Dallas College Civil Rights Tour and Speaker Series

[Music]

[Mark Green] Hello, friends. I am Mark Green, and I serve as a Professor of US History at the Mountain View campus. Today I have the honor and privilege of introducing Mr. Dale H. Long to kick off our 20-21 Dallas College Civil Rights Tour Speaking Series. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham, Alabama became known as the Magic City because of its rapid growth and dominance in iron and steel production.

To African-Americans like Mr. Long who grew up in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, the city was known as Bombingham for the more than 50 bombings that occurred in the city between 1947 and 1965.

Initially, the bombings were used to intimidate families of color who were attempting to purchase homes in predominantly white residential areas. Later, they were used against anyone working towards racial desegregation in the city. The neighborhood that noted political activist and academic Angela Davis grew up in experienced so many bombings that it developed the nickname Dynamite Hill.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the city lived up to its infamous moniker in the most horrific way. Local Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. Then 11-year-old Dale Long survived the bombing. Almost 58 years later, he is here to share with us what it was like to grow up in Bombingham and bear witness to one of our nation's most shocking tragedies.

Mr.Long, thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

[Dale Long]: Good morning. And thank you, Mr. Mark Greene, for that introduction and for inviting me to participate in this educational experience.

You know, it was tough on my parents as they brought up my brother and I in Birmingham in the '50s and '60s.

Birmingham was the most thoroughly segregated city in this country because of Jim Crow laws that came about basically back in 1896 when a Supreme Court ruling that said it was all right to segregate facilities, as long as they were equal. It's known as Plessy versus Ferguson. And that created a roadmap for Birmingham to keep facilities separate but, in most cases, unequal.

That was known as the Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. As been mentioned, there were bombings all over Birmingham. Every one of them went unsolved. It was felt that the City of Birmingham Police Department all knew who were responsible for the bombings.

It was well-known that, in many cases, the police and the Ku Klux Klan were the same people or at least they talked to each other about making sure that African-American people stayed in their place. And the main way to intimidate was through bombings. Several homes bombed, churches bombed, businesses bombed. And, again, every one of them went unsolved.

You know, there was no counseling for black boys and girls because we would hear those bombings from time to time and, obviously, it was quite terrifying for us as young people. As my brother Kenneth and I grew a bit older, we would have questions that we would ask our questions about this issue of segregation and of the things we experienced that just didn't quite make sense.

For instance, when we turned on the television, there were images of a family's, white families, Leave it to Beaver, Make Room for Daddy. We would always see those TV shows but none featuring black people. Even as we watch the television and we'll see images of any city, USA, for some reason, you would never see black people doing simple things like walking down the street or coming out of a department store.

As we started to do things in Birmingham, we would pass by an amusement park that was a city run park but it was on the grounds of the State Fair of Alabama. It was called Kiddie Land Park. And my dad and mom tried their best to avoid passing by this, especially during the summer in the evening where we can see the lights and hear the music and smell the popcorn.

We would always ask, Well, why can't we stop and enjoy the park? And my mom said, because we're African-American, we were prohibited from doing so. That only created even more difficult questions that Ken and I had about what was wrong with us? We have been told that the sky's the limit. All we have to do is apply ourselves, study hard, and we could achieve and be whatever we wanted to be.

But there seemed to be a difference in what we started to realize. We could not participate in in Birmingham. If we went to a department store, we would see water fountains for black people and water fountains for white people. Usually, the white water fountains were filthy -- I mean the black water fountains, excuse me, were filthy and very difficult to access. That was segregation in Birmingham.

You could not try on clothes in a department store, a pair of pants or shirt. You dare not touch a hat and put it on because, if you did, your parents were forced into buying it. In order for my mom to buy shoes for us, she would have to trace our bare feet on a piece of paper and present that to the salesperson in order to buy shoes. If they didn't quit -- didn't quite fit, too bad. We would have to trade them with friends who might fit the shoes and have some sort of bartering system like that because we couldn't bring them back, had our feet then placed inside of those shoes.

Neighborhoods were thoroughly segregated. Schools were segregated. You couldn't go to a burger joint, couldn't go to one of the restaurants downtown or any of the hamburger joints or fast foods around town because black people weren't welcomed. They had a place called Jack's Hamburgers in Birmingham. And you -- they would wait on you, but you would have to go to a window at the very back to be waited on. You know, we weren't too particular about those burgers, anyway, because my parent's burgers tasted better anyway.

Buses were thoroughly segregated, the city owned bus system. And we all know the story about Rosa Parks, who attempted to ride the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the state capitol, about 100 miles from Birmingham. This particular day, she had a long day at work. And the law said that, as white people began to enter the bus, black people would have to move further to the back. And then when the bus filled up with white people, black people had no other choice other than to stand up.

Didn't matter how old they were or if the woman was pregnant or somebody was crippled, you had to stand up to allow white people, even a kid, to take your seat. In order for black people to board the bus, they would have to enter the bus from the front, place their money into the container, exit the bus and then come back in through a rear door -- a door in order to access the bus. Many cases as you paid your money and attempted to access the rear door, the bus driver would just drive off just for the fun of it. And most of the occupants who were white got a big laugh out of it. That was segregation in Birmingham.

So as my brother and I had all of these questions about why were African-American people treated so bad, they would try their very best to explain to us why that exists. And we were so confused about it. But always my mother would send us to her mother, our maternal grandmother, Nanee. That's what we called her. And she lived next door. And she would explain to us how she went to school at Clark Atlanta University and how they made their way to Birmingham.

And then when she ran out and then she looked at our confused faces, she would always end her discussion with a mantra. Boys, if you want to overcome this segregation issue, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get yourselves a good education. Again, she would say pray, have faith, walk upright and get an education, a good education.

In 1963, one of the ministers in Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth, attempted to enroll his daughter into some of the white schools, Phillips High School, I think it was. And he tried several times. And as he attempted to do so, he would -- he was met by mobs of Ku Klux Klansmen who would beat him unmerciful.

Now, they didn't bother the girl, but they beat dad really bad. And many times his attack was on TV, and we were able to see what happened to him. That meant don't try it again or the rest of the black people in Birmingham don't dare try to do it.

Reverend Shuttlesworth was persistent, and he tried several times to enroll his daughter into Philips High School. Well, see, because by that time in 1954, we had Brown versus Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that took place in Kansas. And it basically said that even though Plessy versus Ferguson allowed for separate but equal facilities, the facilities in the Birmingham schools indeed were not equal.

So that meant that Fred Shuttlesworth wanted to enroll his daughter into predominantly white schools. You've got to understand that that was ten years after Brown versus Board of Education.

After these attempts, Dr. -- Mr. Fred Shuttlesworth decided to reach out to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By this time, he had become known all over the country, all over the South. And he had successful boycotts and bus boycotts in the state of Georgia. And so he asked Dr. King to come to Birmingham and help things out. And that started the Freedom Movement of 1963.

Now, Dr. King would have the rallies with people from Birmingham at 16th Street Baptist Church, which was one of the largest churches in Birmingham. It was situated not too far from downtown Birmingham and a few blocks away from City Hall and the county courthouse. It was directly across the street from Kelly Ingram Park, which is where the demonstrations usually started and stopped.

Typically, demonstrate the next morning with his brilliant oratory, with his intellectual depth. And I would see him on television, but we never went down to hear him talking. I wanted to go so bad.

You see, Dr. King had a brother that pastored a church in Birmingham, in Ensley suburb. And his sons Al and Derek King, where my brother and I best friends. And so we hear about the Civil Rights Movement directly from our two buddies.

You know, every now and then we would -- we would be over to their home, perhaps on the weekend having a good time. And I recall their mother telling us he is to lower our voices because Dr. King was in the room trying to get some rest. You know, and I asked her, I said, you know, are you telling me that Dr. King's on the other side of that door? She said, Yes. And you don't know how bad I wanted to just go in and see him because I'd seen him on TV several times.

I'd seen him in magazines and jet magazine and everything. I've seen him in the newspaper in Birmingham, but I'd never seen him in person. And I wanted to see him so bad. I didn't know but a few bit -- a few months later, I would get that chance to see him in person.

Dr. King would have a rally at the 16th Street Church, and that rallies would be attended by adults. And the next morning, the adults would show up at the church, and they were taught nonviolent resistance. That mean no weapons. If the police hit you, you couldn't hit back. If you had a knife or a gun or anything that can be considered a weapon, even a fingernail file, you had to leave them in a box because Dr. King was nonviolent.

Typically, the people would leave 16th Street Church, cross the street, go over to the park area; and they would be met by police with cattle prods, billy clubs, fire hoses, attack dogs; and many of them would be taken to jail. Now, that posed a problem for the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham and Dr. King because, as the parents were being locked up, there were no body at home to take care of the kids.

The other part of it was, when the adults were locked up, incarcerated for a couple of days, obviously not showing up to work, the employer would figure out that they were locked up because of the Civil Rights Movement. And whenever they did get out of jail and try to return to work, they would find that they had no jobs.

So Dr. King decided to, rather use adults, ask the kids of Birmingham to participate. Thus became the Kids Campaign of 1963. So kids were invited to come to 16th Street Church, and I wanted to go so bad. And I had several discussions with my mom and dad because I wanted to go.

I understood that even as a 10- or 11-year-old kid the significance of being a part of a movement that would hopefully change things for people of color in Birmingham. But my parents didn't want us to do it, and so that was a measure of protecting us.

Now, it wasn't such that our parents were against the movement. But they were fearful of what would happen to us, inevitably, when we got arrested. And so I wouldn't dare defy them, but it was a struggle for me.

And so when I was seeing the movement on television because, again, Dr. King had a very smart way of dealing with the media. He would plan the demonstrations in time for all of the media who was in Birmingham from around the world to record what was going on and then give them time to get their film back to New York or wherever they were coming from because the essence of using the media was that the whole world saw what was going on in Birmingham, at the 5 or 6 o'clock evening news.

It was important for people to know how black people were treated in Birmingham, and I think Dr. King used that media brilliantly because back then, again, no internet. But it was very brilliant of him to use that to let the world know, here's what's happening to people of Birmingham, simply trying to do things that weren't normal for people to be able to do, to go to school, to go to a department store and try on clothes, to have a decent water fountain, to go to the doctor and sit in a waiting room and not have to go to what was known as the colored waiting room, to be able to ride the bus, to be able to get jobs working in a department store or doing something as simple as being a bus driver. All of those jobs were out of reach for people who looked like me.

At some point, the kids were locked up in droves. When the jails were filled, they were sent out to the State Fairgrounds, and they were locked up behind cages standing cages. Imagine that.

I have several friends who went to the demonstrations. And, again, I was hearing about the movement from Al and Derek King and struggle with wanting to go. And, again, as I had these discussions with my mom and dad, they will send us to grandmother next door. And our grandmother would tell us after she struggled to try and explain things to us. Her mantra that she always used. Boys, if you want to overcome this issue of segregation, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get yourselves a good education.

