Podcasts about sharecroppers

It's been a long time…and a sizeable chunk of this podcast! We're preparing a hell of a party this week, as we hit 400, Ify cruises into the sunset as host, and we finally cover the original supernatural drama that film nerd dreams are made of, Ryan Coogler's SINNERS. We've got past guest and IRL Ify bud Cody Ziglar riding shotgun this week to boot! And we dream up what some serious films might be like if we threw some vampires into the mix.What's GoodAlonso - Pineapple Upside-Down Cake (especially Nancy Silverton's)Drea - “How long does it actually take” TikToksZig - Tom Cruise coconut cake from Doan's Bakery (+Ify mentions King's rainbow cake)Ify - NeotropolisIfy's Staff Picks on LetterboxdRyan Coogler Aspect ratio videoStaff PicksAlonso - Red RoomsDrea - Let the Right One In (and Green Room)Zig - Assault on Precinct 13 and From Dusk Till DawnIfy - From Dusk Till DawnThanks to our sponsor, Good Story Guild! Listen to In Media Res wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on BlueSky, Facebook, or InstagramWithDrea ClarkAlonso DuraldeIfy NwadiweProduced by Marissa FlaxbartSr. Producer Laura Swisher

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal HillIn the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.Recently Kelley listened back to those early recordings with Signal Hill contributor Conor Gillies. He hadn't heard some of the recordings in decades. Memories came flooding back as Kelley reflected on the people, the story and the power of oral history. Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, and the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and more.Pie Down Here was produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman, with help from the Signal Hill team: Jackson Roach, Annie Rosenthal, and Lio Wong. Music by Nathan Bowles. You can listen to the entire first issue of Signal Hill — eight original stories — on their website at signalhill.fm, or wherever you get podcasts. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers.

Bava Metzia 103 : Marc Chipkin : 2024-06-10 Property lease where the parties dispute how much time has passed. Borrowing an item in good working order forever. Sharecroppers who lease a field have to abide by the local custom.

The 8th perek finishes with a discussion about replacing a rented house that fell. The ninth perek discussed the laws of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

A case can certainly be made that most Americans could be classified as sharecroppers. The definition seems to fit. Tremendous energy spent on the right on the wrong issues.  And RFK, Jr is running for President.

Episode: 2385 When cotton was king in Texas.  Today, think about cotton.

Patrick Dixon talks with James Benton about the emergence of sharecropping as a compromise between former slaves – freedmen – and landowners, and sharecroppers subsequent struggles for rights and power. Benton is the Director of the Race and Economic Empowerment Project at the The Kalmanovitz Initiative at Georgetown University.  For our Labor History Object of the week, Ben Blake at the Meany Labor Archives pulls out a collection of buttons from the Solidarnosc union movement in Poland. NOTE: This podcast originally aired on October 7, 2018. Questions, comments or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Engineered by Chris Garlock. Labor history sources include Today in Labor History, by David Prosten. This week's music: Sharecropper's Blues, featuring Charlie Barnet with Kay Starr on vocals.

In this episode, UVA Law 3L Marley Peters and I interview Brittany Farr, Assistant Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Farr is a scholar of private law and race. With more than a decade of interdisciplinary training, her research draws on history, legal theory, and cultural studies to theorize how marginalized populations have availed themselves of otherwise inhospitable legal regimes. In particular, her research focuses on enslaved and free African Americans' use of contract law during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interrogates the ways in which contract law mediated African Americans' relationship to bodily autonomy, economic freedom, and legal agency both during and after slavery.  We're discussing her article, Breach By Violence, forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, which analyzes the use of private law by sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South to address violent breaches of contract by landlords.  Brittany Farr NYU Homepage: https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=57053 Interview with Samuel James (S. J.) and Leonia Farrar, May 28, 2003. Interview K-0652. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/playback.html?base_file=K-0652&duration=01:29:20 Oral history with 84 year old black female, Joiner, Arkansas https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000030 

On January 1, 1939, 1,500 Missourians went on strike. They were tired of hard work, being poor and living in shacks. This podcast explores what that strike means today to one Missouri community.

