The Joy Trip Project

Hosted by James Edward Mills, this series delivers each day in the month of February a compelling audio story via podcast in about 60 seconds. Each narrative offers a brief glimpse into the life and times of Black men and women who have shaped our cultural identity. The series is called Unhidden Minute. I hope you’ll join us.

Immediately following my return from Washington D.C. - I mean on the flight home – I was inundated with kind words of support and condolences for the demise of my Christmas Tree. Due to excessively high winds early in last week of November 2023, it is indeed true that the beautifully decorated holiday tree provided to the White House by the National Park Service sadly fell over. News reports in photographs showed the tree lying on its side. But as I graciously replied to each of these thoughtful notes, I found great comfort in the knowledge that the 63-foot Norway Spruce I had followed from the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia to our nation’s capital, The People’s Tree, stood proudly on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building.Immediately following my return from Washington D.C. - I mean on the flight home – I was inundated with kind words of support and condolences for the demise of my Christmas Tree. Due to excessively high winds early in last week of November 2023, it is indeed true that the beautifully decorated holiday tree provided to the White House by the National Park Service sadly fell over. News reports in photographs showed the tree lying on its side. But as I graciously replied to each of these thoughtful notes, I found great comfort in the knowledge that the 63-foot Norway Spruce I had followed from the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia to our nation’s capital, The People’s Tree, stood proudly on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building.

At the time, more than 30 years after the end of the Civil War, there were stationed there an all-Black unit of enlisted men known collectively as the Buffalo Soldiers. These men who fought the Plains Wars of westward expansion and sadly participated in the displacement of Native people, were given the opportunity for a peacetime mission into the American heartland. Led by Lieutenant Moss, a white officer. Over the next two years, from 1896 to 1897, the Buffalo Soldier Bicycle Corps would make three expeditions across the West. In 2022, Eric Cedeño retraced the route that they traveled from Fort Missoula, Montana, to Saint Louis, Missouri. The distance of more than 1900 miles. In the retelling of their story through physical reenactment, the Bicycle Nomad takes us on a journey back in time. In his travels following the path of the Buffalo Soldiers, Cedeño not only celebrates the accomplishments of black Americans from our past, but also inspires further exploration of our history that is too often overlooked.

The protection of public land requires the broad ranging vision and leadership of federal service professionals at the highest levels. As the 19th Director of the National Park Service Charles F. Sams III is guiding the management of a complexed agency that oversees the protection of 63 National Parks and more than 420 individual monuments, battlefields, lakeshores and grasslands. A member of the Confederate Tribes of the Umatilla Indians, Sams is the first Native American to serve as the administrator of the memorial sites that preserve our natural history and enduring national heritage.

When the folks at the Public Broadcasting Service went looking for a charismatic personality to host their latest documentary film series on the natural world, they reached out to a man with just the right skills to bring the outdoors into every home in America.

Baratunde: My name is Baratunde Thurston. I am a multimedia storyteller operating at the intersection of race, technology, democracy and climate. Because I love this planet.

The wild. There's nothing quite like the feeling of stepping outside. And breaking free from the modern world. I'm in northern Minnesota, on the edge of a lake that resembles an ocean. In places like this, it's easy to see nature as something so powerful, so vast.

We could never leave a real mark on it. But our footsteps are almost everywhere these days. And while knowing that can weigh you down, it can also lift us up and inspire us to change.

JTP: The show airs on PBS television stations nation-wide. And like its host, the program explores those points of connection where the outdoors and the human experience come together for fun, adventure and environmental conservation. Each episode introduces viewers to remarkable people and places from one end of this great nation to other. In advance of the premiere of this amazing new series I had the chance to talk to Baratunde Thurston and get an inside look into America Outdoors.

 

The PBS Series America Outdoors is coming to your favorite Public Television station. Check your local listings for dates and times near you. Baratunde Thurston is the author of the book “How to be Black” and he’s the host the “How to Citizen” Podcast. You can learn more about him and all his amazing work at Baratunde.com

Our Music comes courtesy of Artlist featuring the talents of The Cliff

 The Joy Trip Project is made possible thanks to the support of the Schlecht Family Foundation and the National Geographic Society. You can follow along on this and other journeys through history at Joytripproject.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please drop me a note in the comments or better still write a review on one of our many stream platforms including iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify and Google Podcasts. I’d love to hear from you. You can also reach me via email with your constructive questions, comments and criticisms at [email protected]

On May12, 2022, history was made as the first team of Black American climbers successfully ascended to the summit of Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world. Known as the Full Circle Everest Expedition, this group of six men and one woman, all of African descent, made it safely to the top of the mountain and back to Everest Base Camp. The team included an array of climbers from across the United States and one native of Kenya. They ranged in age from 26 to 62. And they achieved this great accomplishment with the invaluable assistance of eight Nepali Sherpa guides. At a moment in time when even the most remote corners of our planet seem well within reach of human endeavor and ambition, this unique expedition is the latest milestone not only in the progress of high-altitude mountaineering, but the global advancement of racial diversity, equity and inclusion in the outdoor recreation industry.

