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#black history month 2023
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Happy Black History Month!
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rubyduckk · 1 year
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Showing some appreciation for black Star Trek queens during black history month :3
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thewales-family · 6 months
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The Prince and Princess of Wales visit the Grange Pavilion as they celebrate the beginning of Black History Month and the 75th of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush, in Cardiff, Wales -October 3rd 2023.
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ethancrossmedia · 1 year
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Celebrating Black History Month this month in February! 😀
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ausetkmt · 1 year
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February is Black History Month, a time dedicated to honoring and celebrating the essential contributions of Black people in the story of America. National and local events and online celebrations will take place throughout the month to focus attention on Black people's achievements and history. 
Since 1976, the US has marked the contributions of Black people and celebrated the history and culture of the Black experience in America every February. Read on to learn more about Black History Month and the ways in which you can participate.
The story of Black History Month
Born as a sharecropper in 1875, Carter G. Woodson went on to become a teacher and the second African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 and eventually became known as the "father of Black history."
On Feb. 7, 1926, Woodson announced the creation of "Negro History Week" to encourage and expand the teaching of Black history in schools. He selected February because the month marks the birthday of the two most famous abolitionists of the time -- Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Feb. 1 is also National Freedom Day, a celebration of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the US.
By the 1940s, schools in Woodson's home state of West Virginia had begun expanding the celebration to a month, and by the 1960s, demands for proper Black history education spread across the country. Kent State's Black United Students proposed the idea of a Black History month in 1969 and celebrated the first event in February 1970. President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976 during the US bicentennial. 
The excellent history site BlackPast has a full biography of Carter Woodson and the origins of Black History Month. 
Visit a Black or African American history museum
Almost every state in the US has a Black history museum or African American heritage site. The country's first and oldest is the Hampton University Museum in Hampton, Virginia. Like many other museums, it offers a virtual tour and online exhibits.
One of the most famous of these museums is the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum, which is located steps away from where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, allows you to sit with Rosa Parks on the bus that inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, among many other powerful exhibits.
African-American heritage sites include historic parks and other significant locations and monuments in Black history. Some of the most popular include Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, the epicenter of US school desegregation. You could also consider visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta.
If there's no museum or heritage site near you, keep an eye out for the Black History Mobile Museum, which traverses the country all month and through the summer. Throughout February you can find the mobile museum in several states, starting in New Jersey on Feb. 1 and making its way through 12 other states. See the full list of 2023 tour dates here. 
Learn about Black music history by listening online
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Marley Marl and Mr. Magic were superstar rap DJs for WBLS FM in the 1980s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
From spirituals and blues to the rise of jazz, R&B and hip hop, Black music has been entwined with American culture for centuries. 
There are lots of ways to learn about and experience the power of Black American music online. One of the most extensive and free resources is the Black Music History Library, created by Jenzia Burgos. The compendium includes an array of Black music sources, with links to music samples, full recordings and interviews, as well as books and articles.
Another remarkable Black music website is the #312 Soul project. Originally launched as a month-long series on Chicago's Black music from 1955 to 1990, the site publishes original stories from Chicago residents about their personal experiences creating and enjoying Black music.
For snapshots of Black music between 1982 and 1999, check out the Hip Hop Radio Archive, a collection of radio show recordings from commercial, college and independent hip-hop stations. Of particular note are classic radio shows from New York City's WBLS, featuring Rap Attack with Marley Marl and Mr. Magic.
Online streaming music services also curate collections for Black History Month -- Spotify has an extensive collection of Black music in its Black History is Now collection. Tidal and Amazon Music also include special Black music collections on their services.
Support Black-owned businesses and restaurants
Becoming a customer of local Black businesses helps protect livelihoods and supports Black entrepreneurs.
If you aren't sure which businesses in your area are owned and operated by your Black neighbors, several resources can help. Start off by learning how to find Black-owned restaurants where you live. 
Several directories have now been created to highlight and promote Black businesses. Official Black Wall Street is one of the original services that list businesses owned by members of the Black community.
Support Black Owned uses a simple search tool to help you find Black businesses, Shop Black Owned is an open-source tool operating in eight US cities, and EatOkra specifically helps people find Black-owned restaurants. Also, We Buy Black offers an online marketplace for Black businesses.
The online boutique Etsy highlights Black-owned vendors on its website -- many of these shop owners are women selling jewelry and unique art pieces. And if you're searching for make-up or hair products, check CNET's own list of Black-owned beauty brands.