At one point, Dr. King was locked up himself. And as a means of intimidating him, they locked him up in solitary confinement. He was all by himself. And while he was locked up, some of the ministers, white ministers in Birmingham, they bought a full age -- a full-page ad in the Birmingham News. And they wrote an editorial, and they were asking Dr. King to back off of the demonstrations, to wait a little while, to put off the demonstrations to give the city fathers' time to work things out.

But Dr. King knew that if you ask people -- white people in Birmingham to wait, that always meant never. And so in response to these preachers who put the ad in the paper, Dr. King used scraps of paper, anything he could find to pen what is now known as a Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And I would ask as you study the Civil Rights Movement that you would make an effort to go and read that famous essay, that brilliant essay because Dr. King responded to those ministers and, really, it led to his first book, Why We Can't Wait.

Dr. King was finally released from jail. He was -- his release was made possible by an attorney that lived up the street around the corner from, me on Dynamite Hill, Arthur Shores. And about the same time, there was the A.G. Gaston Motel, which was down the street from the church, 16th Street Church. And my dad was a manager there.

And one morning we woke up Sunday morning. We should have been getting ready to go to church, and we knew that there were many people in our house. And normally we wouldn't see white people in our home. But we knew there were white people in the house, and my brother and I were terrified when my mother finally came to my room and explained to us who these people were, she explained that the A.G. Gaston Motel had been bombed the night before as well as Dr. King's brothers home, Al and Derek King's home.

And we were really terrified by that because we wanted to know, was our dad all right? And we asked my mom, Well, who are all these people in the house? And she said they were the FBI and the police and media questioning our dad. We asked her to stop his interviewing and have him to come into our room so we can see for ourselves that he was okay. And then we spent time on the phone trying to call Al and Derek to make sure they were fine as well.

A few weeks later, of course, Medgar Evers over in Mississippi, worked with the NAACP, was tragically assassinated in his front yard in front of his wife and family. And I even remembered my mom and dad discussing joining the NAACP because, at that point, I think the NAACP had become outlawed in Birmingham. And the officials there wanted the list of its members, and my parents were really afraid to be a part of that group because of what might happen to us. They didn't want us victimized in one of the bombings or anything else.

It was difficult for my mom and dad to raise two boys in Birmingham. But again, not having any access to mental health or counseling for African-American boys, after hearing these bombings and seeing it on the news every day, there was our grandmother Nanee who said, Boys, you need to pray, have faith and walk upright and get a good education.

It was September 15, 1963. 16th Street Church was again the rallying point for the Civil Rights Movement and what became known as The Children's Movement. That was right downtown Birmingham. The reason why Birmingham -- the 16th Street Church was targeted because we had received quite a bit of threats, telephone threats, threats by mail over the course of a few months, but nothing ever happened to 16th Street Church.

That morning, my mother, who was a school teacher, dropped my brother and I off at church for Sunday school. Normally she would be there as well, but she had to return home to finish a report that was due the next day relative to her school teaching job. But there were many school teachers that went to 16th Street Church. And, ironically, many of them did the same thing. They dropped their kids off and went back home to finish their report.

My brother Kenneth went to his Sunday school class. And I went to mine, which was located in the library of the church. After Sunday school class -- and I recalled it being Youth Day, where the youth of the church took over the entire service that was to take place at the 11 o'clock hour up in the sanctuary. The library and the kids' classes were in the basement of the church.

At about 10:23, right after our class was over, the library, the whole building began to shake. I remember the lights going off and dust and smoke and total darkness because, again, even though it was 10:20 in the morning, we were in the basement of the church. There was dust. There was smoke. I don't really recall there, hearing the sound of the explosion. But I remember the room shaking. I remember books falling off of the shelves. And probably the thing that frightened me the most, there was a huge bookcase that was -- the front part was glass, and it was reeling back and forth. And had it tilted over on some of us -- because there were about eight boys in that library -- it would have killed some of us.

We had no idea what was going on. And we sort of looked at each other and ran out of the library into the lower auditorium part that had folding chairs. Now, again, we couldn't see because of the dust and because of the darkness. And I remember running into the chairs and getting my shins hit and we were so determined to get out of there, not really knowing what was going on. That adrenaline alone allowed us to continue to run, despite the fact that we were bumping into these chairs that were really quite painful for 11- and 12-year-old kids.

As I attempted to run up the stairwell, that I knew that side of the basement of the church was open, I was met by a police officer. He had both sides of the stairwell blocked. He was holding on to the rails. And I tried to run past him under his arms. And he looked at me and said, Get back down in there, nigger. Now, you know, response time today is about 7 to 8 minutes with fast cars and computers. But explain to me why the police were there within seconds of the bombing. I ran right past him some sort of way. I don't remember even touching him, I was moving so fast. And I got on the outside of the church, wondering what was happening.

Then it dawned on me, that I started to smell the pungent odor of dynamite, gunpowder. And I guess you asked yourself the question, well, what do you know about dynamite and gunpowder? Cap pistols and fireworks. And, again, our neighborhood had been -- homes in our neighborhood had been bombed several times before, so we knew the smell of that gunpowder and dynamite.

I started to see people come down out of the main auditorium, down this huge stairwell. Many of them were being helped down the steps, and many were hysterical and crying. I noticed that that was blood all over their foreheads and other parts of the body, and some of my friends -- and I was terrified by that.

People were running around looking for their loved ones, looking for their siblings, looking for their parents. And then it dawned on me I had not seen my brother Kenneth. I looked around on the outside as I saw people began to gather but didn't see him. And so I went back into the basement looking for my brother. I went to the classroom where he should have been. And I called his name, looked under the tables and yelled for him but there was no one in the room.

I came back out the second time and I remembered to grab my clarinet because I played in the church. I missed it the first time. But I saw it on the table near that same stairwell, and I grabbed it and I walked out. And I looked around and I looked around and I ran all over the area. And, finally, I saw my brother who was with his Sunday school teacher, my grandmother's best friend, Miss Esther McCall.

And looked like she was holding on to nine little kids. My brother was about nine years old. And she looked like she was holding on to them all at the same time. And I was so happy to see my brother. And I told her, I said, Miss McCall, I'll take him right now because our dad was right up the street at the A.G. Gaston Motel, and I knew he'd be there pretty quickly. And she questioned me, but her hands was full with taking care of the other kids. So I grabbed Kenneth by the hand and made sure he was okay. And we stood there on the corner, waiting for my father to come down the street.

Probably within a minute, I could see him running. I had never seen my dad run like that. But he ran down the street, and by this time the police had blocked off the street and they stopped him from exiting, from crossing the street. My dad defied the police, similar to what I did when I was trying to get out of the church. He said, Those are my boys, and I have to go see about my kids right now. Without even waiting on a response, he crossed the street and he hugged us like he never done before, all the time asking us were we okay.

He looked at us head to toe, just making sure that we were okay. And I saw the terrifying look in his face because, see, you remember he, too, had experienced the bomb just two or three months earlier when the A.G. Gaston Motel was bombed. He walked us that block down the street to his office at the motel that had been repaired by then, obviously, and he attempted to call home to tell our mom that he had found us and we were okay, but the line was busy.

My dad even tried to call next door to my grandmother and aunt, Nanee's house. And her line was busy, too, and he was so frustrated. And I remember seeing news reporters in the small lobby of the A.G. Gaston motel, and they were trying to gain access to these pay phones because they were trying to report their stories back to wherever they had come from.

See, reporters, white reporters even, weren't welcomed at the hotels in Birmingham, the Holiday Inns, the [inaudible] and the other hotels because they knew that they were there to report what was going on in the Civil Rights Movement, and they didn't want that information to leave Birmingham because it would affect the city economically. So reporters weren't welcome.

Pretty soon my dad finally got through to my mom, and what should have taken about 7 to 8, 9 minutes for her to drive from my home to the church took about 45 minutes. She finally pulled under the breezeway of the A.G. Gaston Motel, and it looked like she jumped out of that car before she put it into park. Tears were in her eyes as she jumped out and hugged us and again went through the process of making sure that we were okay.

Oh, we were okay physically. But, mentally, we were a mess. She loaded us into the car and took us home. And we started to see people gathering all over downtown Birmingham and demonstrations were taking place and people were singing the Freedom Songs, We Shall Overcome. We ain't going to let nobody turn us around. People were visibly angry.

We got back to our home and my grandmother and aunt met us in the front yard. They examined us themselves and asked us to tell them what we had experienced then. We told them as much as we could. And by this time we were in tears and shaking. Again, no counseling for black boys and girls. But there was Nanee, grandmother. And she told us, Boys, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get a good education.

Later that day, around 5 or 6, we learned that 27 people had been taken to the hospital. Again, 27 of our friends. And then we learned the tragic news that four girls, four precious little girls, Denise, Addie, Carol, and Cynthia were found basically on top of each other as they were in the ladies room, putting on their choir robes preparing for the 11 o'clock service. Again, it was Youth Day. And the theme for that Youth Day celebration was the love that forgives.

Monday morning came about, and after school we spent time visiting homes of the bereaved. We went to the Wesley home. We went to the Robertson home. We went to the McNair's and went to the Collins' home. We took groceries to some and made sure that they had food to eat. And we sat and cried with grieving parents and siblings because their four little girls were tragically killed. Neither one of these girls have participated in the movement. Nobody went to jail. But they were victimized by the bombing.

Now, meanwhile, you know, everybody in Birmingham and especially the police knew the guys who were doing this, but none of them were arrested immediately. Carole, Carole Robertson's funeral was Tuesday at St. John Baptist Church, which was right around the corner from 16th Street Church. And as I recall, there was a mass funeral with Cynthia, Denise and Carol -- Cynthia, Denise and Addie, their funeral was at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church on the other side of town in the place of where the University of Alabama Birmingham is right now.

I don't remember how I made my way from school to Sixth Avenue Church, but I remember standing on the outside of the church listening to Dr. King who delivered the eulogy because they had a PA system where you could hear his eulogy on the outside because they wouldn't allow any more people to enter because there were too many people already inside.

I stood there and watched them bring out four coffins, four little coffins with my friends inside. The pallbearers loaded them into the waiting hearse, and then the ministers followed the pallbearers out. And that was Dr. King and Reverend Shuttlesworth and Reverend Abernathy and Reverend Cross, the minister at my church. They were all in their robes.

And as the coffins were being loaded, I saw Dr. King about ten feet away from me. He seemed to have this strange look on his face. Every time I looked at him, looked like he was looking directly at me. It was so powerful a moment for me, I really didn't know how to handle it. And I attempted to look away. But when my eyes went back on him, looked like he was looking right at me. I called it my epiphany experience.

See, because Dr. King was blamed for the loss of those girls' lives because it was he that came to Birmingham and created the movement that enraged the clan that caused that to happen.

Pretty soon the entire world knew about that bombing, and the bombing of the church proved to be the pivotal moment in our history that created the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Federal Housing Act of 1968. And of course, you know, the history. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.

14 years after the bombing, Bob Chambliss, one of the people who were accused of the bombing, was convicted. I think it was, what, 1977. And then, later, 40 years later, Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton and Robert Chambliss finally were tried and convicted and sent to prison for life. I went to Birmingham to the Blanton trial because I wanted to see closure. So I drove from Dallas back to Birmingham to sit and witness the trial because I wanted to see the perpetrators punished for what they had done and for the lives of my friends that were taken away.

