Collective Roots Celebrates Black History Month
Black History Month is time to remember important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. Collective Roots is committed to celebrating this important month of history and social action. We invite your own perspectives, reflections, and contributions to this portal page for celebrating the work of Collective Roots within the context of Black History Month. We are particularly interested in acknowleding local heroes and young leaders who are making a difference in their communities--living examples and role models of African American culture that enrich all of our lives.
As we progress through the month, we will be adding articles and links to this page, so please come back and visit from time to time!
WHAT STUDENTS HAVE TO SAY
"Black History Month talks about how African Americans have changed life throughout history. Before some African Americans didn’t have rights. Now they do and they are equal to other people. I think yes, some people are struggling in America because they might be poor, and it is hard to get a job."
-Anonymous Student at East Palo Alto Charter School
"One African American who has made a difference is John W. Boyd, Jr. When Virginia poultry farmer, John W. Boyd, Jr., watched as his loan application was tossed into a trash can during an interview with a USDA official in 1989, he decided to fight back and said, “no more!”
John W. Boyd, Jr.'s accomplishments tie into our garden because he fought for his rights and we are fighting in our garden class for the right to eat fresh fruits and vegetables."
- Oscar, Student at East Palo Alto Charter School
One African American that has made a difference is Van Jones. He made a corps which was created to train youth for eco-friendly “green collar jobs.” The Ella Baker Center is working to create the country’s first ever green enterprise zone. It will attract environmentally sound industry to Oakland. This person’s work is connected to the garden because Van Jones wanted to help the country, and is now calling for green economic development. He wants to help the economy."
-Eduardo Acuna, Student at East Palo Alto Charter School
Have something to share about Black History Month? Consider making a contribution to our Forum on Black History Month by clicking here.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH OVERVIEW (Wikipedia)
BLACK HISTORY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
“Dismantling Toxic Racism” (Excerpt follows) by Robert Bullard.
Read the excellent article in The Crisis by clicking here.
People of color make up 56 percent of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities, nearly double the percentage in areas beyond two miles (30 percent). People of color also make up 69 percent of the residents in neighborhoods with clustered facilities. Percentages of African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos and Asians/Pacific Islanders in host neighborhoods are 1.7, 2.3 and 1.8 times greater in than in non-host areas (20 percent vs. 12 percent; 27 percent vs. 12 percent; and 6.7 percent vs. 3.6 percent), respectively.
Siting disparities are not limited to any one part of the country. Forty of 44 states with hazardous waste facilities have disproportionately high percentages of people of color in host neighborhoods - on average about two times greater than the percentages in non-host areas (44 percent vs. 23 percent). Nine out of 10 EPA regions have racial disparities in the location of hazardous waste sites.
Unfortunately, 20 years after the release of Toxic Wastes and Race, significant racial and socioeconomic disparities persist in the distribution of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities. Although the current assessment used newer methods that better match where people and hazardous waste facilities are located, the conclusions are very much the same as they were in 1987. In fact, people of color are found to be more concentrated around hazardous waste and other polluting facilities than previously shown.
PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES FROM COLLECTIVE ROOTS
Saree Mading is an African American leader and resident of East Palo Alto, Board Member of Collective Roots, and Administrator at East Palo Alto Charter School, has written an amazing letter about the initiative to develop the East Palo Alto Community Farmers’ Market. If you have a few minutes, please click here to view this inspiring letter. Read her Collective Roots' profile by clicking here. Read about her work at East Palo Alto Charter School by clicking here.
“Elle” Lettecia ("Elle") Rayson is an African American leader and resident of East Palo Alto, Board Member of Collective Roots, and Chairperson of the East Palo Alto Community Farmers' Market Organizaing Committee. Read her profile and personal connection to the work of Collective Roots by clicking here.
Pat Foster, Mayor of East Palo Alto
Pat Foster is an African American leader who has a long history of advocating for the community of East Palo Alto. Pat is a champion of many causes including efforts to improve the food system in East Palo Alto.
Rose Jacobs Gibson, Supervisor, San Mateo County
Prior to her service on the Board of Supervisors of San Mateo County, Supervisor Jacobs Gibson was a member of the East Palo Alto City Council from 1992 to 1999, serving as Mayor in 1995 and 1996. She was instrumental in turning the once high crime rate city into a "City on the Move". In 1999, Supervisor Jacobs Gibson accepted the honor of being selected "Woman of the Year" by the 21st Assembly District, California State Legislature.