Donate to Black organizations and charities
Donating money to a charity is an important way to support a movement or group, and your monetary contribution can help fund programs and pay for legal costs and salaries that keep an organization afloat. Your employer may agree to match employee donations, which would double the size of your contribution -- ask your HR department.
Nonprofit organizations require reliable, year-round funding to do their work. Rather than a lump sum, consider a monthly donation. Even if the amount seems small, your donation combined with others can help provide a steady stream of funds that allows programs to operate.
Here are some non-profit organizations advancing Black rights and equal justice and supporting Black youth:
Black Lives Matter 
NAACP 
Thurgood Marshall College Fund 
Color of Change 
Black Girls Code 
The Black Youth Project
Attend local Black History Month events
Many cities, schools, and local organizations will host events celebrating Black History Month in February 2022. Check your local newspaper or city website to see what events are happening in your area -- for example, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Baltimore and Louisville, Kentucky, have extensive events planned this month.
If you can't find anything in your area or don't want to attend events in person, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, is offering a handful of online Black History Month events throughout February.
Watch Black history documentaries and movies
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Black is King is an elaborately staged musical directed, written and produced by Beyoncé. Disney
You can find movies and documentaries exploring the Black experience right now on Netflix, Disney Plus and other streaming services. 
The CNET staff has compiled a selection of feature films and documentaries for Black History Month 2023, including the wonderful Summer of Soul and Black is King. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu all have special collections of streaming movies and shows for Black History Month.
PBS also offers several free video documentary collections, which include smaller chunks of Black history for all ages. The collections include subjects like the Freedom Riders, the 1963 March on Washington and the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.
Find Black authors and stories for yourself and your children
There are so many great books written by Black authors you should read -- not only during Black History Month but all year round. So, where do we start? Try your local library. Many will have Black History Month collections for both adults and kids.
Libraries will also often have Black History Month book recommendations by age. The San Diego Public Library, the Detroit Public Library and DC Public Library, for example, have programs and collections to browse for adults and children.
Next, try Black booksellers. The Noname Book Club, dedicated to amplifying diverse voices, has compiled a list of Black-owned bookshops across the US. The club also highlights two books a month by writers of color.
Dive deeper into Black history with online resources
The National Archives includes many primary resources from Black history in America. Rowland Sherman/National Archives
You can find remarkable Black history collections on government, educational and media sites. One of the best is the aforementioned BlackPast, which hosts a large collection of primary documents from African American history, dating back to 1724.
The National Archives also hosts a large collection of records, photos, news articles and videos documenting Black heritage in America. The expansive National Museum of African American History & Culture's Black History Month collection is likewise full of unique articles, videos and learning materials.
The New York Times' 1619 Project tracks the history of Black Americans from the first arrival of enslaved people in Virginia. The Pulitzer Center hosts the full issue of The 1619 Project as a PDF file on its 1619 Education site, which also offers reading guides, activity lessons and reporting related to the project.
You can buy The 1619 Project and the children's picture book version -- The 1619 Project: Born on the Water -- as printed books.
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alleannaharris · 1 year
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Today's Black History Month illustration is of Paul R. Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects.
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Paul Revere Williams was born in Los Angeles in 1894 and was orphaned at four years old. Immediately after high school, he landed internships and jobs at local architecture firms despite the racial prejudice. Williams took classes at the Los Angeles Beaux-Arts School and then attended USC’s School of Engineering. He became a certified architect in 1915.
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In 1920, Williiams was appointed to the first Los Angeles City Planning Commission, and the year after, he received a license to practice architecture in California and started working for John C. Austin. In 1922, he opened his own firm and served as an architect for the Navy during WWII. In 1923, Williams became the first Black person inducted into the American Institute of Architects.
He was an outstanding draftsman, and had the skill of rendering drawings upside down. He developed the skill so that his white clients (who might have been uncomfortable sitting next to a black architect) could see his drawings right side up across the table from him.
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Williams designed over 2,000 homes, including the homes of Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
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Along with designing homes for the wealthy and the stars, he designed affordable homes, public housing, civic, commercial and institutional buildings. Williams was also part of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) planning and design team.
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Some of his works include the Golden State Mutual Life building in LA, St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, and the Los Angeles Superior Court.
