Black By God l The West Virginian

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On BBG

Soul Food In Randolph County: The Southern Kitchen WV Grand Opening Set For Nov. 5

Best friends Sinquiss Anderson and Sharell Harmon traveled to Italy and came back hungry and inspired to open a restaurant.

Read the story by Kabrea James

Teaching While Black: A Lesson In Hair Controversy

Ugo Onwuka is a teacher. Ugo Onwuka has supremely cool hair. So naturally, her students asked her about it. But for Black teachers across the nation, Teaching While Black — the title of Onwuka’s popular TikTok series — comes with senseless, oppressive rules that dictate who is allowed to have boundaries and who isn’t.

Read Jackie Mulay’s article

Three to Read

Black Newspaper History

JR Clifford is often credited as West Virginia’s first Black newspaper publisher, with The Pioneer Press. Journalist and researcher of Fredrick Douglass history in the Mountain State, J. Muller introduces us to George Welcome, above, whom Cliford purchased the paper from.

Welcome, buried in present-day Martinsburg, West Virginia, was the publisher and editor of West Virginia’s first Black newspaper in 1882.

Read the story

Today is the Deadline to Register to Vote

Early voting runs from Oct. 26 to Nov. 5. This voter guide tells you what you need to know, including how to register to vote.

Mountain State Spotlight Voter’s Guide

The Legacy of Sundown Towns in West Virginia

I knew Sundown Towns existed across the country and across the decades of the Jim Crow Era–from the end of the civil war until the height of the civil rights movement– forcing Black people out of towns nationwide. I didn’t know that my family lived in one, in Nicholas County, where eight generations of my family had made their home.

Read Tara Brown’s story on expatalachians.com

Seedy Talks

The in-person and online event is coming back Thursday, Oct. 27 with Vallscreek farmer, entrepreneur and community organizer Jason B. Tartt, Sr. who will lecture on his social justice and community work in McDowell County, West Virginia.

Register for the Seedy Talks event

Publisher’s Note

I am fresh off two planes and an hour drive from the Pittsburgh airport back to West Virginia from Tulsa, Okla. Delta lost my luggage, but I found more than I could emotionally carry at the American Folklorist Conference in Tulsa, where I presented on Folk Reporters.

Tulsa’s history is a portal into the mass destruction of Black communities and businesses across America. The parallels of the suppressed 1921 history of the Tulsa Massacre connected to our Battle of Blair Mountain and the 1970s story of “urban renewal” where the interstate destroyed Black business districts from Tulsa to Charleston.

Charleston’s Triangle District is one example.

We can only hope Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will seek some remedy or reparations.

In Tulsa, I met Folklorists from across the globe excited about BBG’s Folk Reporter project. They see my vision for “a unique reporting process that blends ethnography and journalism to engage citizens to inform their communities.”

Many thanks for your donations during our BBG fundraising email campaign. We raised more than $2,000 for our next print paper dropping at the end of October and for Folk Reporters development.

I also met some of the outstanding Tulsa Fellows like Quraysh Ali Lansana who is also the Executive Producer for Focus: Black Oklahoma, a news and public affairs program on various topics relevant to the African American community in Oklahoma.

Artists are helping to shift the narrative of Tulsa while being provided the resources to do so. If only West Virginia were as inventive.

Speaking of West Virginia artists.

Rumor is there has been some turnover at West Virginia Culture and History. We need an investigative “Folk Reporter” to explore the career, impact, and reign of Commissioner Randal Reid Smith, starting with an explanation of why Stonewall Jackson still stands on our capitol lawn. (I’m also curious if the rumor is true that the Commissioner keeps John Brown’s noose in his office drawer? Maybe only Baby Dog knows the mysteries of the West Virginia Arts Commissioner.)

West Virginia desperately needs a thriving arts community that celebrates the true diversity of the region, not just the particular tastes of a few.

Artists, storytellers and entrepreneurs are the changemakers we need.

#endrant

— Crystal