So why is the food history of a community so important? And can Durham's food history be applied to other places? Who owns land, who can grow food and make a living doing so, and who has access to food, any food, least of all healthy food? The answers are deeply influenced by historical policies and practices. These in retrospect, clearly exacerbated, supported, and even created food related calamities, the dual burden communities face of both food insecurity and diet related chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. Understanding these practices is important in creating change. And in understanding that conditions imposed on neighborhoods rather than personal failings of residents explain what we see today. This is a story about Durham, North Carolina. These days, Durham is famous as one of the South's foodiest towns and known for its award-winning chefs, thriving restaurant scene, and reverence for even the most humble foods served with down-home charm. But Durham, just like the rest of North Carolina, like other states and other countries, has discouraging any high rates of food insecurity. This is juxtaposed to high rates as well of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases. It is helpful of course, to know how things are now, but a more complex and highly important question is how we got here. Enter history. What can be learned from a detailed historical analysis, in this case of Durham, and how relevant is this information to other places?   The Duke World Food Policy Center worked with historian, Melissa Norton to write a report titled, "Power and Benefit On The Plate The History of Food in Durham, North Carolina". This recording is an abridged version of that report and features documented historical quotes from the relevant periods in history as read by contemporary voices.   Let's go back to the beginning. Durham, North Carolina is the ancestral home of the Occaneechi, the Eno, the Adshusheer and the Shocco indigenous peoples. Before European colonizers came, land was not something that people owned. Instead land and its natural resources were shared so that everyone could benefit.   “To our people land was everything, identity, our connection to our ancestors, our pharmacy, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands, were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself. It was a gift, not a commodity. It could never be bought or sold.”  Robin Kimmerer, Potawatomi Nation.   Durham's tribes and clans supported themselves through hunting, foraging and communal farming. They managed the habitat for fish, fowl and other wild animal populations. They used controlled fires to clear land, had complex farming irrigation systems and created a network of roads for trade and exchange. When European settler colonists came into North Carolina life for indigenous people changed dramatically. At first, they taught colonists how to forage and clear land, what to plant and how to care for crops. The colonists came to North Carolina believed that they had the spiritual, political and legal blessing of Pope Alexander the sixth through the doctrine of discovery. This decree labeled indigenous peoples as subhuman because they were not Christian and treated their land as available for the taking.   “The Indians are really better to us than we are to them. They always give us rituals at their quarters and take care we are armed against hunger and thirst. We do not do so by them, generally speaking, but let them walk by our doors hungry and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with scorn and disdain and think them little better than beasts in humane shape. Though if we're examined, we shall find that for all our religion and education, we possess more moralities and evil than these savages do not.” John Lawson, English settler colonist in North Carolina, 1709.   Settlers forced native people off ancestral homelands and took possession of the stolen land and its resources. As a result, many indigenous people left to join other tribes, some hid in order to remain in the area. And some were forced into assimilation programs or enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean.   Going back to the early colonial settlers, most were small scale farmers who grew corn, fruits and vegetables and commodities such as tobacco, wheat, and cotton for their own use or to barter. As farms grew from the 1500s through the 1800s, colonists brought West African people by force to use as free farm labor. West Africans brought seeds from their homelands and foods such as hibiscus, yams and sweet potatoes, watermelon and bananas and millet, okra and sorghum became a permanent part of the Southern food culture. Food was an essential connection to home, to community and resiliency. Indigenous and enslaved African people interacted and exchanged practical and cultural traditions.   “My name is Alex Woods. I was born in 1858. In slavery time I belonged to Jim Woods. My Missus name was Patty Woods. They treated us tolerable fair. Our food was well cooked. We were fed from the kitchen of the great house during the week. We cooked and ate at our home Saturday nights and Sundays. They allowed my father to hunt with a gun. He was a good hunter and brought a lot of game to the plantation. They cooked it at the great house and divided it up. My father killed deer and turkey. All had plenty of rabbits, possum, coons and squirrels.” Alex Woods   In 1854, the development of the North Carolina railroad transformed agricultural markets. The farming economy shifted from fruits, vegetables, and grains toward large scale cash crops, such as tobacco. The railroad stop in Durham became the center of the city. By the time the civil war began in 1861, nearly one out of three people in Durham county were enslaved. A quarter of the area's white farmers legally owned enslaved people. Cameron Plantation was the largest plantation in the state with 30,000 acres and 900 enslaved people.   To be self sufficient, create security and build wealth. People needed to own land. The federal government passed the homestead act of 1862 to create new land ownership opportunities. As a result in the west 246 million acres of native people's land were deeded to 1.5 million white families.   That same year, the federal government also passed the moral act. This established North Carolina State University in Raleigh as a land grant university to teach white students practical agricultural science, military science and engineering. 29 years later in 1891, North Carolina Agriculture and Technology University in Greensboro was established to serve black students, but the institutions were never funded equally.   In 1865, the civil war ended at Bennett Place in Durham with the largest surrender of Confederate troops. Reconstruction occurred in the subsequent years from 1865 to 1877. During this time, Durham struggled with its own political, social and economic challenges. One of which were the circumstances faced by formerly enslaved people who were freed with no land, no jobs, no money and no citizenship rights. Historians estimate that more than a million freed black people in the country became sick for malnutrition, disease and near starvation. And tens of thousands of people died.   Listen to the words of Martha Allen, a young black woman at the time.   “I was never hungry till we was free and the Yankees fed us. We didn't have nothing to eat, except heart attack and Midland meat. I never seen such meat. It was thin and tough with a thick skin. You could boil it all day and all night and it couldn't cook. I wouldn't eat it. I thought it was mule meat. Mules that done been shot on the battlefield then dried. I still believe it was mule meat. Them was bad days. I was hungry most of the time and had to keep fighting off them Yankee mans.” Martha Allen   In the years after the war, a few people had cash, but landowners still needed farm labor, poor farmers and families of all races struggled. Landowners began hiring farm labor through share cropping and tenant farm contracts.   “The Negros have as their compensation, a share of the crops that shall be raised one third part of the wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, syrup, peas, sweet potatoes and pork. But the seed wheat is to be first passed back to the said Cameron, the hogs to be killed or pork shall be fattened out of the corn crop before division. The said Cameron is to have the other two thirds of said crops.” Cameron share cropping contract 1866.   Sharecroppers work plots of farmland, and then received a fraction of the crop yield for themselves as payment. For newly freed black people. Many of whom worked the same land, lived in the same housing and worked under the close supervision of the same overseers sharecropping felt like slavery under another name.   In 1868 and 1877 North Carolina passed the landlord tenant acts, which legalized the power imbalance between landowners and sharecropping farmers. For poor farmers there was simply no way to get ahead. And so-called black codes, laws enacted throughout the south in the 1860s and beyond denied black people the right to vote, to serve on juries or to testify in court against white people. With tenant farming, workers paid rent to landowners and kept all the proceeds from the crops.   “We lived all over the area because we were tenant farmers, very poor living on the land of the owner who was of course, white. We used his mules and he paid for the seed and the tobacco and the stuff that we planted. Of course, as I look back now, I know how they cheated us because we never had anything.” Theresa Cameron Lyons, 1868, on growing up in a black tenant farming family in Durham County.   North Carolina politics during this time was dominated by white supremacist ideology and by efforts to keep blacks from voting and from holding political office. In 1896, the US Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal treatment of blacks was legally permissible. This created the legal basis of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. From 1896 to 1964 Jim Crow laws imposed racial segregation on nearly all aspects of life, including schools, transportation, and public facilities. These laws institutionalized economic, educational and social disadvantages for black and indigenous people, such court sanction exclusion combined with violence and intimidation from white people created severely hostile living conditions for North Carolina's black people. As a result, registered black voters in North Carolina plummeted from 126,000 in 1896 to only 6,100 in 1902.   As the year 1900 dawned, more than half of the US population were farmers or lived in rural communities. Durham County was still largely farmland, but there was incredible urban growth in the early decades of the 1900s. This too had an impact on Durham's food and the community.   Demand for tobacco and textile factory workers was growing in Durham. Although only white workers could work in the textile factories. Both black and white migrants found work in Durham's Liggett Myers and American tobacco factories. Black workers had the lowest pay, most backbreaking jobs in the factories and were paid less than the white workers.   Outside the factories black women had more job opportunities than black men, but as cooks and domestic servants. And they also held some administrative positions. As people traded farm life for the city, they had to adjust to a new way of life. This meant living off wages in the new cash economy and the crowded close quarters of urban living.   Textile mill owners in the East Durham Edgemont and West Durham areas built subsidized mill villages to provide housing for white workers close to the factories. Each mill village had its own churches, schools, recreation centers, and stores.   “Yeah, it was a complete store. They'd have very few wise work in the mills. They would have a man that went out in the morning, they'd call it taking orders. He'd go to all the houses and the woman of the house and tell him what she wanted. He'd bring it back in time to be cooked and served up for what they called dinner, which is of course lunch. And he'd go do the same thing in the afternoon. Have it back in time for a good supper.”  Zeb Stone, 1915, a white business owner from West Durham, North Carolina.   Many textile workers had grown up on farms and knew how to garden and raise chickens, pigs, or even cows in their yards. Families preserved extra garden produce and meals for the winter. Home canning became popular and increased during World War I and later in World War II, as food shortages meant rations for canned food. The federal government urged people to rely on produce grown in their own gardens called victory gardens and to share resources with neighbors.   Six predominantly black neighborhoods developed in Durham, along with black churches, schools and businesses, people form close relationships with each other. And even though the yards were often small, many black people also maintained gardens, kept chickens until the local government banned livestock in the city limits in the 1940s. Buying from black businesses meant investing in the whole black community. Community leaders preached how each dollar spent would flow in a wheel of progress throughout black Durham. Neighborhood grocers were owned by and for people who lived in black neighborhoods, here's what longtime Durham state representative Henry Mickey Michelle has to say about growing up in the Hayti area of Durham.   “We didn't have to go across the tracks to get anything done. We had our own savings and loans bank, our own insurance company, our own furniture store, our own tailors, barber shops, grocery stores, the whole nine yards.” Durham state representative Henry Mickey Michelle   Black and white farmers came to Durham's urban areas to sell fresh produce on street corners and created popup farm stands throughout the city. Many came to Hayti, Durham's largest black neighborhood and to the center of black commerce that was dubbed Black Wall Street. Durham established the first official farmer's market then called a curb market in 1911 to connect county farmers with urban consumers.   The federal government helped farmers stay informed of developments in agriculture, home economics, public policy, and the economy. The Smith Lever Act of 1914 launched cooperative extension services out of the land grant universities. In 1914 extension services for Durham County's white people began and services for black communities started in 1917, hoping to draw young people into farming.   Segregated schools in Durham offered agriculture training. Programs for the future farmers of America served white students and new farmers of America programs served black students.   By 1920 farmers comprised 50% of the population in Durham County outside the city core. Nearly half of these were tenant farmers. Arthur Brody, a black man who made his home in Durham had this to say about his family's experience.   “My granddaddy had 50 acres of land. They said he was working for this white family and the man took a liking to him. And back then land was cheap. And that man told him, Robert, what you ought to do is buy an acre of land every month. He gave him $12 a month. So he bought an acre of land a month, a dollar a month for a year. And he bought that farm with 52 acres of land in it. And he built his house out of logs. I remember that log house just as good I can.” Arthur Brody   Black families were beginning to acquire farmland. Although black owned farms were generally smaller and on less productive land than white owned farms. At its peak in 1920, 26% of farms nationally were owned by black farmers.   The shift to industrialized agriculture concentrated on just a few crops, created new pressures for farmers, especially small scale farmers who were already struggling with the depressed economy, depleted soil, outdated farming tools and the constant demand for cash crops, black and white farmers alike struggled with a lack of fair credit and chronic indebtedness. Here is what the Negro Credit Unions of North Carolina had to say about the farm credit system in 1920.   “Perhaps the greatest drawback to the average poor farmer, struggling for a foothold on the soil and trying to make a home for himself and family in the community is the lack of capital. If he buys fertilizer on time, borrows money or contracts to be carried over the cropping season, it is usually at such a ruinous rate of interest that few ever get out from under its painful influence. The man who owns a small farm as well as he who rents one has long been victimized by the credit system.” Negro Credit Unions of North Carolina brochure   In Durham, life still followed the seasonal cycles of farming. There were special times for communal rituals, such as berry picking, corn shucking and peach canning. Mary Mebane described growing up in a black farming community in Northern Durham County in this way.   “Berry picking was a ritual, a part of the rhythm of summer life. I went to bed excited. We didn't know whose berries they were. Nobody had heard about the idea of private property. Besides the berries wild, free for everybody. The grown people picked up high and the children picked low. We children ate them on the spot, putting purple stained fingers into our mouths, creating purple stained tongues while the grown people wiped sweat and dodged bumblebees.” Mary Mebane   Many black Durhamites joined in the great migration of black people to cities in the North and Western parts of the country. More than 6 million black people left the South between 1917 and 1970. Those who stayed found themselves caught between traditional farming culture and an increasingly modernized urban world and black farmers had the further burden of discrimination in federal farm lending programs, which hampered their ability to sustain, adapt and expand their farming.   In the 1930s, the country was grappling with a great depression and the dust bowl. The textile industry was hit hard by the reception and white textile factory workers struggled. Families survived on cheap fat back, flower beans and their own homegrown produce. Through bouts of unemployment or underemployment. Hunger was never far off. Durham's black working class occupied the bottom rung of the economic ladder even before the great depression. Poverty and food insecurity increased to such an extent that black Durhamites were six times more likely to develop pellagra than whites in 1930. Pellagra is a disease caused by niacin deficiency. It was the leading cause of death in the city after tuberculosis. Nurses counseled Durham's black residents to eat green vegetables and fresh milk, but they were told that economics not lack of knowledge led to poor eating habits.   As one black patient remarked: “We would like to do everything you say, but we just haven't got the money.”   During the great depression, the food situation became so desperate that the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration and charities such as the Red Cross began distributing food relief. The supplies staved off hunger to some extent, but black and white residents were both complaining the food wasn't what they would normally eat. Here an unemployed white textile worker in East Durham described his family's struggle with the emergency relief rations during the great depression.   “I go around to the place that the WPA distributes commodities and the last time they gave me four packs of powdered skim milk, five pounds of country butter, three pounds of navy beans, 24 pounds of flour. That was grand flour to mix awful bread. I've tried every way I could think of to cook it. And it ain't been able to do anything with it yet. That stuff just ain't fitting for a dog to eat, but I have to use everything I get. One of the boys gets up early every morning and goes out and picks berries for breakfast. They with butter do make the flour eat a lot better. He wants to pick some for preserves, but we can highly get sugar for our needs right now. But there is something about us that keeps us hoping that in some way, the future will take care of itself.” Unemployed white textile worker in Durham during the Depression   Over time federal, state and local Durham aid efforts shifted toward training and getting people new jobs, but black men and women did not get the same opportunities as Durham's white residents. In 1933, the federal government passed the agriculture adjustment act later known as the farm bill. This legislation raised market prices and paid farmers to rest soils depleted from intensive farming. But this created new problems for small farmers already struggling to survive. Davis Harris reflects on the changes these policies caused in the black farming community of Northern Durham County.   “The federal government started paying farmers to put their soil in what they called the soil bank. At the time the US was producing more grain than they needed. So they asked farmers in order to preserve the land and soil, if they could just let the soil rest. And if you did that for 10 years, the people like me growing up who got public jobs, it was difficult to go back to the farm because you get accustomed to getting paid every month. And to go back to once a year was difficult, almost impossible. And then the farmer's equipment gets obsolete and the facilities get obsolete and there is no help. So I see that as a turning point because you've lost all your resources, your equipment, your facilities, and your workforce, and the farmers are 10 to 12 years older. So a lot of the farmers had to get public jobs so they can get enough credit to draw social security.” Davis Harris   Black land owners also contended with private property laws that put them at a very real disadvantage. Black families had little reason to trust institutions and were far less likely to have a will than white families. So when a property owner died without a legal will, their property passed to all their direct heirs as partial shares. A form of ownership transfer called heirs property. Over several generations property ownership became increasingly unclear as dozens or even hundreds of heirs could own a small share. Heirs were then more vulnerable to land speculators and developers through a legal process called partition action. Speculators would buy off the interest of a single heir. And just one heir, no matter how small their share, and this would force the sale of entire plot of land through the courts. Black farm ownership peaked between 1910 and 1920, and then dropped dramatically due to the changing farm economy, discrimination and coercive means. From 1910 to the 1930s, the total number of farms in Durham declined dramatically. But black farmers lost their land at more than twice the rate of white farmers.   