So how does the story end? You know, when my grandmother talked to us about the bombing of the church and counseled us, again, she referred to her mantra, Boys, pray, have faith, walk upright and get a good education.

But after the bombing and after we learned about the death of those four girls, she added something to it. She said, Boys, God spared you for a reason. Could have been four little boys versus four little girls. Do something for somebody else. Make something of yourselves. God has a plan for you.

Now, I had no idea what that was. But years later when I left Birmingham and I went to college, I ended up here in Texas and went to Texas Southern University down in Houston. And it was there that I learned at a fraternity meeting about what became my way of giving back in a significant way.

I learned about the mentoring through Big Brothers, Big Sisters and became a part of that program that almost a week that I finished school and went to work. I was working at NASA on the Space Shuttle program and found out from one of the African-American employees about Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and I've been a volunteer ever since, now almost for 50 years.

When my little brother that I have now who's a teenager calls me and talks about the police shootings and about Trayvon Martin and about the things that he sees on the news and he wants to know, could he be victimized by the police and police brutality, and I explained to him about his appearance and wearing hoodies, to making sure he's -- his parents know exactly where he is and hanging out with his friends and don't be out too late.

But when I run out of things to talk to him that was designed to protect him, always went back to my grandmother's mantra. Pray, have faith, walk upright, and get a good education. And you will be able to overcome the issues that you see in your experience right now with the many things that shouldn't be happening to people of color, maybe one of these days that will all end.

Let's hope so. I pray that it does.

Thank you.

[ Music ]

Hi, everyone, my name is Roy Vu, and I teach History at Dallas College North Lake Campus. Today I'll be presenting a paper on Family, Food and Freedom: African Diasporic Family Ties Via Emancipatory Foodways.

My presentation will encompass all three.

And as far as my personal interest in Civil Rights Movement and Black History Month, it stems from the fact that I'm a son of Vietnamese refugee parents.

And in regards to the Vietnam War, I was -- I found Martin Luther King's statements on the Vietnam War profound.

For instance, during the civil rights era, he remarked that unfortunate a disproportionate number of black men, poor black men, as well as poor whites from the south, were being shipped overseas to fight the war in Vietnam, and as a result, they endured unfortunately the highest number of casualties.

Another historic focal point that intersects my own personal history with black history and the civil rights era is the fact that in regards to Vietnamese refugees, and there were so many in the United States, thanks to civil rights legislation, like Immigration Act 1965, and a little bit later on, civil rights movement, the Refugee Act 1980 those acts would grant political asylum to thousands of Vietnamese refugees, who are fleeing from communist Vietnam, and be able to resettle in countries like the United States.

So those are just the two of many historical intersections that allow me to pique my interest or allow me to pique my interest in terms of learning more about black history and the Civil Rights Movement.

And of course, history is personal, right? Everyone has their own history.

So in fact, I like to always say to my students, history never ends until every story is told.

And in regards to today's story, again, as I mentioned, a moment ago, I'll be covering African American diasporic foodways, tying in with emancipatory foodways.

So without further ado, let me go ahead and begin with a quote from civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

"Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon.

But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family and nobody can push you around.

If we have something like some pigs and some gardens and a few things like that, even if we have no jobs, we can eat it, and we can look after our families." End of quote.

This is from Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a civil rights activist and founder, Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Family members, quote, encapsulates the ties that bind family, food, and freedom.

And also, the topic of my presentation and this is presentation goes along with a solace theme for 2021 on the black family.

And so, it's important that we celebrate black foodways and how such black foodways help emancipate African Americans, not just during the civil rights era, but even before back in the days of slavery, and of course, to new African American foodways that are going on today in the 21st century.

So let me move on to -- ooops. Let's move on to Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian and recipient of the 2018 James Beard Award.

He made -- in his book, "The Cooking Gene", he made numerous references to food and race.

So in the history of African Americans and the certificates of food and preserving and protecting and expanding black culture, Twitty poignantly analyzes that, "The food is, is in many cases, all we have, all we can go to in order to feed," I'm sorry, "all we can go to in order to feel our way into the past.

For others, we are on interesting note on pages of a very different conversation.

For African Americans and our allies, food is the gateway into larger conversations about individual and group survival.

It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning." And he admits, "for the most part, despite meaningless food."

He further assesses on the points of protecting, preserving and promoting African cuisines that have been Southernized in the United States.

"Through history is not in the food, it's in the people.

We'll work against the loss of our cultural memory against the consequences of institutional oppression, against indiscriminate flagrant appropriation and against courts of public opinion that question our authenticity, maturity, and motives of the revolutionary act of clarifying and owning our past.

It is my belief that the very reason we are here in space and time is deliberately connected to our journey with food.

The only question I ever wanted to ask for myself was, how is my destiny shaped by the history of Southern food?"

So here, Twitty poses a crucial and valuable question, to what extent in working against loss of cultural memory could African foodways be remembered and reinvigorated, survive, recapture, and expand, while overcoming the destructive, violent cultural genocide brought forth by the ongoing consequences of slavery, Jim Crowism, institutional racism, and cultural appropriation.

It is a question that must be recognized, addressed, and deliberated with meaningful action to combat and reverse the loss of cultural memory.

Moving on to African Diasporic Foodways from Slavery to Jim Crow Era, of which I don't have the time to delve deeply into the history of African diasporic foodways during slavery, but I'll just give you a snippet of what African slaves managed, or how African slaves managed to regain some food sovereignty, in other words, regain some control over what they consume.

OK. All right. So going far back into early American history.

Scholar Monica White argues that African slaves planted gardens and raised crops as a form of resistance.

She declares that, "The millions of men, women and children who were kidnapped from the homelands in Africa, and transported through the Middle Passage in the most extreme case of forced deportation in world history possessed knowledge in microclimates, and the particular kinds of crops that they could grow in places where they were as told as enslaved.

In addition to human cargo, slave ships carried African food staples, seeds, roots and vegetables that are produce, and livestock.

These staples would feed the crew and minimally the enslaved, but they're also incorporated into our culture of plantation economies, and became critical to the survival and wellbeing of both those living in slavery and their captors.

Researchers identify their African yams or root, bananas, hibiscus, millet, okra, pigeon peas, plantains, rice, sesame, sorghum, sweet potatoes, and on and on, to the Americas and the Caribbean throughout the Middle Passage."

So in the history of American slavery regarding the food distribution consumption of South, despite the plethora of food staples bought forth by African slaves, scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris says that slave owners often gave their slaves the less desirable parts of an animal, such as the fish head and backbone, or the hog's tail, brain, gizzard, and chitterlings.

These were typical on most southern plantations, unfortunately.

So Cohen writes, "Enslaved cooks improvised cooking methods that transform tougher cuts, as well as awful, the entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal into tasty dishes."

OK. So oftentimes, to nourish themselves for survival and improved health, African slaves would seek ways to regain some food security, reclaim the food heritage and reestablish the food sovereignty to have some control over their own food consumption and diet.

The foods given to African slaves by the slave owners were woefully short and inadequate of supplementing a balanced healthy diet.

African slaves resort, therefore, to their creative culinary skills and ingenuity to transform the leftovers into wholesome delicious meals with some nutritional value.

Consequently, African slaves and the cultivation food gardens would become another act of slave resistance.

So by cultivating herbs, vegetables and fruits, African slaves sought food resistance to meet their own health needs.

Scholars have identified the location of slave gardens or provision kitchen gardens -- kitchen grounds, excuse me on many former plantations, including the remnants of African seed, and root crops that eventually made their way to diets of contemporary Americans.

Most likely work on Saturday or Sunday, according to White, "Those who were enslaved grew crops such as various types of squash, yams, sweet potatoes, various kinds of peas, such as guinea peas from New Guinea and for soil fertility, it serverd more purposes cow and pigeon peas."

White goes on to argue that slave gardens are performances of resistance.

Well, gardening these crops are performance of slave resistance, arguing that, "Yet it seems likely that enslaved people decided what to grow, how to grow it, and what to do with the harvest in these gardens.

Thus, slave gardens represented independent production grounds, it can be understood as a strategy of resistance to corrupt system and an effort to create food security."

Food -- Therefore food provisioning can be seen as liberatory, enslaved people is using food production as a strategy of developing social relations and some autonomy.

For those who were enslaved, this practice of growing food, especially foods for the Motherland, and the social exchanges that went on in the marketplaces were also opportunities to enact freedom.

Using food production the slaves were able to practice the cultural and ceremonial uses of land that are brought with them as a way to celebrate their ancestors and the homeland they left behind.

Therefore, examples of black farming as resistance occurred during the transition from slavery to reconstruction, and well into the Jim Crow era."

So here, we talked about African foodways, as well as Afro-Caribbean foodways from the Middle Passage where millions of slaves were forced into bondage and transported in slave ships cross the Atlantic Ocean, making their way to the Americas.

So this journey would be known as the Middle Passage.

But along the way, slaves end up at places like Haiti and Cuba, throughout the Caribbean, and, of course, the United States, as well as South America.

They would carry with them Afro-Caribbean foodways or traditions that would help them live and survive and of course, would give them a more balanced diet.

And again, as I mentioned, slave gardens are perceived as an act of resistance.

So for slaves themselves, who cultivated these food variants, they are basically active agents of history where they would enact a form of resistance.

And in regards to black American farmers of the Jim Crow era, this is where I will talk about next.

And to give an example, since during my sabbatical, I did some research in Houston, my main area of interest was Vietnamese Americans and their home gardens, but along the way, I learned more -- also learned more about African American foodways in Houston, and the history of such foodways in Houston.

So Houston, Texas, there's a long tradition of black residents who cultivate their own vegetable gardens that remains today.

Historian Tyina Steptoe aptly explains the migration of blacks Southerns from Louisiana and East Texas,the migration to Houston at Jim Crow era, racial segregation violence toward African Americans.

She describes this as development in black settlement of its residential wards during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Steptoe profoundly analyzes, "The wards by Houston feel like a collection of small towns rather than one city."

Thelma Scott Bryant [assumed spelling], who was born in Third Ward in 1905, commented that her neighborhood felt very much like the country in the early 20th century.

Likewise, musician Arnett Cobb, who came of age in Fifth Ward described community of his youth as a country town.

Indeed, many of the people who moved to his neighborhood from the country continued the same customs and agricultural practices, they have brought forth -- that brought with them for the countryside, excuse me.

Most families raised chickens and grew okra, greens, corn, other subsistence crops in the backyards."

Here, African American migrants brought to Houston their own customs of raising their own vegetables, herbs, and farm animals when they lived in the countryside, but kept with them when we're selling and Houston, and thus preserving their cultural practices.

Historian, author and colleague Dr. Malcolm Fryer refers such aforementioned practices as cultural continuities, which are integral to cartel cultural appropriations, and marginalization of their food heritage.

So cultural continuities is just carrying farming customs from the rural to urban environment is one of many contributions blacks and the migrants have brought to Houston, enriching the city's polycultural world, despite under Jim Crowism.

