Guess Which State Towers Over All the Others on Wind Energy?, onEarth
In a state known for caucuses and cornfields, renewable energy has taken root. More than 30 percent of Iowa’s in-state electricity generation already comes from wind — and it’s only going to increase, thanks to a new wind farm housing a turbine that’s taller than the Washington Monument.
Using Literature as a Force for Good Among Austin’s Homeless Population, CityLab
Barry Maxwell, a former resident of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, is paying it forward. As founder of Street Lit, he collects donated books and provides a creative writing class (participants write short stories, poetry, blog posts) to create a sense of community among those living on the streets.
Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City, New York Times Magazine
More than 60 years after the monumental Brown vs. Board of Education court ruling, New York City public schools remain some of the most racially- and economically-divided in the country. So where does a middle-class African-American family enroll their daughter: A segregated, low-income public school or a “good” public or private one?
Tag: African-American
There’s More to Innovation Than Asking ‘What’s Next?’
Omoju Miller, a self-described futurist (someone who studies the future’s possibilities), enjoys picturing tomorrow. As a Nigerian woman who settled in the Bay Area, she’s already torn down historical barriers to work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, a white man’s world. But in envisioning a new society, Miller isn’t thinking only of contemporary struggles; she’s pondering what humanity will need next. Take one of her projects: Hiphopathy, where she’s using machine learning to parse rappers’ metaphorical language, in the hopes of teaching a computer to think conceptually, developing, in the process, a form of artificial intelligence.
Recently, NationSwell spoke with Miller about true visionaries that inspire her and the lessons we can all take away from their avant-garde thinking.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I would say it’s learning how to listen and learning how to not do things for people. A good leader is somebody that enables others to rise to their own challenges. In leadership, it’s so easy sometimes to just want to jump in and do the work yourself because you can do it a lot faster. But a good leader does not do that. A good leader is a teacher who supports you as you stumble and figure it out for yourself.
What’s on your nightstand?
The book I just read — well, it’s not on my proverbial nightstand, it’s on my computer — it’s a series of essays by Tim Urban on [the website] Wait But Why? unpacking Elon Musk and his companies. Why did he found Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX? Why does he do what he does? Why did he come from South Africa, move to Canada, then to the United States? How can one man actually think he can be that intelligent that he can create a technology that will move us to Mars so that he can given humanity a chance to exist? The hypothesis is that at some point in time, something is going to happen to Earth that is going to make it impossible for humans to survive. Just like how the dinosaurs went extinct. And the only way you can prevent that happening is if the human species became multi-planetary. And there’s this man on Earth right now who believes he can capitalize enough people and resources to take humanity to multi-planetary existence. That is crazy! That is futurism to the max.
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
One of the reasons I actually came to Berkeley, Calif., and the Bay Area specifically was because of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and the rest of them. I’m a big Star Wars fan and also a big Coppola fan, and I wanted to live in a place close to Skywalker Ranch. I wanted to breathe the same air as the people who gave Hollywood the finger and decided they could tell their own stories and were willing to mortgage their homes and everything to tell their fantastical stories. I can’t say that Star Wars is one of my favorite movies, because it’s not. I think it may be the Godfather series. It’s such a great story, and it’s also very beautiful. It’s a story of people who live life to the fullest. Micheal Corleone needn’t have to be the Godfather. He could have remained what he wanted to be, but the pull of family was so strong. I also love the movies of Spike Lee, and it’s been great watching those over the years because the stories he tells are so different. It’s just wonderful that he’s such a consummate artist.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first became a software engineer?
The first thing I want to tell myself is make sure that you own your own path. Don’t settle for just a job, no matter how fabulous it is. Don’t settle for it, because you have the capacity to invent the future. And [you] cannot invent the future when you’re wasting your time.
What inspires you?
