Different is the debut children’s book for both Kaepernick and illustrator Eric Wilkerson.

“I saw Eric’s previous work and… there are a few things that immediately jumped out,” says Kaepernick. “One was his ability to pull emotion with his illustrations and really bring that to life… He was able to create just beautiful scenes in their entirety.”

Wilkerson comes from an entertainment background — he’s worked in film, commercials, and video games — and used Adobe Photoshop for these illustrations.

“The first thing I wanted to do is give the characters a stylization that made it look… more like still frames from an animated film,” says Wilkerson. “I wanted it to feel like you turn every page… and it’s like somebody just paused the movie.”

One of Kaepernick’s favorite illustrations is young Colin standing, shoulders back, chin up, chest out, smile on his face. The whole image evokes confidence. Wilkerson explains that’s intentional — it’s called the “low-angle hero pose.”

All the illustrations are bright and colorful, with lots of bold reds and desaturated blues. Wilkerson and Kaepernick collaborated closely on the look of the main character, Colin. Kaepernick sent over some grainy childhood photos. They often worked on the illustrations together, over Zoom, with Wilkerson making adjustments in real time.

“We talked in-depth about the style of the face, the shape of his nose, the ears, the hairstyle, the texture of the hair,” says Wilkerson. He didn’t want the main character to be an exact likeness of Kaepernick, but there is definitely a resemblance.

For this book, Wilkerson also re-created Kaepernick’s original childhood artwork, which is included in the back of the book.

“He absolutely did me some favors,” Kaepernick says, laughing.

He describes his original drawing this way: “The bodies are round, the necks are pretty long,” he says. “The heads are pretty big and round… thick legs and triangle block feet. I tried to draw hearts in there, but they kind of look like tomatoes, maybe apples. No arms at all.”

The best part of the drawing, Kaepernick says, is the little Lhasa Apso, Kiwi.

Wilkerson gave it a professional upgrade and a personal touch. “I would physically hold a crayon the wrong way and then try to draw with it,” he says. “But also giving myself only 2 minutes to do it.” He asked children of friends and family to draw, and then he scanned their work for the book.

“So even my daughter drew our entire family and it’s on the bulletin board in the classroom in the book,” Wilkerson says. “I was so thrilled that we got to put that in there.” He also used his daughter as a model for young Colin.

“The cover is basically, you know, her outside holding a newspaper,” he says.

Kaepernick’s nieces, Leilani and Knysna Reid, also contributed artwork to I Color Myself Different. “Part of the inspiration for this book was I was reading books to my niece, Knysna,” says Kaepernick. “A lot of the books just didn’t have characters that look like her.”

Leilani and Knysna illustrated the end-pages with a series of hearts, a unicorn, the sun, Kaepernick’s jersey number, and smiling people.

“Thinking about two young Black girls being able to see their artwork in a published book and from a young age be able to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve had my artwork published. Now what else can I do?’ You see how it begins to open up possibilities for them just mentally of where they can go and what they can do,” says Kaepernick.

Kaepernick says he gave this much consideration to every detail that went into this book. He wanted to make sure his message was clear: being different is “supercool,” but being different is also normal.

“Growing up in a white town and white population or white spaces, you’re constantly the fly in the buttermilk,” he says. “And it was actually one of the things we went back and forth on… how do we address the fact that I’m adopted and different in my family, but also making sure that we’re not positioning Black as different, or brown as different.”

So he made sure that the books young Colin is reading on the first page represent a range of possibilities, with one about space, coding, plus a superhero comic. It was important that Mrs. Musa, the kindergarten teacher, be a Black woman with an African name, and that the best friend who steps in to support Colin is Black.

“They may feel like small pieces, but in the grand scheme of things they add up to be a lot,” Kaepernick says. Ultimately, he and Eric Wilkerson hope that this book helps kids feel less alone.

“The part that I love about being different is you don’t feel like you’re a replica,” says Kaepernick. “I get to be unique. I get to be my full self and… I get to just be free in that sense.”

