Trillbilly Worker's Party - Bonus Episode: Black In Appalachia (w/ guests Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin, Angela Dennis, and William Isom)

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

For this very special bonus episode we're joined by the hosts of the Black in Appalachia podcast, Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin and Angela Dennis, as well as the director of the Black in Appalachia project, William Isom, to discuss the history of the black experience in Appalachia. Check out the Black in Appalachia podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also visit their website at https://www.blackinappalachia.org/

So thanks for joining us today. We have a very special podcast episode for you today. We are joined by three very special guests from the Black in Appalachia podcast and project. We have Dr. Nkeshi El-Amin, sociologist of race and place at the University of Tennessee. We've got William Isom, who is, I believe, director of the Black in Appalachia Project, and Angela Dennis, journalist. Hello, how are you?

I'm pretty good. Do you all want to go around and maybe just introduce yourselves, say a little bit about yourselves, that way we can associate a voice with the name. And also, if you want, say pronouns. So I'm Terrence, I'm he, him. I'm Nkeshi Alameen. I am she, her.

Like you said, I am a, I'm sorry, sociologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville currently. I'm also hosting and producing the Black in Appalachia podcast. I study Black in Knoxville within the context of Appalachia. I'm engaged in a lot of community sociology. Yeah, that's good. Great. That's awesome. And I'm Angela Dennis.

I am a journalist. I am also an editor for a Black media company called Black Window Chaser. And Reese, my most recently, I was brought on with the Knox News Sentinel, which is part of the USA Today Network, as a reporter of social justice and race. Awesome. I actually got a real job. I'm William Isom. I'm the director, he, him. I'm the director of the Black in Appalachia project here at East Tennessee PBS,

public television in Knoxville. I'm from Morristown, Tennessee, which is east of here. Yeah. Awesome. Well, like I said, I'm Terrence. These are my lovely co-hosts, Tom Sexton and Tanya Turner, who you may already know. Hey, y'all. Hey, hey.

Hey. I'm She. Hey, I'm SheHer. I'm so glad to have y'all on today. Well, so just to tee things up here a little bit. Good to see you, William. We're going to be talking about history today, and really specifically my favorite kind of history, history that's not often discussed or talked about or taught in mainstream American education and discourse. And I'm referring, of course, to the black experience in this region we call Appalachia. And so you all have this podcast that you started. Can you tell us a little bit about how and why the podcast got started and what you have looked at so far? Sure. I think we always tell people that to understand the podcast, you have to understand the larger initiative.

And William is the best person to explain the Black and Ablatch Initiative. I see your method. Right. Always defer. Always defer. Always going to make you the first one. Yeah, so we started doing the thing that kind of local, small local PBS stations do best, and that's produce, you know, very locally specific documentaries. And we did one, this was about eight years ago, we produced a documentary about Swift Memorial Institute,

which was in Rogersville, Tennessee, once upon a time. with Memorial Institute, which is in Rogersville, Tennessee, once upon a time. And we got finished with it. It was pretty good. And people were really excited about it. And my boss, Chris Smith, who's the head of production development, he was like, oh, man, we should we should keep doing that. And I was like, all right. And so I just kept doing it.

And he kept he kept letting me do it uh and now he now he can't stop me so now now who's the boss um so um yeah so since that time we just continue to produce these these short locally specific documentaries uh one of the ones that we actually finished recently was the one about the Easter Kentucky Social Club. It was the longest one I've ever helped produce, and it was an hour long. And actually, that documentary was because of a conversation I had with Tanya. We were talking about the anniversaries of apple shop and and the eastern kentucky social

club and tanya sparked my brain to make that documentary about the eastern kentucky social club so that's where that came from tanya oh love it stirs the drink so anyways we we continue to produce these documentaries. And but we also in doing the documentary production, we saw that there was a lot of stuff that people had in their attics and their basements. And I wanted to try to figure out like how it felt irresponsible to go in and like and extract these documentaries from communities and not leave them and see this other need, communities and not leave them and see this other need, which is like helping folks flesh out their local narratives for their own research and own availability and visibility. And so we started building out a community history database. And similarly, a lot of these documentaries are about dead black and white history. And we wanted to show that these communities are still alive and thriving today and so we would take um start taking documentary photographers with us to document the modern state you know