My belief in self- transcendence. At first, I thought I was going to have a normal life: white picket fence and all that kind of stuff. And I want to have that, but the question is, what’s next? When you get to that point, you don’t care about things anymore because you literally don’t care about material things. You are beginning to push your mind and what you can invent and what you can do. And with every little bit I was able to attain, it was like, Can I dream bigger? Can I dream bigger? I think that for the last six or seven years, I’ve gotten to the point where I truly believe I can solve the problems I put my mind to. I’m convinced I can do that. That is enough to make you wake up every day and go do it.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I would say finishing my Ph.D., because I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. Not because it was difficult or it was hard, no, that’s not the issue at all. It was because there were so many other distractions, there were so many other jobs that I could have taken that would pay a lot more money than staying in school and prioritizing finishing a Ph.D. So sticking it out and finishing it required so much will, because I was giving up so much money every couple of months to keep on doing it. I’m very happy about that.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Gazing out from the columned manor of Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., visitors can admire green gardens, footbridges over burbling canals and moss-cloaked cypress trees. When the azaleas bloom each spring, one can almost forget that these 500 acres (originally, it was 2,000 acres) of Lowcountry Field were once a working plantation where dozens of slaves toiled growing rice. Staring the brightly colored flora, it’s difficult to comprehend the majestic home hasn’t always been a place of beauty and was once a site of exploitation, whippings and sexual violence.
Out of sight from the main residence, stand four extant wood-sided cabins, painted white. Here, slaves slept and ate and prayed and sang, raising families in single rooms. Amid the lovely Southern grounds, these dwellings stand as a reminder of the captive men and women who lived and died on the land they were forced to cultivate.
Across the country, these shacks and cabins are under threat. Unlike the mansions where slaveowners displayed their wealth, these dwellings are far from magnificent. Housing fieldhands, many were built from the cheapest material available. Most resemble tool sheds, which, some might say, is effectively what they were. Among the catalog of historic homes, battlegrounds and memorials worthy of recognition, these hovels rarely make the list.
That’s why Joseph McGill, a Charleston native, began sleeping overnight in these crude shelters in 2010. Now nearing 80 overnight stays in 16 states, McGill says what started as a kind of publicity stunt to draw attention to the structures has grown into a movement. After the election of our nation’s first black president, the conversation around daily violence in urban communities and the retirement of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, McGill hopes the preservation of these makeshift homes will play a part in how America comes to terms with its racist past. Without the buildings, he argues, what’s there to remind us of the institution of slavery?
“One of the things that we need to understand is that 12 of our former presidents were slaveowners, eight of whom owned slaves while they were in office. Even those who contributed to those major documents that we live by today — you know, the Constitution’s ‘We, the people.’ It should have read, ‘We, the people,’ comma, ‘here in this room,’ because otherwise that document meant nothing to you,” McGill tells NationSwell. “Even after emancipation, there were obstacles put in place to deny those recently freed people their pursuit of happiness. Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. We’re still being denied opportunities to pursue that happiness. We’re dealing with the residuals of that today.”
McGill always loved history. In his prior day job at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, he safeguarded America’s iconic buildings. And on weekends, he dressed up as a solider for Civil War reenactments. (As a black man and descendant of slaves, he “fought” for the Union.) But he began to notice that African-Americans’ place in history, especially antebellum history, was often glossed over. It’s undisputed in textbooks that landowners held slaves and a bloody conflict erupted over their freedoms. But outside of, say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, there’s little public knowledge about the everyday lives and traditions of the enslaved. Across the South, McGill felt like he had a much easier time spotting statues of Johnny Reb (a personification of Southern states) than seeing plaques about early African-American figures.
McGill slept in his first cabin — on the oak-lined Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant, S.C. — in 1999, as a way to get footage for a documentary about war reenactors. He didn’t think of the meager buildings again until 2010, when he was asked to consult on the restoration of Magnolia Plantation’s slave cabins. After his second overnight stay, he realized these places had to be preserved. “When the buildings aren’t there, it’s easier to deny the people who lived in those buildings,” he says. “The fact that they exist is an opportunity to let the world know that these people not only existed, but contributed highly to the fruits of this nation.”