Samantha Balaban and Melissa Gray produced and edited this interview for broadcast.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/02/1089986114/colin-kaepernick-i-color-myself-different-book

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

Uganda’s Vanessa Nakate says COP26 sidelines nations most affected by climate change

As young climate activists descended on Glasgow for the COP26 UN climate summit, Vanessa Nakate was faced with a familiar yet sad experience: Being pushed to the side.

“I think it’s not just my experience. There are many activists from the global south who have been sidelined at the conference,” she said.

Nakate is no stranger to the world stage or being erased from the record, having attended another summit last year in Davos, Switzerland.

While she was there she posed for a photo with other activists. She was the only Black woman among the five who were photographed, and when The Associated Press published the photo, they cropped her out of the picture.

After the photo was published Nakate tweeted: “You didn’t just erase a photo, you erased a continent, but I am stronger than ever.”

You didn’t just erase a photo

You erased a continent

But I am stronger than ever pic.twitter.com/J34WMXvPAo— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) January 24, 2020

She also posted a video asking the question: “Does that mean that I have no value as an African activist, or the people from Africa don’t have any value at all?”

Nakate is Ugandan and her experience in Davos influenced the title of her new memoir, A Bigger Picture. My Fight to bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. She spoke with NPR about the role gender plays in climate activism, whether the COP26 summit feels inclusive, and her advice for other youth who want to get involved in climate activism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and includes some web-only highlights.

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Interview Highlights

On how young people view the climate crisis

Many young people … young adults, very many teenagers, very many children are worried about the reality of the climate crisis. They are worried about the kind of future that they are walking into. And sometimes it can be challenging for very many young people because they can get frustrated. They can get depressed because of the continuous inaction of leaders and the escalating climate disasters. I have experienced it as well. So it is sad because young people are seeing how much their lives are in danger. But again, it’s also helpful because they are not keeping silent about it. They are speaking up. They are mobilizing and they are sending messages out, demanding for a future that rightfully belongs to them.

On the need to learn more about climate change from the perspective of those in the global south

There is so much to learn about the climate crisis, and learning about the climate crisis means learning from the voices that are on the front lines. And we have seen how continuously activists from the global south, who are speaking up from the most affected communities — their voices are not being platformed. Their voices are not being amplified. Their stories are being erased … This is a problem. We can’t have climate justice if voices from the most affected areas are being left behind.

On whether the COP26 summit has felt inclusive or exclusive

On my first day at the COP, I happened to meet [Nicola Sturgeon], the First Minister of Scotland … with Greta Thunberg. And unfortunately, some media, the way they were reporting about it, you would see a picture, but then it would say, “Greta meets First Minister,” [and not include my name]. And honestly, I just didn’t have words for it, because this is something that I have already talked about. I think it’s not just my experience. There are many activists from the global south who have been sidelined at the conference.

On what climate change looks like in Kampala, Uganda

Uganda, as a country, heavily depends on agriculture as an economy, and also for very many families, especially in the rural areas. So with the rise in global temperatures, the disruptions in weather patterns are causing extreme weather events like flooding, like landslides, like extreme droughts. So it means a loss of people’s funds, drying of people’s crops, destruction of people’s houses. These are some of the visible impacts of the climate crisis in Uganda.

On the role gender plays in climate activism

This is a conversation that many people don’t want to have. People don’t like mixing climate and, for example, race or climate and gender. But it’s evident that women and girls are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis in communities like mine. In many communities across the global south, where women and girls have the responsibility of providing food for their families or collecting water for their families or firewood for their families. So many times women are at the frontlines when these disasters happen. It is their hard work that is put to nothing when the farms are destroyed or when their crops are destroyed. It is women who have to walk very long distances to look for water for their families in case of extreme water scarcity.

On what to say to young people who don’t know where to start with climate activism or those who feel they don’t have any power

Well, I would say that no voice is too small to make a difference and no action is too small to transform our community. Many times, young people think that they need to have so many resources or they need to have a specific kind of voice or a specific kind of support. When I started my climate strikes, I only had like a marker, like a pencil to write my sign … so that was the first thing that we used to go to the climate strike, and we just kept on sharing on social media. So I think it’s really important for young people across the world to know that you are not too small to make a difference.