That introduced the concept of urban farming in early 20th century long before the term itself became part of the American vernacular and trendy in the 21st century.

Furthermore, African Americans' cultural continuity via urban farming adds to the unique characteristics of Houston's urban development and growth, and the people who make the city.

Right. Now, going to transition to the civil rights era, Black Home Cooks, Chefs, Restaurateurs, and Farmers in the Civil Rights Era, in which no food no justice, no peace.

I will share a few stories. There's a lot more, but I'll just share three stories today just to make sure that I won't overextend my time.

So, transition to civil rights era. Let me share a few examples of black home cooks, farmers, chefs and restaurateurs who fed, housed and protected civil rights activists, starting off with Georgia Teresa Gilmore and her Club from Nowhere.

Scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris, "The attention of the nation turned to Montgomery Alabama December 1, 1955, where Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress and civil rights activist refused to give up her seat in the back of a crowded city bus to a white man and was arrested.

That day marked a historic turning point in the evolving civil rights movement as Montgomery's black community with well known leaders such as Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., to little known figures such as Georgia Teresa Gilmore, a local cook organized mass meetings and bake sale fundraisers to protest the city segregation laws."

So first, sheds greater light on the role of lesser known civil rights activists, like Georgia Gilmore.

She explains that, "Georgia Gilmore walked to and from the National Lunch Company where she worked every day during the boycott, until she was fired after testifying in court in Montgomery.

Undeterred, she cooked from her own home and organized the Club from Nowhere, a name chosen to ensure the anonymity and safety of its members.

The working class black woman from nowhere raised funds to support the carpools by selling homemade pies and cakes at local beauty parlors, Laundromats, and gas stations.

Each week Gilmore reported club success to the standing ovations of volunteers, gathered the mass meetings led by Reverend King.

The pie and cake money brought station wagons used in the boycott carpools. I'm sorry. The pie and cake money bought station wagons used in the boycott carpools.

Gilmore eventually turned part of her home into a public dining area thanks to encouragement and startup funds from King and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the boycott.

She created a backdoor restaurant where black and white customers, attorneys, activists, barbers, doctors, preachers and politicians alike could enjoy her fried chicken, pork chops, stuffed bell peppers, macaroni and cheese, and chitterlings.

In November 1956, US Supreme Court declared segregation of public houses to be unconstitutional, and the boycott ended.

Georgia Gilmore continued to feed the civil rights movement 10 years after the Montgomery bus boycott.

She prepared food for participants in historic Selma to Montgomery march."

Food scholar John T. Edge would add to that quote, "Threatened whites recognize," I'm sorry, "threatened whites recognized that Georgia Gilmore's house on the Deracote Street [assumed spelling]served as clubhouse for progressive black Montgomery, so did King.

In fact Gilmore's house restaurant which started the divide between dining hall and private club defined a welcome table ideal that would emerge as a primary metaphor in the civil rights movement.

After she stepped away for her job at National Lunch to claim her own business underground black economy, her success hit too of the moves come during the Black Power stage of the Civil Rights Movement, when instead of angling for the integration whitespaces, African Americans created black spaces at a moment when they had seemingly low leverage cooking for the brave black women intimate and essential power."

Moving on to Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967.

Scholar Monica White explains, "The Freedom Farm Cooperative was an antipoverty strategy to meet the needs of impoverished residents of Louisville, Mississippi, in Sunflower County.

Freedom Farm was a community based rural and economic development project.

Its members were unemployed farmers who have been dispossessed of access to land and displaced by mechanization."

White goes on to analyze that Freedom Farm represents opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based on building alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Fannie Lou Hamer, White praises her political accumen and intellectual fortitude to connect food security with voting rights.

"In her work with SNCC and with the Mississippi freedom Democratic Party, she connected starvation of people in Sunflower County, not only to pressure to migrate but also to the pressure not to register to vote."

From Fannie Lou Hamer, "Nobody told us we have to move from Mississippi. Nobody tells us we're not wanted, but when you're starving, you know."

So in creating Freedom Farm as a means to develop a stable black community on the foundation of agriculture, Hamer illuminated, the relationship between economic self-sufficiency and political power and translated the theory into action.

In an effort to increase access to healthy food, FFC's members worked collaboratively in planting, maintaining, and harvesting the crops in the community gardens.

And the community spaces, 30 in the first 40 acres were dedicated to subsistence crops and community garden where co-op members planted greens, kale, turnips, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, tomatoes, butter beans, and more.

In 1972, these subsistence crops are more than 1,600 families.

 At least 10% of the community garden harvest was donated to needy families whose members were unable to work the fields.

Cooperative families share the remainder, and if there was more than they needed, FFC shipped the surplus to feed needy families as far away as Chicago."

White goes on to say that the Freedom Farm Cooperative would also help families who were displaced by the automobile industry and its families in urban areas who struggled to gain access to healthy food, and adequate and healthy, I'm sorry, adequate affordable housing, clean water, and quality education, and healthcare deployment as well.

White argues that "FFC developed a model community resilience and collective agency as a foundation for political action that speaks to those who live in food insecure communities, such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago and New Orleans.

It offers a new way for those who historically -- who have historically been excluded to build sustainable communities."

So between 1969 and Hamers's death in 1976, the Freedom Farm Cooperative increased from originally from 40 acres to several 1,000 acres, and it was used for food production.

It was also used for cash crops of corn and soybeans, and provide housing entrepreneur activities.

Food scholar John T. Edge argues that Hamer's intrepid commitment to black food production in 1960s to 1970s set precedents "for current dialogues about food sovereignty."

One more example, we like to talk about the Black Panther Party and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, which started 1969, ended in 1980.

The Black Panther Party advocate for food justice, fighting against food security that plagued black neighborhoods.

Edge asserts that, "Bobby Seale helped found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense 1966, focused his attentions on food too.

Inspired by the rhetoric of Malcolm X, and anti-colonialism in Africa, Seale, like other Panthers, argued that power will allow blacks to gain land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace."

Sociologist Alison Hope Alkon views that "The West Oakland farmers market has roots in the Black Panther Party, which emphasized community self-determination and self-sufficiency.

The Black Panthers Party, Free Breakfast for School Children Program tie their political approach to issues of food and hunger.

As recipients of free food, the school children could have characterize -- could be characterized as victims in need of charity.

However, Black Panther Party leaders and volunteers used rhetoric to envision the children are subjects rather than subjugated objects, by referring them as little brothers, little sisters, and the only assurance we have of a new indifferent tomorrow, the Black Panther Party posited children as entitled to rather than merely in need of free food."

Alkon 41 further elucidates that the -- end of quote, sorry. Alkon further elucidates that, Free Breakfast for School Children and others of our programs were tailored not only to sustain the black community, but to introduce them to the party's ideals, which included a right to food."

Noble chef and author Brian Terry states that, "In the late 1960s, the Black Panthers had this brilliant analysis around the intersection of poverty, malnutrition, and institutional racism.

They wanted to liberate black communities, and they know that providing food for young people was key."

Now, there are many other examples as well, including Chef Leah Chase, who passed away back in 2019 at the age 96.

She fed several US presidents at her creole restaurant, Dooky Chase, a famed restaurant in the New Orleans' Treme neighborhood.

So her beloved Creole restaurant in New Orleans' Treme neighborhood had long been important being an eating place for civil rights leaders in the city, go all the way back to the 1960's Freedom Riders, for instance.

And there are many other examples as well.

So these are just a few examples that provided today.

Moving on to a few photos.

This one is of Georgia Gilmore as she adjusts her hat for photographers during the bus boycott, Montgomery bus boycott trial of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

Yeah, Fannie Lou Hamer, a fierce advocate of civil rights and food justice.

Again, she was the founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

And, again, tying in or connecting the issues of civil rights with food justice, Hamar and others advocated the right of African Americans to gain food sovereignty.

And then you have the Black Panther Party, one of the cofounders, Bobby Seale here checking the food bags provided for school children.

As we all know, 2020, 2021 unfortunately, we've seen many videos and images of long lines of food banks and school children today not having access to school breakfast and lunch programs.

And so, this issue remains unfortunately prevalent today among US school children.

And going back to the Black Panther Party, they're one of the early advocates, if not the first, to establish a free breakfast program for schoolchildren.

Another photo here, Black Panther serving children free breakfast at Sacred Heart Church in San Francisco, California.

We're going to move on to Black Food Geographies, African American Urban Farms and Gardens Today.

I met you at the West Oakland Farmers Market which was inspired by the Black Panther Party.

I'm not going to delve too much into the West Oakland Farmers Market for -- you know, to save some time.

So for West Oakland Farmers Market, you have the influence of Black Panther Party that would lead to farmers and food gardeners in Oakland to establish a farmers market of their own in West Oakland.

And so, not only would you have an opportunity for black farmers gardeners to sell their produce and earn some income, but also these farmers, gardeners at such farmers markets, like the West Oakland Farmers Market would provide African Americans, in particular West Oakland, access to healthier food options, OK, particularly in areas that has food deserts, lacking in healthy food options.

OK. Moving on to the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and the D-Town Farm.

I want to spend more time on this.

Scholar Monica White contends that, "Across generations, black Detroiters are using our culture as a way to convert vacant lots with overgrown grass into community gardens that serve as social spaces.

These spaces now function as community centers where people learn about healthy eating, increased access to healthy food, and receive health services.

They're a place where intergenerational relationships are nurtured and maintained, and where residents have a safe space for exercise.

For many in Detroit, the new relationships they forge between land, food and freedom are response to the housing foreclosure crisis, the closing public schools, the water shutoff crisis, and issues of policing."

Monica White would further add that for members of the DBCFSN, "They oversee the work of D-Town Farm, which is about two acres, as critical to their survival that became involved in community farming for many reasons, including neighborhood beautification, insuring Detroit residents access to clean healthy food, and become stewards of the environment.

They engage in farming to reallocate land within the city for green purposes for meeting the needs of the local community.

They also engage in farming as community based business strategy oriented toward political change.

They hope that participating in the farm will plant seeds in farm workers' minds, demonstrating the critical nature of community based control of collective resources.

D-Town activist recognized farming as a strategy of resistance and sustainable community building.

As Fannie Lou Hamer did before them, D-Town farmers have built new institutions on their own, and saw an opportunity to work toward food security and food sovereignty, and to gain greater control of the food system that affects their daily lives.

Farming food security became steps towards self-determination and self-reliance.

The community builds and controls its own social institutions, restoring the earth or transforming the food system become possible.

D-Town farmers' resistance strategy focuses on their use of land to create community spaces to teach about healthy eating and to create a new vision of Detroit.

By the 2016 growing season, D-Town farm was producing more than 30 different crops, including acorn, squash, zucchini," I'm sorry, "acorn squash, zucchini, kale, collard greens, tomatoes, basil, green beans, watermelon, beets, turnips, and so on.

An unusually broad spectrum by the way for a city farm.

In addition to the fruit and vegetable herb crops, D-Town farmers maintain a mushroom growing operation and an apiary that produce honey.

D-Town also had hoop houses for year round food production and runs large scale composting operation."