McGill started contacting historic sites and preservation groups across the Palmetto State and soon, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard (including several in the North, where, we often forget, slavery persisted through the late 18th century), asking to visit their slave residences. Because of their enthusiastic responses, he created an official organization — the Slave Dwelling Project — that works to protect the homes that remain standing more than a century and a half after being erected.
Soon, people started reaching out to him (both individual families researching their lineage and established historical societies hoping to broaden their offerings), wanting to join his overnight visits. “I’m seldom sleeping in these places alone anymore.”
Putting together a group isn’t always easy. McGill has to fend off ghost hunters and treasure seekers. And some private hosts worry that descendants of slaves will knock on their door asking for what McGill calls the “r-word”: reparations. And interestingly, McGill says blacks can be hesitant to participate. “There are a lot of us, being African American, that don’t even want to set foot on a plantation,” he says, explaining that they don’t want to go to a place where their family was held as chattel. “I express to them that they are part of the problem, not the solution. As long as we continue to be afraid to even want to come to these places and have the courage to tell that story, [others] are going to tell it the way they want,” referencing tour guides who say masters were kind and treated their slaves well, calling that narrative, “junk history.” Once that message is delivered and it becomes clear that these stays are about African Americans and their history — revisiting history, not revising it — most agree to participate.
Once others started accompanying him, the project’s aims subtly shifted from an external campaign for recognition to an internal dialogue about race in America. Bringing together descendants of slaves and slaveowners in the very place where one group once shackled the other inevitably prompted soul-searching and candid discussion.
One night in Stagville, a historic North Carolina plantation, for example, young black men spoke by glinting lantern-light of the anger, fear and frustration they live with. In Mississippi, one female college student asked McGill if he had ever met a descendant of slaveowners who is proud of his family’s history. On South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, a young black man, whose family had been enslaved there, stared at a wall built of tabby concrete, made from broken oyster shells, sand and ash. “I’m allergic to oysters,” he said. “I wonder if my ancestors were.” And in the coachman’s quarters on a Hillsborough, N.C., plantation, a 100-year-old matriarch told stories about her ancestors, who had been born into bondage on the property.
McGill’s stays are not just for African Americans; whites who want to revisit their history as a way of making amends often join him. Prinny Anderson, a leadership coach descended from Virginia slaveowners, has joined McGill on 22 stays to date — all within driving distance of her Durham, N.C., home. When descendants of slaves are sharing their family history, she’s largely silent, preferring to listen and absorb. But when the group is largely white, she says she’s an “instigator,” asking critical questions.
Anderson’s most moving trip was a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop estate in Charlottesville, Va., where she has family connections. She fell asleep in the basement (where the slave workplaces were constructed, hidden from sight), thinking about her distant cousins, white and black, and what it meant to revisit their shared home.
“That really felt like getting the blessing of my ancestors. You came home and slept where your great auntie slept,” Anderson says. “Nobody who lived in the big house during that day ever came down to the [slave] quarters and slept on the floor. In that sense, it was like crossing the bridge.” Spending the night there, it was like Anderson had atoned for something.
Part of the Slave Dwelling Project is to recover slaves’ individual narratives, finding personal stories amidst the black mass in chains. “I think the general perception is that enslaved people were brought here for the ability to do grunt work or heavy lifting: the physical labor. But there’s a lot more to their skills and abilities,” McGill says. From the engineering feat of “taming those cedar swamps” to growing rice and constructing building frames, ironwork, bricks and tools, slaves were vital to the plantation’s production, arguably much more so than any master lounging in the big house.
While the conversation at these places steeped in history may be the most candid talks you’ll hear these days on the subject of race, McGill knows it’s not the only forum for the issue. If anything, he hopes the talks will overflow into guests’ neighborhoods and university dorms. And there, discussion will be led by people who are better informed of their place in the long march for racial equality.
Above all, McGill wants his guests to remember that black history does not begin at a Montgomery bus stop in 1955 and end at a Memphis hotel room in 1968. It spans lifetimes, back to the auction block and long past when Obama leaves office. The recent conflict at the University of Missouri, which ended in the president’s removal, did not begin when these students arrived on campus or even when the school was ordered to integrate by a court order in 1950. Anyone who has listened to Billie Holiday croon “Strange Fruit” knows Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance featuring dancers in Black Panther uniforms was not the first to push the envelope. These victories, whether from the Civil Rights movement or Black Lives Matter, all date back to one common source: slavery, a period we cannot forget, McGill insists.
“Historically, these are some times we have not yet overcome. There’s still things that we have not yet dealt with, rooted in the institution of slavery,” McGill says. “If we should let these buildings go away, then we are going to allow this nation to continually perpetuate that false narrative. We shouldn’t allow that to stand. We shouldn’t let that narrative carry the day. The record needs to be corrected.”
Through McGill’s work, the authentic story is now being told.
Correction: This article originally stated that Magnolia Plantation was 390 acres in size and that slaves worked in cotton fields and later on as freed sharecroppers. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
MORE: Fighting Prejudice in America: One Woman’s Battle to Change the Rhetoric Surrounding Race
Criminal Justice Reform Is Imminent. Here’s Why
Van Jones may joke that he’s been an African American “for a very long time,” but it’s impossible for him to ignore the serious racial inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system. With blacks incarcerated at six times the rates as Caucasians for the same crime, the multi-hyphen Jones co-founded the organization #Cut50, which works to reduce the prison population by 50 percent in the next decade.
During an exclusive interview with NationSwell, Jones discussed how the fight for reform is progressing and which 2016 presidential candidates are mostly likely to bring about change within the criminal justice system.
How has your organization #Cut50 participated in the [criminal justice reform] debate?
“I hosted a summit in March with Newt Gingrich — he and I became friends working together on CNN — and we thought, if we work really hard, we could get 100 people together for an hour, leaders from both sides, to talk about this issue. We got 700 people for seven hours, including 10 members of Congress, three governors, two Cabinet secretaries and a video from the president.
“Out of that summit, three bills were introduced and a channel was opened up between Koch Industries and the White House — mortal enemies, but not on this one issue. On JusticeReformNow.org, we collected 120,000 signatures from people saying Congress and the president should work together to get something done this year. We’ve worked as effectively as the other groups — the Coalition for Public Safety, ACLU, the Drug Policy Alliance or FAMM, Families Against Mandatory Minimums. We’re working very hard, and we’re very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
In Washington, #Cut50 is lobbying for the SAFE Justice Act. What would that legislation do?
“The most important thing is letting judges be judges again. We so overreacted to the crack epidemic in the 1980s; we stripped judges of their right to judge and instead imposed mandatory minimum sentences. Even if you’re someone caught with drugs because you were forced to by a boyfriend who was threatening your life or you had never made any mistake before, a judge couldn’t say, ‘Well, look, the punishment should fit the crime here.’ In all circumstances, they just rubber stamped it and would give you some atrocious sentence. You can get 25 years for shooting a cop and 30 years for a non-violent drug offense. That’s the kind of thing that this legislation begins to address.”
READ MORE: 7 States Making Bold Criminal Justice Reforms
Even though Congress is talking about criminal justice reform, it doesn’t seem like the presidential candidates are giving it much attention, with a couple exceptions like Rand Paul. Why is that?
“They’re talking about reform more in this election than any other in American history. Even people like Ted Cruz have spoken out against mandatory minimums. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have addressed this issue, after being pushed by Black Lives Matter. But notice on the Democratic side, Bill Clinton in 1992 made his case to the American people by attacking Rev. Jesse Jackson, executing an African-American with mental health issues in his own state and putting more cops on the street. Hillary Clinton is having to speak out about the catastrophic excesses that have resulted from that kind of attitude. Even Bill Clinton himself has had to come out and say that things have gone too far.
“People pretend that Democrats have been good on these issues and that Republicans have been terrible. In fact, it’s the reverse. Some of the worst policies have come from Democrats like Bill Clinton, and Gov. Gray Davis and Gov. Jerry Brown here in California. Meanwhile, Republican governors like Rick Perry, Nathan Deal in Georgia and John Kasich in Ohio have actually been closing prisons. It’s not a traditional debating point, but it’s an issue that’s rising in importance.”