The audio version of this interview was produced by Noah Caldwell and Jonaki Mehta and edited by Ashley Brown. Wynne Davis adapted it for web.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/10/1053943770/ugandas-vanessa-nakate-says-cop26-climate-summit-sidelines-global-south

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

“The story of Frederick Douglass’ hopes and aspirations and longing desire for freedom has been told—you all know it. It was a story made possible by the unswerving loyalty of Anna Murray.”

So began Rosetta Douglass Sprague, daughter of Anna and Frederick Douglass, in a speech delivered in 1900 that later became the book My Mother As I Recall Her. It remains one of the few works that focuses on Anna Murray Douglass, in contrast to the hundreds that have been written on Frederick Douglass and his legacy. That neglect is in part due to the paucity of materials available on Anna; she was largely illiterate and left behind few physical traces of her life, whereas Frederick wrote thousands of letters and multiple books. But without Anna, Frederick may never have achieved such fame for his abolitionism—or even escaped slavery.

Frederick and Anna met in 1838, when he still went by the surname Bailey and she by Murray. The daughter of enslaved parents in rural Maryland around 1813, Anna was the first of her siblings to be born free after her parents were manumitted. She lived with her parents until the age of 17, at which point she headed for Baltimore and found work as a domestic helper. Over the years she managed to earn and save money; the vibrant community of more than 17,000 free blacks in the Maryland city organized black churches and schools despite repressive laws restricting their freedoms. When she met Frederick—historians disagree on the when and where their acquaintance occurred, but it may have been in attending the same church—she was financially prepared to start a life with him. But first, he needed freedom.

By borrowing a freedman’s protection certificate from a friend and wearing the disguise of a sailor sewn by Anna, Frederick made his way to New York City by train (possibly spending Anna’s money to buy the ticket, says historian Leigh Fought). Once there, he sent for Anna and they were married in the home of abolitionist David Ruggles. According to Rosetta, Anna brought nearly everything the couple needed to begin their life together: a feather bed with pillows and linens; dishes with cutlery; and a full trunk of clothing for herself.

“It was a leap of faith on her part, but there’s not many free black men to marry, and even that could be precarious,” says Fought, the author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass and professor of history at Le Moyne College. “If she marries Frederick and goes north, she might be working, but she’s got a husband who’s free and in the North there are schools and their children can be educated.”

The two settled into a small home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and both continued working menial tasks or housekeeping until Anna began having children. The first four were all born in New Bedford, including Rosetta, Lewis, Charles and Frederick Jr. Meanwhile, Frederick was becoming ever more involved in the abolition movement, and before long, he was traveling extensively to give speeches—including a two-year stint in England from 1845 to 1847—with Anna left alone to raise and support the family. During that time, she managed to save everything he sent back and used only her own income from mending shoes to support the family.

Having the wife act as the family financial planner was common for the period, Fought says. “Within working class households there’s going to be more egalitarian management of the money, and women kept the household books.” This was especially important for the Douglass family, since Frederick was away from home so frequently.

Upon Frederick’s return from England in 1847, he moved the family from Massachusetts to Rochester, New York, where they would play host to innumerable guests involved in the anti-slavery movement, and hide runaways on the Underground Railroad. Frederick also began publication of The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper.

But Frederick’s increasing fame and visibility came with difficulties for Anna beyond the danger inherent with operating a stop on the Railroad and having a husband who drew the ire of slavers. In addition to the hidden guests, the Douglass home also played host to a number of Frederick’s colleagues, including two white European women. Julia Griffiths, a English woman who helped with The North Star, lived in the Douglass household for two years, occasionally commenting on the lowly nature of Anna’s work. “Poor fellow!” she wrote in one letter in reference to Frederick. “The quiet & repose he so much needs are very difficult for him to attain in his domestic circle.” Another houseguest, German Ottilie Assing, had numerous unkind things to say of Anna.

Frederick’s close affiliation with both these women only added fuel to the fire of rumormongering that followed the family. He was accused of having affairs with both, in part to discredit his work as an abolitionist and in part because of stereotypes of the day about the infidelity of African-American men. For Anna to defend herself would’ve required abandoning the privacy of their home life that was such a privilege for an African-American woman of the era.