Collard Greens Festival in East Palo Alto
"The Festival celebrates collard greens because collard, mustard and turnip greens were one of the basic foods that historically sustained African Americans as a people. Collards spread from Africa to Europe centuries ago and were brought to North America by slaves. Forced to create meals from leftovers, slaves created the famous southern greens. One-pot meals also represent a traditional method of food preparation, which is linked directly back to West Africa. They have been popular ever since in the American South traditionally prepared by boiling or simmering slowly with a piece of salt pork or ham hock and typically served with freshly baked or fried hot water corn bread." Click here to view an article about the event in the SF Chronicle.
Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto
The Stanford University Committe on Black Performing Arts produced the AMAZING video, "Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto" that was completed and debuted October 26, 1996. A curriculum guide will be distributed to Ravenswood City School District classrooms in 1998. The archive, consisting of audio and video taped oral histories, newspaper articles, academic papers and videotapes of the plays is open to the public by appointment. "Dreams of a City: The East Palo Alto Project" (Also known as EPAP) was originated by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, in collaboration with the citizens of East Palo Alto, in 1991. It was to unite the CBPA's mission and expertise regarding the presentation of the performing arts from the perspective of African American culture with the community's goal of presenting its history from the perspective of its residents. You must see this film!
Kontac (aka Stephen Ashford) Raps for His Community
Rap artist Kontac taps the old-fashioned school PA mike and shouts out the theme: "We got a problem here in the Bay Area. Roughly 45% of our inner city minority kids aren't finishing high school." So begins Stay in School, a music video featuring ten well-known Bay Area rappers all delivering this single message. The video was shot at the East Palo Alto Charter School where project organizer Kontac (aka Stephen Ashford) works as a PE teacher. Just released in December, the video features Bay Area artists like platinum-selling rapper E-40, Mugzi, Keak Da Sneak, Federation, Dem Hoodstarz and Mac n AK (the last two EPA locals). Stay in School was directed by Hayves Streeter II and is a Transvideo Studios Production. Click here to read an article about Kontac and the CD project. Click here to view the entire article on EPA.NET. Kontac and fellow rappers recorded Stay in School as a maxi single in early 2007. The CD not only got out a message but helped raise funds for Bay Area schools. A "Making of" piece on the Stay in School video was just released on YouTube last week. (See You Tube embed below.)
JUNETEENTH CELEBRATION IN EAST PALO ALTO (YouTube Video)
YUCA - Youth Advocacy Organization Represents Youth of All Colors
This dynamic youth-based organization uses creative media and methods to advocate for their community.
Henrietta Burroughs and EPA Today
Henrietta is the Editor and Founder of EPA Today, East Palo Alto's leading Newspaper publication. EPA Today also has on an online presence (see EPA Today video footage below).
Garden guru Anan Lololi revives ancestral African farming to seed hope in the neighborhood.
The walk through the public housing project surrounding Lawrence Heights Community Centre is mid-winter bleak. The four-storey apartments hug the barrier wall behind which the Allen Expressway’s white-noise roar blankets the sonic landscape. Orphaned patches of grass are squeezed like afterthoughts between sidewalks, concrete and asphalt. But it is these scattered bits of green that excite Anan Lololi, former bass player for 80s reggae group Truth and Rights and founder of AfriCan Food Basket. What he sees under this useless vestige of British outdoor aesthetics is not only untilled plots of organic farmland but a vehicle for black youth to reconnect with their roots.
AfriCan Food Basket, T.O.’s largest urban agriculture operation, has six community gardens in Lawrence Heights alone, and with the aid of a few dozen neighbourhood youths has been preparing 6 acres of land adjacent to Black Creek Pioneer Village near Jane and Finch. Hmm. Why would farm skills and food smarts be important tools in a part of town where the closest most kids get to the country, much less the natural food cycle, is a bag of potato chips? Before Lololi got his hands on this, it was – yup, you guessed it – lawn. Now, each growing season, it produces about 181 kilos of food. “For 300 years we were on plantations, so there is this deep psychological barrier to considering farming as an option,” he says of African Canadians. “And yet many of us come from long farming traditions.”
Read the whole story in the NOW Toronto News Magazine by clicking here.
Meet Will Allen, Founder of Growing Power
Will may have grown up poor, but he was never hungry. For the second youngest of seven kids, life on a rural Maryland farm was all about hard work, family pride and good food. “We learned not to give up when things got tough;’ he says, “and we were self-sufficient.” Will’s hard work paid off at school — he earned a basketball scholarship, which led to a stint in the now defunct American Basketball Association.