There’s a lot of discussion already, but that doesn’t always translate into reform. Do you think that now’s finally the time?
“Now here’s something that I think nobody knows. President Obama went to a prison, the only sitting president who’d ever been to a prison. Some people thought that was historic, but that was only a third of the history that was made that day. When he came out of the prison, he didn’t come out chastising the people who were locked up. Instead, he came out and identified with them. He himself had done some of the same things that got these kids in trouble. Now that’s history. For a sitting president to identify with incarcerated felons? And to point out, ‘There but for the grace of good and good parenting, go I?’ That’s extraordinary. That a president would have been in prison, that an American president would have been a felon — that’s a remarkable statement.
“Another third of the history that day was that no serious Republican in the United States of America attacked him for it. In fact, John Boehner himself said he wanted to have a vote on bipartisan criminal justice reform. Now this is a president who could put forward a bill that declared kittens are cute and he would be attacked by Republicans. This is a president that cannot get Republicans to agree with him on anything. And yet on this issue a black president goes into a prison and talks to black felons, and he doesn’t get attacked at all. Now that gives you a sense of the level and depth of the sea change on this issue. You can see in that one day how far this issue has moved in a very short period of time.
“We will get comprehensive criminal justice reform signed by this president, if not by Christmas, certainly by Easter. It’s the only thing that a critical mass of leaders actually agree needs to be done. There might be a thousand fights on the details, but everyone agrees it has to happen.”
This interview has been condensed and edited.
(Front page image: John Moore/Getty Images)
Who’s Responsible for Mass Incarceration? Van Jones Weighs In
It could be said that Van Jones is a Renaissance man. Best known for his book “Rebuild the Dream,” a proposal to revive the American economy, Jones also served as President Barack Obama’s special advisor on green jobs, co-founded four nonprofits to tackle the country’s largest obstacles and regularly appears as a commentator on CNN.
Recently, the Yale Law School graduate turned his attention to mass incarceration. He spoke to NationSwell by phone from the Bay Area about the latest in criminal justice reform.
After so many highly publicized events — the shootings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, you could go on and on — people on both sides of the aisle are talking about criminal justice reform. What allowed this historic moment to happen?
“I think that the core values of both political parties have been violated by the massive expansion of the incarceration industry. If our country is a ‘liberty and justice for all’ country in the ideal, then both parties have their roles to play. The Republicans tend to be the part of liberty. They’re concerned about individual rights and limited government. Well, the incarceration industry is rolling over both those ideas every day. The Democrats tend to be very concerned about justice — particularly social and racial justice. Well, obviously the incarceration industry is the antithesis of that. It’s the antithesis of treating marginalized groups fairly. Both parties have their own independent reasons for being concerned. Then you have this explosion of digital media, social media and hashtag activism that has created a context in which both see the salience of the issue.”
For so long, our justice system seemed to rely on fear: We need harsh penalties so criminals aren’t out on the streets committing more crimes; we can’t change our policing methods because crime will go up. How do you combat that pervasive negative emotion?
“Both political parties were stuck on stupid for three decades. Democrats and Republicans were in a footrace with each other off this cliff to see who could propose dumber, longer sentences for increasingly petty offenses, and both parties got completely away from any kind of evidence-based, rational policymaking in this area.
“I think now we’re seeing another set of fears is beginning to counterbalance that. Crime has reached historic lows, both in places where there was excessive incarceration and in places where there was not. Crime’s been going down and so people can be a little more reasonable when they think about this stuff psychologically. But there’s also a growing fear on the right of increasing government power as more of a libertarian strain in the Republican party gets bigger. Their concern for militarized police, people being jailed for personal choices of drugs and even the NSA has created a counterbalancing set of fears within some quarters of the right.”
[ph]
So, do you capitalize on that fear? Or do eventually you need to shift perceptions for a more lasting change?