“Frederick is very circumspect about mentioning Anna [in his writing] because he’s trying to respect her,” Fought says. “Women weren’t supposed to appear in print. You appeared in print when you got married and when you died. Something had gone wrong in your life you appeared in print at other times.” To respond publicly to rumors about her husband would send Anna down a road she didn’t want to be on, Fought explains, and chip away at her respectability.

For Rose O’Keefe, author of Frederick & Anna Douglass in Rochester, NY, Anna doesn’t get the credit she deserves. “They say she held the household together, but there was so much more to it than that,” O’Keefe says. Anna would’ve been working constantly to manage the guests, keep the house clean, tend the garden, balance the varying opinions of her husband’s colleagues without getting caught in the middle, and keeping their work on the Underground Railroad secret. “It was a tough role, a very tough role.”

And there were plenty of personal low points in her life as well. Frederick was forced to flee the country in 1859 after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid to avoid being arrested under the charge that he’d assisted in the attack (though he hadn’t). The couple’s youngest daughter, Annie, died in 1860 at age 10, and the family home in Rochester was burned down (likely due to arson) in 1872. The Douglasses lost over $4,000 worth of goods in the fire, as well as the only complete set of the North Star and Frederick’s later news publications.

After the fire, Anna and Frederick moved to Washington, D.C. While Frederick continued his work, Anna continued managing the home, now with occasional help from Rosetta, as well as numerous relatives and grandchildren. She died in 1882 after a series of strokes, leaving behind a legacy that few people ever thought to explore.

“People judge Anna to not be good enough for their great, darling Douglass,” Fought says. “Some of it is racially prejudiced because she’s darker skinned. They don’t believe she’s pretty enough.” But even though she left only the slightest mark on the written record of the past, Fought argues that there are still ways to understand some of what her life was like and who she was.

“[People like Anna] did leave an impression on the historical record by doing things. You have to be quiet and listen to the choice they made and understand the context and the other possible choices they had,” Fought says. “In that empathy, we understand more about their lives. Often you don’t get them, but you get the outlines of where they were, and an idea of what going through their life would’ve been like.”

For Anna, it was a life of working in the background and often being held to unfair standards. But it was also a life of freedom, and numerous children who had the advantage of an education, and who continued coming to her for advice and solace until the end of her life.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle’s Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hidden-history-anna-murray-douglass-180968324/

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

Ifeanyi Nsofor is a public health physician from Nigeria. Dr. Nsofor is Director of Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch and leads the organisations’ advocacy interventions. He is a leading advocate for universal health coverage in Nigeria. He serves as CEO of EpiAFRIC. Ifeanyi received his medical degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University School of Medicine. As a 2006 Ford Foundation International Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Ifeanyi obtained a Masters in Community Health degree. He is an alumnus of Harvard Kennedy School’s Strategic Frameworks for Non-profit Organizations. He has led 17 research projects across Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and Nigeria. He was Co-Lead of evaluation of African Union intervention for Ebola Outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Ifeanyi is a 2018 New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He has spoken at TEDxOguiRoad on “without health, we have nothing.”

Fellowship Focus: Increased advocacy for health equity in achieving universal health coverage in Nigeria.

https://healthequity.atlanticfellows.org/ifeanyi-nsofor

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

The recipe for a wildly successful TikTok account — at least, for Alexis Nikole Nelson — is to post entirely about foraging.

Known on social media as “Black Forager”, Nelson has drawn in more than 2 million followers. For those not familiar with the term, Nelson says foraging is essentially “a very fun way to say, I eat plants that do not belong to me and I teach other people how to do the same thing.” The videos she posts showcase her collecting and cooking everything from acorns to yellow dandelions to dead man’s fingers (AKA the seaweed codium fragile.)

But for Nelson, foraging goes beyond rummaging around in other peoples’ shrubbery. It’s a way to connect with African American and Indigenous food traditions that many people were discouraged — or actively prevented — from accessing.

