Affixed on jewelry, tattoos, fabric, and home decor, and even in the pattern of wrought-iron fences in places like Washington, D.C., and Savannah, Georgia, is a heart-shaped symbol with curly circles at the top and bottom, almost like the mirroring of two S’s to make a heart.

It is one version of the popular Adinkra symbol Sankofa.

Sankofa literally means “return to your past” or “go back and fetch it.” It can also mean “it is not taboo to go back and fetch it,” which is useful as an apology (e.g., “I invoke Sankofa and wish to go back and correct what I did at yesterday’s meeting when I incorrectly accused you of wrongdoing”).

Also commonly symbolized by the outline of a bird whose head and beak are pointed backward, toward its tail, often with an egg either in the beak or nestled in the tail, Sankofa has become a cultural phenomenon. It gives a name to the African diaspora’s concerns for heritage, legacy, authenticity, and dignity—in the U.S. and beyond.

Sankofa belongs to a communication system called the Adinkera, or Adinkra, which comes from present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast—key West African regions from which African Americans’ ancestors came.

After Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, the country’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, instituted a national policy to revive and celebrate the Adinkra system, particularly the concept of Sankofa. Nkrumah also welcomed the descendants of enslaved Africans to repatriate, or at least visit, the nation. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and many other artists, activists, and culturally curious African Americans began making trips to Ghana in the late 1950s, where they would have likely encountered Adinkra symbols and philosophies. Scholarship around the Adinkra started to become more visible stateside, too, beginning in 1983 with the publication of Ivory Coast anthropologist Georges Niangoran-Bouah’s The Akan World of Gold Weights.

The concept of Sankofa resonates with core aspects of African American culture and life. The ideas of “return” and “back-to-Africa” anchor African American nationalist thought. Even more pervasive in Black people’s consciousness is the endearment of Africa as a homeland. By reflecting folk narratives presenting flight as self-emancipation and escape from enslavement and oppression, Sankofa embodies a sense of love, affection, respect, and sacred remembrance that affirms African American cultural uniqueness and celebrated difference. The principle of Sankofa is a reminder that “flight” and “return” go hand in hand. Just as peace can only come from knowing one’s legacy as well as the healing power of cultural memory.

Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima’s 1993 resistance-themed feature film Sankofa helped introduce the proverb to a wider audience. The multi-award-winning independent film begins in contemporary times, with a culturally unaware African American model doing a photoshoot on the same Ghana beach where the historic Elmina enslavement fort still stands. The model then travels through time to the enslavement past and discovers the sacredness of how her ancestors survived through revolts and sacrifice. Rich in themes of communalism, revolt, Pan-Africanism, and intellectual agency, Sankofa is a revolutionary vision of enslavement courage. In the years since its release, it has attracted a cult and cultural following.

The Sankofa cultural explosion continues in high schools and colleges today. In Black Studies classes, teachers introduce Sankofa to newer generations through the film and as an example of African philosophy. For many, it is a new and inspirational experience that reinforces the educational goals of historical recovery and presents the rich intellectual tradition of the African world. In practices of Black psychology, Sankofa grounds wellness and renewal in ancient wisdom. And in literary analysis, Sankofa is a paradigm that asks readers to map the ways characters of African descent travel and explore heritage homelands. This travel is often multidirectional and involves not just Africa, but also the Americas, the Caribbean, and even Europe.

But Sankofa is most visible outside of academia, in the explosion of businesses, schools, and community engagement projects that have embraced the name “Sankofa.” Represented by familiar icons (a heart, a bird) rather than some of the less familiar geometric shapes in the Adinkra, Sankofa holds immediate, recognizable visual appeal. While community institutions may not necessarily have a deep understanding of Sankofa’s precise Adinkra meaning, Sankofa has also been embraced by some as a general African/Black legacy concept that communicates that they are proud agents of a global heritage.

Consider just a sampling: Sankofa Kitchen (Dallas); Sankofa Arts Lounge (Dallas); Sankofa Research Institute (Houston); Sankofa Village for the Arts (Pittsburgh); Sankofa African and World Bazaar (Baltimore); Sankofa Church (Atlanta); Sankofa Community Discount Card (Atlanta); Sankofa Initiative (Jacksonville); Sankofa Creations Spalon (Jacksonville); Sankofa Jazz Festival (Miami); and Sankofa Soul, the sponsor of music festivals in St. Lucia, Curacao, Brooklyn, and Coney Island.

For hundreds of years, African Americans have used everything from storytelling to art to religion to keep their heritage alive in a hostile U.S. In 1991, African American archaeologists even discovered Sankofa symbols in a colonial-era African burial ground during a high-rise construction project in lower Manhattan; that site is now a national monument. Such relics from the past, like the Akan gold weights that fueled commerce for 500 years, show the depth and longevity of the ancient traditional West African roots of African Americans.

The knowledge imparted by African ancestors—an inheritance forcibly taken away, though never completely lost—has endured, yet African Americans revel in the more recent awareness of the vast Adinkra system because it is specific amidst a cultural history that largely has been a generic remembrance.

Imagine the possibilities for cultural reclamation and enrichment if the African American and diasporic communities continue to utilize not just Sankofa but the wealth of philosophies shared within the entire Adinkra system. Because among its symbols lie universal wisdom around the human capacity to heal, to repair, to renew, and to return.

The post What Can Sankofa Teach Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hailed as a truth-teller and a champion of Black empowerment, disparaged as a hoodlum with a hot temper whose lyrics glorify violent behavior, the late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur continues to be remembered in contested ways, more than 25 years after his murder in a drive-by shooting. In 2023 alone, FX aired a five-part docuseries on him, at least three different writers authored books about him, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awarded him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a long-overdue arrest and indictment has finally been made in his murder investigation.

I’ve thought a lot about Shakur, beginning in the 1990s when I was a teenage fan of his music and more recently during the four years I’ve spent researching, writing, and promoting my book, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. During this time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the public continues to overlook Shakur’s greatest legacy: that of a messenger steeped in the Black prophetic tradition, blending spirituality and liberation theology with social justice advocacy—conveying principled messages meant to deliver Black people in this life and thereafter.

To be sure, Tupac Shakur was an imperfect messenger. He was brash, profane, and often vulgar. He faced repeated arrest and incarceration for alleged assault and other offenses. He drank liquor, smoked blunts, and celebrated promiscuity. But Shakur at the same time was a harsh critic of police brutality, he advocated for women’s reproductive rights, and condemned wealth inequality in America. More than anything, he was deeply committed to his core demographic: young Black men. To Shakur, young Black men were lost sheep in the wilderness of North America—banished and besieged, feared and misunderstood—and he longed to be their redeemer, even if it meant offering his own life as a cautionary tale.

If Shakur could be said to have a creed or doctrine, it would be the doctrine of Thug Life. Many people assumed he was promoting hooliganism, but, Shakur explained, Thug Life was an acronym for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”—meaning the injustices children face at a young age have repercussions on society at large. Thug Life, to Shakur, was his way of reaching his folks where they were at, without judgment or reproach.

“Young Black males out there identify with Thug Life because I’m not trying to clean them up,” he said. “I am, but I’m not saying come to me clean. I’m saying come as you are.”