Moving on to the Gardens of Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

Changa Muenda [assumed spelling], born and raised in Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood New Orleans, that was the worst hit community by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, deliberates over the points of home gardening, culture continuity, and food sovereignty for African Americans when rebuilding her neighborhood in the post-Katrina era.

Muenda asserts that, "The gardens are our community centers. It's really about the people first.

The space needs to serve the people.

What I'm focused on is increasing the capacity of these gardens to serve our people and be effective community building tools.

We're building community and replace your old cultural traditions of our neighborhood.

There was a time when everyone here had their own backyard gardens, which is something that they did, sharing produce and helping one another, harvesting from fruit trees that grew around the neighborhood.

This has to be a space that is safe for people who have felt disenfranchised and overlooked.

So that as community, we know these gardens, the projects are not about other folks coming here and deciding what should happen, that this is ours."

I'm spending a little more time on Urban Harvest and Plant It Forward Farms.

This is more my area of research.

In regards to Urban Harvest, here's the food writer David Leftwich, provides some great details about one of the oldest community gardens in Texas, community that was confronted food desert issues, yet at the same time was expanding food sovereignty for African Americans.

Leftwich argues that, "Urban Harvest has community gardens set up in food deserts with the aim toward, for one, the oldest raised bed community garden along the Gulf Coast, and that's the Alabama community garden and Third Ward.

And they are associated with Urban Harvest, but mostly they're running it on their own."

Leftwich elaborates more on Alabama community garden and its mission to serve food desert communities.

"So it's a pretty big community garden, it's primarily African American, like there's a couple of schools that gardens there.

There's certainly a true community garden.

Urban Harvest does a lot of work with the community gardens.

There's this kind of overarching to teach classes, provide logistic support and more.

So to confront, sorry, so to confront food justice and sovereignty challenges, marginalized populations often collaborate with local farmer organizations, such as Urban Harvest, as well as Plant It Forward Farms.

Thus, community home gardens also play a pivotal role in producing enough healthy greens for their family, neighbors, and community.

Such community home gardens give them opportunities to seek food justice and redeem themselves and their food heritage, regain their food sovereignty, particularly in working class food desert neighborhoods, and as a result root and cultivate a part of their culinary citizenship to belong to this land.

I'll explain more about culinary citizenship in a minute.

Now, in regards to Plant It Forward Farms, they are a nonprofit organization that assists new refugee and immigrant groups in Houston to resettle their lives in the city and become urban farmers.

Hundreds of thousands of Congolese refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Congo have recently experienced the traumas and difficulties of war, displacement, refugee camp life, resettlement and marginalization.

For the more fortunate, some Congolese refugees were eventually granted asylum to resettle in cities like Houston.

In their brief resettlement history, they work tirelessly to earn a decent living wage while residing in working class neighborhoods of Southwest Houston as they adjust to living in a new country.

Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming challenges and odds, the Congolese diaspora in Houston continue to persevere -- continues to persevere and demonstrate resilience in agency, as they develop their own community and retain their food heritage.

[Inaudible] turned to urban farming and home gardening.

Plant It Forward Farms, again, nonprofit organization in Houston, assists Congolese refugee farmers, establishing only sustainable, small scale urban farms that sell fresh locally grown produce.

But the organization also provides farmers opportunity to earn a modest living.

The personal stories of farmers such as Toto Alimasi in Harriet, in Gangwal, are just a few significant stories out of thousands that allow us to critically contextualize and storicize African refugees and immigrants in the United States who attempt to cultivate sustainable small scale urban farms toward achieving emancipatory foodways.

For farmer Toto Alimasi, he raises herbs, vegetables, fruits like amaranth, African eggplant, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane to remind him of his homeland.

Regarding the aforementioned produce, Alimasi asserts, "When we eat this, we feel like home," end of quote.

At a small farm, he walks and guides me to his banana trees and points out several bunches of small bananas with each bunch carrying a dozen or more.

He proudly and joyfully declares, "I grow these banana trees here.

When we eat bananas, we remember Africa."

So that ends our discussion on black food geographies.

Again, there are many more examples, but these are a few examples I wish to share today.

I also want to share just a few photos of Plant It Forward Farms.

Here's -- Here are actually three small Plant It Forward Farms at the Westbury community farm site in Southwest Houston.

It's a beautiful farm site as you can see, right, you know, in the city limits of Houston, Texas.

This is farmer Toto Alimasi, back when I had shorter hair, the pre-COVID-19 days back in October 2019.

It was a pleasure to talk to.

Henriette in Gangwal. She's been a Plant It Forward Farmer since 2018.

Again, these gardens are beautiful, and green, and lush, and again, they're providing healthy food options, right, in neighborhoods, communities that lack such options.

In addition to that, these refugees are earning a decent living by urban farming.

All right. So moving on to Critical Food Studies, Theoretical Frameworks in Emancipatory Foodways.

I won't go into great detail over these theoretical frameworks.

But just to start off real quickly on food sovereignty, actually I have a graph that I want to show you.

Food sovereignty is about having control over some healthy food sources.

If space and resources are available no matter how limited, African diasporans typically cultivate produce to gain access to fresh and affordable food, which leads to better overall diet, health and food security.

When cultivating crops familiar to the African diaspora culture, then African Americans are preserving their food heritage.

By preserving the food heritage, they demonstrate food resistance to unhealthy food options.

They're often ubiquitous in black working class neighborhoods.

To overcome marginalization of their food heritage, they would be agents of food justice, using herbs, fruits, and vegetables from their own farms and gardens to make culinary dishes that remind them of home.

OK. That's the concept -- basic concept food sovereignty.

Moving on to culinary citizenship.

Culinary citizenship expresses the need and control by the oppressed to compensate the suffering and misfortune by cultivating traditional food ways of creating, raising, procuring, consuming, and sharing the food to neighbors and strangers, to friends and foes alike.

Culinary citizenship is a close cousin of agrarian citizenship, but with an emphasis on the urban, suburban, and exotic places, not just the rural locales.

Not unlike agrarian citizenship, however, culinary citizenship also permits the oppressed to remember, recover, redeem, and expand their traditional foodways.

It is the network of systemic practices to grow food to live a dignified life to a freedom from despair, hopelessness, poverty and statelessness.

Moving on to food and culinary justice.

I do have another quote from Michael Twitty.

Quote, "We are surrounded by culinary injustice where some southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating."

In other words, Twitty is addressing the issue of cultural appropriation of black food, and the failure to -- our failure to recognize the innovations and ingenuity of black chefs, home cooks, farmers and gardeners.

And one example that we use would be barbecue, right?

The popular biggest fare in the south and the rest of the country as well.

And so, barbecue like he mentioned, "Might go the way of the banjo, an African instrument that most people now associate with bluegrass music played by whites."

For anthropologists Ashante Reese, she argues that, "Food justice is fundamentally about racial justice, because in the United States, racism not only structure everyday practices, I'm sorry, everyday experiences, but also influenced the underdevelopment of neighborhoods and the implementation policies that disproportionately disenfranchise black communities.

Documented in these inequities and eradicating them is essential as we work toward a more just food system.

Self-reliance is neither simply cultural nor simply spatial.

Residents understanding of self-reliance was grounded in historical and spatial context, addressing structural inequalities, while building community using the garden as a central site, which to work.

In this context, feeding the community took on greater meetings that providing fruits and vegetables.

Feeding meant youth development, visions for entrepreneurship, and potentials for strengthening relationships with parents and caregivers."

Going back to Michael Twitty, who calls for culinary justice, Twitty demands culinary justice and defines it definitively as, "The idea that people should be recognized for their gastronomic contributions and have a right to their inherent value including the opportunity to derive empowerment from them.

Today, this widens the lens of food justice, which centers around increasing access to healthy food and helps amplify how culture, food and power interplay and amplifies the agents leading the revolution."

So with the concept of culinary justice, Twitty has certainly advanced our philosophy on food, the production, procurement, preparation, sharing and consumption and remnants of food.

And finally, liberatory agriculture. This comes from scholar Monica White, whom I quoted before.

She argues that, "Liberatory agriculture ignited the imagination of former activists and African American farmer cooperatives during the mid-19th century.

In the 21st century, self-determined agriculture, alongside lessons learned from decades of successes and failures, had the real potential to offer similar opportunity for urban growers who are responding to the harsh conditions of deindustrialization and economic downturn."

Here's an image of culinary historian Michael Twitty, again, the 2018 James Beard Award recipient, and author of "The Cooking Gene."

So to conclude, black food matters.

And I'll start with a quote from Chef Kwame Onwuachi, the author of "Notes from a Young Black Chef", which by the way is North Lakes 2020-2021 Common Book Read, so kudos to our great common book committee. "

My ancestors are those who like Auntie Mi, ground cassava flour for hours, soaked stockfish, and hit kola trees until the nuts fell down.

My ancestors are steeped in the curries and jerk of Jamaica, and found in the stews and roux, gumbos and jambalayas of Louisiana.

It was something I couldn't deny any longer."

So this goes -- this ties in with all the previous concepts we talked about in emancipatory foodways, right.

So farm to freedom delves into how African Americans utilizing foodways will experience greater liberation from the traumas of enslavement, racism, inequity, injustice, poverty, land loss, and food insecurity.

Also allows them to embrace Afro-Caribbean food heritage and roots through farming, cooking, and gardening.

And furthermore, just as Twitty stated, it addresses culinary injustices, right, to right the wrongs.

In addition, for black chefs, home cooks, farmers, gardeners, there's more to black food than just soul food, OK.

So going beyond soul food, black food is diverse, it's complex, it's healthy.

Think about the different regions when you look at Afro-Caribbean cuisine, right, stretching from Africa to various parts of the Caribbean, to the Americas, right?

In addition, not only that, you have in terms of soul food, the diversity of soul food itself.

Today, you have vegan soul food and chefs creating -- or staff should begin soul food restaurants in creating vegan dishes, right?

So in other words, you know, black food matters and black food is diverse, complex and healthy.

In regards to 21st century African diaspora foodways, it's about the perseverance, right, and the preservation, as well as expansion and celebration of black food.

And just to complete our presentation for today, here's a photo of Chef Kwame Onwuachi, author of "Notes for Young Black Chef".

And also, I want to show you photograph of Chef Mashama Bailey, 2019 change James Beard Award recipient.

And Mashama Bailey, a black chef in Savannah, Georgia established restaurant called the Grey Restaurant.

Her work reclaims segregated spaces for integrated dining.

And it was, by design, it was with a purpose, right?

Chef Bailey was, as mentioned, the 2019 James Beard Award recipient.

She transformed what was a generation ago a segregated Greyhound bus terminal into an award winning restaurant called the Grey, now serving as an integrated dining space.

OK. All right. So that concludes my presentation for today.

I do have a list of books should you wish to read more about African American, I'm sorry, African diasporic foodways, as well as emancipatory foodways.

I recommend all these books, particularly again, Kwame Onwuachi's "Notes for Young Black Chef", as well as Michael Twitty's "Cooking Gene." Monica White's "Freedom Farmers" is a marvelous piece of work as well, and many others.