Willie Roberts, a black Durham County mechanic and farmer was interviewed in the 1930s and had this to say about the tensions of the time: “We got some mean neighbors around here. They hate us 'cause we own, and we won't sell. They want to buy it for nothing. They don't like for colored people to own land. They got a white lady, Ms. Jones on the next farm to say that I attacked her. I hope to be struck down by Jesus if I said or did anything she could kick on, it's all prejudiced against a colored family that's trying to catch up with the whites. They hated my father because he owned land and my mother because she taught school and now they're trying to run us off, but we're going to stay on.”   In 1942, many young men were serving in world war II and black agricultural laborers were leaving farms as part of the great migration to Northern and Western states. So the federal government enacted the Bracero Program to address severe farm labor shortages. This allowed contract laborers from Mexico into the country to fill the labor gap. Where you live, determines where you buy food and what food is available. And Durham's black urban residents were grappling with Jim Crow laws and with segregation.   “In all licensed restaurants, public eating places and weenie shops where persons of the white and colored races are permitted to be served with and eat food and are allowed to congregate. There shall be provided separate rooms for the separate accommodation of each race. The partition between such rooms shall be constructed of wood, plaster or brick or like material, and shall reach from the floor to the ceiling…” The code of the city of Durham, North Carolina, 1947, C13 section 42.   Segregation and racial discrimination meant that opportunities for home ownership, loans, and neighborhood improvements favored white people, discriminatory policies and practices also impacted access to nutritious foods and to restaurants and resentment was building.   A black woman recalls her childhood experiences during this time: “When I was a child, the Durham Dairy was a weekly stop on Sunday evenings as part of our family drive, we would park, go into the counter and then return to the car with our ice cream. After my father finished his, we would drive around Durham while the rest of us finished our ice cream. I had no idea as a young child that the reason we took that ice cream to the car was because the Durham Dairy was segregated and being an African American family we were not allowed to eat our ice cream on the premises. I was shocked to learn as an adult how my parents had been so artful in sparing this ugly truth from me and my younger siblings.”   As early as the 1920s, Durham's white homeowners had to agree to racial covenants on their suburban home and land deeds, such covenants explicitly prevented black ownership and restricted black residents in homes, except for domestic servants. This practice was legal until 1948. The National Association of Real Estate Boards code of ethics at that time directed real estate agents to maintain segregation in the name of safeguarding, neighborhood stability and property values. The industry practice known as steering remained in effect until 1950.   “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing in a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood…” National Association of Real Estate Boards code of ethics   The great depression stimulated the country's new deal, social safety net legislation, including the social security act of 1935, which offered benefits and unemployment insurance. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 created the right for workers to organize. However, agricultural and domestic workers positions held predominantly by black people during the 1930s were specifically excluded from these programs, losing out on both fair pay and labor protections.   Historian Ira Katznelson wrote extensively about the impact of these policy decisions on the country's African Americans: “Southern legislators understood that their region's agrarian interests and racial arrangements were inextricably entwined. By excluding these persons from new deal legislation it remained possible to maintain racial inequality in Southern labor markets by dictating the terms and conditions of African American labor.”   The federal government also recognized home ownership as one of the best ways to stabilize the economy and expand the middle class. The homeowner's loan corporation, a government sponsored corporation created as part of the new deal developed city maps and color coded neighborhoods according to lending risks, these maps became the model for public and private lending from the 1930s on. In Durham and elsewhere, red lines were drawn around black, mixed race and the poorest white neighborhoods, the effects of redlining now close to a century old had profound effects that are still felt to this day. Over time these maps discourage investment in home ownership and also business development in these areas ringed in red and encouraged and supported these things in white neighborhoods.   By defining some areas as too risky for investment lending practices followed, poverty was exacerbated and concentrated and housing deserts, credit deserts and food deserts became a predictable consequence. Redlining maps also shaped lending practices for the GI Bill Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. The GI Bill made mortgages available to World War II veterans with little or no down payment. And with very low interest rates. The aim was to create financial stability and the accumulation of generational wealth for those who would serve the country through home ownership. However, most homes were in suburban neighborhoods, primarily financed by the federal government. Between redlining lending practices and real estate covenants restricting black buyers, home ownership simply wasn't possible for the vast majority of the 1 million plus black World War II veterans. Between 1935 and 1968, less than 2% of federal home loans were for black people. The GI Bill also did not issue home loans on Indian reservations, which excluded many Native American veterans.   In the late 1950s, Durham received federal money for a local urban renewal program to clear slums and blighted areas through the Housing Act of 1949. The city chose to demolish a large section of the Hayti area, the city's largest and most prominent black neighborhood and home to most black owned businesses. This changed everything. City officials cited the poor physical conditions of Hayti as the reason for demolition. The land was then used to build North Carolina highway 147, a freeway connector.   Louis Austin editor of the Carolina Times wrote in 1965: "The so-called urban renewal program in Durham is not only the biggest farce ever concocted in the mind of moral man, but it is just another scheme to relieve Negroes of property."   Hayti's destruction included a significant part of the neighborhood's food infrastructure, such as grocery stores and restaurants. What was once a thriving and resilient food economy where wealth remained in the community became a food desert.   Nathaniel White, formerly a Hayti business owner in Durham had this to say about the destruction of the Hayti neighborhood: “Well, I think we got something like $32,000 for our business. As I look back on it now, if you're going to drive a freeway right through my building, the only fair thing to do is to replace that building. In other words, I ought to be able to move my equipment and everything into a building. If they do it like that, you will be able to stand the damage. Now, the highway department has a replacement clause in their building, but the urban renewal had what they call fair market value, and that won't replace it. And that's where the handicap comes. Just say, you give them $32,000 that probably would've bought the land or whatever, but it wouldn't put the building back and everything like that.”   In the 1950s, Durham built federally funded housing projects for low income families. But by the late 1960s, public housing in the city was almost exclusively for black people and clustered in existing black neighborhoods. This further reinforced patterns of residential segregation, Durham's lunch counters and restaurants became rallying points during the civil rights movements. North Carolina's first protest was at Durham's Royal ice cream restaurant in 1957.   Virginia Williams, a young black woman at the time was a member of the Royal Ice Cream Nine who staged the protest: “None of it made any sense, but that had been the way of life. And that's the way the older folk had accepted it. And so I guess I was one of them who thought, if not us, who, if not now, when. So the police officers came and they asked us to leave. I remember one of them asking me to leave and I asked for ice cream. And he said, if you were my daughter, I would spank you and make you leave. And then I said, if I was your daughter, I wouldn't be here sitting here being asked to leave.”   In 1962, more than 4,000 people protested at Howard Johnson's Ice Cream Grill in Durham. The struggle to desegregate eateries intensified in 1963, when protesters organized sit-ins at six downtown restaurants on the eve of municipal elections, hundreds of people were arrested and protestors surrounded the jail in solidarity. And in the weeks that followed more than 700 black and white Durhamites ran a full page ad in the Durham Herald newspaper. They pledged to support restaurants and other businesses that adopted equal treatment to all, without regard to race. The mounting public pressure resulted in mass desegregation of Durham Eateries by the end of 1962, ahead of the 1964 federal civil rights act that legally ended segregation.   Although civil rights wins brought about new political, economic and social opportunities for black people, desegregation didn't help black businesses. They suffered economically because black people began to explore new opportunities to shop outside their neighborhoods, but white people didn't patronize black owned businesses in turn.   In 1964, the federal government passed the Food Stamp Act as a means to safeguard people's health and wellbeing and provide a stable foundation for US agriculture. It was also intended to raise levels of nutrition among low income households. The food stamp program was implemented in Durham County in 1966. A decade later the program was in every county in the country.   From 1970 through the 1990s, urban renewal continued to disrupt and reshape Durham central city. As both white and middle class black residents left central Durham for suburban homes, banks and grocery stores disappeared. Textile and tobacco factory jobs were also leaving Durham for good. Thousands of workers became unemployed and the domino effect on home ownership, businesses and workplaces disrupted much of Durham's infrastructure and its community life.   From 1970 through the 1980s, the availability of home refrigerators and microwaves also changed how families stored and cooked their food. Durham already had higher numbers of working women than the national average. As a result, convenience foods, foods from restaurants, prepared meals at grocery stores and microwavable foods from the freezer were in demand.   Like many Americans, Durham residents had become increasingly disconnected from farming and food production, both physically and culturally. Food corporations now used marketing in the media to shape ideas about what to eat and why. The food system became dominated by increasing corporate consolidation and control. And by large scale industrial agriculture emphasizing monoculture. Corporations were fast gaining political and economic power and used their influence to affect trade regulations, tax rates, and wealth distribution.   In the 1980s, the federal government passed legislation that boosted free market capitalism, reduced social safety net spending and promoted volunteerism and charity as a way to reduce poverty and government welfare. These policies negatively impacted Durham's already historically disadvantaged populations. Nonprofit organizations began to emerge to deal with the growing issues of hunger and food insecurity and nonprofit food charity became an industry unto itself. More than 80% of pantries and soup kitchens in the US came into existence between 1980 and 2001.   The H-2A Guest Worker Program of 1986 allowed agricultural workers to hire seasonal foreign workers on special visas who were contracted to a particular farm, but workers did not have the same labor protections as US citizens.   That same year, the US launched the war on drugs to reduce drug abuse and crime. Low income communities were disproportionately targeted when Durham's housing authority paid off duty police officers to patrol high crime areas, particularly public housing developments. Hyper policing, drug criminalization, and logger sentencing for drug related offenses caused incarceration rates to rise steadily. Durham's jail and prison incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 rose higher than anywhere else in North Carolina.   Here is an excerpt from an interview with Chuck Omega Manning, an activist and director of the city of Durham's welcome program. “Being totally honest, high incarceration rates for people of color is very detrimental to our health. Even in the Durham County Jail, you have a canteen that's run through a private company who only sell certain things like oodles of noodles that are not healthy. And then in prisons, you don't get to eat vegetables unless it's part of your dinner. And even then it's oftentimes still not healthy because of how it's cooked. But if you don't work in the kitchen, you don't get to decide, you just get it how it comes and you pray over it and eat it. But then over time, people get institutionalized in the system. And when they return home, they continue to eat the same way because they're used to it. And the financial piece only enhances that because you have individuals coming home, looking for employment, trying to do something different. And there are just so many barriers even with food stamps. So it almost feels like you're being punished twice. And it's very depressing.”   In the 1990s, Durham wanted more investment in the downtown area. Instead of the factory jobs of the past, the downtown area shifted to offer low paying service jobs and high paying jobs in research and technology. Wealthy newcomers were called urban pioneers and trailblazers and purchase properties in historically disinvested city areas.   Low wage workers today cannot afford new housing prices in Durham, in most cases, or to pay the increasing property taxes. Many people are losing their homes through when increases, evictions and foreclosures. Gentrification has also changed which food retailers exist in the local food environment. Sometimes this creates food mirages where high quality food is priced out of reach of longtime residents.   The North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA of 1994 also changed Durham and North Carolina. Farmers from Mexico and Central America driven out of business by the trade agreement immigrated to places like North Carolina, looking for agricultural and construction jobs. Durham's Latino population grew from just over 2000 in people to 1990, to nearly 40,000 in 2014, one out of three Durham public school students was Latino in 2014. Today, 94% of migrant farm workers in North Carolina are native Spanish speakers.   In 1996, the federal government made changes to the nation's food assistance security net. It dramatically cut SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps and limited eligibility to receive benefits and the length of benefits. In Durham, SNAP benefit participation rate decreased by 14% between 1997 and 2001 despite a 2% increase in the poverty rate.   Durham's Latino Credit Union opened in 2000 at a time when three quarters of Latinos did not bank at all. Over the next 20 years, Latinos developed and operated restaurants, grocery stores and services across Durham. This provided the Latino population with culturally resident food, community gathering spaces and jobs.   Processed foods had become a central part of the American diet by the early two thousands. And the vast majority of food advertising promoted convenience foods, candies, and snacks, alcoholic beverages, soft drinks and desserts. In addition, companies did and still do target black and Hispanic consumers with marketing for the least nutritious products contributing to diet related health disparities, affecting communities of color.   During the great recession of 2007 to 2009, job losses, wage reductions and foreclosure crisis increased the number of people struggling to afford and access enough nutritious food. As a result, SNAP participation rose dramatically in Durham.   In 2008, the farm bill included language about food deserts for the first time. A food desert was defined as a census track with a substantial share of residents who live in low income areas and have low levels of access to a grocery store or to healthy affordable foods in a retail outlet. Today some scholars describe such places as areas of food apartheid. This recognizes the outcomes of past policy decisions that disinvested in disadvantaged populations and locations, the cumulative effects of living under food apartheid have profound impacts on the health, wellbeing, and life expectancy of people of color and the poor.   Here's an excerpt from an interview with Latonya Gilchrist, a Durham county community health worker: “I've suffered a lot in this body for a lot of people it's genetic, but I feel like, and this is my personal feeling based on what I've experienced and my whole family. It's the role of food deserts and the cost of food, not being able to have a community grocery store and what I'll say for Northeast Central Durham or the East Durham area where I grew up, we always had corner stores that sold everything we didn't need. And very little of what we did need. Back when I was a child growing up, potato chips cost 16 cents a bag, and you could get potato chips all day long and all night long, and people could get beer and wine in the neighborhood, but you couldn't find fruits and vegetables until my daddy started selling them on a truck. So diseases come about genetically, but it's increased or enhanced through living in poor poverty stricken neighborhoods.”   Durham foreclosure spiked during the great recession of 2008 and were disproportionately located in historically black neighborhoods. Owners in high poverty neighborhoods have been targeted for high cost subprime loans by lenders through a practice known as reverse redlining. As neighborhoods gentrify and longtime residents get displaced, there is an increasing spatial disconnect between services and amenities and those who utilize them and need them the most. Food, housing and retail gentrification are closely intertwined.   Here's an excerpt from an interview with Eliazar Posada, community engagement advocacy manager of El Centro in Durham: “Gentrification is affecting a lot of our community members and not just affecting the youth, but also the families, unless we can find ways to subsidize housing or find a way to make gentrification not so dramatic for some of our community members. The youth are not going to be staying in Durham if their parents can't stay.”   Durham's people of color and low income people overall have disproportionately high incidents of diabetes. In a 2016 survey in the Piedmont region, 16% of respondents with household incomes, less than $15,000 reported having diabetes compared to only 6% of residents with household incomes of more than $75,000. By 2017 black patients were 80% more likely than white patients to have diabetes in Durham.   In Durham County in 2019, the average hourly wage for food preparation and serving jobs was $10.83 cents an hour or $22,516 annually before taxes. Such wages are all been impossible to live on without government assistance. The fair market rent for a two bedroom housing unit in Durham in 2018 was $900 a month or about $10,800 a year.   Food inequality is a lack of consistent access to enough food for a healthy, active life is caused by poverty, the cost of housing and healthcare and unemployment and underemployment. It is also impacted by the interrelated forces of home and land ownership, political power, economic resources, structural racism, gender oppression, and labor rights. Durham's communities continue to build community solidarity and mutual aid as people lend money, time and other resources trying to make sure everyone can access adequate and healthy food.   In a remarkable feat of resilience the Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation was awarded official recognition by North Carolina in 2002, following 20 years of organizing and sustained advocacy. They purchased a 250 acre plot of land just outside of Durham County and planted an orchard of fruit bearing trees for collective tribal use. This is the first land that the tribe has owned collectively in more than 250 years.   Durham's black farmer's market emerging from 2015 to 2019 is also a testament to community building through food. The market supports local black farmers and makes healthy eating attainable for individuals living in some of Durham's food apartheid areas. Market organizers are challenging social norms, classism and racism, and believe that healthy living should be possible for everyone.   So why is the food history of a community so important? And can Durham's food history be applied to other places? Who owns land, who can grow food and make a living doing so, and who has access to food, any food, least of all healthy food? The answers are deeply influenced by historical policies and practices. These in retrospect, clearly exacerbated, supported, and even created food related calamities, the dual burden communities face of both food insecurity and diet related chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. Understanding these practices is important in creating change. And in understanding that conditions imposed on neighborhoods rather than personal failings of residents explain what we see today.   A few pieces of this history are specific to Durham, the role of tobacco and textiles, for instance, but most of the fundamental influences on the economic and food conditions are broad social attitudes and practices around race and poverty. And from federal, economic, agriculture and housing policies that have affected urban rural areas in every corner of the country, there is hope from local ingenuity to change food systems and from people in local, state and federal policy positions who are working to reverse inequality and to re-envision the role of food in supporting the physical and economic wellbeing of all people, learning from the past is really important in these efforts.