Our play cousins at TED Radio Hour spoke to Nelson about foraging, followers, and finding cultural (and literal) roots. Their conversation, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Zomorodi: So when you forage, Alexis, you walk into your backyard or into a forest. What do you see that most of us don’t? It’s like a supermarket, basically, for you?

Nelson: It’s like Disney World, but full of plants and much cheaper food. You walk in and you see this very vibrant ecosystem that we are a part of. And there’s something so fulfilling about it, right? You’re just like, I pulled this out of the ground, and now it’s sustaining me! So I look into natural spaces and I just see wonder.

Do you remember the first time you went foraging as a kid?

I remember gardening with my mother at the house I grew up in. One day stands out in my mind when I was probably not helping at all. And my mom pointed out some grass in our yard that looked different than all of the other grass, which, until she pointed it out to me, I had never noticed. So my mom tells me to go and break some for her. I break it and suddenly, the air is perfumed with garlic. And she’s like, “That is onion grass. You know how we sometimes cook with green onions? You can cook with that too.” And warning, if you tell a five-year-old that, they will just start breaking plants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them.

And probably eating them! So your mom was very into plants, clearly. Did you get your love of food and gardening and the outdoors from your parents, do you think?

Absolutely. On my dad’s side of the family, his mom is also of an Indigenous ancestry — Iroquois ancestry — so as a kid, he was being exposed to foodways that some of his peers weren’t necessarily. And my dad is excellent in the kitchen. It was really this kind of coming together of the two things — cooking and gardening — that I enjoyed doing with my parents most as a kid. And I’m very lucky to be a Black kid who grew up with two Black parents who were also very outdoorsy, because not all of us get that. There’s been this cultural separation between a lot of Black folks and the outdoors.

Alexis Nikole Nelson is behind the popular TikTok and Instagram videos based on her experience and advice on foraging. Tim Johnson/Columbus Monthly Magazine

But historically there wasn’t that same separation, right? And you’ve been studying just what happened. Can you explain?

So back when a lot of Black folks were still enslaved, there was a whole lot of knowledge trading between Black folks and Indigenous folks in a lot of the southern states — and a lot of midwestern and northern states, too, actually. And for a lot of people who were enslaved, the way that you beefed up the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing. So that knowledge that was a huge part of early Black culture here in the Americas.

After Black people were emancipated, suddenly laws were put in place very rapidly about only being able to reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. So if you can’t hunt and forage on public property, and you don’t yet have private property to your name, boom, that is a part of your life that you are not partaking in anymore. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just fall away completely.

And is it true, then, that when there was an opportunity to go foraging once again, some people thought, ‘Well, I don’t have the handed down knowledge, and anyway, only poor people would do that’?

Yeah, you have this really weird thing happen in the 20th century where everyone is, like, wanting to show off wealth. So foraging kind of became taboo even if you did have the knowledge to do it — and that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because the thinking was, why would you be heading down to the creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana?

And in the 1950s and 1960s, being a Black person out in nature, out in the woods, out in predominantly white spaces was a very scary thing to do. For the sake of your safety, that’s not a space that you would want to necessarily be in. So it was kind of like a three-combo punch to us culturally moving away from getting to know our natural spaces. And I am one of myriad people who is actively trying to combat that.

Do you feel like it’s working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get from your followers?

One of the best days I think I’ve ever had in my life, I was out foraging and a girl who also happens to be Black — probably a teenager — she runs up to me and she’s like, “You are that girl from Tik Tok!” And I was like, “Oh, my god yes!” And she was so excited. So I got to take her and show her what I was there harvesting. I got to give her and her mom a cut-leaved toothwort leaf so they could taste the spicy brassica-y-ness from it.

And the way that her and her friends and her mom’s face lit up, I went home and I cried. I cried for like a solid 20 minutes because that’s — oh my gosh it’s, like, almost overwhelming. And the thing that stuck with me was she was just like, “You’re doing this for the culture.” Man, I’m starting to tear up just thinking about it now.

In some ways, through foraging, you are helping people reconnect with their own history and the ways people used to eat off the land, in a seasonal, sustainable way.