So my question is for students and the rest of the audience, what does black food mean to you?

How can we preserve and expand black foodways from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States and around the world?

In what ways could we honor and celebrate black chefs, home cooks, farmers, gardeners, and restaurateurs?

What steps are necessary to improve racial and gender inequalities in the culinary world?

And I'll end with another quote from Chef Onwuachi, "I want to see the world in which not only the food from the African diaspora but the food from Africa is given the respect it deserves.

When I push open the kitchen doors, I want to see dining room full of diners, but especially brown and black diners who look at their plates, feel seen, celebrated, and recognized.

And when I look in the mirror, I want to see a young black chef who made that world a reality."

This is just a wonderful illustration by an artist.

And that's Fannie Lou Hamer. Well, not the artist, I'm sorry, this is an illustration of Fannie Lou Hamer and her influence on African diasporic foodways.

Thank you.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Hello. Welcome to the Civil Rights Speaker Series.

I am Professor Rachelle Powell, Sociology Instructor at North Lake Campus.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And I am Dr. Rolanda Randle, Government Faculty at Richland Campus.

[Rachelle Powell]:  This presentation, "The Story Behind the Headlines, the Fight for Social Justice in Education during the Civil Rights Movement," will focus on some of the headlines that you've heard and seen throughout the Civil Rights period, but we're also going to talk a little bit about some of the lesser-known stories behind the headlines.

So, again, welcome to this series, and we hope that it provides you with a better outlook of some of the issues related to education during the Civil Rights Movement. Thank you.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And as we move through the presentation, we've established a timeline for you to follow.

And as we talk about the different cases and the different events that occurred, we are going to spend a lot of time talking about the families' involvement because with the stories, you've heard the headlines, but we don't always know how it affected the family, so that is one of the focuses.

And as you see the timeline here, look for it throughout the presentation. We'll start in the 1800s to talk about how education for African Americans began and then lead through what's happening today. Next slide.

And for this particular slide, we're using "Separate but equal," and we'll talk about what that term actually means. I want to start out with the history of the Freedmen's Bureau.

It was established after the Civil War during Reconstruction to help integrate the newly-freed slaves into society and also to help those White families who lost land or were left without a home because of the Civil War, and one of the major functions of the Freedmen's Bureau was to help establish an education system for African Americans and to protect the teachers who were part of that school system.

So, it was established in 1865. It was temporary through the federal government, and it ended in 1972.

Through the Freedmen's Bureau, there were over 1000 schools established for Blacks and loans made to some of the historically Black colleges and universities that exist today to help them get up and running.

And so, after the Freedmen's Bureau and after African Americans were freed from slavery, we move into Plessy v. Ferguson. It's a seminal case in our history.

And in that case, the Supreme Court at the time basically upheld the constitutionality of separating the races, and they established the doctrine "Separate but equal," stating that if African Americans and Caucasians were separate, as long as the facilities were equal, then that was constitutional. Next slide.

[ Music and Singing ]

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  It sort of -- it was the -- the bubbling up that was coming to the early '60s and the events that led up to Rosa Parks sitting on the bus, you know, to the March on Washington.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  We were proud to do what we know we needed to do.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  They were a direct forerunner of trying to move the nation into a different direction.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  The history of the walkout at Adkin High School in Kinston is a marvelous and very encouraging story. And to be honest, I'd never heard about it.

[ Music and Singing ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now, in that brief -- this brief video clip you heard about Adkin High School and the walkout from 1951. So, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail.

And the fight -- fighting for equal education was well underway when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, but one of the lesser known fights that happened was with the Adkin High School walkout in 1951, and Adkin High School is located in Kinston, North Carolina.

One day in 1951, an announcement was made over the loudspeaker, and the announcement was, "Carolyn Coefield has lost a red pocketbook."

Those words were the signal that triggered the walkout of 720 Black students. The students, not wanting to cause troubles for their parents or teachers, told no one about their plan, which was executed perfectly.

Prior to the walkout, five students spoke with the school board, demanding better facilities and materials similar to what the White students had at their high school.

The school board did not waiver and chose not to make any improvements to the building or supplies at the Black-only school.

That prompted the students to devise and implement their walkout plan. They marched with signs that read, "Freedom, Equal Rights, and Education."

This walkout illustrates how aware Black students were of the fact that their education was not the same as their White counterparts.

The walkout received widespread attention with the media wanting to see if the students had actually done that.

Within one year of the walkout, although still segregated, the Adkin High School received a new swimming pool, a new gym, new classroom, and new vocational building.

And this was all done before the Brown v. Board of Education's lawsuit. And so, this just shows you that the fight for civil rights, it did not begin with Brown v. Board of Education.

Most often when we talk about civil rights in education, we always focus on Brown v. Board of Education. And although that was a pivotal point in civil rights regarding education, we just want to stress that the fight for equal education and racial justice within education was a fight long held before the Brown v. Board of Education decision came through.

We've provided more information about this in our resource section of this presentation, so I encourage you to look at that when you have an opportunity. Thank you. Next slide.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Now, as Professor Powell mentioned, Brown v. Board of Education is another seminal case in social justice in education. So, when we talked about Plessy v. Ferguson and "Separate but equal," that doctrine lasted for 58 years. Brown v. Board of Education was the case that finally overturned that.

And by applying the Equal Protection Clause from the Fourteenth Amendment to African Americans and in public facilities and in this case specifically in public education, stating that there's no such thing basically as "Separate but equal," and one of the cases that tested the ruling from Brown was the Little Rock Nine.

After Brown, there was a call from the federal government to integrate schools, public education, and one of the first cases that gained a lot of notoriety was the Little Rock Nine.

With the Little Rock Nine, there was a group of nine African American students who were going to integrate the high school in Little Rock, and it was a major media event because the National Guard had to be called in to walk with those students to class because there was so much protest about integrating the schools and everything that happened in Arkansas, eventually with the schools being -- all schools being closed down.

Governors started to take the same action and close down schools all across the United States.

The clip that is -- that accompanies this particular story is just the story of one of the students who was from the Little Rock Nine talking about how she felt after that first year of trying to integrate the school and also with having security with her almost 24/7, but she speaks of -- they couldn't be with them everywhere because she was a female.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  By the time school had ended, I had sort of settled into myself, and I could have gone on for the next five years. It didn't matter anymore. I was past feeling.

I was -- I was into just that kind of numb pain where you say, "Hey, I can make it. Do whatever you'd like," and it just doesn't matter anymore.

But I came home, and by myself, I walked to the backyard, and I burned my books. I burned everything that I could burn.

And I just stood there crying, looking into the fire, and wondering whether I would go back, but not wanting to go back.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  Melba Pattillo didn't have to face that decision. The next year, Governor Faubus closed down all of Little Rock's high schools to halt integration.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  The troops were wonderful. You know, there was some fear that they were dating the girls in high school, and I don't care what they were doing.

They were wonderful. But they couldn't be with us everywhere. They couldn't be with us, for example, in the ladies bathroom.

They couldn't be with us in gym. You'd be walking out to the volleyball court, and someone would break a bottle and trip you on the ball. I have scars on my right knee from that.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Okay. In this brief video clip, you're going to hear about the Prince Edward County School and their response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  I missed the whole four years out of school. And I think I lost a lot of education because now some of the things we have in school, I have missed it, and I have a hard, you know, time trying to get there.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  I knew that the whole thing was wrong. The most important thing was, "Why was it wrong?" There was nothing else I could say but, "It was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong."

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  After I got old enough, they closed school. And well, I guess I was more hurt than anything else because -- well, I had to leave home, and I've always loved it here, and I just felt bitter.

I don't know why. It was just because I guess that's -- well, they just closed the schools and shut the door.

[Music; Video audio, man speaking]:  Prince Edward County, Virginia, the only county in America that closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Where Negro and White fought over the interpretation of the Constitution for 10 bitter years.

Where every resident had to decide for himself where the law lay. In court decrees? Or in his own personal attitudes and beliefs?

[Video audio, male minister speaking]:  These children are members of a lost generation. I'm Reverend Griffin, minister of their church, and I know.

Sometimes, I look at them, and I wonder if the whole struggle was worth it because in a sense, what we did to them is undeniable. We sacrificed them to prove they were equal.

[ Changing Radio Stations ]

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  Well, I'm not about to sacrifice my children. I mean, I want them to get a good education, but I really believe they can't get a good education in an integrated school at least not in the South. It just won't work in the South.

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now with this brief video clip, you heard about the Prince Edward County school closure. So, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about that.

Now, this was, of course, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, so you would think that since the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was unconstitutional with regard to schools and they were required to integrate, that that would be -- would have been the end of the story.

But, in fact, it was not. And so, while there have been many cases and many instances where integration improved the lives of African American students, there are cases that shows where it did not help Black students during that period.

And one such case is with the Prince Edward County schools. And in this school district, the county chose to close the school district, the entire school district, rather than integrate, although that was the law of the land.

And you might be thinking, "Well, if they close the schools that would impact the White students, as well as the Black students." Well, it did.

And the county had an answer for that. They understood and they created a plan to address the issue.

What they decided to do was to open up private academies for White -- for the White students in the county, so they were still able to receive an education while all the schools that were supposed to integrate were closed to the Black students.

The state also, recognizing that these private schools charge tuition, the state offered scholarships and grants to cover tuition.

But of course, the tuition -- the grants and the scholarships were only available to the White students in the county. So, Black students were not allowed to attend any of those private schools.

Now, some Black families may have sent their children to live in other counties and other cities and perhaps even in other states to receive an education in an integrated school, but many families could not do that for a variety of reasons.

Some churches decided to hold classes in their basements. But again, that was limited in terms of what they could offer the students.

And what it ended up doing was most of the Black children in Prince Edward County simply did not attend school.

So, there were lawsuits back and forth through the courts for a period of 10 years or so where they were determining whether it was constitutional for, number one, the school district to close entirely, but also with opening the private schools and with providing tuition and grant and scholarships for the students.

The cases were finally settled. And in 1964, the school district finally reopened, and the students were allowed to go back to school.

But when you look at that video, you've heard about the students who say that they lost four or five years of education that they were never able to get back because the schools were closing.

So, again, I encourage you to watch the video clip in its entirety, and there's more information about this school closure in the resource page of this presentation.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Okay. So, I'm sure most of you have seen the depiction of Ruby Bridges.

On the original, it's showing her being escorted by federal officers from the school building. And then, Norman Rockwell did a picture in 1964 depicting this particular event because it moved him so much.

But Ruby Bridges -- when we're talking about how it affected the family, the reason that Ruby Bridges was -- caught media attention, first, it was because she was only six years old, but she was the first Black student to integrate an elementary school in the South.

And so, to talk about what happened with her family, she and her mother had to be escorted every day by four officers to the school and back home every day, and it had a really negative effect on her family.

Her father lost his job. The local grocery store stopped selling groceries to her mother.

And her grandparents, who were sharecroppers, they were evicted from the farm that they'd lived on for a quarter of a century, just because the parents chose to allow Ruby to integrate the schools.