Greetings To The Living. Thank you for tuning in to the Up Is Down podcast and double-plus-good thanks to all who support this work. Read ahead for news about supporting this work...This go round I attempt to bring attention to the often misused term, "homesteading". If you are building a life of self sufficiency and autonomy through community and self reliance, the hard and sweaty work of agriculture and animal husbandry, trading goods, services and value with other like-minded people and using only cash in your community for mutual aims and benefits, building barns, sheds, coops and gardens by yourself or with others then you, my friend, are not "homesteading". You are decentralizing, plain and simple. There's no other way to say it. I'm sorry. There is no more Homesteading. There is only Decentralizing. At least in the United States. The irony is that all of the things the OG homesteaders did was by necessity for life not a lifestyle choice, which is what makes up the "neo homesteading movement" that we see today; the luxury of choosing a lifestyle and a nostalgia for the past with romance of a fantasy.The starved, bleeding and puss-filled plight of the mid 19th century homesteader was necessary in order to arrive at the place we are nowadays, which ironically or not, is a place many of us are trying to leave. Another inversion. It is a disservice, in my opinion, to name that effort "homesteading" when in reality it is an effort at decentralizing, for there is nothing comparable taking place by youtubers, podcasters, and content creators regarding so-called homesteading to the OG pioneering homesteaders of the mid 19th century. Those people tried and died at the urging and incentive of the federal government, a government whose aim was always to form a centralized cohesive class system even if it had to mask that objective in "life, liberty and the pursuit of property". What we desire is departure from that empirical machine of grinding authority and centralization of power. We desire decentralization. The closest thing we can relate that desire to is a romanticized and programmed notion of the past as way to create a future. But the days of wide open spaces and being left alone are gone and gone for good. And they ain't never comin' back. They will never ever leave you alone.The truth is that the government first homesteaded the nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by ruthless murder and genocide, then subleased parcels of that property to a handful of poor people while allowing corporate giants of industry to suck up the remaining 80% of those millions of acres of "free land". We would be wise, conscious and courteous not to compare the luxury of choice we have today with the suffrage of those crafty, tirelessly inventive, sick and starving people 150 years ago. It was a different time. And we ought to use a different word.***AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM UP IS DOWN***BETWEEN RECORDING AND PUBLISHING THIS EPISODE PAYPAL HAS RESTORED MY ACCOUNT TO FULL FUNCTIONALITY. FOR NOW ANYWAY. THAT SAID, THE SUREST WAY TO SUPPORT THE SHOW AND THE WORK WE DO HERE IS TO USE THE P.O. BOX ADDRESS FOR DECENTRALIZED SUPPORT ACTIONS LIKE CASH OR CHECKS. THE SECOND BEST WAY TO SUPPORT THE SHOW AND THE WORK IS TO AUTHORIZE YOUR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION TO ISSUE A CHECK DIRECTLY FROM YOUR ACCOUNT JUST LIKE ANY OTHER AUTOMATIC PAYMENT FOR ANY OTHER BILLS. YOU CAN USE THE SAME P.O. BOX ADDRESS FOR THE DESTINATION.***Executive Producers of Ep 127***William CarterDianna RobisonSeth Klann***Associate Exec. 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Then consider the money value you'd place on that value and consider returning that value in the form of a donation to this production. You can decide for yourself what amount feels right for you. You don't need a PayPal account, just the generosity and will to support something you value and believe in. It all helps. This work is enjoyable but not easy, it takes time and costs money. Your support is needed and highly appreciated.PayPal Support Link:https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=U66JAQQUSFSUYBitCoinCash BCH: qzgwfjeu5vp634h84zzurw8kdah5j3cuxg8daq6qrk. Venmo: @Dean-Reiner-1A GREAT WAY TO SUPPORT THIS WORK IS TO PURCHASE SOME OF MY ARTWORK. BY DOING THIS YOU NOT ONLY SUPPORT ME AND THE SHOW BUT YOU ALSO HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW FOR IT THAT IS BEAUTIFUL, ORIGINAL AND MADE BY MY OWN HANDS. I DO NOT PRODUCE OR ENDORSE CLEVER MERCH MADE BY FORCED VACCINATED SLAVES IN FACTORIES FAR AWAY. 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Back in 1939, the world was a different place. For one thing, there were a lot more people involved in farming. In Missouri’s Bootheel region, this meant bodies were needed to grow cotton. Under the sharecropper model, those Missourians who grew cotton had no guarantees of a wage. They could be evicted anytime from the […]