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He spearheaded the redesign of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a renovation which cost $3 million. The cursive letters on its sign are based on his own handwriting. Outside of LA, he remodeled buildings and spaces for Howard University (dentistry school, architecture and engineering college.)
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He received many awards including the NAACP Spingarn Medal and USC’s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 1957, he became the first African American to become an AIA Fellow. In 2017, Williams was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal, America’s highest honor for an architect. He was the first Black architect to receive the Gold Medal.
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Williams passed away in 1980 at 85, leaving a mark on West Coast architecture and aspiring Black architects.
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I’ll be back tomorrow with another illustration and story!
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eastsideofthemoon · 1 year
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THEE Captain of the USS Discovery
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legomocfodder · 1 year
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Black History Month 2023
Lunella Lafayette a.k.a Moon Girl
NSFW blogs do not reblog!
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Black History Month 2023💖🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎
Miles Morales, Spider Man
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Kat Elliot, Wendell & Wild
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Gus Porter, The Owl House
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Penny Proud & Her Family, The Proud Family
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Robby & Mo Malto, Transformers Earthspark
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Lunella Lafayette/Moon Girl, Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur
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Terry & His Family, My Dad the Bounty Hunter
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Bailey, Hamster & Gretel
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Jabari & Meadow, Entergalatic
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A more classic shout out!
Tucker Foley & Valerie Gray, Danny Phantom
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I’m so happy to see more and more Black characters in animation as time keeps going forward🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎 I’m excited to see what comes next in terms of diversity and representation in cartoons and modern media!
Here’s the one I did last year!
https://at.tumblr.com/dnpanimationstudioclone/black-history-month-2022/r8hs0zr4ym1k
Any other Black characters you want to give a shout out? I’d love to know💖🤎🖤
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zakiyastubbs · 1 year
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Happy Black History Month!
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cleverclove-arts · 1 year
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[Image ID: Digital art of a bookmark featuring African-American French actress, Josephine Baker. There are two versions of Baker drawn from the bust up. The top is of Baker as an actress. She is wearing a fur boa and wears her hair cropped and curled in a 1920s fashion. The bottom is of Baker in a French Resistance spy suit and cap. Her hair is tied back. The text in the middle features a quote, which reads the following: “no happiness can be built on hate.” -josephine baker, black french actress and WWII spy. The very bottom has a red, yellow, and green flag, a recognized symbol of Black History Month. The text beside it reads “happy black history month ♡.” /End ID.]
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cocofetti · 1 year
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There is no way for me to read a Bell Hooks book and just take out one good quote. I just wanna take a highlighter and color the whole damn book! Almost every sentence and thought from that woman is an automatic banger in the quotes for life living category!!
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meerawrites · 1 year
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What Mardis Gras means to me
Let the good times roll!
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View On WordPress
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thewales-family · 6 months
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The Princess of Wales visits Fitzalan High School as she celebrates the beginning of Black History Month and the 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush, in Cardiff, Wales -October 3rd 2023.
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gutslutpress · 1 year
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“An Ode to Darkness” — from Melanin: Black by Dre Hill (Gutslut Press ‘22) 
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An Ode to Darkness: In the shadow of the void, that was the universe, was the light of life born. It poured out of the gate of the woman covered in the dark, exploding into a series of stars and planets across a blank canvas. Rocks shattered and merged, rolling, and molding together. The cosmos spiraled and kissed her neck. Like the sun, she watched over the formation of the Earth, blowing the breath of her life into its soil. From the dirt and mud sprang the first woman, molded like clay, in the likeness of she who is darkness. From her loins she grew the first man. It was a tedious and arduous process. She raised her hands to the sky, locking her fingers with the woman clothed in the cosmos. Together they knead the Earth and birthed the first continent, Africa. This is the ode to darkness. The spiritual song rooted in the depths of humanity, connecting the light that is black, with the darkness that is white. This is the story, of herstory, the birth of all peoples from the original woman. This is the balance of nature, the dispelling of chaos with order, and the immortalization of the black body.
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ausetkmt · 1 year
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The car made its way along a tree-lined gravel road. The sky was clear, and as the car drove by, the trees swayed from side to side, almost like a sign of welcome. The road opened up into a large pasture. In the middle of the pasture was a wooden pergola with grapes growing on it and a circular garden surrounding it. Tiny houses darted the pasture, as brown children played merrily in the mud. In the center of all of this, planting in the circular garden like she was Mother Earth herself, was a Black woman.