Yeah. So many of us have such a fraught relationship with food. A lot of that is due in part to societal pressures. A lot of that is due to how processed food is. And I personally have had a historically very fraught relationship with food. I grew up very overweight, and I was always being pressured to eat less, cook less. I, full disclosure, dealt with an eating disorder in my early and my mid-20s in which food was very much the enemy — in which I trained myself to stop thinking about this subject that I had loved thinking about and dreaming about my entire childhood.

In a way, diving back into foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It was not on purpose. I was super poor after college, living in a house with five of my friends and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables. And so I was like, well, you know, let me turn to some of that weird knowledge that I had been amassing for no reason as a kid. And it just brought me this joy and this connection to place that I didn’t have at that point in time. So much so that I went out and I sought out more information, and I got more bold with my cooking and started being willing to put flour and bread into my food again. And I was willing to make sweet things again. There’s something soul-nourishing about caring about how you’re nourishing your body.

To hear more of Manoush’s conversation with Alexis, visit ted.npr.org.

Please Note: If done incorrectly, foraging can pose serious risks. Those who choose to pursue foraging should conduct thorough research from multiple credible sources, consult experts, and exercise caution.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/09/09/173838801/meet-alexis-nikole-nelson-the-wildly-popular-black-forager

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

Derrick Young Jr. is a champion for social justice and equity. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Leadership Brainery, a non-profit organization addressing unequal access to advanced education and workforce leadership opportunities for minoritized communities.

Derrick’s commitment to fostering equity stems back earlier than he remembers. It was heightened in college when he received acceptance into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Undergraduate Public Health Scholars Program. He learned that we must search fully upstream to find what is causing our most vast societal inequities. He identified systemic restrictions to accessing adequate information, education, and opportunities as the main factors.

After studying at Tufts University School of Medicine’s Public Health Program, Derrick led an HIV prevention awareness campaign and testing initiative at Codman Square Health Center, decreasing stigma and increasing testing for Dorchester’s high-risk populations. He later became the Policy and Strategy Specialist for Intergovernmental Relations at the Boston Public Health Commission. At BPHC, he represented the City of Boston on local and statewide public health coalitions, drafted priority legislation, and prepared the annual operating budget for approval by the City Council. When the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, he was assigned to the Boston Medical Intelligence Center as the Information Box Supervisor, providing colleagues, elected officials, first-responders, and local residents with rapidly evolving coronavirus updates and resources.

Derrick is the former Membership Chair of Harvard University Center for AIDS Research Community Advisory Board and former Tufts Public Health Alumni Association President. He currently holds community leadership roles as a Tufts Alumni Council member and United Negro College Fund New England Leadership Council member.

Derrick earned his Masters of Public Health degree with a Health Services Management and Policy concentration from Tufts University School of Medicine and his BA in Psychology from Grambling State University. He also earned his Certificate in Disruptive Strategy from Harvard Business School.

https://www.derrickyoungjr.com/bio

See Young’s work on the Covid-19 Impact on Black America

https://www.derrickyoungjr.com/covid19

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

Meet Parker McMullen Bushman, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Inclusive Journeys, and founder of Ecoinclusive Strategies. Parker is a dynamic speaker and facilitator that engages organizations in new thinking around what it means to be a diversity change-agent and create dynamic organizational change. Parker’s background in the non-profit leadership, conservation, environmental education and outdoor recreation fields spans over 24+ years. Parker has a passion for equity and inclusion in outdoor spaces. Her interest in justice, accessibility, and equity issues developed from her personal experiences facing the unequal representation of people of color in environmental organizations and green spaces. Parker tackles these complex issues by addressing them through head on activism and education. For 9 years Parker has worked with businesses to catalyze action to build culturally diverse and culturally competent organizations that are representative of the populations that they seek to reach and serve. Parker is the founder of the organization called Ecoinclusive Strategies. Ecoinclusive (ecoinclusive.org) provides training and resources for non-profit, cultural, and environmental organizations. In Parker’s role as Chief Operating Officer she oversee the core operational functions of Inclusive Journeys. Inclusive Journeys (www.inclusivejourneys.com) is a tech company with a mission to create data-driven, economic incentives for businesses to be more inclusive and welcoming, resulting in safer spaces for people who regularly experience discrimination.