Back in 1939, the world was a different place. For one thing, there were a lot more people involved in farming. In the Bootheel of Missouri, this meant cotton. Under the sharecropper model, those Missourians who grew cotton had no guarantees of a wage. They could be evicted anytime from the land on which they lived and worked. In this episode of Mo' Curious, we learn about the 1939 sharecroppers strike in Mississippi County, Missouri. It was on January 1 of that Depression year that Bootheel tenant farmers, or sharecroppers, participated in a protest. They camped on the roadside to draw attention to the deplorable economic and housing conditions that kept them impoverished and dependent. For two months, fifteen hundred Missourians lived their lives on the side of Highway 60 between Sikeston and Charleston. In order to bring a better understanding of the strike to area youth, we asked Charleston High School students to conduct oral history interviews. These interviews aimed to explain the strike and its legacy on the surrounding communities. Mo' Curious by Missouri Life is a podcast about the past, present, and future of the 24th state. Hear past episodes at MoCurious.com.

 ATLANTA  WAS THE CITY IN WHICH REV. KING GREW UP,  LEARNED LIFE , HOW TO REPRESENT OTHERS, AND TEACH EFECTIVELY.IT ALL STARTED IN  HIS CHILDHOOD HOME IN ATLANTA.

Matthew chapter 21 Luke chapter 12 Mark chapter 20

(Originally released 10/7/2018) Patrick Dixon talks with James Benton about the emergence of sharecropping as a compromise between former slaves – freedmen – and landowners, and sharecroppers subsequent struggles for rights and power. For our Labor History Object of the week, Ben Blake at the Meany Labor Archives pulls out a collection of buttons from the Solidarnosc union movement in Poland. Questions, comments or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Engineered by Chris Garlock. This week's music: Sharecropper's Blues, featuring Charlie Barnet with Kay Starr on vocals. #LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA #unions #sharecroppers #jamesBenton #solidarnosc #poland

