Black in Appalachia

The Black in Appalachia Podcast was lucky enough to talk with 102 year old Clara Hughes from Oliver Springs, Tennessee. She has led an incredible life, so you can only imagine the amazing stories she has to share, such as, she was the first Black woman to sit on the Y-12 Union Board in Oak Ridge, outliving 2 husbands and carving out a career and life from the East Tennessee coalfields to a venue of cutting edge technology and science.

On this episode of Black in Appalachia, Enkeshi is joined by University of Tennessee Sociologists, Shaneda Destine and Michelle Brown to share about a project the three of them worked on around the topic of Black safety. Black safety is a term Enkeshi developed in her dissertation that was concerned with how in a violent anti-black racists society, Black people and Black communities provide a sense of safety not captured in mainstream carceral understandings of safety. Together they curated a set of scholars to write on the topic and interviewed activists about their understanding and practices of safety. The episode highlights their interview with Ash-lee Woodard Henderson, Chattanooga native and Co-Executive Director at Highlander Research and Education Center.

Curator Kreneshia Whiteside-McGhee talks about her installation Y’all Don’t Hear Me: The Black Appalachia. As part of the exhibit Kren sits down for a conversation with Nikki Giovanni.

Featured artists include Amanda Banks, Jabari Browne, Kamau Bostic, Kywaun Davenport, Laiza Fuhrmann, Nikki Giovanni, Genesis The Greykid, Vandorn Hinnant, Frederick Johnson, Ashley Jones, Mary Martin, Charlie Newton, Iantha Newton, Mikael Owunna, Travis Prince, Walter Reap, Justin Rocha, RaMell Ross, Jessica Scott-Felder, Larry Silver, Myke “Murda” Stallone, Moses Sumney, Raymond Thompson, Carrington Ware, Crystal Wilkinson and Coco Villa.

On this episode of Black in Appalachia, Enkeshi teams up with four educators of  West Virginia University's national writers project to bring you letters from the archives. The team went to the University's archive for a workshop on how to incorporate primary sources in developing new narratives of Appalachia. While in the archives they discovered a master clap-back king and had to tell his story. 

In this unreleased episode from March 2022 William talks with Daryle Lamont Jenkins of the One People’s Project to get an update on what’s happening in the white supremacy movement.

Enkeshi and Pumpkin talk with Pam Nixon about her advocacy work in Environmental Justice in Institute, West Virginia.

This was a live-recorded event that was part of the University of Tennessee's Black Ecologies Week, held as a partnership with UT Humanities Center initiative with Africana Studies, The Bottom, Black in Appalachia, East Tennessee PBS, UTK departments, and other community and university partners.

Black in Appalachia’s Angela Dennis talks with Matthew Hawn, a teacher who was fired for exploring the concepts of white privilege and racial disparity. Hawn stresses the need to engage students to think deeply about values, history and society as he tries to reclaim his place in the classroom.

On this episode, Enkeshi and Pumpkin welcome wildlife biologist, writer, and poet, Dr. J Drew Lanham. Originally interviewed at Black in Appalachia's live show for the University of Tennessee's "Black Ecologies Week", we discuss and riff about birds, nature, and Appalachian South Carolina. We discuss his memoir "The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature", as well as his lessons from being a birdwatcher.

On this episode of the Black in Appalachia podcast, Director William Isom sits down with Enkeshi El-Amin to talk about the Marcus Garvey led Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the organization’s early twentieth century impact across Appalachia. Explore the scope of the UNIA and the types of activities that were attractive to working class Black people in the mountains, how informal networks and the organization's newspaper facilitated its spread and the challenges the group faced particularly from the feds.

On this episode of the Black in Appalachia podcast we reflect on the historical and contemporary importance of the Black press to Black people and Black communities. We ground this conversation in a special feature of a new Black newspaper in West Virginia called Black by God: The West Virginian. The paper is published by Afrolachian Poet, Crystal Good. Around the paper’s 1st anniversary, we had a conversation with Good to learn about its origins and all the work she is doing with Black by God.