February 23, 2024

Black History Special: Flooded Out By Racism, One Step Further: The Story of Katherine Johnson, and Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.

52 minutes

In this Black History Month special, “father of environmental justice” Dr. Robert Bullard is calling for justice for the community of Shiloh, Alabama, which has suffered repeated flooding ever since a highway was widened and elevated in 2018, causing destruction to homes that Black landowners have proudly kept since the Reconstruction era.

Also, Katherine Johnson was an African American trailblazer who while living under Jim Crow in the south worked at NASA as a mathematician and helped put a man on the moon. Her daughter Katherine Moore shares her mother's story.

And poet Camille Dungy transformed her sterile lawn in white Fort Collins, Colorado into a pollinator haven teeming with native plants and the wildlife they attract. Her book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden recounts that journey alongside a world in turmoil amid the coronavirus pandemic, police violence and wildfires.

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By World Media Foundation