This week on the show April Sims, Secretary Treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) AFL-CIO and member of the Washington State Redistricting Commission, joins Crystal to get in to how redrawing district boundaries in our state happens, how it impacts communities where lines are redrawn, and how you can advocate on behalf of your community as the Redistricting Commission makes its decisions. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii, and find Commissioner April Sims at @aprilr_sims.    Resources Washington State Redistricting Commission website: https://www.redistricting.wa.gov/ Redistricting & Census Information from the Office of the Secretary of State: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/redistricting/redistricting-information.aspx “Changes ahead for Washington state's political landscape: Redistricting may bring some drama” by Jim Brunner from The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washington-unlikely-to-gain-congressional-seat-but-2021-redistricting-may-still-bring-drama/ “Washington State Hits 7.7 Million with 14.6% Growth in 2020 Census” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist: https://www.theurbanist.org/2021/04/26/washington-state-hits-7-7-million-with-14-6-growth-in-2020-census/ “After Months Of Delay, The Census Data For New Voting Maps Is Coming Out Aug. 12” by Hansi Lo Wang from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/05/1024878625/2020-census-data-redistricting-voting-districts-when-release “Public asks Washington redistricting committee to keep them together” by Brennen Kauffman from The Daily News: https://tdn.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/public-asks-washington-redistricting-committee-to-keep-them-together/article_175d4174-4014-5f46-9fa6-51c36175fa0a.html Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm your host, Crystal Fincher. On this show we talk to political hacks and policy wonks to gather insight into local politics and policy through the lens of those doing the work and provide behind-the-scenes perspectives on politics in our state. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today we are thrilled to welcome April Sims who is the Secretary Treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO - the first woman of color and the first Black person to be elected as a WSLC executive officer. And who was appointed to the Washington State Redistricting Commission in January - also being the first woman of color, the first Black person to be appointed to the commission. So this is a big deal and we really want to cover the topic of redistricting because it is so important. So just first off, thank you for joining us - really appreciate you and having you on. [00:01:26] April Sims: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to join you again and really excited to talk about the work of the Redistricting Commission, so thank you again for having me. [00:01:36] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. So I guess just starting from the beginning, what does the Redistricting Commission do and what made you want to be involved with it? [00:01:44] April Sims: Oh yeah, great question. So the Redistricting Commission redraws our Congressional and legislative boundaries every 10 years, based on population shifts and changes. And it's significant because those maps remain in effect for the next 10 years, in terms of what the boundary lines look like and whether or not folks have the opportunity to elect representatives from their own communities. So the redistricting process is incredibly important, but I think why it's important to me and why I wanted to serve on the commission - I think it's a number of things both personally and professionally. So you mentioned that I'm the Secretary Treasurer for the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and as the Secretary Treasurer my fiduciary responsibilities are constitutional compliance in the budget, which doesn't sound that exciting, except that our constitution includes language that charges us with fighting the forces that seek to enslave the human soul and to protect our democratic institutions of our nation. And the right to vote is fundamental to that and making sure that everyone has the opportunity to cast a vote that could lead to them electing someone who's going to represent them in their community. So professionally it's important to me, but also personally it's important to me. My grandparents migrated to Washington from the South, they were sharecroppers in rural Louisiana. And my grandfather found out that the landowner was shorting some of the families on the crop payout, so he got the rest of the farmers all riled up. I like to think of him as a union organizer because that's what we do - is organize workers against bad bosses. But that wasn't the kind of thing that you did in that time and in that area, so he put his life at risk doing that and they were planning to lynch him, and he had to flee the South. And migrating to Washington changed our family's story, it changed our history - well, maybe not our history, I guess, I should probably rephrase that - but it changed our family's story, right? It changed the future of my family. And they couldn't freely exercise their right to vote in the South, so voting when my grandparents migrated here was a huge deal. Every year they would get the community together, they'd dress up, Election Day was a big deal - then they'd go vote, they'd share a meal together, it was like a holiday for my family and the members of my community. So our redistricting process maintains our democracy and that's personally why this work is important to me. [00:04:35] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely critical. I did not know that about your grandfather and family. So you just come from a legacy of organizing and, wow - just representative of really the harrowing life-threatening attempt to just live. To just live and to experience just fairness, and survive, and help your family just make it. [00:05:00] April Sims: Yeah. [00:05:00] Crystal Fincher: So especially at this time where we see voting rights under attack, not just attacking via issue - but structurally, institutionally - looking at people interfering with the ability for people to cast vote, disenfranchising people, and gerrymandering happening all across the country. The way we do redistricting here is a little bit different than we see in a lot of those other areas - how does ours work? [00:05:34] April Sims: Yeah. That's a great question because it is really unique in Washington State. Lots of other states - their Legislature is responsible for redistricting and redrawing their maps. In Washington, there are four appointed commissioners - the House Republicans and Democrats each appoint one commissioner and the Senate Democrats and Republicans each appoint one commissioner. Those four commissioners select a fifth non-voting commissioner who serves as Chair and helps kind of navigate or facilitate the process. Those four commissioners are responsible for drawing the final maps - they have to be agreed on by three of the four commissioners. Those maps have to be finalized by November 15th so they can go to the Legislature for adoption. The Legislature can change our maps, but only by a vote of two thirds majority of the Legislature and then they can't change the maps by more than 2% in any one area. So it is a little unique - all of the commissioners are independent, appointed by caucus, but serve independently. [00:06:50] Crystal Fincher: Right. Okay. So two commissioners appointed by the Democratic caucus, two commissioners appointed by the Republican caucus, and then there's one - is there a Chair? [00:07:02] April Sims: There's a Chair, yeah. The Chair serves as a non-voting commissioner. [00:07:08] Crystal Fincher: Okay. And so I guess a cross between a bipartisan and nonpartisan - but really bringing in a lot more independence than we see in other states where active legislators are directly drawing those lines which sometimes comes up with more extreme outcomes. How do you think the process that we have here, I guess, manifests in the results that we've seen? Has that turned out to be better historically? Has it turned out to be worse? What has our process yielded up to this point? [00:07:46] April Sims: I think for the most part, the maps have been competitive, right? That it's led to competitive districts, which is ideally the point - that every voter should feel like their vote matters. And how your district is drawn impacts whether or not your vote matters. So I think historically it's been a process that hasn't had a lot of representation of young people, minorities, low-income folks - because it is a volunteer commission that pays a small stipend, but it's a lot of work. So you have to either work for an organization that supports your serving on the Redistricting Commission or have enough financial means to take this position unpaid. So I think that impacts who has historically served on the commission and what values they bring to the work. [00:08:46] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And that's a very big deal. And as we talked about just upfront, this has been - historically been a domain of predominantly white men, and concerns of representation from community just hasn't been there. You are the first Black person serving on this Redistricting Commission, the first woman of color serving on this Redistricting Commission. As you're approaching this work, what difference do you think that makes? Or bringing your experience and your life and identity to this work, how does that help? How does that play out? Why do you think that's important? [00:09:30] April Sims: Well, I think it's what happens organically with representation. So as we're thinking about even community outreach, how we reach out to communities of color and underserved communities - what happens organically for me, because these things are top of mind for me, right? How do I make sure that my community has an opportunity to participate and feels like their voice in this process will make a difference. I bring the voice of my community into all the spaces where I work and operate. So just it's an organic thing that happens with representation - but because it happens organically with representation, it also means it doesn't happen if there isn't representation, right? That there aren't folks that just naturally are looking around the room and asking questions about who's missing and how do we bring folks who are missing into the space. But I will tell you candidly, Crystal, it's a lot of responsibility. I think there's high expectations - anytime you're the first, right? High expectations to serve my community well, do my job well, be fair and negotiate maps that are going to make a difference. [00:10:53] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. We could talk for quite some time about the challenges of being the first, and the expectations and the institution that you are walking into that has never been designed or even tasked with accommodating someone different. And here you are and having to push up against some of those just institutional attitudes, tradition that has excluded you, precedent that has excluded you, and trying to make that process more inclusive. I think as we look at these maps here in these states, there are a number of districts that are competitive - there are a lot of districts that could go either way. There are purple districts - there's been a lot of population shift in different areas and some demographics in different cities and areas are very different than they were before. So how do you approach, I guess, trying to maintain fairness as you're drawing the districts? And what does that look like collaboratively as you're working with the two people appointed by the Republicans? How does that process work? How is the sausage made? [00:12:08] April Sims: Well, I think it starts with clarity around your values, right? Being clear about what's most important and how you prioritize those values - like what is a value and what is a consideration? I think historically folks have always viewed, I certainly did before I was part of the process, viewed redistricting as an incumbency protection plan, right? I think that that is a consideration but not a value, right? So being clear about what's a value and what's a consideration and how you prioritize those things. I think in terms of population shifts and what we know about the growth in Washington State, we're still waiting on the data. So I think the first approach is to ask all the questions and capture as much anecdotal information as we can while we're waiting for the data to come in. So for your listeners - historically, we use the Census data to redraw the maps. And historically that data is available to the commission and to the general public sometime in the middle of April, but because of COVID and problems with the former administration, that Census data is not available to us until August 16th. Now remember, I said we have to finalize our maps by November 15th, so we're working behind in terms of when that data is available. So we know that the population in Washington has grown, we can make some assumptions. There are some population estimates about where the bulk of the growth has been, but we don't have that detailed demographic data to tell us who is living where and where the population shifts have not only been, but where we anticipate those population shifts to continue to grow over the next 10 years. Because remember these maps will be in effect for the next 10 years, so it's not just a snapshot of where we are right now. But also what data we can gather that will tell us where we might be in 5 or 10 years, so that we can be mindful of those things when we're drawing maps too. So right now the process is to just gather as much data as possible and not make any assumptions based on population estimates until we have the actual Census information. [00:14:35] Crystal Fincher: But there are- [00:14:36] April Sims: Oh, go ahead. You're going to ask me another question? [00:14:37] Crystal Fincher: Oh no, sorry. Go ahead. [00:14:40] April Sims: No. I'll just keep rambling. Your listeners are going to get tired of hearing my voice so you should jump in. [00:14:44] Crystal Fincher: It's good information. I think what I was wondering is - you talked about bringing values to this work. What are the values that you're bringing? How are you processing this? What kind of lens are you bringing to this process and how does that impact the feedback that you give? [00:15:03] April Sims: That's a great question. I think the first value that I'm bringing to this process is to be as open and transparent as I can be - keeping in mind that we still will be negotiating final maps. But to be as open and transparent as possible and to acknowledge that I don't have the answers, at best I have the questions. And I want to provide as much space as possible for folks who will be directly impacted by these final maps to provide me with the feedback and the information that I need so I can be as thoughtful as possible around what these final maps look like. [00:15:44] Crystal Fincher: Well, and I appreciate that you are reaching out more and more deeply into the community than has happened before. Certainly having to make accommodations just during the pandemic and how to get feedback - considering that. But particularly, I think, just looking from some feedback from some communities of color of different types and different areas, the conversation from last redistricting period to this one certainly talking about majority-minority districts, or districts where there's a majority BIPOC population, but also looking at - does that potentially in some ways also dilute some votes or take away some power, if then you're dissecting cities in a certain way and in several areas, and breaking up some of the natural ability to mobilize around some issues. And I'm thinking of Yakima, I'm thinking of South King County - where some districts are comprised of five cities or more. How do you, I guess, think through that and are you primarily seeking to keep communities together? What does community mean? Is that based off of municipality? How do you approach that? [00:17:11] April Sims: Yeah. Well, there is a criteria written into the law, right - for the Redistricting Commission - that includes that the districts should be equal population; that they should be compact, convenient, and contiguous, so as whole as possible, right? That we reduce dividing county and municipal boundaries, that we do not favor or discriminate against any incumbent candidate or political party which I think is something that the general public might not be aware of - that that is actually written into the law and part of our redistricting criteria - that we encourage electoral competition, and that we preserve communities of interest. So I think that gets to your question, Crystal, around majority-minority districts and keeping our tribal reservations and our tribal nations together. Those are all communities of interest, but there could potentially be other communities of interest. School districts are arguably a community of interest, so doing as much as we can to keep school districts together and cities - like right now, we're hearing testimony from folks in Eastern Washington and in the Bremerton area that their cities are divided among three different legislative districts and how challenging it is for them to consolidate their political power, so that they can elect folks that have their communities of interest in mind. So I think that - thinking about what is a community of interest and how we keep those communities of interest together - is definitely not just a legal criteria but a value, and that's where public comment really is helpful for me. And what I'm looking for when folks are offering comment to the commission is for information around those communities of interest. There's what we know based on data and then there's what we know based on what we hear from folks who live and work in these communities - and it's hearing from folks who live and work in the communities that's really helpful. I mean, we can analyze the data until the moon explodes and cut it 19 different ways, right? But having folks, having your listeners show up at an open meeting and providing us with the little nuances and the nuggets of information that the data won't tell us is really, really helpful. [00:19:34] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. And I identify with the feedback that you were getting from folks in Eastern Washington. I live in Kent, and Kent has three legislative districts in there and some of those challenges of organizing and being able to elect people. So how do people offer public comment? When are the opportunities for them to get involved? How can they submit testimony or testify to you live? [00:20:05] April Sims: Well, the first thing that I would tell your listeners is go to washingtonredistrictingcommission.com - wait, is it .gov? I should know the email off the top of my head but now I'm going to Google it. So - [00:20:19] Crystal Fincher: And it's great, we'll also include that in our show notes. [00:20:23] April Sims: Yes. Oh, go to redistricting.wa.gov - that's our official website. You can provide feedback to the Redistricting Commission in a number of different ways. You can attend a public outreach meeting - we are wrapping up our first round of public outreach meetings and scheduling our next round. So go to the website and you definitely can find more information about the upcoming public meetings and how you can offer your testimony. But if you're not comfortable with technology, or you don't want to be on Zoom, or you're not sure that you want to give your public testimony orally - you can also email us, you can submit your comment online, you can submit a video. So if you miss the public comment meeting for your specific area, you can upload a video. We're trying to make it - you can call and leave a message for us. We're trying to make it as accessible as possible, right? Knowing that folks process in different ways and feel comfortable providing feedback in different ways. We also have a tool where you can actually draw a map of either your district, or your region, so you can provide that information to us if you want to nerd out on the numbers, like I know a lot of us do. Or you want to play around with what you want your legislative or your congressional district to look like - that's a tool that's available, and all of that information is shared with all of the members of the commission. So we try to provide as many ways as possible. And folks can submit their written testimony or their oral testimony, or their video testimony in whatever language they're comfortable with and we will translate it. So we wanted to remove as many of those barriers as possible through our public outreach this year. [00:22:27] Crystal Fincher: I love that. I love all the different ways that people can get there, I love that there is not a language barrier. Is there also non-English and alternate language outreach happening? [00:22:38] April Sims: Yeah. Sending out information in a number of different languages, working with stakeholders and community partners to find out - and I think this is important - not just language that's translated or documents that are translated, but communication that's culturally competent, right? So taking our lead from community stakeholders around what messaging resonates with the communities that we are seeking to engage. So we don't - we want to meet folks where they are and we want to be as inclusive as possible, so being culturally competent in our communication is important. We have ASL and Spanish translation automatically available for all of our meetings, but if someone wants to attend a meeting they can request an interpreter in another language and we will provide that. [00:23:29] Crystal Fincher: Okay. And so a lot of people - as I just encounter people all over the place and get in random conversations about submitting testimony and voting and all of that - offer comments such as, I just don't know what to say, I don't know what they want to know, I don't know what would make a difference, what do I have to say that they don't already know, what could be helpful that I have to say. What is it that is helpful to hear? And what is it that people can tell you? And what kinds of experiences are useful for you to know? [00:24:01] April Sims: Ooh, great question. I think the stories are most helpful and that's what moves folks the most. So when I hear stories from folks who say - my neighbor is in a different legislative district, but our kids go to the same school. Those are - I want to dig in deeper and look at why is that the case, why are we dividing this specific community of interest and is there an opportunity to make that community whole? I think also stories around how folks have been harmed by the redistricting process in the past - stories about 10 years ago, I was in this district and now I'm in this other district and I don't have the same voice or the same opportunity to participate in the democratic process because I've been drawn out of my neighborhood or I've been drawn out of my community - so I think hearing stories about harm. And then I also think what's helpful for me is for folks to tell us - how has your community changed? We've got the current maps and I think, I'm trying to find the right word for this, but I think the standard course, right? Is to look at the existing maps and redraw based on an existing map. And so if we look at the existing map and we redraw from where the current lines are just based on data, that might not necessarily tell us how that community has changed over the last 10 years. Some of the demographic data will get us there, because we can look at some of the micro data and we can drill down fairly deep. But I also find it really helpful for folks to let me know how their community has changed since the last time we drew the maps, so that when I'm looking at the new maps I can be mindful of that. [00:26:00] Crystal Fincher: That is really helpful information. And I think that's an excellent point - that it's not just the data, it's about the people - and fundamentally, the people, their neighborhoods, and communities, and how they can feel a part of their community, participate and be a part of their community, and giving feedback back on how they are or are not able to do that and how boundaries can impact how they can do that. So I appreciate that, that's excellent insight. I want to also ask just about - on the composition of the Redistricting Commission - as we talked about, two people appointed by the Democratic caucus, two people appointed by the Republican caucus - one of those people appointed is a former Senator, Joe Fain, who narrowly lost re-election after being credibly accused of rape in the - he was a Senator in the 47th Legislative District, which is southeast King County. And he was appointed to serve on this redistricting commission by the Republicans - certainly has raised a lot of eyebrows, caused a lot of concern - and many people feeling it's inappropriate. How does that impact your work? What's your view on serving with someone who has been credibly accused and so far there has not been a legitimate investigation into what happened? [00:27:39] April Sims: Yeah - and Crystal, we've heard a lot of testimony and a lot of public comments since our very first redistricting commission meetings about how members of the public feel like this has impacted their ability to participate. I think we have to make space for the hard work that folks who are daylighting sexual assault are doing, and we have to acknowledge that there has been harm done, right? It's a difficult position to be in because ultimately we negotiate our final maps with the other members of the commission. So at the end of the day we have a job to do, and I'm going to do the job that I was appointed to do to the best of my ability. I think it's unfortunate that this is who the Republicans chose to represent - the Republican Senators chose to represent their caucus in this process because based on the public comment that we've heard, it is impacting folks and their ability to participate in the process. We want to have an open, transparent process that's accessible to everyone and if we have folks who feel like they can't participate because of these allegations then that does real harm. And ultimately, the Republicans got to pick their person and this is who they picked. So I'll do the job that I was appointed to do and we'll negotiate the best possible maps for the folks in the State of Washington that I can, and it's unfortunate that we have this playing out in the background and that there isn't more accountability. [00:29:36] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And that there isn't more accountability there - certainly I share that feeling. I'm also wondering just your opinion on, now, to serve on this commission there has to be a period of time after you finished serving from office - so it's not like someone can leave office today, serve on the commission tomorrow - there is a grace period in there. There is also a grace period after serving on the commission where you can't run for office. However, that grace period doesn't cover the length of time - these maps will be in place for 10 years later. And so someone could conceivably eventually run for a district that they helped to shape and create and could think of this as drawing their own boundaries. And in that example actually, former Senator Joe Fain, who some may feel is on an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation after the rape allegation could potentially be involved with drawing lines and then try and make an entrée into office. Certainly this could happen with anyone serving with there - you could choose to run, other people could choose to run. Do you feel it's appropriate for commissioners to be able to run if they've been involved in drawing those boundaries? [00:31:08] April Sims: Yeah. I think you raise a really good question. Right now, it's a two year embargo, so you have to have been removed from elected office for two years and you can't run for two years after the maps go into effect. Actually I should double check that - if it's after the maps are finalized or when they go into effect. And so I think the thinking there is you couldn't be a first-term candidate under the new maps but that certainly doesn't prohibit you from being a candidate two years later, right? So the maps will go into effect in 2022, you could arguably run for an elected office in 2024. And I'll have to double check - I don't know if it's state and federal office based on the maps that we draw or if it's any elected position - I think it might be any elected position but I should double check. I don't have plans to run for office so it wasn't a deal breaker for me. But I think you raise an interesting point - how long should that embargo be? Should it be two years? Should it be five years? The population will continue to shift over the course of the 10 year maps, so at some point in time the districts change. I don't know, I think that's a really good question. I say now that I have no plans on running, but 10 years from now who knows what my life would look like and whether or not I'd be interested. So - [00:32:46] Crystal Fincher: I mean, you could run and you would be a formidable candidate. I'm just throwing that out there. [00:32:50] April Sims: I appreciate that but I'm pretty happy where I am now - big work to do, but I appreciate that Crystal, I do. So no, I think it's a really interesting question and might be worth looking into - where is the ethical boundary? [00:33:11] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. Interesting questions involved in the process that certainly, I think, we will be discussing more in the future and I appreciate getting your take on them. I think overall as we are wrapping up here in the time - why do you think it's so important to be involved in this process? For people to get involved in this process? What are the stakes? [00:33:37] April Sims: Well, the stakes are whether or not we end up with maps that keep communities of interest whole, right? And it is important because these maps will shape the future of policy for Washington State - who we elect next year to represent us - those are the folks that are going to pass policy that will outlive our current maps. The policies that we pass over the next 10 years will be in effect long after the next round of redistricting is over, and so we've been able to do some really amazing things in Washington State - we lead the nation in minimum wage and our Paid Family Medical Leave Act, we just passed overtime protections for farm workers who have historically been left out of the National Labor Relations Act and- [00:34:32] Crystal Fincher: That was huge. [00:34:33] April Sims: Huge, huge. And Crystal you know that those exemptions are rooted in racism and are tied to Jim Crow and slavery, right? Leaving farm workers out of standard protections for workers, because most farm and agricultural workers, when those laws were passed, were Black folks, right? Sharecroppers like my grandparents. So those types of policies are passed by members of our Legislature, right? And having members of the Legislature that hold our values and the values of our community - it's how we impact change, right? I'm trying to say this in a really eloquent way, but we need folks who care about the things that we care about elected into office and the only way we get those folks elected into office is to have maps that keep our communities whole. And the only way we have maps that keep our communities whole is if we get engaged in this redistricting process. So the work that we do right now engaging in the redistricting process sets the direction for the policies that we have in Washington State for generations to come and whether or not our communities are going to be protected as part of that process. [00:35:50] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. Well, I think you said it perfectly eloquently. I do not have anything to add to that - that is excellent. And I just sincerely appreciate you taking the time to help educate us about this redistricting process today. [00:36:04] April Sims: So much appreciation to you, Crystal, and to the team for having me today, for giving me some space to talk a little bit about this wonky thing we call redistricting in Washington State, so - it's always a pleasure to see you too, by the way, so - [00:36:19] Crystal Fincher: You too. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, excited and excellent work. Thank you for involving the community in this process and let's all make a point to make our voices heard. [00:36:29] April Sims: Let's do it, I'm with it. [00:36:32] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks. Our chief audio engineer at KVRU is Maurice Jones Jr. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I, and now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts, just type in "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. You can also get a full text transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced during the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in, talk to you next time.