In 1962, over a decade before Shakur was born, the writer James Baldwin reflected on his brief stint as a child preacher at a Pentecostal church in Harlem. In his essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” first published by the New Yorker and later reprinted in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes what he’d perceived as the hypocrisy, arrogance, and gospel of submissiveness endorsed by the Black Church, and the feeling that the church had abandoned the urgent needs of the people, encouraging them “to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.” He wondered why they couldn’t organize around something tangible, like “a rent strike,” and he asked: “Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”

Thirty years later, Shakur’s 1993 song, “I Wonda if Heaven’s Got a Ghetto,” has clear parallels to Baldwin’s essay. The song, a B-side to his anthemic single “Keep Ya Head Up,” contrasts the pie-in-the-sky promises of the church to the real-life ills facing his community: police brutality, poverty, drug addiction, and other ills. Unlike Baldwin, though, Shakur seems to be asking not if heaven will replicate the same segregated and deplorable conditions as America’s inner cities, but whether heaven will welcome with open arms all the subjugated people who suffered, struggled, and rebelled against their conditions.

Early on in his career, Shakur realized that when the church fails to reach the people most in need, it’s the militants, hustlers, or entertainers who will fill that need, and he would embrace all three roles interchangeably. At the same time, Shakur didn’t shy away from rebuking the church for not doing enough to address his community’s needs. In a 1996 VIBE interview, he acts as an interrogator of the church and its function in society: “If the churches took half the money that they was making and gave it back to the community, we’d be a’ight,” Shakur says. “Have you seen one of these goddamn churches lately? It’s ones that take up the whole block in New York. It’s homeless people out here. Why ain’t God lettin’ them stay there? Why these n****s got gold ceilings and shit? Why God need gold ceilings to talk to me?”

Consciously or not, Shakur’s demands for the church and society at large to pay attention to the unmet needs of Black Americans links him directly to the Black prophetic tradition, exemplified not only by Baldwin, but also Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells, and many others. The Black prophetic tradition, with roots that date back to the arrival of enslaved Africans to the American colonies, is a rhetorical tradition, rooted in (but not confined by) the Black Church, bearing witness to injustice, speaking truth to power, and boldly condemning White supremacy. The role of the prophet—from the days of Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and Daniel, to today—is not to mollify but to rebuke a nation that has deviated from principles of justice and righteousness. Black prophetic fire is a forewarning of grim and dire consequences, both for America and the world, if Black and other marginalized people continue to be persecuted. As the theologian James H. Cone writes in his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, “The black prophet is a rebel with a cause, the cause of over twenty-five million black Americans and all oppressed persons everywhere.”

This, to me, defines Tupac Shakur. In the many hours I’ve spent reexamining his music and listening closely to his words, I’ve come to appreciate him beyond his reputation as a brash and hotheaded young nihilist. The recent influx of products, programs, and conversations related to Shakur proves I’m not alone in this reconsideration and recognition. Shakur was a bearer of difficult truths, a fiery and zealous critic of injustice, and a fierce advocate for the liberation and deliverance of the downtrodden. These are the responsibilities of the prophet. The prophet’s role is not to power over the people but to empower people to better themselves and envision a better world. “I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world,” Shakur said, “but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.”

‘Nearly three decades after his death, Shakur’s millions of listeners across the world—young fans and oldheads like myself—continue to parse Shakur’s words, as though conducting biblical exegesis, seeking meaning and inspiration in his lyrics and interviews. As Black American men are killed by police officers at a staggering rate, as the gulf between rich and poor grows wider, and as drug addiction and overdose deaths continue to disproportionately affect communities of color, Shakur’s words remain as relevant and important—indeed as prophetic—as ever before.

The post Tupac Was an Imperfect Prophet appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How do you remember—and reconnect—a neighborhood destroyed by highway construction over a half-century ago?

Since 1983, this has been the mission of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s annual Rondo Days festival. “[You see] everyone you grew up with and everybody you’ve ever known, your childhood and everything,” said former Rondo resident Brian White, Sr. in 2015. “You might see people you haven’t seen since you were five, six years old out here.”

It may mix historical exhibits, field day tournaments, 5K runs, picnics, dances, and religious services, but the festival is no ordinary reunion. Rather, it is an effort to memorialize a riven historically Black community, while also giving living reminder to the persistence of the Rondo diaspora.

Since the early twentieth century, Pullman porters, factory and packinghouse workers, and accountants all populated Rondo, making it “a hub, a place where military, professional, and streetwise Black people gathered, talked, and exchanged ideas,” Marvin Roger Anderson, a co-founder of Rondo Days told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1990. By the 1950s, bounded by Rice Street to the east, Lexington Parkway to the west, and University and Selby Avenues to the north and south, Rondo’s roughly 1.25 square miles  were home to about 80% of St. Paul’s Black population.

It was a place of “beautiful and gracious homes,” remembered former resident Joyce Williams in a 2016 oral history interview, with “hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork, hutches, [and] stained glass windows.”

In 2021, while testifying to the Minnesota House transportation committee, Representative Ruth Richardson called Rondo “the heartbeat of the Black community” of St. Paul.

Nonetheless, between 1956 and 1968, the state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul razed the neighborhood in order to make way for I-94, the east-west interstate that runs from Michigan to Montana. Richardson pointed out that, far from an accident, the decision to route the highway through Rondo was intentional: Officials had dismissed an alternative, less destructive plan through an “underutilized industrial area.”

The highway construction devastated St. Paul’s Black middle class. Over 600 Black families lost their homes, alongside longstanding businesses and institutions. Rondo residents also lost the ladder to generational wealth: a 2020 study suggested that, compounded over time, the lost home equity added up to nearly $160 million.

The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act—at the time, the single biggest federal infrastructural investment in the nation’s history—reshaped the nation in countless ways. And it came at great cost. Between 1957 and 1977, nearly 1 million Americans lost their homes to highway construction, most of them people of color. Since the early 1990s, some 6,300 additional families have been displaced by highway expansion projects.

Planners knew that the interstates threatened urban communities. In 1958, the Sagamore Conference—convened by the Highway Research Board and attended by top federal, state, and municipal officials, academics, and civic leaders—issued a report clearly noting the perils of highway construction. It warned of widespread displacement, with low-income, non-white, and elderly residents facing the “greatest potential injury.” (Nevertheless, to this day, literature from the Department of Transportation that is used frequently in planning and engineering graduate programs self-servingly casts this history as a series of minor, unexpected, and unintended consequences.)

In some cities, “freeway revolts” did halt construction, but this advocacy failed to include non-white homeowners. In Memphis, the white, middle-class-led Citizens to Preserve Overton Park successfully challenged the construction of a highway corridor for I-40 in the Supreme Court. But Black activists in Nashville who organized a similar group to challenge I-40 construction through their community failed in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court denied the case a hearing. Nashville’s Black community could only stand by as the highway ripped through its businesses, homes, and institutions.

In June 2021, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg initiated new efforts at the Department of Transportation (DOT) to address this problematic legacy, dedicating $1 billion to “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.”

But money doesn’t do anything on its own. To repair the damage that the planners of the 1950s wrought on communities of color, we have to address both the physical infrastructure itself, and the stories we tell about it. That means first, acknowledging and reckoning with the interstates’ history and, second, community-based efforts to restore the physical fabric of the divided neighborhoods.

To change the cultural narrative of the highways, urban planners Sarah Jo Peterson and Steven Higashide advocate for “truth and reconciliation” carried out, in part, by existing institutions such as the Transportation Research Board and university researchers, or perhaps even a Congressional commission.  “If we have any hope of avoiding future injustices, we have to fully understand the past,” notes Higashide.

These efforts feed physical solutions like ReConnect Rondo, which received a $2 million grant from Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program in February 2023. ReConnect Rondo is aligned with but independent from Rondo Days: an initiative “to create Minnesota’s first African American cultural enterprise district connected by a community land bridge” that will “repair, restore, and revitalize Rondo.”

Nearly 25 years ago, St. Paul journalist Joe Soucheray wrote that the Rondo Days festival “comes in softly and touches in a healing way the fading scar of Rondo Ave.” Over the years, this soft touch has had an impact, including by efforts to make the community more visibile through signage, a tribute at the local library, and Rondo’s inclusion in a permanent exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. More recently, a small pocket park called the Rondo Commemorative Plaza opened with the intention to honor the community and welcome new members, such as Somali, Karen, Hmong, and Oromo residents. ReConnect Rondo’s dream of physically and psychologically suturing the old community through a land bridge serves as an extension of this decades-long project.

The eventual Rondo land bridge will be the physical culmination of the efforts catalyzed by Rondo Days. But it is only possible today thanks to the labor of locals, former residents, and activists to make the community’s narrative known. Now it’s up to the rest of us to build it.

The post A Black Neighborhood, Upended by a Highway, Looks to Reconnect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie.

Yet the story is one-sided. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the histories of Latinx and Black communities are overshadowed by Anglo-dominated narratives.

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed prompted a national reckoning with commemoration. Communities began to think about what to do with controversial, often racist, statues, markers, and place names. Many wanted their landscapes to tell a different story—one that did not venerate racial violence.

The targets of these conversations have been mainly physical plaques and statues—but the resolutions are far more varied. New digital tools let scholars, students, and community members create new, and newly inclusive, forms of memorialization. Hitching historical research to new digital technologies helps tell different, more inclusive, and more nuanced narratives about the past. Malleable digital technologies can be much more creative and responsive than stone statues, soldiers in bronze, or iron plaques. In season three of “Western Edition,” the podcast we host at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we highlight some of these innovative efforts across the West, including in San Antonio.

One of these is the digital history project Mapping the Movimiento. Created by professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio and its Special Collections Library, the project functions like a “bus tour of San Antonio civil rights locations,” history professor Omar Valerio Jiménez says. Anyone in San Antonio with a smartphone can use the interactive map.

Mapping the Movimiento’s 15 sites span the 20th century. They include Edgewood High School, an anchor for the city’s Mexican American West Side and focus of important judicial rulings about public school funding inequities, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in the late 1980s by Chicano and other activists working toward social justice in San Antonio and beyond.

Mario Cantú’s family restaurant is on the map, too. “Anybody who was anybody in the Chicano movement when they came to San Antonio met at Mario’s,” says historian Jerry Gonzalez. Known as “the first eating space in San Antonio to desegregate its food counter,” the restaurant served as a vital social hub for the city’s Mexican American community in the 1950s. Today, the restauarant building has been demolished and the land upon which it once stood is part of the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio. No physical plaque marks the space. Visitors to Mapping the Movimiento’s website can see artifacts and images from the restaurant’s heyday and learn how Cantú became a key figure in the city’s Chicano and civil rights activist communities.

Similarly, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists, an initiative of Texas A&M University–San Antonio historian Pamela Walker, uses digital mapping to commemorate the sites and experiences of Black San Antonians during the Jim Crow era. In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum and the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, Walker’s team of student-researchers reconstructed the histories of more than 20 locations included in the Green Books—gazetteers that mapped safe tourist destinations for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era. QR codes placed around the city connect passersby to a digital map of Black San Antonio and a richly researched essay for each featured site.

One of Walker’s students, James Thomas, researched the Carter Undertaking Company, a funeral home at 601 Center Street. Now called the Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary, the institution has been continuously operated and family-owned since 1906, and its funeral directors played a crucial role in social justice work of the mid-20th century. Black-owned businesses provided Black families with financial stability, enabling protests against Jim Crow Era abuses and helping in turn to provide safety nets for neighbors, Thomas writes. They provided for elders “who weren’t getting the proper care that they needed,” and contributed in significant ways to “build a better community on the East side for the African Americans.”

Like Mapping the Movimiento, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists includes sites that still exist and sites that have disappeared from the city. Reading the Green Books in present day offers a glimpse into the vibrant world of Black San Antonio during the era of Jim Crow, but also shows how much of it had been lost to urban renewal. For instance, student Delaney Byrom researched the former State Theater, which hosted plays and movies from 1929 to 1960 at 209 North Main, now the site of a parking lot.

Byrom spoke with patrons of the theater such as Walter Dykes, now in his 90s, who watched films there as a child—dressed up for the occasion in a tie, but still mischievously inclined toward throwing popcorn and making noise. Byrom’s grandmother, Liana Reyes, also frequented the theater as a teen. She remembers it as a segregated place, where she—a Mexican American—could sit in the front, but Black patrons had to enter through the back and sit in the balcony.

Walker hopes her project’s digital markers will be a first step to giving the stories of Black San Antonians “a permanent footprint on the landscape.” Digital memorialization initiatives are important, she says, because, when it comes to historical markers and sites, “there have been far too many communities, especially Black communities and communities of color, who haven’t been able to have a say in [creating memorials that reflect] what’s important to them.”

The landscape of memory and commemoration and race is shifting in the U.S., thanks to historians, students, activists, and community members who are reimagining it in exciting and innovative ways. Pairing grassroots historical research with emerging digital technologies democratizes: It allows communities, individuals, and institutions that have for far too long been left out of public history-making and memory to see their stories heard and respected. The questions Mapping the Movimiento and Safe Spots for Negro Motorists’ researchers grapple with—concerning race, belonging, and legitimacy—lie at the heart of a healthy American democracy, one that can link memory and reckoning.

The post In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. McGhee, our 12th annual winner, joins a distinguished group of authors that includes Danielle Allen, Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, and most recently, Jia Lynn Yang.

The Sum of Us opens with a simple question: “Why can’t we have nice things?” The answer, McGhee finds—when it comes to everything from public education and voting rights to environmental regulation and labor—is racism. For centuries, white Americans have opted to disinvest in public goods, services, and protections out of fear that people of color, and Black Americans in particular, would benefit disproportionately. The resulting policies have cost nearly everyone, leading to democratic dysfunction and deep economic inequality.

But McGhee found hope, too, as she traveled around the United States to research the book—in the form of stories of Americans coming together to fight inequality. The Zócalo Book Prize judges noted the book’s current of optimism in their praise. One judge lauded McGhee’s “call for all Americans to unite in ways that work toward eliminating racism so that we can all prosper together.”

The Sum of Us is “far-reaching in its accounting of what we all lose when public pools get drained, when racism pits workers against one another, and when the legacy of slavery fosters a political economy that spreads economic inequality and environmental injustice,” a judge noted. “McGhee shows us how to move away from the zero-sum thinking that has long antagonized race relations and toward policies by which we might refill our pools.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture and interview with McGhee, will take place on June 1, 2022 at 7 p.m. PDT. For the first time since 2019, the event will be held in-person in Los Angeles and stream live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel. The program will also honor Georgia poet laureate Chelsea Rathburn, winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize for “8 a.m., Ocean Drive.” Zócalo’s 2022 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked McGhee to talk about the themes of her book, the American stories that inspire her, and how she came to make the book’s central argument.

The post Heather McGhee Wins the 2022 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Soul food is famously revered for pork and barbecue, for savory side dishes cooked in lard. I am a Black man who grew up loving my mother’s cornbread dressing and my aunt’s macaroni and cheese. I found comfort in these foods. Then I became a vegan. At first, I wondered, if I did not eat soul food as I had historically conceptualized it, what kind of Black person would I be? Where would I belong?

Cultural identities are baked into culinary identities. This is especially true for people of color: What you choose to eat, and not to eat, speaks volumes about where you belong. The culinary term “soul food” can be traced back to the 1960s, when Black people who moved north during the Great Migration began referring to their musical and culinary experiences as “soul music” and “soul food.” As “soul” became a linguistic signifier for Black culture, it became a self-empowering shorthand for being able to survive in a racist society, and to resist the dehumanization of Black and African culture. The roots of soul food are antiracist.

I know that not eating meat can be antiracist, too, and that veganism aligns with these self-empowering principles. Not consuming animal products resists factory farming’s dehumanizing forces and disproportionate impacts on Black people and on the Earth. But there have been moments when my evolving diet has compromised my ability to feel like part of my community—even part of my family.

For us, soul food consists of the classics so often associated with the term: fried chicken, collard greens, dirty rice, jambalaya, okra, cornbread dressing, and pretty much anything one can eat off a pig. Over the years, these foods have given me comfort. When the pervasive reality of racism knocks me off-center, the red beans and rice I grew up with is the ground from which I remember myself as beloved and belonging. For me, red beans and rice feels like home.

When I left Battle Creek, Michigan, to attend graduate school in the outskirts of Los Angeles, my family was concerned that the move would “change” me, or make me some kind of hippie. They may have been right. When I arrived in Claremont, I was your typical, grilled meat-loving omnivore. Three and a half years later I was a vegetarian, and not too long after that, I was a vegan. I grew dreadlocks and a beard.

I dreaded my first trip back home after I became a vegetarian. I knew my family would question my diet and challenge my cultural authenticity. Sure enough, my dad made a show of cooking meat to add to the beans and rice I had prepared for Christmas dinner—despite the fact that there were plenty of other meat dishes for him to choose from. My beans and rice were not authentic to our family, and he made sure everyone knew it.

My experience is not unique. Countless other people of color feel alienated for being vegan, even though their veganism may be rooted in a commitment to community. In America, food has long been—or been mixed up with—an engine of oppression, and the Black body serves as a constant reminder of it. Black people were enslaved because of our agricultural and culinary acumen. Economic exploitation of traditional farm and factory farm laborers, who are predominantly Black and Latinx, persists today. So does housing discrimination, which makes it hard for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to shop for affordable fresh fruit and vegetables near their homes.

Soul food is how Black people define ourselves, and celebrate the stories of how we survived. And yet, soul food’s overwhelming cultural power presents a strong argument for reexamining it. Are the stories we tell ourselves about traditional notions of soul food still useful? Is the idea of soul food really about the food itself, or is it rooted in the wisdom of the communities that created it? How might soul food be used to tell stories about who we want to become, and not only who we once were?

I suggest that we begin by decolonizing soul food—unearthing the ways white American stereotypes around Black food and culture have shaped our understanding of the cuisine of our Black ancestors. We don’t have to look farther than Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben—stereotypes created to normalize segregation—to see the influence of white assumptions about Black cookery. De-linking these images from our ideas about soul food helps us uncover knowledges that have always existed on the margins.

For instance, there is no static definition of what it means to eat in a way that is “Black.” In his book Hog and Hominy, culinary historian Frederick Douglass Opie writes that what Americans think of as a traditional West African diet, consisting of “darker whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables, and colorful fruits and nuts” supplemented with meat, evolved because during slavery and its aftermath, Black folk had to eat what they were able to access. They had to learn how to make inexpensive cuts of meat taste wonderful.

If we think about the history of Black food as a window into surviving the racism that is foundational to our domestic food system, we tap into deeper meanings that can easily be overlooked. We might say that what animates soul food isn’t the chicken, or the hog, or any foodstuff in and of itself—but rather a spirit of preservation and promotion of the Black community. And this realization should prompt ethical reflection and response.

I suggest that veganism, particularly Black veganism as other activists and I have described it, shows one powerful way. By opting to not consume animal products, Black veganism forces us to examine how the language of animality and “animal characteristics” has been a tool used to justify the oppression of any being who deviates, by species, race, or behavior, from white cultural norms. By challenging the racist stereotypes within these norms, Black veganism invites us to learn more about the history and development of Black food and food culture beyond the terror that was slavery, tenant farming, and picking cotton. I find parts of myself in the stories of chefs such as Hercules Posey and James Hemings, and food justice activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer.

Studying the history of African and Black culinary and agricultural acumen, in conjunction with changing my diet, gave me the confidence I needed to lean into my Black as well as my vegan identity. And I think it helped my family along, too. Discussions about the way we eat provided an opportunity for my family to remember the stories of our ancestors. Over dinner, we talked more about the foods of my grandfather’s childhood in Mississippi—rice, beans, vegetables, stews, eggs, and occasionally meat. We also learned that one reason he worked on farms, despite the abuse he faced, was to decrease his own food insecurity.

These stories offered us more than any of us could have imagined. Telling and retelling these stories allows Black people to understand our food within the context of our own histories—and to continue to ensure that our dietary changes preserve and promote the communities we come from.

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Fannie Lou Hamer—a poor, middle-aged, Black sharecropper—wasn’t having it. That August, she testified before a convention committee, alongside better-known civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., and demanded the right to represent the citizens of Mississippi as a party delegate.

Hamer was not the typical face of the growing movement, dominated by elite men and youthful radical activists, but a Mississippi Delta cotton picker with a sixth-grade education. She sat at a witness table, the committee chair behind her, stared down by 100 rank and file members and nearly 200 spectators and reporters. Two male colleagues had already read prepared statements, to little response from the audience; Hamer’s speech buzzed with authentic personal and emotional experience, and it stole the show. Her voice rose as she recounted virulent racism and state-sanctioned terror. She told how a white landlord, W.D. Marlow, evicted her from the land she farmed and the home she shared with her husband and daughters—simply because she tried to register to vote. She described how police beat her brutally, just for trying to teach other people how to register to vote. Hamer’s eight-minute plea ended with a haunting question: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where…our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Hamer’s words resonate today, as the fight for voting rights for Black Americans and other marginalized groups continues. On November 3, Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from advancing in the Senate, denying Democrats the opportunity to restore voting protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and recently struck down by the Supreme Court. Then, as now, Hamer’s story reminds us that famous leaders like Dr. King do not stand alone in confronting those who remain deaf to the voices of justice and unity. Ordinary Americans, too, must step up to demand change.