For Chantel Johnson, this scene was “heaven.” It was actually Bear Creek, North Carolina, in May 2016, but more importantly, it was Johnson’s first glimpse into homesteading, and she was hooked at first sight. 
Johnson, an African-American woman in her late 20s at the time, made her way up the gravel road that day with her boyfriend, whom she’d met a few months prior on OK Cupid. Johnson was attracted to his profile picture: a shot of him standing with goats. She recalls thinking to herself, “Are those goats? I want to meet those goats!” 
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Chantel Johnson at her first homestead in Chatham County, North Carolina, 2016. Photo courtesy Chantel Johnson
Johnson was grieving and depressed. It had been less than a year since her younger brother, who had been shot and paralyzed on the South Side of Chicago in 2014, succumbed to his injuries and passed away, in August 2015. 
She carried that grief with her up the gravel road that day to visit her boyfriend’s friends, an interracial couple — Black wife and white husband, with kids — who owned a 30-acre homestead in Bear Creek. When the friends offered Johnson and her beau the opportunity to live with them on the homestead and help out, Johnson jumped at the chance. If this was heaven, then perhaps she could find the antidote for her grief here. 
One of the first official uses of the term “homesteading” was in 1862 with the passing of the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln to encourage western expansion and United States agricultural development. But the act of homesteading — a focus on self-sufficiency dependent on the land, with an emphasis on subsistence agriculture — predates the Homestead Act, especially for Black Americans.
Homesteading knowledge and skills allowed slaves to create a modicum of a life for themselves by growing their own supplemental food, raising small livestock and making needed tools and home goods. This same knowledge sustained Black families during the Reconstruction era and beyond. While there have been several resurgences of the self-sufficient homesteading mind-set in the United States, the face of these movements has been overwhelmingly white. 
Meanwhile, Black people, and Black women in particular, have become the poster children for the antithesis of the values homesteading espouses. In contrast to self-sufficiency and hard work, Black women are stereotyped as dependent, disproportionately reliant on public assistance, and unwilling to work, perhaps most famously by former President Ronald Reagan’s racialized “welfare queen” remarks.
Black women also bear the brunt of many of our nation’s worst health outcomes, including high rates of obesity, high mortality from heart disease and breast cancer, and some of the worst maternal health outcomes and infant mortality rates. Only recently has the medical field started to acknowledge the role of trauma in facilitating these disparities. 
Johnson recalls several layers of trauma from her childhood and young adult years. As a young girl growing up on the Southeast Side of Chicago, she remembers moments of joy and abundance contrasting starkly with moments of anger and scarcity, which flowed lockstep with the dwindling of the family’s financial resources from the first to the end of the month. 
Then as an undergraduate student at a predominantly white university in the Midwest, she recalls being shunned by white and more affluent Black classmates alike, because she didn’t speak or behave the way they felt someone in that space should. She quickly learned to code-switch, alternating between ways of speaking and behaving based on her surroundings. It’s a practice that many Black people are all too familiar with, in their efforts to live, work and study in predominantly white environments. 
She also struggled initially with coursework, attempting to translate her Chicago secondary education, where she graduated as salutatorian, to the rigors of university work. Johnson has conflicting feelings about the costs and benefits of her undergraduate education: “I was so fortunate to be at that school, where an institution had time to nurture me, but at the same time I was being traumatized and I was being changed. And that was a very difficult thing.”
Between 2012 and 2014, her middle brother and younger brother were each shot several times, but survived. The ultimate trauma was her younger brother’s untimely death, 15 months after he was shot in 2014.
Johnson received her bachelor’s degree, graduating cum laude, later earned a master’s degree and obtained a research job in North Carolina. But the impact of the trauma remained. Taken together, these experiences created a rage against “the system” in Johnson. She was angry about systemic racism and poverty and the laws, policies and institutions that uphold it. 
“I’ve done everything right — star child, went to college, went to Africa for a few months, did AmeriCorps, I volunteered, I got this job, and I don’t understand why this isn’t enough and my brothers are being shot,” she says.
This revelation, four months prior to discovering Bear Creek, marked the beginning of Johnson’s homesteading journey. In her mind, self-sufficiency was the only option, because the system wasn’t going to take care of her. It was rigged. 
Consequently, by the time she got her first glimpse of heaven, she was already intent on giving up her spacious two-bedroom townhouse in Durham, North Carolina — in exchange for less than 300 square feet of shared living space, with no electricity or plumbing, and an outside toilet. And to gradually transition from her research job, where she was miserable, in exchange for hard labor cultivating, raising animals and living off the land. 