Mildred Taylor originally did not set out to write a children's book when she wrote "Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry," yet it quickly became a children's classic and classroom staple for young readers. We'll reexamine this iconic work that unflinchingly examines racism as the children and their parents find ways to push back against the injustices of the Jim Crow South. Our hosts discuss what actually makes a book a children's book, try to guess how much things actually cost in the 1930s (*insert obligatory "how much could a banana cost, $10?"*) and profess their love for the book's most iconic, very 90s, former cover. Plus, we'll hear from Marsha Quarles, a library associate at our South Bowie Branch, about the lasting impact of this book. These Books Made Me is a podcast about the literary heroines who shaped us and is a product of the Prince George's County Memorial Library System podcast network. Stay in touch with us via Twitter @PGCMLS with #TheseBooksMadeMe or by email at TheseBooksMadeMe@pgcmls.info. For recommended readalikes and deep dives into topics related to each episode, visit our blog at https://pgcmls.medium.com/. As a beloved historical fiction novel that tackles a difficult and important aspect of American history and that is often taught in schools, there's a lot of background research to dive into with this book! Here are a few of the key resources we used. Two articles about recent challenges to the inclusion of this book in school curriculum: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-11-12/burbank-unified-challenges-books-including-to-kill-a-mockingbird https://www.newsweek.com/kill-mockingbird-other-books-banned-california-schools-over-racism-concerns-1547241 And here's the title's listing in the ALA report of the top 10 banned books from the 2000s: https://bit.ly/2SSgkbi. It was most often cited for use of language. Notably, Roll of Thunder is actually book 4 in a multi-part series about the Logan family. You can see the full series listing here, including the final addition to the series released in 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/series/54001-logans If you're interested in learning more about money and inflation from the early half of the 1900s: https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/this-is-what-groceries-cost-the-year-you-were-born/ 

Morris Kelly's great-grandfather was a sharecropper who bought his own freedom. In this podcast, Morris, who today owns SF Roots cannabis company, shares the story of how he came to grow up in The City. He chronicles the various schools he went to, talks about Muni rides to arcades and movie theaters all over town, and car rides with his grandparents on which they'd visit non-chain stores and restaurants. He shares stories of leaving San Francisco—to visit family in Milwaukee, or to go to Baptist conventions in the South with his grandparents—and the lessons he learned on those trips. Uninterested in conventional high school, Morris found Urban Pioneers—an outdoor program for students that got them out backpacking and exploring various spots around California. Morris got out of high school and, as he puts it, went on to "goof off" at City College. Related Podcast Ricky Rat, Part 1 and Part 2 We recorded this podcast at SF Roots HQ in April 2021. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

The River Church of the Nazarene

We sit down and talk about the Alabama Sharecroppers Union and how Communism guided the Union    Facebook.com/dixieprole Patreon.com/dixieprole https://twitter.com/DixieProle?s=09 Digital copy of Hammer and Hoe: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://libcom.org/files/Hammer%2520and%2520hoe%2520Alabama%2520Communists%2520during%2520the%2520Great%2520Depression.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiR34ONyb_vAhWRRzABHVg8BXYQFjAbegQIIxAC&usg=AOvVaw2Xfc039HfsjFQHHEKJMYNW   Interview with Dr.Robin Kelly: https://youtu.be/y_yxkrpLMAE    

Born to parents who were sharecroppers, Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She's the author of the multi-award winning book “The Color Purple.”  She published “The Color Purple” in 1982 and received in 1983 the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.Learn Black History. Teach Black History.For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

Date: 11/22Speaker: Buddy EadesSermon Series: Restoration- Proofing the Kingdom of GodSermon: A Sharecroppers StorySermon Text: Nehemiah 5

Fascism has always been a part of the American Experience for some of us. Declaring the teaching of that history racist only serves to cover up the everyday fascism that people think doesn't exist.

This sermon given by the Rev. Peter Moore during uncertain times. The Scripture reading for this sermon is Luke 20:9-19 The Parable of the Wicked Tenants 9 He began to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, and leased it to tenants, and went to another country for a long time. 10 When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants in order that they might give him his share of the produce of the vineyard; but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11 Next he sent another slave; that one also they beat and insulted and sent away empty-handed. 12 And he sent still a third; this one also they wounded and threw out. 13 Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ 14 But when the tenants saw him, they discussed it among themselves and said, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.’ 15 So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16 He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When they heard this, they said, “Heaven forbid!” 17 But he looked at them and said, “What then does this text mean: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’?[a] 18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” 19 When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people. Footnotes [a] Luke 20:17 Or keystone

Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke words that are all too relevant today. Today on Making Contact, you’ll hear archival recordings, and excerpts from a powerful new film featuring Fannie Lou Hamer. You’ll hear about the context of her life, and the lives of other sharecroppers in Mississippi.

Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke words that are all too relevant today. Today on Making Contact, you’ll hear archival recordings, and excerpts from a powerful new film featuring Fannie Lou Hamer. You’ll hear about the context of her life, and the lives of other sharecroppers in Mississippi.

This is part 2 of my interview with Jim Spradley. He was born in 1923 in south Georgia. He is in his 90's. Today we are talking about education and a desire to go to school. Jim mentions books that made an impact on him when he was young. He liked the stories of the hero making it to the top by working hard. He discusses his father allowing him to go to school but that when he got home from school he changed clothes to do his chores. Jim shares thoughts about teachers celebrating kids who did something great! He comments that many of the older boys talked about getting old enough to quit school not school as a way out. Enjoy this new segment of my interview of Jim Spradley. Make sure that you listen past when we say goodbye. We talk a little longer.  Next week I will have a short episode as I reflect on Jim's comments in part two.   Length- 14:38  

 Mr. Jim Spradley was born in 1923. He was the child of sharecroppers in Dooly County, Georgia. This is the first part of my interview with Jim. At the time of this interview he was 91 years old. (By the way, one of his dogs was sitting with him on the couch, from time to time you can hear the dog at his side.) This episode is focused on growing up in rural Georgia. Our talk is an excellent source of information for generating discussions with students about life in rural Georgia on farms. You will hear Jim- also known as Watson and Bud- recall going to school, buying supplies, working on the farm, and daily life. Food for thought... How could you use Jim's recollections of his life to create an engaging activity for your classes? He talks about overalls, sharecropper, mules, cotton, and much more. Could you use these words to help explain life on a farm in rural Georgia? Listen to his story about not wearing shoes for the class picture. What did the boys try to get away with and why? At the conclusion of this episode we even talk about needing to see a doctor. By the way, at the beginning of the episode, you hear Jim mentioning an interaction with a WWI veteran who he ran into just before he shipped out to WWII. He was worried about what was going to happen and whether he would return and the gentleman wanted to tell him stories about WWI. He promised himself that he would never tell boring stories of how he won the war. I think that you will discover that these stories are far from boring. Thanks for listening.  Enjoy! Length - 27:17

Fannie Lou Hamer's 100th birthday is Oct 6. She's no longer alive, and may not be as widely known as others in the civil rights movement --- but her words have a relevant ring today.