Hamer fought her way up from one of the poorest and most segregated places in the country to challenge a deeply divided nation. Born in October of 1917, she was the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend. At the time, one in four Black children in Mississippi did not live to see their fifth birthday due to malnutrition and lack of access to medical care; most hospitals refused admittance to women of color and their families. Seven of the Townsends’ children died before Hamer’s birth.

As sharecroppers farming cotton, the family was stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty, borrowing from their landlord to cover the costs of housing, seed, equipment, and work animals, and purchasing food, clothing, and medicine at inflated prices through the landlord-owned and operated plantation commissary. Before paying the family at settlement time in December, the landlord deducted all these accrued expenses from their commissary account. If the price of cotton was high, the Townsends were able to save a little money to survive the winter. Most years, though, their share barely covered their debts. “We would just, you know, exist. Not really live, exist,” Hamer later told an interviewer.

Hamer started picking cotton at age six. She was a bright child, but by sixth grade she’d dropped out of school to help pay the family’s expenses, which would only be pressed tighter during the Great Depression. Some of her siblings moved North, or sharecropped elsewhere. In 1939, Hamer’s father, a part-time Baptist minister who supplemented the family’s income by bootlegging, died of a stroke. By then her mother had gone blind and was completely dependent on Hamer for food and shelter. Hamer found solace in her church, where the Bible and her powerful singing voice gave her spiritual and emotional comfort. In 1944, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a sharecropper and mechanic on the W.D. Marlow plantation outside of Ruleville, in Sunflower County. By this time, prosperity had increased in the Mississippi Delta, but many landlords continued to cheat their sharecroppers. Around her, Hamer saw fellow African Americans linger in abject poverty, unable to vote to improve their situation.

Changes were starting to brew in post-World War II America. Challenges to Jim Crow laws reached the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that preserved racial segregation in American schools. But in places like Mississippi white supremacists pushed back. Black people who asserted their constitutional rights faced threats, economic reprisals, physical assaults, and murder.

Hamer would have been aware of all of this when, in 1961, young people involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization founded in April 1960, came to Mississippi to empower local people to register to vote. Hamer was living with Pap and their daughters on the Marlows’ cotton plantation when SNCC activists made it to Ruleville. Hamer knew the risks in getting involved with SNCC—violence, harassment, or worse from white neighbors—but also realized she must act. In recent months, a local white doctor had sterilized her without her consent after she sought treatment for benign uterine tumors; the procedure was so common for poor Black women that it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Unable to demand restitution or accountability from the doctor, Hamer became “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

SNCC offered her a glimpse of what was possible—the seeds for liberation. The group represented the beginning of a “New Kingdom right here on earth,” she later remarked, and “the hope that we prayed for so many years.” With the group’s support, Hamer took the voter registration literacy test; within hours, Marlow evicted her but demanded Pap and their daughters stay to finish picking the season’s crop. Unprepared, Hamer moved from neighbor to neighbor until she found a small rental. The SNCC promptly hired her to work as a community field representative to help other people register, recognizing her natural leadership abilities and nurturing them through personal and professional training. Encouraged by SNCC and other civil rights organizations, Hamer began organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to represent Black and marginalized Mississippians.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several SNCC colleagues were returning home to Mississippi after two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, where they learned nonviolent protest and voter registration techniques. During a layover at a bus terminal in Winona, Mississippi, police arrested them for trying to integrate the terminal restaurant and washrooms—despite recently enacted federal rulings outlawing segregated seating on interstate buses and in terminals. The police department in Winona was known for unrestrained cruelty toward Black prisoners. Hamer and her colleagues survived four days of terror, including brutal beatings and sexual assault, before they were released.

In the convention hearing room in Atlantic City, Hamer relayed what she’d been through in stark terms, describing the punches and “horrible screams” that echoed in the Winona jail, and how the police pulled up her dress, exposing her bare body. The television audience was awed; President Lyndon Johnson, who listened to the convention live, was frightened. While he personally agreed that Mississippi, with a population that was half Black, shouldn’t be allowed to seat an all-white delegation at the convention, he was losing support from white southern Democrats who were flocking to the segregationist George Wallace and the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater. Seeking to blunt the impact of Hamer’s speech, Johnson called a press conference to pull cameras away from the hearing room, and soon negotiated an agreement with prominent civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, to seat the all-white delegation and give a paltry two nonvoting seats to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Hamer was deeply betrayed—“We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she told a reporter—but her demands for representation had not failed. A year later, Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which reinforced the rights secured by the 14th and 15th Amendments, made poll taxes and literacy tests illegal, voided other laws that obstructed the rights of citizens to vote, and allowed federal registrars to monitor voter registrations and elections in states with histories of disenfranchisement. In 1968, at the DNC convention in Chicago, a reconstituted Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, now known as the Loyalist Party, was seated on the floor; Mississippi’s all-white delegation was turned away. A record 340 Black delegates and alternates from across the country sat and voted for the party’s nominees. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, reaffirming the 1965 law.

Today America faces a new voting rights crossroads—the kind of moment Hamer, who continued to face hardship but continued her activism until her death in 1977, would find all too familiar. In 2013, the Supreme Court reversed key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Federal oversight rolled back. State and local officials closed polling sites, made voting hours shorter, purged voter rolls, and passed stricter voter ID laws. In September, Texas passed SB1, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation.

Once again, it is harder to vote in minority and poor communities, and once again, advocates are pushing back. On November 4, the Department of Justice sued Texas over SB1, arguing that it violates federal voting rights laws. Congress is still considering the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. If these bills become law, they will help secure voting rights by setting national standards safeguarding access to the ballot, improving election security, ending congressional gerrymandering, securing elections from foreign influence and dark money, and easing access to voter IDs.

This time around, we don’t have Fannie Lou Hamer to call on us to fix our deeply and profoundly broken democracy. But we carry her story, which reminds us of the travails generations of Black Americans have endured in the fight for their civil rights—and that a single, ordinary voice can bring about the extraordinary change we want to see.

The post The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Recorded just four days after the devastating bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, it became an instant classic, selling nearly a million copies to an overwhelmingly Black audience over the next decade.

Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2004, “Peace Be Still”—the title track on a collaboration between the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, and the “King of Gospel,” James Cleveland—remains, to this day, an enduring cultural touchpoint for the ’60s. “No record ever,” wrote historian Anthony Heilbut, “neither Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ nor the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road,’ has so blanketed its market.”

Of the thousands of gospel songs recorded in the early 1960s, how did “Peace Be Still” come to define its era? Was it a case of being the right song at the right moment? Were embers of emotion from the Birmingham blast hovering over the recording session that evening?

The cover of the album Peace Be Still, with artwork by Harvey Williams. The record’s title track defined an era of gospel music. Courtesy of Malaco Music Group.

That was my personal theory—that the song’s raw power was prompted by the terrorist attack. But when I interviewed Angelic Choir members, I discovered they saw things differently. They insisted that the bombing and other violent acts against African Americans did not govern their lives, nor their singing, that night. “We weren’t so disturbed that we couldn’t serve the Lord. We knew the Lord, and we were there to praise and lift up His name. That was the purpose,” one chorister, now in her 80s, told me. “So anything that happened anywhere else, we were just there to praise the Lord and thank Him that we were able to make it.”