The transition came with other challenges as well. Johnson recalls initially being scared of the chickens she was tasked with putting back into their coops every night, having to rely on the assistance of a 5-year-old on the homestead for help. Also, after moving to Bear Creek permanently, two of the first homesteading tasks Johnson learned were chopping wood and lighting the wood-burning stove for cooking and heat. Two months later, Johnson found herself in the dead of winter, cold in the tiny house. Everyone else was away; she was alone and crying because she couldn’t light the wood-burning stove. 
“That’s when I started to regret my decision,” Johnson remembers. But thankfully her cell phone still worked, so she found a YouTube video that walked her through lighting such a stove. Figuring out how to do it convinced her that maybe she could make it in this way of life. That she could bet on herself to succeed in spite of the odds.
While Johnson didn’t grow up with examples of homesteading around her as a child, for Aja Yasir growing your own food was always a normal way of life. Her parents were a part of the Second Great Migration: the period from 1940 to 1970 when Black people migrated from the South to Northern states en masse. Both of her parents brought the practice of subsistence agriculture with them to Chicago, purchasing a vacant lot next to their home in Englewood, on the South Side, to establish a home garden. They weren’t alone; other families in the neighborhood also had home gardens. For Yasir’s parents, the act of growing your own food was bolstered by 1960s and 1970s Black health messaging from the Chicago branches of the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and Chicago-based Black public figures like Dr. Alvenia Fulton.  
By the time Yasir was born, in the mid 1970s, growing food at home had become an established family tradition. A tradition that was almost broken when in her early adult years Yasir decided she wanted nothing to do with agriculture. Instead, she moved as far away from Chicago as she could, to pursue her bachelor’s degree in Atlanta. But a polarizing global figure would entice Yasir back to the land: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. 
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Four-year-old Aja Yasir at her parents’ garden in Chicago.  Photo courtesy of Aja Yasir
It was late 2005, Yasir had returned to the Chicago area, completed a master’s degree, and was working at a local radio station. A colleague at the station shared an article about Chávez ousting an American missionary group, New Tribes, from Venezuela, accusing them of being imperialists and exploiting indigenous people. Yasir’s interest was piqued. Then, in 2006, she heard Chávez’s United Nations speech, in which he referred to President Bush as “the devil,” in protest of U.S. global domination. Yasir wanted to investigate the conflicting media images of Chavez — hero of the poor versus villain of democracy. So she left Chicago for Venezuela, with no Spanish and a flimsy local job prospect. She stayed in a town in Barlovento, a region with a large population of Afro-Venezuelans, known for its cocoa production. 
Yasir still remembers how fresh everything tasted in Barlovento, and the prominence of locally grown and made food: “You cannot escape agriculture in that town because everybody is doing something involved with agriculture, whether it’s raising chickens in their yard, or growing bananas, or harvesting and making chocolate. Agriculture is just connected like that.” Barlovento made her appreciate her Englewood upbringing, rooted in urban agriculture. 
Her reunion with the land would come to serve her almost a decade later.  
Yasir considers herself to be someone with a lifetime of traumatic experiences, although she prefers not to retraumatize herself by going into detail about a lot of it. However, she did share about a recent anguish. In January 2016, her 3-week-old daughter, Yaminah, unexpectedly died, falling victim to a rare genetic condition. The cumulative effects of years of unresolved trauma, combined with losing a child, resulted in a complex array of mental health challenges. 
A couple of months after the death of her youngest daughter, Yasir found herself driving around Gary, Indiana, with her husband, trying to decide if they could live there permanently. In 2015, the family had rented an apartment in Gary as a trial, prompted by the lower cost of living than the Chicago suburb where they’d previously resided. Now they wanted something of their own. But Gary had its challenges — hit hard by deindustrialization, white flight, racism and poverty. The city was blighted and grocery stores were scarce. 
Yasir and her husband eventually found a house that had been abandoned for two decades in a less depressed part of Gary and decided to purchase it, under the expressed condition by Yasir that the only way she could live there is if she put a garden in. Shortly after purchasing the property, she mulched the entire front lawn with wood chips, a regenerative agricultural practice to enrich the soil, in preparation for her front yard garden. 