Fannie Lou Hamer's 100th birthday is Oct 6. She's no longer alive, and may not be as widely known as others in the civil rights movement --- but her words have a relevant ring today.

What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? We explore those questions this week on Sites, with the help of one of the most widely shared strategy articles in the history of Copyblogger. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Sonia Simone’s article: Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites Hi there, and welcome to episode 4 of Sites. It s great to be back with you, and have another opportunity to help you take the next small step toward the continuous improvement of your website and overall online presence. It s time to complete the cycle. In the first three episodes we covered content, design, and technology which means there is one pillar of a successful WordPress website left for us to cover this week before we start the cycle over again next week. That pillar is strategy. So in this episode of Sites, we review one of the most widely shared strategy articles ever written at Copyblogger. As of the day I m recording this, it has 7,447 shares — over 3800 on Twitter and over 2000 on Facebook. Clearly, this is a topic, and a lesson, that has connected in a major way. The reason is because it taps into one of the greatest fears we all have about investing legitimate time and money into building something online: that someday, due to forces totally outside of our control, we could lose what we ve built. It s a frightening proposition, especially if you ve built your business and livelihood around your online presence. But it needn t be so frightening if you own the land on which you build. That keeps you in control. And that is the big lesson of this week s episode of Sites, which is based on a blog post written by Sonia Simone titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy. What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? Let s explore that now, via words written by Sonia and spoken by me and don t forget to stick around after the reading for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy We have a great bookstore in my town the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think of a great independent bookshop. It s perfect for browsing, with lots of comfy chairs to relax in. The books are displayed enticingly. There s a little coffee shop, so you can relax with an espresso. They get your favorite writers to come in for readings, so there s always an event and a sense of excitement. They do everything right, and they ve always had plenty of customers. But they still closed their doors last year. No, not for the reasons you might think. It wasn t Amazon that killed them, or the proliferation of free content on the web, or the crappy economy. They closed the store because they were leasing their big, comfortable building and when that lease ran out, their landlord tripled the rent. Literally overnight, their business model quit working. Revenues simply wouldn t exceed costs. A decision made by another party, one they had no control over, took a wonderful business and destroyed it. And that s precisely what you risk every day you make your business completely dependent on another company. It might be Facebook. It might be eBay. It might be Google. It s called digital sharecropping, and it means you re building your business on someone else s land. And it s a recipe for heartbreak and failure. What s digital sharecropping, anyway? Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land and takes most of the profits generated from the crops. The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on. Well, we re professional content marketers not subsistence farmers and our work doesn t involve 12-hour days in grueling conditions. So is sharecropping still dangerous? It is, for a couple of reasons Reason #1: Landlords are fickle Let s look at Facebook. What if you moved all of your marketing to a site like Facebook? It s local, it s free to sign up, and it makes businesses feel like they re doing something cutting-edge. But what happens when Facebook thinks you ve done something that violates their terms of service and deletes your account? Or changes the way you re allowed to talk with your customers? Facebook is a particularly fast-changing platform, but it s not the only one. An entire industry has sprung up based on trying to figure out what Google s going to do tomorrow, both as a search engine and as an advertising platform. If you re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you re sharecropping. You re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn t actually care. Reason #2: Landlords go away The other problem with sharecropping is that the landlord may or may not be here next year. Sharecroppers have put millions of hours into sites like Digg or MySpace. And those sites still exist but they re no longer bringing the traffic they once did. Sharecropped land, in other words, has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time. Maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest will buck the trend. Maybe they ll continue to stay healthy and vibrant for decades. The best we can do is guess. And if we guess wrong, our business goes into a slow and steady decline. So are Facebook and Google bad for business? Of course not. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and many more search and social sites are all superb tools to add to our marketing mix. The secret is to spend most of your time and creative energy building assets that you control. There are three assets you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your digital business: A well-designed website with your own hosting — go back and listen to episodes 2 and 3 of Sites for more on each of these topics. An opt-in email list, ideally with a high-quality autoresponder A reputation for providing impeccable value Developing these assets are the equivalent of buying your building instead of renting it. Any of these can still fall prey to outside influences. The bookstore s building can burn down. And your site can be hacked, your email account closed down, your reputation smeared. But repairing your assets is in your control. You can fix the hacked code, export your email list to another provider, and respond effectively to manage your reputation. More importantly, you can proactively protect those assets by taking website security seriously, avoiding any spammy or dodgy practices with your email, and cultivating a loyal audience who will vouch for you as being one of the good guys. You ve put a lot of time and effort into your business don t put it all at risk by building on rented land. Again, that blog post by Sonia Simone is titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy and it was originally published at Copyblogger.com. I ll have a link to the original post in the show notes, which you can find at studiopress.blog/sites04 because this is episode number four. Now here is this week s hyper-specific call to action: Call to action Take five minutes this week — preferably right now, since this content is fresh in your mind — and review your content and community mix. How dependent are you on Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other sites that are great for distributing content and making connections but that you don t own? And here s a way to think about it: when you consider your audience, is your first thought to think about how many Twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, or is your first thought to think about how many people are on your email list or how many site members you have? Because remember: the way you interact with your audience on Twitter and Facebook could be forced to change or even taken away at any time. But you ll always own and determine the rules of engagement with YOUR list on YOUR site. It s an empowering feeling. So think about how much you may be digital sharecropping, even unintentionally, and then the next step is figuring out how to regain any control you may have ceded. Coming next week, we start the cycle over. We ve now done an episode each on content, design, technology, and strategy so it s back to content. In our first content episode, we discussed the three-part strategy for crafting a winning content marketing strategy: the who, the what, and the how. Now we get to explore each of those areas further, starting with the who. We ll discuss how to attract your ideal customer with perfectly positioned content. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly Take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviews says: I never knew that there was so much to consider when it came to my website, but thanks to this podcast, I now look at my site through a new constructive lens. Thanks to this show, I ve been taking action to improve my online appearance. I am eagerly awaiting more. That s helpful — both to me, as I look to continue to improve the show, and to people who are browsing shows in Apple Podcasts wondering what will give them the most value for the time they invest in listening. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the mesmerizing purple logo designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

This episode dishes the dirt on "Dance Moms" star Abby Lee Miller's conviction and sentencing. Strip club employment policies go under the microscope (and it's as gross as you think). I personally thank all the wonderful people who have reviewed this show on iTunes! Michael Roberts article, 8/29/13: http://www.westword.com/news/exotic-dancers-sue-strip-club-for-worker-exploitation-5861260 Michael Roberts article, 5/10/17: http://www.westword.com/news/shotgun-willies-strippers-say-club-ripped-them-off-in-new-lawsuit-9049435   Subscribe to Habeas Humor on iTunes: https://itun.es/us/sms5hb.c Subscribe on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=140194&refid=stpr Email the show: HabeHumor@gmail.com Twitter: @habeashumor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/habeashumor/ Please note that this podcast is for entertainment only and does not constitute legal advice or form an attorney-client relationship. 

Hubert Wesley was only five when his family left the Choctaw reservation and became sharecroppers. In this episode, he shares his memories of how they came to live in Noxubee county and the hard times they endured. As the son of a Choctaw sharecropper, Wesley worked year-round, cutting timber and chopping cotton. He recalls the primitive lifestyle and the spirit of cooperation it fostered within the Choctaw community. After Wesley’s family harvested their crops each fall, they were paid to help the white farmers. He explains how the Choctaws were treated differently from their white coworkers and recounts paying ten cents for a ride to Macon and sitting with black customers at the cinema. Photo: Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History

Get all of the episodes and notes here ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/the-sales-podcast ). Join The Five ( https://info.thesaleswhisperer.com/thefive ) to make every sale. * Are you a farmer or a hunter? * Video views drop-off in the first 7 to 30 seconds * People think the technology will do the work for them * Technology + no sales system = frustration then failure * Ryan Deiss * Discovery content (Streaming is usually not great for this) * Community content (Streaming can be great here) * Email marketing is the red-headed stepchild of marketing > > You're a sharecropper on social media." * Radio in the B2B space may not be the ideal medium for you * Targeted media can help with branding to get you on the shortlist in B2B * Radio is great for ugly-duck businesses * Gary Vaynerchuk ( https://amzn.to/2RZj03E ) had success on social media discussing wine * You need to be entertaining to deliver a message * "The plan is nothing but the plan is everything." Eisenhower * If you wait until they need what you sell you have a credibility problem because they know you are trying to sell them. * The short list...intuitive and reputation * Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice * Starting to put systems in place and scale * May take 6-12 months to build name recognition * "Advertising is a tax for businesses that are unremarkable." Seth Godin ( https://amzn.to/3eEpX3z ) * "Strong brands make for weak salespeople." * "Marketing is just selling in print." Claude Hopkins ( https://amzn.to/2xMMJG1 ) Get all of the show notes for every episode of The Sales Podcast ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/podcasts/ ) with Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer® ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/ ). Use these resources to grow your sales: * Sell More This Month ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/30-day-sales-growth ) * Hire Better Salespeople ( https://talentgenius.simplybook.me/v2/ ) * Hire The Best Keynote Speaker ( https://www.wesschaeffer.com/ ) * Find Your Best CRM ( https://info.thesaleswhisperer.com/best-crm-quiz ) * Join the Free Facebook Group ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/theimplementors/ ) Check out early episodes of The Sales Podcast: * Episodes 1 to 10 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-one-to-ten ). * Episodes 11 to 20 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/the-sales-podcast-episodes-11-20 ). * Episodes 21 to 30 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-21-30 ). * Episodes 31 to 40 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-31-40 ). * Episodes 41 to 50 ( https://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/sales-podcast-episodes-41-50 ). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sales-podcast/exclusive-content Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy