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"I had been living this carefree life, but when Dr. King was assassinated, I believe I was 11 years old. It made me want to study more and more about Black history to prove to myself our worth.
And when I grew up, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I had this plan where I thought I would teach for seven years and then go to law school. But I remember a sixth grader saw me studying and she said, ‘I want to read big books like that. What is that big book about?’ And I told her it was a law book. And she said, ‘Mmm, I think you’d make a better teacher than a lawyer.’
Well, eventually that student became a lawyer. And just the thought of it makes me cry because I had influenced her to do something that she wound up loving. And I stayed in the classroom and found my true love of teaching.'" (StoryCorps)
"Like many Black Americans born in the second half of the 20th century, Walker has ancestral ties to agriculture, but he grew up alienated from it. His father had spent summers working on his family’s farm operation in rural Kentucky, where they sharecropped on land owned by white people. Walker’s dad fled as soon as he could and ultimately set up an IT-services business in Atlanta, raising Walker and his sister in the city’s then-semirural far northern suburbs. Stories about life in the Kentucky fields were scarce. To his father, farming represented “trauma [that] gets passed down,” something to escape. When Walker began to devote his life to agriculture as a young adult in the late 1990s, “my dad would always say, ‘Everybody’s trying to get off the farm. Why are you trying to get on the farm?’”" (Mother Jones)
"“No Farms No Future” gets to the heart of America’s food system. Each episode will illuminate a pressing issue faced by farmers and ranchers: How can we protect farmland against threats like development? How can we promote equitable access to farmland, especially for BIPOC, queer, and female farmers? And why is farmland a solution to the climate crisis, but only if we get farming right? Hear from farmers and ranchers as they make the tough decisions that will shape their future—and ours. Tune in for monthly episodes, created in collaboration with American Farmland Trust and Heritage Radio Network." (American Farmland Trust)
"TULLAHASSEE, Okla. — If you really concentrate, you can imagine the town that this community’s elders describe. There was the grocery store on the highway, and the gas station. There were the shops where children walked to buy lunch for 50 cents on school days. There was Ms. Sadie’s chicken shack and Dr. Minor’s office. All of that’s gone now. In their place, either vacant lots or dilapidated buildings.
Today, you’re more likely to see loose dogs than people on Lincoln Street, the town’s main drag. There are a couple of horses in a yard just across from the town hall, which used to be the center of a bustling commercial district. Now, Lincoln Street has a handful of homes, the low-slung cinder-block town hall, two churches and just one storefront, Bates Barbecue.
The once-thriving all-Black town of Tullahassee was ravaged by government policies that divested it and other Black communities, said Mayor Keisha Currin. And she says the city is owed reparations to get back on its feet." (The Washington Post)
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"Black history runs deep in the sport of horse racing. When it comes to the contributions of African Americans and the Kentucky Derby, Black horsemen and jockeys played a vital role in the sport of horse racing.
From the first Derby race in 1875 through the early 1900s, Black jockeys and horsemen laid the foundation for horse racing, said Chris Goodlett, director of curatorial and educational affairs at the Kentucky Derby Museum." (NPR)
Most northbound runaways were on foot and unarmed, but many southbound freedom-seekers, especially from Texas, rode horses and carried guns. “It was a reflection of the culture and the most effective strategy,” says Audain. “They could travel faster, defend themselves and hunt for food.” Escaping on horseback probably also helped to neutralize the much-feared bloodhounds and other slave-hunting dogs; the dogs had no clear human scent to follow and likely couldn’t keep up with horses over long distances.
Kyle Ainsworth, a historian and special collections librarian who runs the Texas Runaway Slave Project at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, has calculated from runaway slave notices that 91 percent of Texas escapees were male, with an average age of 28. “Many women were responsible for raising their children,” says Ainsworth. “It was very difficult for enslaved people to run away with young children, although there are definitely a few examples where they tried." (Smithsonian)
"So while beachgoers may consider seaweed nuisance, Dorgan knew from experience it was teeming with potential, CBS News meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Berardelli reported for "CBS Saturday Morning." He sent samples of it to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia to test for organic certification. Through that, it was discovered that the high uptake of natural vitamins and minerals in seaweed drove up reproduction and milk production in cows.
Dorgan knew instinctively that seaweed would be healthy for cows, but research revealed an unintended consequence: seaweed made cows less gassy.
Globally, methane is responsible for 30% of global warming. Of that, livestock, such as cattle, account for about one-third of all methane emissions.
"They [researchers] found out that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as high as 40%," Dorgan said." (CBS News)