Almost 70 years since the first formally recognized ascent of Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, Black Americans have at last realized the metaphorical vision that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined in his many speeches that encouraged the aspiration to climb mountains. In was in August of 1963, the same year that the first American team led by Jim Whittaker reached the Everest summit, that King shared his dream at the March on Washington and declared that freedom for all people must be allow to “Ring From Every Mountainside”

But throughout the Civil Movement of the 1960’s and well into the 21st Century, it would take more than 50 years for the feat of a successful Everest ascent to be achieved by Black South African climber Sibusiso Vilane on May 26, 2003. Three years later, Sophia Danenberg of Seattle, Washington, became the first Black American climber to reach the summit of Everest in 2006. In the time since, of the many thousands of people who have made it to the top, only six have been Black. And more than 15 years after that first ascent by Vilane, it is only now that a team of Black Americans have been assembled, trained and financed with the support of commercial sponsors and nonprofit donors to finally ascend as a community to the most prestigious mountain top on the planet. With the Full Circle Everest Expedition, the number of Black climbers to ascend to the summit has now more than doubled!

The story behind this ground-breaking accomplishment is the culmination of the many decades of effort on the part of diversity, equity and inclusion advocates who recognize the importance of creating recreational spaces and opportunities that are welcoming and accessible to all people. To truly understand how we got to this particular moment in our history I believe it’s necessary to take a close look into the lives of those individuals who are intimately a part of it. Among the seven climbers on the Full Circle Everest Expedition team who reached the summit is Demond "Dom" Mullins. I just happen to reach him in Nepal over the WhatsApp messaging platform while he was trekking through the Khumbu Valley. In the village of Phortse, a few weeks before the rest of his teammates arrived to begin their journey, I caught him during his dinner.

In this very candid conversation Mullins shares not only his life and career as a climber but also his work to earn a doctorate in the field of sociology through the study of war and military conflict. We also discussed his time spent as a soldier in the U.S. Army. At the age of 19, he was called to serve in Iraq immediately after the events near his hometown of New York City on September 11, 2001.

I’m James  Edward Mills and you're listening to The Joy Trip Project.

Demond "Dom" Mullins in Lulka, Nepal

Through his aspirations to climb high mountains Demond Mullins has defined for himself a place in the world where he can express both pride and passion for his convictions. In the days that follow Dom and his fellow team members of the Full Circle Everest Expedition will demonstrate to themselves and the entire world exactly what Black climbers can achieve. After almost six weeks of concerted effort the Full Circle team made it to the summit of Mount Everest. With Dom the other climbers include Manoah Ainuu, Eddie Taylor, Rosemary Saal, Thomas Moore, James “KG” Kagambi, and Evan Green

You can learn more about the Full Circle Everest Expedition online at FullCircleEverest.com. Proceeds from the sale of logo-ed stickers and patches go to support the families of Himalayan mountain workers through the Juniper Fund. Buy yours today at the links below For The Lives of Sherpa

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Our Music comes courtesy of Artlist featuring the talents Spearfisher, Muted, Out of Flux, Yehezkel Raz, The Places, and Evert Z

 The Joy Trip Project is made possible thanks to the support of the Schlecht Family Foundation and the National Geographic Society. You can follow along on this and other journeys through history at Joytripproject.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please drop me a note in the comments or better still write a review on one of our many stream platforms including iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify and Google Podcasts. I’d love to hear from you. You can also reach me via email with your constructive questions, comments and criticisms at [email protected]

A few weeks before his 80th birthday, I had the rare pleasure to speak by phone to the 15th director of the National Park Service Robert Stanton. From his home in Maryland, Mr. Stanton shared with me a personal history of his career as a leading figure in the preservation of public land as well as the enduring legacy of our heritage as a nation. Born in 1940, as Black American Stanton was subjected to the racially focused prohibitions of the Jim Crow era that denied him access to many of the national parks and monuments that he would grow up to manage. And though he and his family were restricted from the recreational spaces where white Americans were free to travel, Stanton was able from an early age to experience the wonders of nature.Stanton: I grew up in rural segregated Texas, and we came from very meager means, so we did not vacation. I was in the cotton fields or the hay fields during my young adulthood. But I was not a stranger, if you will, to the out of doors, you know, with bare feet running through the woods, fishing in the lakes, gravel pits, taking a little dip in our birthday suits and what have you and watching out for the copperheads and water moccasins. But so, no the out of doors were not a stranger to me.JTP: It was during his childhood that policies that had restricted Black Americans from visiting national parks were slowly beginning to lift. Under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt around the end of the Second World War progressive shifts in the nation’s attitude toward Black Americans became a bit more favorable, despite the objections of many state legislators and private citizens.

