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.

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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.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1084137609/grammys-nominees-awards-jimmie-allen-music

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

Roger Arliner Young (1899 – November 9, 1964) was an American scientist of zoology, biology, and marine biology. She was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology.^{[1] [2]}

Early years

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.

After obtaining her doctorate, Young became an assistant professor at the North Carolina College for Negroes and Shaw University (1940–1947),^[5] and held teaching positions in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana until 1959.^[5]

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]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Arliner_Young

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.

“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.”

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.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/24/1093167996/gardening-collard-greens-seed-savers-heirloom-collard-project-food-recipes

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.

Other programs of note are:

Center for Black Educator Development

Summerhouse Institute

Call Me MISTER

The Bond Project

Black Male Teacher Initiative Consortium

Parting Thoughts

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.

https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/need-black-male-educators-in-early-childhood-classrooms-f5b2d1e90c73

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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.

https://www.shraddhayoga.org/teachers

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.’”

Reprinted with permission from The Forward.

https://www.jewishboston.com/read/a-black-female-rabbi-on-the-anti-racist-progress-the-jewish-community-has-and-hasnt-made/

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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.

Also read:How To Support Black Owned Businesses In Waltham

https://patch.com/massachusetts/waltham/black-electrician-opens-shop-waltham-hopes-set-example

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Chester Higgins’ camera brings a 360 degree view to Black life

Not long after I arrived at his Brooklyn brownstone, Chester Higgins started telling me about “The Spirit.” He was nine years old when “The Spirit” visited him in his bedroom in rural New Brockton, Alabama.

“There’s this Black man who’s standing in a very calm, still position,” Higgins said. “His eyes are closed and gradually his eyes open, he raises up his hands. As he’s walking towards me and extending his hand and says, ‘I come for you.'”

Higgins was terrified but his grandfather, a Baptist minister, explained the incident as an apparition and interpreted it as the boy’s calling to the ministry. In September 1957— two months before his 10th birthday— Higgins was presented with a minister’s license and started preaching at local churches.

But when Higgins went off to Tuskegee Institute, he left his religious calling behind. As business manager of the student newspaper, he encouraged advertisers to buy bigger ads with photos in them. This is how Higgins stumbled into photography.

From minister to photographer

At the home of the college’s professional photographer, Higgins was moved by portraits of poor farmers on their way to market. Higgins got the photographer to teach him how to use his camera, borrowed it and shot photos of his family back in New Brockton. Seeing his relatives’ faces in framed portraits on the walls of their homes was like being paid, he said.

“They found a sense of agency in themselves that they hadn’t seen before, that reaffirmed their sense of worthiness,” Higgins said. “I picked up the camera out of love for my family. I did not have a long term plan with the camera. But what changed that is the civil rights movement.”

In the late 1960’s Higgins was active in civil rights protests. He joined people picketing outside the mansion of Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, in Montgomery. He didn’t like the mainstream media’s coverage of the civil rights protests.

“We weren’t seen as American citizens petitioning our government,” he recalled. “We were seen as potential arsonists, rapists or just thugs. It taught me that a picture never lies about the photographer.”

Years later during a job interview with A.M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of The New York Times, Higgins said there were three things that were always missing in images of African-Americans: “decency, dignity and virtuous character.”

A local barbershop in Tuskegee, AL, 1972. Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Higgins decided that the best way to remedy the white media’s depiction of African-Americans was to become a photographer. After his junior year at Tuskegee, he traveled to New York in the summer of 1969 and cold-called a number of big-circulation picture magazines, stressing that he was seeking feedback from a photo editor, not a job. Higgins will tell you that “The Spirit” was responsible for him meeting Arthur Rothstein, the director of photography at Lookmagazine.

“The Spirit brought this man into my life,” said Higgins. “The door opens and here he is.”

Rothstein, one of the giants of American photography, was clearly impressed with Higgins who explained that his goal as a photographer was to “change the way the media portrays my people.”

Higgins said Rothstein took him under his wing because he could sense Higgins’ “desperate energy” to master the craft of photography.

Rothstein was so keen on the college kid from Alabama that he gave him 35mm film and critiqued Higgins’ work. Higgins remembered one day when Rothstein took four sheets of paper from his desk and cropped one of Higgins’ pictures.

“He calls me over and says, ‘Here, take a look.’ I went and I looked and I was amazed,” Higgins recalled. “I asked him, ‘Was that my picture?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s your picture but you didn’t know it. All this other stuff was competing with it and you didn’t know what to zero in on.'”

The papyrus reed boats used by fishermen along the Blue Nile corridor. Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

I wanted to have my images on the world stage

After graduation, Higgins moved to New York and spent several years freelancing before being hired as a staff photographer at The New York Times in 1975. During the 39 years Higgins worked at the newspaper, some 40% of his images, he says, were of people of color. And he points with pride to the fact that he got a picture of Kwanzaa published in the paper almost every year, as well as images of a Coney Island beach ceremony commemorating the enslaved Africans who perished in the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage.

“This is what Rothstein trained me for,” said Higgins. “I wanted to have my images on the world stage.”

Among those who have appreciated Higgins’ work over the years is Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. When Bunch served as founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he made sure that it acquired some of Higgins’ images.