To her surprise, her desire to do something as basic as grow food turned into a public battle with the city of Gary, which sent citations claiming that the wood chips in Yasir’s front yard were debris that was causing environmental problems in the neighborhood. “I didn’t realize that growing food was so abnormal until moving to Gary,” Yasir recalls. What the city of Gary didn’t know was that Yasir was prepared to fight back. 
She wasn’t just fighting for her garden; she was fighting for her life. 
“You don’t understand the grief that a mother goes through when she loses a child … I would not be able to manage the grief without the garden, and so that was the fight. We don’t have a connection to Gary, we don’t have any family here, the only connection to Gary we have is this garden and the garden is how I process grief … I’m fighting for my medicine.”
In 2019, Yasir sought the support of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, signing up with them as a homesteader. They sent an attorney from California to represent her case against the city. In October 2019, Yasir won. Also, unrelated to her case, in 2019 Yasir’s home became a Certified Wildlife Habitat site with both the National Wildlife Federation and the Indiana Wildlife Federation. In order to be declared a Certified Wildlife Habitat, a garden or outdoor space must be maintained in a way that provides a sustainable environment for native animals and insects. 
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Aja Yasir and her husband Yasir Allah in her garden, which she named “A Rose for Yaminah.”  Photo courtesy Aja Yasir
Yasir’s garden, perched against the backdrop of Gary, is an anomaly. A walkway leading to Yasir’s front door divides her front yard into two sides — food plants on the left and medicinal plants on the right. There’s a small retaining wall at the entrance of her yard, on either side of the walkway, to keep the wood chips off the common sidewalk area. Closest to the retaining walls, she plants edible flowers like roses, poppies and hibiscus, for beauty and pest management. On the left, you might find plants like Black Beauty tomatoes, red okra and Eritrean basil. On the right, she grows medicinal herbs like artemisia (also known as Sweet Annie). Around the back of her house, she has a burgeoning orchard with apple, nectarine, cherry and plum trees. She grows more than 200 species of plants, collects rainwater and makes medicinal teas. Her garden provides an invaluable part of her family’s diet. For example, they get 95 percent of their medicinal and culinary herbs and 100 percent of their leafy greens from the garden during the growing season. She named her garden “A Rose for Yaminah,” for her daughter who passed away. 
Typically, Yasir doesn’t get to spend as much time in her garden and homesteading as she would like, finding moments in between homeschooling her daughter and managing her real estate business. And the results of her labor don’t always materialize quickly, which can be challenging. Yasir explains: “The hardest thing about this lifestyle is patience. I’m a regenerative gardener, which means I put a lot of work into soil health and biodiversity. Restoring balance to an ecosystem can be tough, especially when your family’s food is dependent on that ecosystem.” 
Black women are becoming increasingly interested and visible in homesteading initiatives, as evidenced by the Facebook groups Sistas Who Can and Sistahs of Soil, which have Black female membership in the thousands. There has also been a recent upsurge in followers of homesteading Instagram pages led by Black women, like @thehillbillyafrican and @alysonsimplygrows.
Johnson and Yasir’s stories illustrate homesteading lifestyles catalyzed by mental health needs, but for others the health of the physical body is what leads them to homesteading. This was the entry point for Jacqueline Smith (who goes by Jackie), although in a way she’s been preparing to homestead for most of her life. 
At the age of 9, Smith, also born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Her pancreas ceased to produce the vital hormone insulin, and Smith’s childhood was marked by strict dietary restrictions, daily insulin shots and frequent visits to the doctor. Having to deal with the illness as a child made Smith bookish, by her own description, and reserved.
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Jacqueline Smith teaches a young Black girl gardening at her garden in Chicago. (Photo courtesy Jacqueline Smith)
As a teenager, she attended Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, not because she was interested in agriculture (in fact, the opposite was true at the time) but because her mother thought that the school would offer her a better education, due to its small student numbers and selective entry process. By the time she finished high school, Smith had developed a true interest in agriculture and was offered a full scholarship at a Midwestern university where she pursued a Bachelor of Science in agricultural economics.
While on campus, she was often assumed to be an African-American studies major. Her interest in agriculture was frequently questioned by her largely white, male classmates, from America’s breadbasket states, who were perplexed as to why a Black woman wanted to learn about agriculture. She met their curiosity with her own questions: “Well, why not? Why can’t I learn this?” She never received a compelling response. 