“It took decades to get a system this big and unjust in place. You now have a lot of economic interests that are baked into the cake here. And it’s not just private prisons. You have public employee unions that are made up of prison guards who have a stake in the status quo. You have whole towns that have now been built up around prisons out in rural parts of America. They’re gonna fight to keep those prisons open because they’re looking at being a prison town or a ghost town. This is going to be a long process of unwinding mass incarceration. What really has to happen is a much deeper paradigm shift.”
Personally, how did you get involved in this issue of criminal justice reform?
“I’ve been African American for a very long time. From that perspective, it’s very difficult to ignore the racial imbalances that have been built up and even accelerated in our criminal justice system. Iowa’s population is two percent black, but 25 percent of its prison population is black. I agree with the author Michelle Alexander when she says this is the new Jim Crow. We had enslavement in the 1700 and 1800s, we had Jim Crow segregation and now we have mass incarceration. It’s another way to deny basic humanity and dignity and equality to people with darker-colored skin.
“I think a lot of people in the back of their minds believe there’s more and more black people in prison because more and more black people are criminals. And yet the numbers don’t bear it out. In fact, African-Americans and whites do illegal drugs at exactly the same rates, literally the exact same rate. So, if 10 percent of African-Americans are using substances at any given point, 10 percent of whites are. And yet African-Americans are not incarcerated at equal rates. Not at double the rate, nor at three times, but at six times the rates of whites doing the exact same thing. Now that’s not ‘These African-Americans should get better educated and pull their pants up.’ That’s literally six times the rate of incarceration.
[ph]
“Now where does that come from? It comes from police assuming the worst about any African-American motorist or pedestrian and giving them extra scrutiny. They’re more likely to be stopped, and in those encounters, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be held without bail, more likely to be given heavier charges by district attorneys. At every step and stage, you end up with unfair treatment. It’s not that there’s a lot of outright racism. It’s not conscious — ‘Oh, I hate all black people. I want them to be in prison.’ It’s just this tiny little tickle in the back of your brain that says, ‘I need to secure this guy,’ or ‘I need to teach this guy a lesson.’ As opposed to the white college student to whom he maybe says, ‘Oh well, boys will be boys,’ or maybe, ‘They’ll grow out of it.’ But black guys appear as marauding, drug-abusing menaces. Those kinds of things make it very important for me to speak up.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman
“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”
For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.
Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”
A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.
One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”
“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.
Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.
And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”
How Putting One Foot in Front of the Other Is Saving the African-American Community
“One in two African-American girls born in the year 2000 will get diabetes if something doesn’t change,” says Morgan Dixon, co-founder of GirlTrek. “That’s absolutely not acceptable on our watch.”
Statistics like that, as well as sobering data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that 80 percent of African-American women are obese or clinically overweight, are what motivate Dixon.
Dixon speaks passionately about her family’s American story, from her mother being part of school desegregation in Oklahoma to her ancestors fighting in the Kentucky Regiment during the Civil War. She is the first in her family to graduate from college and found success that wouldn’t have been attainable without the sacrifices of those who came before her.
But something was still missing.
Through long conversations with her friend and eventual GirlTrek co-founder Vanessa Garrison, Dixon discovered that both she and Garrison had an unfulfilled sense of purpose. Specifically, they both wanted to give back to female African-American community.
So they started GirlTrek, an organization that was launched in 2010 to encourage black women to walk their way towards better health. Beyond the obvious physical benefits and community building, Dixon and Garrison cite African-American history as motivation, from the endless walking of Harriet Tubman along the Underground Railroad to the civil rights marches of 1965 in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama.
In March of this year, GirlTrek chartered 10 buses so 500 of its members could participate in the 50th anniversary of the Selma Bloody Sunday March. Wearing their “superhero blue” GirlTrek T-shirts, Dixon, Garrison and their sisters in health marched to honor the sacrifices their community had made before and the desire of African-American women to stand up for their health.
“Black women have prioritized the health and wellbeing of everyone else above themselves because they needed to do that,” explains Garrison. “It’s gotten us to this point, but it’s absolutely going to kill us.”
As of April 2015, GirlTrek had more than 29,000 members in 500 cities nationwide. Their goal? To reach 1 million by 2018. Dixon and Garrison see what they are doing as an extension of civil rights, and they say the time has come for African-American women to focus on themselves.
“We have an obligation,” says Dixon, “to just live our healthiest most fulfilled lives because so many people have walked so far for us to get to this moment.”
Morgan Dixon, co-founder of GirlTrek, is a NationSwell Council member.
Watch How a Group of Noncustodial Fathers Are Helping Each Other Become Better Dads
On the second floor of the Dawson Technical Institute on Chicago’s South Side, a dozen African-American men sit around a conference table discussing the trials of fatherhood. “I see some of me in a few of my sons. Mostly the bad stuff, but I’m trying to change that,” says Eugene Bradford, a father of 18 kids with 13 different mothers. Others around the table nod in agreement. The meeting is a weekly group-counseling session, the centerpiece of the Fathers, Families and Healthy Communities (FFHC) program, a nonprofit in Chicago that helps African-American noncustodial fathers play more significant roles in their children’s lives. Sequane Lawrence, who holds a master’s degree in community economic development, founded the program over a decade ago to help African American men with a variety of social services. In 2011, he decided to focus specifically on reconnecting noncustodial fathers to their children, which he believes is a key strategy to combat the cycle of poverty in African-American communities, where nearly 70 percent of children are born into single-parent families. “When a father’s engaged, they are better off. They graduate from high school, girls are less likely to get pregnant,” Lawrence says. “To put it in a more positive way, they become really productive members of their community.”
Bradford sought help from the group a few months ago after he missed child-support payments and, following Illinois state law, had his driver’s license revoked. FFHC has been working on refinancing Bradford’s child support and helping him get his license back, but Bradford says he has received more from the program than expected. He says the group sessions in particular have taught him to connect in new ways with a number of his children. “It’s been enlightening since the first day,” he says. (Bradford’s case — 18 kids with 13 mothers — is an extreme example of an FFHC father, according to Lawrence. The typical man who arrives on FFHC’s doorstep is in his 30s with two or three children from different mothers.) Since FFHC started three years ago, Lawrence says he has helped around 150 fathers manage child-support payments, find work and improve relations with their children.
How Maryland Decreased Its Infant Mortality Rate in Record Time
People knock local governments for bureaucracy and red tape, but Maryland deserves an equal amount of fanfare for its data-driven — scratch that, successful data-driven — push to lower the statewide infant mortality rate.
With his state’s numbers well above the national average, Governor Martin O’Malley managed to lower it two separate times, both ahead of schedule. In 2007, he set five-year deadline to reduce Maryland’s infant mortality rate by 10 percent. When that goal was achieved a mere two years later, with 8 fatalities per 1,000 live births down to 7.2, O’Malley honed in on the main area of concern: The continued-high numbers of African Americans dying in infancy. Again, he aimed for a 10 percent reduction, this time by 2017. Finding success again, he reached that milestone five years early.
The fruits of O’Malley’s efforts are easy to see. According to Governing, between 2011 and 2012, the state’s infant-mortality rate among African-Americans declined by 14 percent, to 10.3 per 1,000 live births. Also in 2012, Maryland’s infant mortality hit a record low of 6.3, down by 21 percent since 2008 and about the same as the national rate for 2012.
How did O’Malley manage do this so hyper-effectively? It all comes down to data. O’Malley tasked the state’s health serves to identify and funnel resources into areas with the highest infant-mortality rates. Two areas, Prince George’s County (which lies just east of Washington, D.C.) and Baltimore, demanded the most attention.
Baltimore, the state’s largest city, had some of the most grave infant-mortality issues. To address these problems, the state worked with local organizations like B’more for Healthy Babies, which is led by the city’s health department. For instance, B’more’s Sleep Safe initiative uses the media, community outreach and provider education to reduce sleep-related deaths. With the second leading cause of death among city infants being preventable sleep-related complications, this was proof of targeted problem-solving.
In-home education and social services for pregnant women and new mothers also were cornerstones of the Baltimore initiative. The city’s infant-mortality rate has dropped every year since B’more for Healthy Babies began in 2009, falling by 28 percent from 2009 to 2012, Governing reports. In 2012, Baltimore’s infant mortality for the first time fell below 10 per 1,000 live births. Notably, the disparity between African-American and white infant-mortality rates declined by 40 percent during that time.
Prince George’s County saw the creation of a similar “Healthy Women, Health Lives” program that took a comprehensive approach to the overall health of women of childbearing age.
Governing makes a point of noting how a lower infant-mortality rate is good for more than just immediate families.
Infant mortality is far more common among premature, low-birth-weight (LBW) and very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) babies. Including the costs of delivery-related hospital stays, transfers and readmissions, the expenses for a normal-birth-weight Maryland baby totaled $8,703 in 2009, compared to $45,543 for an LBW baby and $239,945 for a VLBW baby. As the number of LBW and VLBW babies declines, the health-care savings help pay for the resources used to reduce infant mortality overall.
The B’more for Healthy Babies and Healthy Women, Healthy Lives programs focus on both education and health resources. As the state’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene realized that many uninsured women were delivering babies without any prenatal care, they charged local health departments with implementing a program called “Quick Start.” This allows uninsured women to get timely prenatal care appointments while awaiting Medicaid eligibility determinations.
With better prenatal care comes better-informed mothers and healthier babies. Call it a win-win.
It’s a Woman’s World Now, and Women Are Making It Better for Everyone
In the past few years, coding has taken on a life of its own and is seen almost as a universal digital gateway to a lucrative career. Kimberly Bryant, a biotech engineer, is harnessing the power of code education through Black Girls Code, a non-profit organization she launched in 2011. In just three years, it’s become so successful that CNN just named Bryant to its CNN 10: Visionary Women list.
The idea came to Bryant when her 12-year-old daughter, a heavy gamer, found herself as the only girl of color at a weeklong computer programming camp at Stanford University in California. Her daughter’s experience was all too familiar: In the 1980s, Bryant was the only African-American woman in her electrical engineering classes, and to this day, she still finds herself completely outnumbered in her field.
Black Girls Code aims to not only amend the dearth of black women in the technology industry workforce —they make up only 3 percent — but to turn the face of the industry on its head.
“We don’t want to just teach the girls to code,” said Bryant, who now works full-time for the nonprofit. “We also want to teach them to create businesses and to become business owners and become like the next Mark Zuckerberg or the next Bill Gates.”
To do so, the organization teaches computer programming and entrepreneurial skills to girls of color, ages seven to 17, attempting to train them to become tech leaders of the future. The program goes far beyond Bryant’s home base in San Francisco, reaching 2,500 girls through chapters in seven U.S. cities and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Eight additional chapters across the country are planned for 2014, with the goal of reaching 1 million girls by 2040.
“We like to say we hope to be like the Girl Scouts of technology, having many different chapters in many different states, as well as many different countries,” Bryant told CNN.
“I’m doing something to make the world a better place for her child,” she adds.
Bryant’s goal to foster a global atmosphere of female success echoes the stories of the rest of the members of the CNN 10: Visionary Women list.
In honor of Women’s History Month, which lasts all of March, CNN told the stories of 10 women working to help other women through education, emotional support, and career motivation. They’re all working toward that goal via unique paths. Victoria Budson, executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, is shattering the wage gap through data-driven means like a gender action portal and professional partnerships. Molly Cantrell-Kraig founded the Women With Drive Foundation to provide transportation to women who otherwise find education and job training inaccessible. Other women included are making fashion-forward clothing for Muslim women and teaching women about menstruation.
“What they have in common is a mission to empower their fellow woman,” CNN wrote in the introduction. And what Bryant, along with the others, represents is a passionate commitment to training the next generation of female leaders.