Stanton: In terms of my exposure to the National Park Service and other land management agencies and putting it in sort of historical context, you recognize the courage on the part of Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, and Roosevelt, when he issued his secretarial order in 1945, saying that there will not be any discrimination in the national parks. My understanding is that when he made the decision that the proprietors of restaurants and overnight accommodations surrounding the gateways to the parks, they raised holy hell. “You mean you're going to allow them colored folks to come in and eat and sleep where they want to in the park?”JTP: It could be said that first battle lines of modern Civil Rights Movement were drawn in our national parks. By order of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in 1945, these public recreation areas were among the first sites to be desegregated nation-wide. It was through the leadership and encouragement of social activists within the Roosevelt Administration and then under President Harry S. Truman that Ickes ordered that the National Parks be made open to everyone regardless of race or ethnicity.Stanton: But the thing I would bring to your attention, which was not widely advertised, is that he had the counsel of two prominent, forceful, unrelenting Black executives who were promoting the integration in full accessibility of not only to Park Service citizen programs, but throughout the breadth of the programs at Interior. The first one was Robert Weaver, who became the first African-American to serve as a Cabinet Secretary at HUD appointed by President Johnson. He was followed by William Trent Jr.. And it is William Trent Jr. who was really a strong advocate that here you have young men returning from World War II and they need to have some way in which they could just sort of relax themselves. Coming from the war, even though we were coming back to places they were not permitted to enter, such as cafes and restaurant, but still they should have an opportunity to enjoy some of the benefits of being an American citizen. JTP: Civil Rights leaders during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt through the 1940s became known as the Black Cabinet or the Federal Council of Negro Affairs. The phrase was coined by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune in 1936 and as group that included Robert Weaver and William Trent Jr., they helped to guide the racial integration of the National Park Service.

Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune, William Trint Jr. and Elanor Roosevelt

Stanton: Trent was a strong advocate, strong advisor working with Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt and others and Harold Ickes issued that executive order in 1945. So we were still very much segregated. But if you get into a national park, you could get your haircut. You could camp. You could go to the restaurant. But that took a lot of courage. 

JTP: It’s important to understand that the National Park Service, like all branches of the Federal Government, including the U.S. Military, had been racially segregated since it was formally created in 1916. It was only with the policy changes encouraged by the Black Cabinet in the 1940s that Black Americans were allowed to even visit these public recreation areas and it would take another 20 years before people of color were actively recruited and encouraged to become National Park Rangers. Robert Stanton was among the first. In his own words this is his story. 

Robert Stanton with President Bill Clinton

Our music in this episode comes courtesy of Artlist. This edition of the Joy Trip Project was made possible thanks to the support of the National Geographic Society and in cooperation with The National Park Service. You can follow along on this and other journeys through history at Joytripproject.com. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please drop me a note in the comments or better still write a review on one of our many stream platforms including iTunes, Stitcher and Google Podcasts. I’d love to hear from you. You can also reach me via email with your constructive questions, comments and criticisms at [email protected]

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For now, go be joyful. And until next time, take care

Long before the National Park Service was established, the geological site commonly known as Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist attraction. Open to the public for guided tours beginning in 1830’s this massive labyrinth of underground caverns and tunnels was first explored by enslaved people whose legacy of stewardship spans more than 5 generations. A Black man named Stephen Bishop lead much of the earliest explorations of the cave system and named many of the most prominent features. An expert on the largest cave in the world that winds more than 47 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, Bishop was said to have guided the most prominent scientists, political figures and writers of the mid-19th century including the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was on a visit to Mammoth Cave guided by Bishop in 1857 that Emerson wrote the essay Illusions, inspired by a feature called the Star Camber.

But when Mammoth Cave was established as the 26th National Park on July 1, 1941, local residents Black and white, were forced off the surrounding land to make room for the new federally managed recreation area. Under the provisions of Jim Crow era segregation, Black Americans were ineligible to become National Park Rangers, despite their long history of service as cave guides.

Born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1947, Jerry Bransford recalls being told as a young Black man to use the rear entrance of the Mammoth Cave Visitors Center. Though a direct descendant of Materson and Nick Bransford, who with Stephan Bishop had led tours and explorations of the cave, he was denied the same privileges as a white visitor. As a child Bransford only heard of his family’s legacy from the stories told to him by his father. Removed from their role as interpreters of this historic site, little evidence remained of all that his ancestors had done to preserve it.