“Chester is someone who has captured the last 40 years of Black America in powerful ways” Bunch told NPR. “He elevated photography from documentary to fine art.”

Bunch is aware that Higgins has made close to 50 trips to Africa and admires the photographer’s effort to portray the continent’s humanity in a way that might foster a deeper connection for other African-Americans.

“He’s not capturing an Africa that’s flawed, he’s not capturing an Africa that is broken,” said Bunch. “He’s capturing an Africa that has a spirit of hope, of possibility that in some ways he believes will shape the African-American experience as well.”

Christmas pilgrims in Ethiopia Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

A life-long assignment in Africa

Higgins made his first trip to Africa in 1971, traveling to Senegal for an Essence magazine assignment. For most of the time he worked for The New York Times he spent his vacations in Africa, often commissioning custom made suits made of traditional African patterns. Now 75, Higgins hasn’t stopped going to the continent to document its history and culture. He spent the first month of 2022 in Egypt.

“Being in Africa, I’ve discovered, is quite a relief for me because… [when I go, I’m] in the majority. I don’t have to worry about people looking at my color and [I’m] a target, people not knowing me and they hate me. I’ve found that the whole stress of racism just lifts off your shoulder.”

Higgins often refers to Africans as “my cousins.”

He’s been to Egypt 20 times, most recently to shoot photos of tombs. His latest book, The Sacred Nile, presents images of pyramids, rock-hewn churches, tombs and other religious monuments along the River Nile. Higgins says his trips to the continent have become his life-long assignment.

“My overall assignment was to create a visual encyclopedia of the life and times of people of African descent,” Higgins said. “I just lumbered along, following The Spirit, following my interests. And that’s what I still do.

Several pyramids in the morning light in the royal burial grounds in Meroe, Sudan. Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

On March 24, Higgins was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Silurians Press Club in New York, the first time a photographer has been honored by the group. Former New York Times reporter Joseph Berger praised Higgins for raising the consciousness of the entire newsroom.

“Chester has always been a man on a spiritual mission, striving to find the humanity, the dignity and the grace in everyone,” said Berger who worked with Higgins over the course of 30 years. “Just look at the photos of Joyce Dinkins adjusting her husband’s tie before his inauguration as mayor or Amiri Baraka jitterbugging with Maya Angelou at Harlem’s Schomburg Center. Higgins, he said, “viewed his job as a calling and the taking of photographs as a sacrament.”

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/31/1089294489/chester-higgins-camera-brings-a-360-degree-view-to-black-life

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First Black Female Master Plumber in the U.S. Shares Her Journey

August 23, 2018

At the age of 30, Adrienne Bennett became the first black female master plumber in the U.S. Now, 30 years later, she is CEO of her own contracting company, Detroit-based Benkari LLC. 

She launched the commercial plumbing and water conservation company in 2008 when she felt she had hit the pinnacle of her career. 

“I’ve been a journeyman plumber, a master plumber, project manager, plumbing inspector and code enforcement officer for the city of Detroit for a decade. There was no place left to go but become an independent contractor,” she says. “It was the final frontier.” 

From a young age, she had an interest in the way things worked, and that lead to her applying for an entry-level training program with an engineering firm in Detroit later in life. The program was a pathway into Lawrence Technology University, where she hoped to study mechanical engineering. 

But a racially charged encounter with someone who worked at the firm shocked her so much that she left the program within a year and never attended college. 

“I was young, naive. I had never been called something like that before. I was blindsided,” she says. 

Her mother helped her through it. “I cried a lot, but she told me to take it as a life lesson and continue to move forward,” Bennett recalls. 

For a few years she bounced around doing odd jobs, including work as an advocate for people on public assistance programs. But then, at a 1976 election rally for Jimmy Carter, Bennett had a chance meeting that would change the direction of her life. 

Gus Dowels, a recruiter from the Mechanical Contractors Association of Detroit, approached Bennett and asked her “How would you like to make $50,000 a year?” “I asked him, ‘Is it legal work?’,” recalls Bennett. 

Dowels was working for a federally-sponsored apprenticeship program for skilled trades and he was looking to recruit minority women, she says. Soon Bennett, who was 22 at the time, was taking the test for admission into the five-year apprenticeship program with the Plumbers’ Union, Local 98.

Throughout her training, Bennett was surrounded by men, both in the classroom and in the field. “It was dirty work. It was rough and physically demanding. It paid $5 an hour with a 50-cent raise every six months,” she said. 

As she started to break through each barrier, successfully passing exams and earning praise from instructors, Bennett met backlash, hostility and bullying from her male peers.

“I always wore a very heavy toolbelt around my waist. I did this for protection because men would try to grab at me inappropriately,” she says. “Many times, I was the only woman with as many as 100 men on a construction site.” 

One time the bullying was so intolerable that Bennett recalled driving in a fog back to the union hall and breaking down emotionally. But she pulled herself together and when she completed the program, she became the first women in the state to have successfully done so. 

“I was not going to let myself or anyone else down,” she says. 

Read the full original story about Bennett’s journey and her work in rebuilding the city she has lived in since she was 9 years-old here.

https://www.phcppros.com/articles/8065-first-black-female-master-plumber-in-the-us-shares-her-journey