Thank Him that we were able to make it. Therein lies the key to decoding “Peace Be Still”—gratitude to Jesus for helping his people overcome the winds and waves of oppression right there in Newark. In many ways, this sentiment speaks to gospel music writ large, which expresses the unflinching refusal of African Americans to surrender to life’s injustices, especially those incited by racial prejudice, and gratefulness to God for being their ultimate protector.

James Cleveland must have had this in mind when he recorded “Peace Be Still” in September 1963. By the time he began work on the record, the 31-year-old wunderkind from Chicago with a gravelly voice and a perfectionist streak had already amassed more than a decade’s worth of experience; a musician, singer, songwriter, and choir director, he’d done everything from steering Detroit’s Voices of Tabernacle to national acclaim for the album The Love of God to teaching a young Aretha Franklin to play piano.

His collaboration with the Angelic Choir came about thanks to a recording deal he signed with Savoy Records, an independent label with a rich gospel catalog, in 1960. The Rev. Lawrence Roberts, who was an executive at Savoy, also happened to be the pastor of First Baptist in Nutley and was responsible for organizing its choir, which sang in church every third Sunday in the early 1960s. When Cleveland approached Roberts to see if he would be open to letting him borrow the Angelic Choir for his recordings, Roberts agreed, but with one caveat: all sessions would have to take place in the church, where the choir members, who had little recording experience, would be more comfortable and their true essence could shine through.

Roberts’ stipulation proved wise: In 1962, Savoy and Cleveland recorded their first two albums with the Angelic Choir, captured during live, in-service recording sessions in the little wooden First Baptist Church. Both records, crackling with the spiritual electricity that arises between anointed gospel singers and excited congregants, exceeded expectations, won critical acclaim, and garnered big sales. The proceeds allowed the First Baptist Church to raze its wooden frame building and begin building a modern sanctuary.

Things had changed by the time Savoy authorized a third live volume in September 1963. Construction on the church still hadn’t wrapped, so the choir had to record in Trinity Temple Seventh-Day Adventist in Newark, where they were temporarily holding church services. Two key players from the original albums, Los Angeles choir director Thurston Frazier and organ prodigy (and future “fifth Beatle”) Billy Preston, were unable to make the September date. And the world was in turmoil. On August 28, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, calling for civil rights and equal opportunity for Black Americans. Days later, on September 15, segregationists planted dynamite beneath the stairs of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—killing four girls, injuring several others, and sending a devastating shockwave throughout the country. Places of worship had always been sanctuaries—literal and figurative—for Black people. Now even churches weren’t safe.

The Rev. James Cleveland was a gospel star before he worked on “Peace Be Still.” For decades after its release, he used the song to communicate his hopes for a better America. Courtesy of Malaco Music Group.

Nevertheless, the project proceeded. Cleveland, who had a reputation for deftly incorporating pop music techniques into gospel’s traditional core, selected “Peace Be Still” for the session after hearing a performance of Gwendolyn Cooper Lightner’s arrangement of the largely forgotten hymn in his newly adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Originally by Horatio Palmer and Mary Ann Baker, its lyrics were inspired by a New Testament story, chronicled in Mark 4:39. Jesus and his disciples were trapped on a boat during a storm: “And [Jesus] arose, and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace, be still.’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

For First Baptist, Cleveland added a few touches. At the moment in the lyric when Jesus commands the storm to stop, the Angelic Choir’s full-throated, staccato singing drops abruptly from fortissimo (thunderingly loud) to pianissimo (a whisper). The plunge elicits interjections of delight from the live audience and several choir members. They repeat the dramatic technique once again, to more shouts. The result is nothing short of spectacular sacred theater.

Perhaps lacking confidence in the album’s sales potential due to the absence of Frazier and Preston, Savoy created little fanfare around Peace Be Still’s release. The label pressed a standard 3,000 copies of the album, following a sales forecast that turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. “Peace Be Still” lit up phones at radio stations nationwide. By the end of the decade, it had sold somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 copies, a phenomenal achievement at a time when gospel albums were lucky to hit 50,000 in sales.

“Peace Be Still” launched the Angelic Choir on the road. The group sang the hymn at the Apollo Theater and on television. They sang it at the New York World’s Fair. With Roberts as director, the Angelic Choir and James Cleveland recorded nine albums of live gospel music between 1962 and 1969, earning two Grammy nominations.

“Peace Be Still”’s impact transcends its musical drama. Like folk spirituals, it communicates on multiple layers. There is the miracle of Jesus saving his disciples by commanding the storm to cease. Then there is the allegorical statement: Because it was still risky for African Americans to record protest songs, the Angelic Choir employed the Bible story as allegory to express their hope, through faith in Jesus and personal resilience, for an end to the trials that came with being Black in America.

“Peace Be Still” is but one prominent example of how gospel music celebrates God’s dominion over earthly ills and how, in the form of a loving, fatherly Jesus, he protects and heals his people. The Ward Singers’ 1950 hit “Surely God is Able,” Rosie Wallace’s 1963 single “God Cares,” and “I Have a Friend Above All Others,” sung by artists from the Soul Stirrers to Sam Cooke and Al Green, make the same case. And no matter how bad life becomes in the here and now, gospel enthusiasts are reminded that a heavenly home awaits where, as songwriter Rev. W. Herbert Brewster wrote in the mid-1940s, the faithful will “be drinking that ol’ healing water; and we gonna live on forever.”

Like most Black music, “Peace Be Still” has evolved from coded message to explicit commentary. In 1976, the Heaven Dee-Etts of Trenton, New Jersey, covered the song as “All I Need is Peace.”

On it, lead vocalist Mary Glanton prays for relief from life’s trials: “Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, Lord, my pillow gets wet with tears.” On her 1983 cover, gospel singer Vanessa Bell Armstrong transforms the song into a daily devotional, calling for peace “in your home, on your job, late in the midnight hour” and “when you don’t know which way to turn.”

By the 1980s, James Cleveland was using “Peace Be Still” to communicate his hopes for improving race relations in America, even in the face of injustice; just a month after Cleveland’s death in February 1991, three Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King after a high-speed chase. Their acquittal in April 1992 sparked five days of civil unrest in Los Angeles.

Leading up to the song’s dramatic climax is the disciples’ final desperate plea for Jesus to rescue them from destruction: “The winds and the waves shall obey thy will.” The danger of the wind and the waves represents different things, to different people, at different times. For some, it represents hunger or poverty, for others it is mental or physical anguish, and for others it is violence or discrimination. But listening to it today, “Peace Be Still” can still calm the soul whenever and wherever the storms of life are raging. Its performance evokes both a nostalgic yearning for the timeless lessons taught in the little wooden churches of yesterday and hope for a better tomorrow.

“I think ‘Peace Be Still’ has lasted all these years,” remarked the Reverend Dr. Stefanie Minatee, whose mother Pearl sang on the record, “because people are living in turbulent times and they are looking for something to hold onto.” Jacqui Watts-Greadington, a latter-day member of the Angelic Choir whose aunt, Bernadine Hankerson, sang with the choir in 1963, agrees. “I often say that when trouble comes, you think about songs like ‘Peace Be Still.’ Those are the songs that carry you through.”

The post The 1960s Gospel Hit That Defined a Genre and an Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The open-air event, which also streamed live online, was produced in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing’s South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinxFuturism, a free multidisciplinary arts festival being held at the mercado, a marketplace and community center in the Figueroa Corridor, this Saturday.

The question of the evening—“Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity?”—offered a dynamic look at how place-based identity can build bonds of solidarity across racial and ethnic lines.

Before jumping into the conversation, moderator Angel Jennings, the Los Angeles Times’ assistant managing editor for culture and talent, explained why the panelists would be using the terms “South Central” and “South Los Angeles” interchangeably.

“You can’t talk about this region, this community, and this area without first giving it a name, and identifying and describing it,” said Jennings. Located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva people, said Jennings, this land has become “the epicenter of the California dreams for so many.” That includes African Americans, many of whose descendants came to South L.A. from the South during the Great Migration, and immigrants from Central and South America and their children and grandchildren, who’ve increasingly made it their home over the last four decades.

When it comes to South Los Angeles or South L.A., Jennings said, both names have legitimate claims to the space.

Panelists Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor, USC sociologists and co-authors of a new book, South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A., which inspired the discussion, agreed, noting that even their title straddles both names. They interviewed some people, young and old, who Hondagneu-Sotelo said, consider South Central “a special term of endearment,” while for others, South L.A. feels more encompassing, especially among those who hadn’t felt included before. “In Watts, they felt very firm,” she added. “This is not South Central. This is Watts. There’s a particular pride in the uniqueness of the place.”

Visual notes by Amanda Oesef

Panelist Corey Matthews, chief operating officer of Community Coalition or CoCo, is a local himself, born and raised on 108 and Western. (He noted, and the audience agreed, that part of being from South Central is naming your streets.) Matthews recalled leaving home and returning to a place with a new name and new demographics. “In a lot of ways,” Matthews reflected, “I’m relearning and learning newly what South Los Angeles is.”

To tell this story of demographic change, Pastor looked to the numbers. In 1970, South Central was 80 percent African American, and around half of Los Angeles County’s Black population lived in the area. Today, South L.A. is two-thirds Latino, and only one-quarter of the county’s Black population lives there. This data offers “a sense of loss on the part of the Black population of this central place of meaning for the community—not just for people who lived there, but for all of Black Los Angeles,” said Pastor.

Amid this demographic transformation, academics and the media focused on the tensions between Black and Latino residents, but few scholars have revisited that narrative since. In their book, Pastor and Hondagneu-Sotelo explore how South L.A. today tells a different story: of how Latino and Black residents have come together and built community in this historically Black space.

What, asked Jennings, were the most surprising things that came out of their research, which included interviews with nearly 200 residents?

For one thing, they said, how central place can be to identity. “Latinos in South L.A. are different than Latinos in the rest of Los Angeles,” said Pastor. Beyond, say, a preference for hip hop over Ranchera music, second generation Latinos, they found, are steeped in the history of American apartheid and Jim Crow. “They’re very easily able to center the struggle of anti-Black racism even as they’re lifting up Latino empowerment,” said Pastor.

Another key finding centered around community organizing. The impact of South L.A. community organizing groups, including institutions like CoCo and Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE), has been widespread in forging coalition-building among Black and brown residents. “We often think people make movements,” said Pastor, “but movements also make people.”

Matthews agreed. “I’m really fascinated by this generation,” he said, noting that young people of color are coming together around issues that matter to them, whether it’s parks and green space, art, wellness, or entrepreneurship. CoCo’s South Central Youth Empowered through Action (SCYEA) group, for instance, held a teach-in in response to the rise of anti-Asian American hate crimes. “They felt it important to elevate [their] concerns and draw similarities between their experiences and their comrades that were of a different background,” he said. It was a marked contrast to his own experience as a young person. “That was something that we were not doing, at least not explicitly, and certainly not with language at the time,” he recalled.

Visual notes by Soobin Kim

The young people doing this work today with this capacious understanding of identity, said Hondagneu-Sotelo, are “South L.A.’s biggest asset.” They possess “love of place formed by these communities, formed by daily experiences, interactions with schools, sports teams,” all of which creates “a strong sense of not only affiliation and solidarity, but consciousness.”

This has larger implications for the nation as a whole, Pastor said. “Historically, South Central has been looked at from the outside as a place of deficits. As a place of economic challenges. I don’t want to minimize all those,” but he said, “South L.A. is a model of what could be done with good community organizing, power building, and coalition building.”

The panelists also answered questions from audience members participating in the virtual chatroom, including one around what such coalition-building demands.

Pastor cited “frank and honest conversations around differences,” recalling a Q&A from a panel he was on several years back with CoCo founder and U.S. Representative Karen Bass.

Pastor recalled a “young Black man who said, ‘You know, I used to like Mexicans, I just don’t like these new Mexicans’—by which he meant Central Americans.” Another, older Black man in the audience offered his own generalization: “‘Latinos like to work.’” These “impolite, impolitic” statements would never come up in an academic setting, noted Pastor, yet they started a difficult, meaningful conversation. “And out of that real and honest conversation grew a Black-brown alliance to support the retrofitting of city buildings, pipelines for jobs for Black and brown people,” he said.

Before the conversation wrapped, Jennings asked the panelists: What should we be thinking about as we reimagine the future around South L.A.?

“Are we building a South L.A. that will allow our young people to buy here, live here, and stay here?” Matthews asked.

Hondagneu-Sotelo and Pastor agreed, addressing displacement concerns. “Home,” said Hondagneu-Sotelo, “is a key aspect of the book, and the looming danger is, can South Central continue to be a home for those who are currently here—who’ve been here for several generations?”

The post How South (Central) L.A. Is Forging Its Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am the first-born daughter, the middle child, who was called Sweet Pea, Mama-Daddy, and Peanie. Naming is very important in the Black community. The act of naming is a great power, reminding each of us how to find one’s voice and how to define, and redefine oneself. Children’s nicknames suggest characteristics that relatives have observed, or into which they believe young people will grow; these can serve as the foundation of your identity.

Sweet Pea is my father’s endearing recognition of the energy and life-giving traits of the legume and the preciousness of the flower. My most important name, my official birth-given name, is Olga. It means “Holy One of God” in Russian, and when spelled backward, it is “A Glo.” I like to amuse myself by thinking my identity is somewhere between God’s holiness and the quality of illuminating others, but I know the real foundation is that I am my father’s daughter.

By association and genetics, that also means I am my paternal grandfather’s granddaughter. His name was Jason, and everyone, family included, addressed him as his professional name, Dr. Sneed. I never had the chance to meet him, but, hearing so much about him, I held him in awe. I grew interested in whatever connections he and I may have had. Many Black families are searching to know the history of their ancestors. And, for the past 26 years, I’ve been searching—as a scholar and as our family’s unofficial cultural historian—for my grandfather.

Born in 1877, Dr. Sneed attended the first medical school for aspiring Blacks in the medical profession in the South, Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, at the turn of the 20th century. To date, my grandfather and I are the sole ancestral linkages to degree-granting achievement in the professional rank of doctor. His, a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.). Mine, a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.).

For years, I had wondered what this other doctor was like, and why family members and relatives eluded my questions about him. As a child, I was told, “Don’t ever ask your father about your grandfather.” Being the precocious child I was, that was the very question I wanted to ask.

While completing my doctoral degree in human communication from the University of Nebraska in 1994, I had to decide on a topic for my dissertation research. I pondered for a long time, and was considering the study of the emancipatory persona of Black female slave narratives. In the course of my indecision, I mentioned my dilemma to my father, who finally gave me my opening. “Why don’t you write about Tulsa?” he asked. “There’s a lot of history there, and history about our family that you don’t know about.”

Cautiously, I approached the topic with which I was most unfamiliar. Still, I proceeded. “Um, Daddy, what was Grandfather like?”

He was silent, then responded. “Your grandfather was a fine man, dapper, one of the first Black physicians in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a social activist. He spoke out against Jim Crow segregation and organized people when he was supposed to be silent. He was taken away to prison, and we lost him to lynching.”

He then paused for what seemed like a lifetime before he said, “You know, I’m 70 years old, and I still miss my father.”

Somewhere between the pain of that statement and the unheard tears of my father as he quickly hung up under the guise of a “bad phone connection,” I knew I had to locate Tulsa within me.

Over the next few years, I would spend research time in Tulsa and in Oklahoma City, mostly during summers, reading files, microfiche records, and turn-of-the-century newspapers at historical societies and libraries, and interviewing men and women who would have been my grandfather’s contemporaries.

I learned that, after graduating from medical school, my grandfather relocated to Tulsa and established his medical practice. He was part of a larger migration in the early decades of the 20th century of forward-thinking, progressive Black business owners. Buoyed by the booming American oil industry, they established a presence in African Creek towns, such as Muskogee, and newly established Black towns, such as Boley, Langston, and Rentiesville, and began building community, establishing education for their young people, and growing their businesses. Those early settlers dreamed of a Black economic blueprint that would serve as a model for other Black towns and communities across the country. My grandfather, and other men and women like him who represented Black excellence in education, entrepreneurship, and business acumen, wanted to redefine the pathway of opportunity, success, and citizenship for Black people.

One result was the thriving North Tulsa business community known as “Greenwood” or “Negro Wall Street.” My grandfather’s medical practice—at the corner of Greenwood and Pine Streets—was just one of the businesses that filled approximately 40 blocks. There were shops, hotels, dental offices, a hospital, a library, theaters, barber and beauty salons, grocery and millinery establishments, and more. But with this newfound prosperity came hostility, fear, and jealousy by whites, leading to the Tulsa Race Riot/Massacre of 1921.

The search for identity is an ongoing search for myself within the shadows of a people who have struggled, resisted, and survived the racial, economic, and social intolerance of Black life in America. My research has guided me–not as a canine sniffs out a bone, but as a motherless child searches for an unknown parent, or as a veteran returning from war looks for that which will make them whole—toward the inclusivity of community. It’s that very inclusivity that the Tulsa Race Massacre sought to destroy during three days of pillaging, aerial bombing, and destruction by white mobs of the community my grandfather helped build. The reported death toll was 300, but many more lost their lives, homes, and livelihoods, while a host of Black bodies unaccounted for were dumped in unmarked graves.

When the Tulsa Race Massacre is mentioned now, it is spoken as something of the past, an event to be memorialized, as it has been this past week. But not everyone agrees on how to do so, or why. Until recently, even the name of the event failed to narrate it accurately: the Tulsa Race Riot, now known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. The term riot, in America, is often imagined as being linked to the idea of a violent Black presence, of Black bodies perpetually defined and affected by violence. In the context of Tulsa, however, riot reveals an enactment of white bodies representing the violent embrace of white racial domination. Here, the violence was solely perpetrated on Black Tulsan landowners, families, and businesses by whites. The term riot fails to capture the essence of brutality and attempted obliteration of those two days. The term massacre suggests the attempt at genocide, of wiping away the Black community of Tulsa and sending a message that a Black economic infrastructure in the U.S. would not be tolerated.

In February 2001, a Tulsan complained in the local newspaper, Tulsa World, “The Tulsa race riot is history you read about it, you learn from it, then move on.” But, what does it mean to move on? What about the stories of survivors, and how they overcame the haunting memories of burning homes, bombed businesses, and charred corpses lying in the streets of the once-booming Black business community? What about their descendants, grappling with generational trauma, like my father and me?

The account of my grandfather’s experience of living through the Tulsa Race Massacre has been told by my aunt, the late Willie Mae Thompson, respectfully known in the community as “Aunt T” and mother of Morning Star Baptist Church. Her most prominent memory was of my grandfather being “tagged” so as not to be killed but rather identified as one who could pass the restrictions of the local white militia. They allowed my grandfather, as a medical professional, a physician, to comb the streets of Greenwood to identify the dead Black bodies from the living ones. Imagine what he must have undergone, surrounded by charred remains and smoldering embers. Imagine the horrifying reality of identifying neighbors, former patients, church members, and young children he may have delivered in birth.

After those days of violence, the Black community was relegated to tents constructed by the Red Cross. They held on to their faith—a faith in God and in community that would create a spirit of endurance, a strength within that gave way to organizing, regrouping, and still attempting to rebuild—in spirit, in community, in memory. Resilience is a term often characterized by the ability to bounce back, to not give up, to refuse defeat. That was the character of these powerful, disciplined, courageous, and defiant people of North Tulsa and of the Greenwood business district.

Dr. Sneed’s death took place in the aftermath of the Massacre. I don’t know much more than what my father told me all those years ago, including exactly when he died. My research is a continual unfoldment of the story of my grandfather’s life, leading me on a path of deeper exploration and inquiry into reconciliation, reparative justice, and accountability.

The survivors of the Race Massacre are often thought of as a group—a sorrowful, pitiful group, dead, buried, and forgotten. Yet their accounts, told by some who are still living (a number that can be counted on one hand today), are narrative discourses—stories—that reveal lives of courage and love, struggle and resistance, pain and despair, and transcendence and hope for future generations of the Tulsa community and of African American communities at-large. The late Mrs. Mabel B. Little, a Race Massacre survivor at the time of my interview in 1996, was a successful business woman who owned a beauty salon in the Greenwood district. She offered this reflection in an oral history published in 2002, which captured the essence of the brilliance of Greenwood and the challenge of its remembrance:

We have lost our memory as a people, so that we have no clear vision of our future. We have lost our sense of direction, if not our sense of purpose. We’re going to have to return to the past to see where we have been so we can know where we are going; not to get bogged down in the past, but to use the past as a springboard to a new and as yet unimagined future. We must take the best of the past and leave the rest alone.

Acknowledging Mrs. Little’s admonition, I will keep snooping, digging, and finding myself in the Tulsa narratives of Black bodies’ lived experience while I continue the search for my grandfather, and to illuminate public memory of the continuum of struggle and resistance of African American life in the United States.

What I have learned is to be vigilant, and to embrace a culture of resilience established by the Black Tulsans in Greenwood in the telling of the story so that none will ever again forget nor fail to be taught and told.

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