Parker brings a unique background to this work having served in top leadership for Marine Science, Environmental Educational, and Cultural Interpretive Facilities. Parker has served as the Vice President for Community Engagement, Education and Inclusion at Butterfly Pavilion, an Invertebrate Zoo located in Westminster, CO. She also served as the Director of Education for the Marine Science Consortium, a research and education center located on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Parker has a Master of Natural Resources from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, with a focus in Interpretation and Environmental Education. 

Parker is a member of several committees that focus on diversity in environmental fields as well as a presenter and trainer on diversity issues. She sits on the board of Environmental Learning for Kids, Metro Denver Nature Alliance, the Next 100 Coalition and the National Association for Interpretation. Parker is a Certified Interpretive Guide and Certified Interpretive Trainer.
​
Ecoinclusive was born out of a desire to make sure everyone has a connection to the outdoors. Especially communities of color that traditional have been underrepresented in these spaces. . Ecoinclusive provides resources for leadership at non-profits and environmental organizations to aid them in building a culturally diverse and culturally competent staff that reflects and connects with the populations that they serve.​

Inclusive Journeys: ​Inclusive Journeys is a company that works to identify safe and welcoming spaces for all. Our first project is the Digital Green Book. We are working to  build a website that’s like Yelp, but for inclusivity. On this website, users can submit business locations they feel safe in, businesses owned/operated by people of marginalized identities. Users can rate a business on a range of things, such as courtesy of staff, ADA compliance, sense of personal safety as it relates to their identity, gender neutral bathrooms, and more. Crowd-sourced entries (like Yelp) will populate “inclusivity reviews” for businesses and recreation spaces. 

KWEEN WERK : KWEEN stands for Keep Widening Environmental Engagement Narratives. KWEEN werk / Earth KWEEN challenges traditional representations of what it means to be outdoorsy by showing a variety of bodies engaged in outdoor spaces. Kween werK is bringing people together in the fight for Justice and Equity. Using Social Media as a tool this Parker shows her many sides as a Social Justice Activist — part Diva, Artist and Educator. ​

http://www.cparkermcmullenbushman.com/bio.html

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

He was fired by Amazon 2 years ago. Now he’s the force behind the company’s 1st union

“He’s not smart, or articulate.”

Those were the words used by a top Amazon lawyer to describe former warehouse worker Chris Smalls.

Smalls had led a walkout at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to protest working conditions at the Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse where he worked. He was fired the same day.

The memo that contained those biting words was leaked just a few days later. But the words would stay with Smalls. They became the fuel that would drive him to lead one of the most dramatic and successful grassroots union drives in recent history.

“When I read that memo, that motivated me to start an organization,” said Smalls, celebrating the historic victory of the Amazon Labor Union on Friday, making the warehouse Amazon’s first unionized workplace in the U.S.

Friday’s triumph would come almost two years to the day of his firing.

At the time, Amazon said Smalls had violated quarantine and safety measures. But Smalls said he was fired in retaliation for his activism. The New York attorney general followed with an investigation and sued Amazon for the incident and even sought to get Smalls his job back.

Smalls didn’t sit still after being fired, and formed the Amazon Labor Union soon after.

Meetings at a bus stop, barbecue and funding through GoFundMe

Smalls had zero union background, nor did he rely on any established labor groups for funding and organizing power.

Instead he raised money for the operation through GoFundMe. Smalls and his co-founder Derrick Palmer — who’s still working at the warehouse — reached out to their coworkers.

The bus stop used by workers became their gathering place. They’d wait there to talk to workers who were heading home from their shifts. They’d have a bonfire going, with s’mores, and get people talking. They invited workers to cookouts.

“We had over 20 some barbecues, giving out food every single week, every single day, whether it was pizza, chicken, pasta,” Smalls said. He even brought home-cooked food from his aunt to some of these gatherings.

They talked to workers about fighting for their rights,about the grueling toll of the job, how you’re on your feet, doing very repetitive, very physically demanding work, for hours. About the breaks that are few and too short.