The beginning of her undergraduate studies also marked Smith’s diagnoses with a second chronic illness, gastroparesis. After finishing her degree and while working at a corporate job back in Chicago in 2006, the stress of her illnesses sent her into a three-day coma. When she awoke from the coma in the hospital, she knew she had to make a change, but she wasn’t sure what or how, so she pursued a master’s degree in public service while she figured it out. 
After earning her master’s degree, she developed an itch to garden. She also started to have recurrent dreams of being pregnant, although she was not. The gardening itch, combined with the increased challenges of managing her health needs while working a structured and stressful 9-to-5, led her to quit her job and become a full-time homesteader. In 2018, she started an agricultural consulting business, GrowAsis, helping clients design, plan and maintain their own garden oasis. When she “birthed” her business and new life, she ceased to have the pregnancy dreams.
Smith lives in Roseland, on the far South Side of Chicago. A typical day involves waking up early in the morning, slipping on her denim overalls, grabbing the chicken feed from her garage, and heading to her backyard to tend to her chickens. She has a total of 11 hens that she keeps for egg production. She usually gives them a small snack of split peas or flaxseeds to eat while she cleans their coop. Their manure is collected and stored for later use in her garden beds. She then turns her compost bin before checking on the status of her vegetable and herb plants. 
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Jacqueline Smith holding some produce from her garden in Chicago, 2016.  Photo courtesy Jacqueline Smith
Smith designs her homesteading activities to support her dietary and health needs. During the growing season, Smith estimates that she can produce approximately 80 percent of the food she consumes from her garden and chickens. During the 2019 polar vortex, Smith didn’t go to the grocery store for two months, because she had enough food stored from her garden that she had either frozen or canned herself. 
Homesteading with two chronic illnesses is challenging for Smith. When her illnesses flare up, it can halt her productivity for days at a time. She’s had to learn to rely on fellow farming friends to step in during these times to help her keep her homestead afloat until she recovers. By doing this she’s built a community, a village, that supports her. 
Chantel Johnson has since moved on from Bear Creek, North Carolina, leaving behind that heaven, in search of one that is her own. The challenge is that Johnson is a landless homesteader, renting land to carry out her homesteading activities. She’s moved a total of four times since Bear Creek due to disadvantageous changes in the rental conditions or increasingly intractable rental relationships with the landowners — when you don’t own the land, you’re at the mercy of those who do. Her relationship with her boyfriend dissolved after move number two.  
Despite the challenges, with each move Johnson has been able to expand her operations. She and her boyfriend in Bear Creek started off with 25 hens for egg production, and then added a few pigs, chickens for meat and turkeys. When their relationship dissolved, Johnson kept the animals and continued to add to her livestock progressively. She eventually decided to abandon agriculture and focus exclusively on livestock, due to the frequent moves, as it’s hard to transport crops from one place to another.
As of this writing in July 2020, Johnson is no longer fully off grid, residing on a farm in Chatham County, North Carolina, with a little more living space and a few more creature comforts. She has come a long way from the newly minted homesteader of Bear Creek. She currently has 500 chickens she raises for meat, a significant increase over last year’s stock, due to the high demand for chicken during the coronavirus pandemic. She also has eight pigs that she recently learned to butcher herself, instead of outsourcing them for processing. She plans to raise 125 turkeys this year for the holidays. She sells her sustainably raised meat at local farmers markets or direct order to customers. Amazingly, this is largely a two-person operation, with Johnson and her current boyfriend, who owns some of the land she farms on, as an employee. 
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Chantel at her homestead in North Carolina, holding one of the 120 turkeys she raised for the holiday season.Photo courtesy Chantel Johnson
Homesteading still plays an integral part in managing her mental health needs, having experienced several ups and downs throughout this four-year journey. Johnson characterizes the first part of her homesteading journey as being about survival — proving that she could survive in this lifestyle. Now, she is determined to make the second half of her journey about thriving. It’s a sentiment shared by Yasir and Smith as well — the intention not just to survive, but thrive.
Beyond this shared intention, these women’s stories are connected in their origins — experiences with trauma as Black women in the U.S. and a decision to return to the land for healing — sisters of the soil, victors of their destiny.
Shanna B. Tiayon is a social psychologist, freelance writer and speaker. Her work focuses on topics of well-being and the ways we may infringe upon the well-being of others. She’s a TEDx speaker and 2020 Best American Travel Writing award winner. When she’s not working in the area of well-being, she’s homesteading with her family — gardening, preserving food and composting.
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