Ultimately Will hung up his sneakers for a suit and tie, taking a job in marketing. But after a decade in the corporate world, he realized something was missing. “I needed the farm — it’s so real and so satisfying,” he says. “Mostly, I wanted that life for my kids.”
When offered a generous exit package from Procter & Gamble in 1982, Will took the money, and grabbed the last working farm In Milwaukee. His $80,000 stake was just a seed. “I ended up investing nearly $1 million over 10 years.” Will’s three kids — two daughters, then 8 and 13, and a then 10-year-old son — grew tip working the 100-acre farm alongside their parents. “Tomatoes, squash, peppers, pumpkins, watercress, -- you name it, we grew it,” laughs V/ill. As promised, the work was grueling “I had to work every summer while my friends had fun,” remembers Will’s son Jason, now an attorney. “Up every morning at 4 am, I complained plenty” adds Jason. But that work ethic helped him get a scholarship, and into law school.” Today the Allen kids are grown, and Will is 53. The farm produces over 100,000 pounds of chemical— free vegetables and distributes close to 2 million more through his roadside stand.
We’re marketing to the poor; the food—insecure areas,” he says. And he is still a believer in the power of farming to shape lives. All kids, particularly poor city ones, are welcome to come by to volunteer and learn, “These kids are going to have to be tough enough to stick to something. Farming really helps you do that.”
Three years ago Will merged the farm with a nonprofit training center: Growing Power. To date, he has taught farming and food processing to more than 1,000 students and helped launch more than 25 urban gardens, some in the poorest counties in the U.S.
“We’re not just growing food, were growing communities."
LaDonna Redmond is president of the Food First / Institute for Community Resource Development, a member of the Illinois Governor’s Advisory Council on Agriculture and Family Farms, and a 2003 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow. Click here to read her excellent article, "Creating local food options in an urban setting: How one woman channeled her discovery about the perils of an industrial food system into creating local options for healthy, sustainably produced food in her own Chicago neighborhood.”
Cathrine Sneed is Founder and Director of The Garden Project in San Francisco, California. The Garden Project works with prisoners in the San Francisco County Jail in a Horticulture program and a post-release program that offers job training in gardening and tree care, counseling, and assistance in continuing education. Over the years, Sneed has worked with thousands of individuals, teaching them to grow food and, in the process, to feed their own need for personal growth and change.
Mo Betta Foods in Oakland, CA
Since 1996, Mo' Better Food has been working to reconnect African American farmers to urban communities to build a healthy community. What started off as a research paper at Morehouse College, turned into a farmers conference and later a farmers market run by students at McClymonds High School. The Mo' Better Food Market sells produce grown by the African American farmers of California every weekend at the Mo' Better Food Market on 7th street and Mandela Parkway (reopening in March 2008).
Wolfram Alderson Remembers His Urban Farming Mentor, Earl Ambeau
Thirty years ago, after organizing 7 farmers' markets in the inner-city communities of Los Angeles, I began the second phase of food system change work with the Hunger Organizing Team. I developed an urban agriculture program that was about growing food in the inner city. To my good fortune, I became the student of an amazing urban farmer named Earl Ambeau. He taught me some real farming skills, and some of the specialized knowledge that urban farmers need to know to survive in the city. Here is photo of me with Earl and another member of our urban agriculture team back in 1980:
Earl was in heaven when he was in the garden and he planted that seed in me too. When I'm in the garden, I feel like I'm in heaven. Here is pic of Earl in heaven:
Earl grew a huge variety of butter beans, collard and mustard greens, melons and squash, and he taught me how to hoe a row, among many more skills. His wife also made the best bean pie I have ever eaten. Earl welcomed me into his home in South Central Los Angeles, and he helped shape my gardening soul, as well as my urban farming skills. It is hard to put into words the impact he had on me, but his love for urban farming was so deep that it inspired you. When he would hold up one of his home grown beans or squash, there was such incredible pride and joy that you felt like you were in the presence of something magic. I can't help but think of Earl whenever I have a hoe in my hand. There must be a special place in heaven for gardeners like Earl.
-Wolfram Alderson, Executive Director, Collective Roots.
George Washington Carver
Born in slavery, but too weak to work the fields, George Carver, created little gardens as a child. He would later become the first African American to receive a masters in agriculture from Iowa State.
-Mo' Better Food (Great organization based in Oakland)
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream..."
Let freedom ring!
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