So, in 1974, there was a major ruling that stated that Boston had still refused to integrate its schools. And so, there was a ruling that stated that the Boston schools needed to integrate, and it ended up being a lot like the Little Rock Nine in that the National Guard had to be called in to ensure that schools were being integrated.

And the clip that you will see from this will be of a mother who is upset that her child was bussed to the school that was in the White neighborhood, primarily an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and they did not bring her back.

So, she was over there alone in a neighborhood where there was extreme violence going on because the neighborhood and the citizens that lived in South Boston were angry about integration.

On the first day, they attacked the school buses with eggs and bricks because they were so angry. But the clip just depicts how a family was affected by her child being bussed to a location and being left.

[Video audio, mother speaking]:  They are not going until they get some Black cops and some Black drivers. They did not pick my kid up at school. He left her over there.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  He left her in South Boston?

[Video audio, mother speaking]:  He left her in South Boston. No, they left her over there.

All those -- All those people out there are Irish. They left her out there. And they refused to go get her.

[Rolanda Randle]:  As we move into 1970 -- the 1970s and 1980s, we start talking about the concept of affirmative action.

The term was first used by President Kennedy when he issued an executive order that required federal government to take affirmative action to employ African Americans who had been systemically excluded from government contracts.

That term was then expanded to other areas such as education. So, one of the major cases that happened related to affirmative action was Regents of California v. Bakke.

Allan Bakke, who was a White male in his 30s, applied to 12 medical schools. UC Davis, he applied to twice.

He did not get in either of those, and he eventually sued UC Davis, saying that he did not get in because of their affirmative action program and because they had let in a Black student who he knew or he thought he knew that his grades were better.

The video that's depicted actually shows the student, the Black student, who was let in at that time because of affirmative action, and she will talk about how she had graduated from an Ivy League in three years versus four and how her scores, MCAT scores and her GPA, were much higher than many of the White students -- excuse me, many of the White students who had applied to medical school.

And so, she talks about her experience, not knowing that she was an affirmative action admission, but finding out after the fact that she was and knowing that her grades were far superior to other students who had been admitted.

So, it's a very interesting case and it set the standard because the court in this case stated that an education system could not use quotas, meaning that they couldn't set aside seats for African Americans or other minorities, that that was unconstitutional.

But in subsequent cases and in this one, they said that race could be a factor to be considered.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  Black progress was facing a challenge. Allan Bakke was an engineer in his 30s when he decided to become a doctor.

He was turned down by 12 medical schools, twice by the one at the University of California at Davis. Bakke sued Davis.

He alleged its affirmative action program unfairly limited his chances of admission.

But Toni Johnson was admitted to Davis Medical School, the first in her family to attend college.

She had gone to Stanford University on an academic scholarship and graduated in three years.

[Video audio, Toni Johnson-Chavis]:  When I was selected for UC Davis and went into Davis, it was not until well into my first year that I had any idea that I had been selected through affirmative action.

Certainly, I had met all the criteria for regular entrance. Certainly, there were other students, White students, who did not even meet the same criteria.

Their GPA was far less than mine. Their MCAT scores were far less than mine. So, I had no idea that I had even come in through affirmative action.

I heard about Allan Bakke the very first year I was in medical school, but there was not much said, other than there was a guy who wanted to get into our class, and he was really angry that he didn't get into the class, so he was going to sue.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Magnet schools. So, we move into 1980 to 1990. So, we're trying to, in this discussion, trying to show how bussing and integration is still pretty much happening in the United States.

And Sheff v. O'Neill, the families -- several families sued because they said that in their particular school district, that the state and the local government, they were expending more funds in the White neighborhoods versus those neighborhoods that were primarily Black and primarily Hispanic.

And so, they sued. One of the remedies in the suit was to establish magnet schools.

There was a federal order that established magnet schools for the purpose of integrating and also for giving -- giving a way for African Americans and other students to improve their educational skills.

So, when this case happened, it was still not until 2020 where they had to go back to the courts and state that -- the court said that the magnet schools should be established and that African Americans should have access to it, and Hispanic students should have access to it, but it still had not happened.

So, they had to go back to court as soon as January of 2020 to enforce this particular order. Next.

[Rachelle Powell]:  All right. In this video, please pay close attention because it's closed captioned only.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now in the midst of the fight for racial equality in education, the focus was on public education, of course, and that was the whole premise behind the Brown v. Board of Education.

But unbeknownst to most people, there was a secondary level of inequality happening specifically within the deaf community.

And as you've seen in this -- saw in the video clip, this person talked about Black American Sign Language, and that was something that was actually new to me.

And of course, I've heard of American Sign Language, but I never knew about this other sign language that was used in the Black community.

And the reason that it was -- this Black American Sign Language came about was because, although the first deaf school opened in 1817, Black students were not allowed to enroll until 1952.

So, for over 135 years, people who were deaf in the Black community had no way of learning a language, had no way of communicating.

So, they had to come up with their own language. They had to come up with their own signs to communicate within their families and within their communities.

And this language is still being used today because oftentimes -- not in every case, of course -- but many times, the -- deaf runs through generations in various families.

And so, that language is passed down from generation to generation.

And so -- but this resulted in this sign language being used in communities and used by multiple generations, and this was something that wasn't addressed as part of Brown v. Board of Education, but segregation, of course, existed for people with disabilities and specifically for the deaf community.

But I encourage you to learn -- to go out and learn a little bit more about Black American Sign Language. It's really fascinating.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Okay. And as we come to modern day from 1990s and into the 2000s, we see an era of resegregation, and that has occurred primarily because of redistricting, the way lines are drawn, zoning, and because people tend to want to live in communities where they feel safe and they feel comfortable, so a lot of people move into communities with other people who look like them.

And so, you see bussing has ended for the most part. So, you see a lot of schools being resegregated, and this is a study from Harvard, and they were talking about, in this particular study, looking from 1990s to 2000, looking at the percentage of schools that are resegregated.

Again, meaning that schools are now primarily consisting of one particular race again. And from the numbers, you see that the numbers look the same from 1970 before bussing to 2000.

And also, when they say percentage of Black students in intensely segregated schools, it is even larger than it was in 1970.

So, we are seeing again of the whole issue coming up with state expenditures for schools and low-income neighborhoods or even middle-income neighborhoods because in Texas, for instance, paying for education is based on property taxes.

So, if you live in a single family home in a nice neighborhood, then you're probably going to pay more taxes, which means that the schools in your area will get more funding from the state.

If you live in an area where it is primarily multi-family housing, which are apartments, then that tax base will be less, and the amount of money that schools are getting will be less.

And therefore, you have an inequality of schools based on funding and location.

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now, as we close out of our presentation, we just wanted to direct your attention to some more recent headlines and to let you know that the fight for racial equality within schools still exists.

Take, for example, Noah Harris. He became the first Black man elected Student Body President at Harvard University in their 384-year history.

So, for 384 years, that school never had a Black person, male or female, that was Student Body President. And that happened in 2020.

And also, there's -- you know, we've heard of different stories, you know, where a valedictorian had to share the honor with a White student.

We have seen the story of, you know, students still having segregated proms because of laws and particularly in Southern states like Georgia.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And as we close out the presentation, again, just to reiterate that the fight for social justice in education continues the last video clip that you will see is of one woman who was arrested and actually served prison time because she used her father's address to enroll her son in the school in his neighborhood because that school was better, and she was eventually arrested and charged with larceny, and there's been several cases like that since 2011, 2015, in different areas, most of them in the Northeast, but they are using the address of someone else who lives in a better neighborhood so that their children can get a better education, and the response to them doing that has been severe.

And they've been arrested, they're being charged with felonies, and they're being asked to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so, as we go out, just remember that the fight does still continue.

[Video audio, news anchor speaking]: Okay, we've telling you about Tanya McDowell. She's the single homeless mother who stands accused of stealing her son's public education.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  Tanya McDowell is a Connecticut mother jailed for what authorities call, "stealing an education."

That is, for registering her son, A.J., at an address not in the school district where she last lived before becoming homeless.

In April of 2011, Connecticut police arrested McDowell and charged her with first-degree larceny for allegedly stealing an education for her son, A.J.

[Rachelle Powell]:  All right. Thank you guys for viewing our presentation.

And here are resources that are available to you for some of the stories you heard throughout this presentation, and we encourage you to take a look at these when you have an opportunity.

But we, again, wanted to let you know that the fight for racial equality in education, has been going on well before Brown v. Board of Education, and it still is going on today.

And so, your part in, you know, looking at the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Tours, you know, sponsored by Dallas College, is a step that certainly you can take to become more aware of what's going on regarding civil rights in education.

And thank you for viewing our presentation.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Thank you.

[MUSIC]

[Narrator:] Hello and welcome to Intersectionality: Black Women and the Family. My name is Dr. Sherry Boyd and I am with Dallas College, North Lake Campus. And I am looking forward to really making this presentation to you today. And I hope that you'll learn something from it. Remember that if you have any questions, don't hesitate to send me an email at sboyd@dcccd.edu.

Today we're going to talk about intersectionality. This is the reality of race and gender bias. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is about capturing the dynamics and converging patterns of advantage and disadvantage. And those will change from context to context. And when I say that, I mean, if I'm looking at ability and age, or ability and gender and sexuality.

In this presentation, we're going to be talking about the Black woman's experience with race and economic and family. And there are millions of ways that this can converge, but this is how I'm going to talk about it today.

I'd like to introduce you to my mother. This is my mother, Ruby Jean Simpson Randolph. And a lot of Black families depended on Black women's earnings. As of 2015, eight out of 10, that's 80.6%, Black mothers are the breadwinners and are the sole earners of at least 40 percent of their household. My mom and my dad lived together.

This is my mom. She was a teacher, a Girl Scout leader. She was a Get Out the Vote volunteer and a mother to all. And I want to give you a little history. And so, my father fought in the Korean conflict and he returned home and he and my mom both completed their bachelor's degree at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, which is a historically Black college.

After they moved from Austin, they've moved to Cisco, Texas and there were no schools for any of the Black children there, so my mother and my father started a school in Cisco, Texas for Black children. And they ran that school for three years. And they moved from Cisco to Odessa, Texas, which was offering better paying jobs for teachers at the time in the state of Texas. My mother was immediately hired and my father had to work three years as a cook before he was hired as a teacher.

My mom also grew up with a mother and father, but her father was not present. Again, we're talking historically because he had to travel in order to find a job. And this at the time of my mother's childhood was a traditional Black family in that the father had to travel to work and my grandmother worked her entire life as a maid.

My mother had eight brothers and sisters. And she and my aunt were the only two children who attended college out of her eight brothers and sisters. And out of my 21 cousins in that family, 15 of us earned degrees, bachelor's degrees, four of us earned master’s degrees, and two of us earned doctorate degrees.

Throughout history, Black women have taken care of blood family and found family. And this tradition reaches back to slavery. So, at this time, I would like to share with you a poem that was written by Kimberlé Crenshaw and she wrote it for Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. And it's something that Eve Ensler does every year in order to talk about the experience of women all over the world. And this is called "Respect."