After a 30- career in marketing as a photographer for the Dow Corning Corporation In Nashville, Bransford was recruited by the National Park Service to use his skills as a storyteller to share his family legacy of preservation. Today at the age of 74, after 17 seasons at Mammoth Cave, National Park Ranger Jerry Bransford continues the tradition as an interpretive guide.

Today National Park Ranger Jerry Bransford shares with us this remarkable story.

During the global Covid-19 Pandemic one of my favorite programs to watch on television was the Cinemax miniseries called “Warrior”. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the late 1870s, this amazing show, inspired by the writings of Bruce Lee, is an action packed period drama that depicts the realities of anti-Asian racial oppression along with the furious fists of Kung Fu fight scenes. One of the main characters in this exciting series is Father Jun, the leader of the City's most powerful gang or tong, played by the New York-based actor Perry Yung.

His portrayal of this hard-edged and often violent leader is so captivating I began an instant fan. By an odd coincidence Yung and I just happen to have a mutual friend on Facebook. After getting acquainted online I also discovered that he is a passionate advocate for the resistance to the rise of hostility toward Asian people and the climate of hatred being perpetuated by white supremacists nationwide. As a master of the performing arts Yung uses his talents to personify prototypical roles of Asian men to give them Both depth and texture far beyond the cliched stereotypes so often presented by Hollywood.

In his latest film “Boogie”, Yung plays the father of the title character, a young man who struggles with his identity as an Chinese-American basketball player with NBA aspirations at the intersection of the Black and Asian communities of the modern era. Yung and I spoke over Zoom not long before the mass murder of 6 Asian women in Atlanta. In addition to the parallels between the current state of anti-Asian sentiment of today and the violence and oppression of the past, Yung and I discussed his long career as both an actor and the maker of the traditional Japanese flute called the Shakuhachi.

You can learn more about Perry Yung on his website at PerryYung.wordpress.com. In light current climate of racism and bigotry across America, I want to encourage everyone to seek out and experience cultures of every variety. Buy their art, learn their language, eat their food watch their media and demand of all those around you to stop the hate.

 

Music this week comes courtesy of Artlist featuring the work of Ian Post and the group Kodo. The opening was the theme music of the Cinemax series Warrior, by Reza Safinia and H. Scott Salinas.

 

 

The Joy Trip Project is possible thanks to support of Patagonia, Yeti, Seirus Innovations, Outdoor Research and a grant from the National Geographic Society. 

 

 

 

Thanks for listening, but you know I want to hear from you. So please write a note in the comments or via email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this conversation write a review on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. There you’ll find past episodes going back more than a decade. Let me know what you think.

For now, go be joyful. And Until next time. Take care!

Even though we might be seeing the back end of the global Covid-19 Pandemic many of us are still stuck at home wading through endless meetings over Zoom and other teleconferencing platforms. With the hopes of creating a little community spirit and to encourage folks out there to step away from their screens and maybe crack open a book instead, I started a little group called the Joy Trip Reading Project. Each month we’re taking a deep dive into stories of primarily Black authors whose work centers around nature and the identity many of us share in common as people who love the great outdoors.

In February, for Black History Month, the title we read was Gloryland, by National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson. This novel is the story of a Black American sergeant in the United States Army at the turn of the last century. As a member of the Buffalo Soldiers, the principle character, Elijah Yancy, reveals to us the life and times of the men who were among the world’s original protectors of public land at the National Parks of Yosemite and Sequoia. Not enough people know that in 1903 the first superintendent of Sequoia was a Black American U.S. Cavalry officer by the name of Captain Charles Young. Despite the national climate of Jim Crow segregation these men were among our first National Park Rangers During a time when race relation in this country were at their most abysmal, the Buffalo Soldiers fought to preserve the best idea America ever had.

Unfortunately, because of some technical difficulties connecting with Ranger Johnson over Zoom I literally had to hold my cellphone up to my computer microphone to conduct this interview. Sorry in advance for the marginal sound quality, but under the circumstances, really can you do? I’m James Edward Mills and you're listening to the Joy Trip Project.

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Music courtesy of Artlist featuring the band Muted, Steve Poloni and Ty Simon.

 

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The Joy Trip Project is made possible thanks to support of Seirus Innovation and Outdoor Research.

This recording of the Joy Trip Reading Project was created in partnership with University of Wisconsin Madison Nelson Institute For Environmental Studies. Here we acknowledge the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk People on the sacred land known for time and memorial as DeJope. Wherever you are in North American please recognize the native people of the place you now call home.

Thanks for listening, but as  always, I want to hear from you so please drop me in note in the comments with your questions, comments or criticisms or write to me via email at [email protected]. You can also find me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. If you liked this episode please write me a review on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you download your favorite podcasts. For now, go be joyful and until next time. Take care.