No one expected this scrappy grassroots campaign to emerge victorious against the behemoth company. Indeed, a first attempt failed. But Smalls persevered, eventually meeting the 30% threshold necessary to hold a vote.

Amazon got Smalls arrested for trespassing

Amazon, meanwhile, spent millions of dollars on labor consultants to fight the union campaigns. The company held mandatory meetings with workers in the warehouse, urging them to vote No.

Amazon even had Smalls and a couple other organizers arrested for trespassing while they were delivering food and union materials to the warehouse parking lot earlier this year.

Amazon’s argument to workers is that it is already a great place to work, without a union. It offers competitive pay, and generous benefits like health care coverage for full time employees and full tuition for college.

But Smalls’ efforts clearly bore fruit.

Almost 5,000 workers cast their ballots and the votes to form a union were won by a significant margin — more than 500 votes.

Amazon had wanted to belittle the union drive two years ago, when as part of its PR strategy the company said it would make Smalls “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Except today, Smalls has become the face of one of the most successful union drives in recent history.

And Amazon has suffered an embarrassing defeat.

“Amazon doesn’t become Amazon without the people,” Smalls said. “And we make Amazon what it is.”

Editors’ note: Amazon is among NPR’s financial supporters and also distributes certain NPR content.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/02/1090353185/amazon-union-chris-smalls-organizer-staten-island

We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!

The oldest park ranger, who told the stories of Black women in WWII, retires at 100

There’s no better way to learn history than from the people who lived it. And for years, Betty Reid Soskin — a.k.a. Ranger Betty — brought her invaluable perspective to work at the National Park Service, sharing experiences that otherwise would have been gone unacknowledged.

“What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering,” Soskin, who turned 100 last fall, has said.

For years, Soskin was the oldest active ranger in the park service, leading public programs at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif. That chapter of her rich life has finally come to a close: She retired on Thursday, capping a career that saw her enrich histories of the World War II home front with her own experience as a woman of color facing segregation and hours of toil.

While Rosie the Riveter was the famous public face of women’s industrial work during the war, Soskin literally had to create the space to tell stories like her own.

“That really is a white woman’s story,” Soskin said of the iconic bandanna-wearing worker, in a 2014 interview with NPR.

Soskin initially helped shape the historical park in Richmond through planning meetings. Then she worked with the park service through a third-party grant highlighting Black Americans’ experiences during World War II. Her drive to ensure park visitors understand the broader context of the war effort, and the backdrop of racism and segregation, led to her accepting a temp position at age 84, and then a permanent job.

As a young woman during World War II, Soskin worked as a shipyard clerk for an all-Black auxiliary lodge of the Boilermakers union, which didn’t allow people of color to join as regular members.

For added perspective, consider that Soskin’s great-grandmother, who had been born into slavery in 1846 and lived to be 102, was still alive as her family’s youngest members continued to cope with institutional racism — even as Soskin helped the U.S. war effort.

In 1945, Soskin and her husband, Mel Reid, opened a renowned record store — Reid’s Records — in Berkeley that stayed in business for nearly 75 years before closing in 2019, selling soul and gospel music.

Soskin says she has lived “lots and lots of lives”

Soskin has lived “lots and lots of lives,” she told NPR in 2014, including writing protest songs during the civil rights movement and working for years in local politics. Years after enduring segregation, she used those experiences to add vivid life to tours and discussions at the Rosie the Riveter Home Front park.

Accolades have rolled in for Soskin. The California Legislature named her Woman of the Year in 1995. The World War II Museum in New Orleans awarded her its silver medallion. She has a middle school named after her.

And in 2015, Soskin introduced President Barack Obama during the national tree-lighting ceremony in Washington. For that occasion, she carried a unique piece of her own history in her pocket: a photo of her great-grandmother.

It was the same photo she brought to watch Obama be sworn in as president, in 2009.

“It’s a kind of experience that covers years, and decades, and centuries,” she said of bringing an image of her ancestor along to those historic moments.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/01/1090301724/betty-reid-soskin-park-ranger-retires-age-100