"Black vaginas are the hardest working vaginas in America. And still they get no respect. No vagina has done so much for this country and received so little. Really. Black vaginas built this country. It all started right here between blueberry black, chocolate cream, honey brown, praline pecan and French vanilla legs. It wasn't the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or the Stars and Stripes that gave birth to America. It was the Black vagina that laid the golden egg, or rather, the chatteled slave. That's right–during America's formative years, the most valuable property produced, the property that the entire economy was based on, the property that was mortgaged to build America was property in slaves. $12 billion worth. One can't begin to fathom in today's dollars. And where does that come from? Whose vaginas passed this $12 billion mark? Whose vaginas were capitalized, colonized, amortized, all to give birth to America? Whose vaginas have been appropriated, syndicated, depreciated, and never, ever vindicated in the process of building this country?"

So this is a photo from the Library of Congress. And I want to talk about the slave owners' exploitation of the Black woman's sexuality. And this is one of the most significant factors differentiating the experience for slavery for males and slavery for females. The White man's claim to the slave body, male as well as female, was an inherent concept of the slave trade. And was tangibly realized, perhaps because, because there was no other place that that was realized but on the auction block. This is where captive Africans were stripped of their clothing, oiled down, poked, and prodded by potential buyers. And the erotic undertones of such scenes were particularly pronounced in the case of Black women.

Labor was segregated by sex and the frequency with which male slaves were sold meant that women were not only left to raise their own children alone, but they also had to rely on other friends and relatives above husbands. Because women were used to populate, to continue to populate the slave population, that segregation by sex meant that women were not only left to raise their children, but they raised other children that were brought to them who were sold from other plantations.

And so this, this I hypothesize, and other historians tend to agree with me, is, is looking at how the Black family was really started to break up and segment was because of what happened starting with slavery. And I could go into some, some deeper issues. I could talk about after slavery, post slavery, post-Civil War, Jim Crow laws. But really all, all it came down to was economics.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a controversial report on Black family life in America. He argued that poor Blacks were caught in this, this tangle of pathology because the Black family had been destroyed by slavery. Slavery, he said, had disrupted the mother-father pair and set in place the female household. And thus, today's children, today's Black children are deprived of their complete family life that would give them the psychological strength to make it in a hostile world. And I have to personally say that you learn to make it in a hostile world as a Black woman; you either do that or you don't survive.

And so it's whether you have two parents or not I think that there are parents that are always trying to help their Black children survive in this world. Now, the Moynihan Report, its fault doesn't lie in the fact that of looking at family stability. And it is desirable. We know that when children grow up in a two-parent home that's stable what privilege that gives them. But here is the insistence of the Moynihan Report is that the Black structure, the family structure, and the Black pathology is a primary driver of poverty and inequality. In effect, saying in his report that because of poverty and inequality, it was the Black families' fault of why they were not, why they were not surviving.

So this, this look at this inaccurate cultural narrative, it, it, it, it does imply that Black families, Black people are to blame for the effects of institutional racism, sexism, classism. And that really diverts the attention from the whole cause of inequality, which was economic inequality. And looking at economic inequality, I'm going to jump ahead to look at where we have been in the last five years.

So, pay gap by gender and race. And this is from a 2015 study. So Black women are paid less than White men and White women, on the average. Black women in the U.S. are paid 38% less than White men and 21% less than White women. If we look at that at an early age, when Black women start working at the age of 16, there is a 21% pay gap for between a Black woman and a White man at the ages of 16 to 24. From 24 to 54, that gap increases to 32% between a Black woman and a White man, and to 37% at 55 plus for a Black woman and a White man.

Why is this important? We'll talk about that. Even in the same job, Black women get paid less. Black women are ambitious. They're just as likely as White men and more likely than White women to say they want to become top executives. But even in the same job, Black women are paid less than White men. For example, Black women sales, Black women sales professionals earn 53% less than white men. If you look at the pay gap for nurses, it's a 19% gap between Black women and White men. If you look at the gap of cashiers, which is one of the lowest paying jobs one can get, It's the 18% gap. Between White women and Black women, It's a 6% gap. But if we look at computer scientists, analysts, and engineers, there's a 29% gap, 29% pay gap between a Black woman and a White man. And there is a 19% pay gap between a White woman and a Black woman.

Did you know that 53% of Americans are not aware between, of the pay gaps between Black and White women? We always look at male and female and we look at those pay gaps and we know that that pay gap exists. But when you break it down by race, the pay gap is even more incredulously different.

The reason why I bring up pay gap because over a lifetime there is a loss of $941,000. Black women are asking for more. They are asking for promotions and raises at about the same rate as White women and men. Yet, the broken rung, broken rung still holds them back at the first critical step for manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 58 women, Black women are promoted.

The average Black woman, as you can see, loses out on almost a million dollars over the course of her life. And the importance of that is is if you are a single Black mom raising children, that has an impact on what you can do with your family. If you are a married Black woman, that still has an impact.

As an educator, what I have realized coming in early on in my career, coming into Dallas College, I came in as a visiting scholar. I was really excited about that. I'd wanted to teach. I came in as a visiting scholar at Brookhaven College. And I took a pay cut to come into that visiting scholar. But then I realized as I started doing my research about Dallas County Community College at the time, is that I came in with nine other people who did, who came in as visiting scholars. And what I saw is that men got brought in at a higher rate than women, even though we had the same degree. And some of the women had more experience than the when, the men. And that goes back very much to our patriarchal system of the man is going to be taking care of the family.

But we have forgotten, we have not watched our statistics as they grow, that there are more single Black females out there with children and single White females and single Hispanic females that are head of households. And when we look at head of households and who the breadwinners are, we see that 50% of White mothers are the breadwinners and 81% of Black mothers. So, if you're losing almost a million dollars because of what you're getting to the dollar that a White man is getting, that affects what you can do economically. More than four in five Black mothers are the breadwinners for their family, meaning that their household depends on their paycheck.

So, when Black moms are paid less, they have less money for the basic family necessities like rent and groceries and school supplies. And over time, this ability to invest in savings and higher education, or property is not within their reach because of how salaries are conducted with Black women. And when we look at this current coronavirus, this pandemic, this has exacerbated a deep and long-standing bias against Black women that are trying to build up their wealth. Black women are shouldering more responsibility at home with less financial security. And according to research from leanin.org, Black women are almost twice as likely as White men to say they've been laid off or furloughed or had their hours and pay reduced because of COVID-19.

And I'm hoping that in looking at these statistics that we see that it's not, it's not about that women are single. And I'm speaking of all women at this time that are taking care of their children. It could be a divorce. It could be, it could be having a baby and being unmarried. It could be widowhood. Currently, we've lost over 500,000 people to COVID-19. And that loss has impacted so many families.

So, as we, as we look at where we're going, we really have to start looking at pay equity because if women, as a whole, got paid the same as men for doing the same job, that would economically affect so many children. And the, the, the, the home, the supplies, the groceries, the rent, all of that could help children really move forward.

And we talk about so much how we want to help children. We help children by helping families. And I speak mainly of the Black family because it has been so broken by the system that has existed in the United States. Even if we don't go back as far as slavery, we can talk about eugenics and how Black women were sterilized, were given hysterectomies without permission so that they wouldn't have more children. Yet within that, you still found that women, women brought in other children into their lives.

And I really want to talk about four women who made a difference historically to the Black family, as women continue to make that impact on the Black family. So here are the four women that I want to talk about. I want to talk about Mary Ann Shadd. She was an American Canadian anti-slavery activist. She was a journalist, a publisher, a teacher, a lawyer. She was the first Black woman publisher in North America and the first publisher in Canada. In doing that, not only was she teaching people to read, she was also keeping them informed. This had a great impact on Black women.

And here's the thing, is we talk about Black women and the Black society as a whole in America being a matriarchal system. It's been made a matriarchal system because of how discrimination and inequality has been built into the United States system.

Clara Hale is next. She is known as Mother Hale. She is an American humanitarian, and she founded the Hale House Center. And it's a home for unwanted children and children who were addicted to drugs. She changed the lives of so many children in the neighborhood that she worked in. And this is something that while she was, was recognized for.

I can tell you, growing up in my family, I had cousins that stayed with me when their family couldn't take care of them. My parents raised two or three people that were in our family. My father being a police officer and my mother being a teacher, our house was never empty of other children being in our house that needed help.

So, while Hale, Clara Hale is famous for that, I am telling you that that is a typical thing that happens in our, in, in, in my family and I think in the Black families as a whole.

The next person I want to talk about is Mae Mallory. She was an activist in the civil rights movement, and she was founder and spokeswoman of the Harlem Nine. Now Harlem Nine was a group of African American mothers who protested the inferior and inadequate conditions in the segregated schools in New York City. And so they were looking at inexperienced teachers, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated conditions. They were looking at gerrymandering that was promoting segregation in New York. And because of that nine, the Harlem Nine, they changed how their children went to school. They wanted and transferred their children to integrated schools that offered a higher quality of resources.

So, the last person that I want to talk about is Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a voting rights activist, she was a women's rights activists, a community organizer, and she was one of the leaders in the civil rights movement. In 1961, Hamer received a hysterectomy by a White doctor without her consent. In fact, for the longest time, it was dubbed the "Mississippi appendectomy."

And I think that if we really want to think, I'm just touching on this, how Black women, Black families tend to question medicine. This is one of the things that did that. I could talk about the Tuskegee experiment. But there are so many things that, that made Black women and Black men distrustful of a system that was supposed to support them. But because Fannie was unable to have children, she adopted two daughters.

And while she was very active in the civil rights movement, there was still that that, that wall of, "You're a woman, we're men. Let the men do their work here." And so in 1968, she decided that she was going to look at other problems that were happening with Black families.

So she started a pig bank. I found this fascinating. So, she started a pig bank and she provided free pigs for Black farmers to breed and to raise and slaughter. And the next year she started a freedom farm cooperative. And she bought up land that Blacks could own and farm collectively. And with the assistance of donors, she purchased 640 acres and launched a co-op store, a boutique, a sewing enterprise. And she single-handedly ensured that 200 family units of low-income housing was built in Ruleville, in Ruleville, Mississippi, and there's, it still exists today.

These are four women that we don't talk about that really built stairsteps for families that helped them change lives. So these are the ones that we know about, but there are so many that exist out there that help families take the next step. What I am hoping as we look at this, that we don't forget that it took women and men to build this country and not leave women out of, out of the picture. Because we still tend to do that. Yet, if we look at our schools, if we just look at K through 12 and we look at education, a majority of the people that are in that field are women. They're teaching our children. They're laying a path for our children. And we need to support that.

And I would like to end by reading part of a poem written by Maya Angelou called "Phenomenal Woman."

"Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I am not cute, or built to suit a fashion model's size. But when I start to tell them, they think I'm telling lies. I say, it's in the reach of my arms, it's in the span of my hips. It's in the stride of my step. It's in the curl of my lips. I am a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman. That's me. Now you understand just why my head's not bowed. I don't shout or jump about or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, it ought to make you proud. I say, it's in the click of my heels. "It's in the bend of my hair. It's in the palm of my hand. The need for my care, 'cause I am a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman. That's me."

[Piano music playing]