the modern community in some of these places and yeah and then uh chris smith was like hey uh the public radio exchange is doing this thing where they will give you money and training to create a podcast. And I was like, I'm not doing a fucking podcast. I have no interest. I don't have time. I don't want to do a podcast. And he was like, man, we should do a podcast. I was like, I think I know some people that might be interested.

And that's where I come in. interested. And that's where I come in. So they like scouted me out, Chris and William like invited me for lunch. They try to like, or coffee or something, whatever. But they, they, they lured me with this podcast idea and knowing that, that I do research on black Appalachia, black nozzle within the context of Appalachia. And so when they brought the idea to me, I was like, hell yeah, I want to do this podcast. I had the exact opposite response. I was like, this is all me, nobody else.

This is mine. So I got really excited about it, but nervous as hell because I wasn't trained to be a podcaster. Didn't really know anything much about podcasting beyond like, you know, what I've heard. And, and, you know, anyways, I was, it's, it's more, it's more a calling professor than anything else, you know, it's more a calling, you know, than anything else. Well, I didn't think it was mine at that time. And, um, but you know, I was like, whatever, face your fears. So we applied. We applied for the grant.

We were chosen. And I'm really proud of this because we were, one, the only television station that applied for this grant. They usually work with public radio stations. So we were among six other groups. And I think 40 total applied that year. So I was really proud. Like we had something legit. And we went through this really intensive training with PRX going up to Boston regularly to be trained by their phenomenal podcast team. And pretty early on, we brought Angela on board because we felt like, you know, as we started to define what we wanted the podcast to be, we cast style and to feel light and to feel informative, but also relatable.

And so, you know, it's been cool to really take some of all of the documentation that William and others have been doing over the years and, you know, bring it into to show the relevance of some of the historic stuff to the contemporary moment. And again, like I said, we targeted, our target is young black folks in the region because we want them to feel proud of Appalachia and to feel a part of Appalachia, to really grapple with their belonging to this region, and also to choose to stay in Appalachia and, you know, and to work and fight for making it a better place, a place where they can thrive as well. Yeah. For sure. Angela, do you have anything you want to add to that?

Yeah. So I was brought in. I can't remember. I think was it you, William, or Nkeshi? One of y'all reached out to me. Yeah. And so it was definitely exciting, but also, I guess, nerve wracking as a writer. I've never done podcasting before either. And so, you know, it's definitely been a learning experience and helped me also to be more connected to my Appalachian identity and roots.

Well, you know, one of the things I think you say on one of your episodes, I believe it was the one about Eastern Kentucky coal miners and the Great Migration, is that I think you said like a recurring theme that you keep coming back to is that this isn't the only story. That's not the only story. And so it seems to me that, I mean, I want to dig into maybe what your sort of mission statement here is, or what your sort of activist or philosophical approach to this is. What are some of these narratives that you're, these sort of hegemonic narratives that you're trying to dispel? And why is that? What is the sort of mission statement behind the podcast? Yeah, I think we definitely, you know, we all know what we think about when we think of Appalachia, right? The mainstream narrative of Appalachia is white. It's hillbilly. It's rustic.

It's, help me out, William. It's backwards. It's topography. You know, it's mountains where we laugh about topography all the time because people, you know, will say, well, we didn't have slavery in this region because of the topography. And so we hear that stuff all the time. And, you know, so as much as that is like the narrative of Appalachia,

if you live here or if you if you're from here or you move to this area like I did, you're immediately sort of taken aback by how does this sit with the fact that I am seeing black people here and that they've always been here and that they have stories that nobody's talking about. And they're dealing with issues of race and racism here. Right. So that was sort of like for me, it was like, wait, there's there's something going on here because, you know,

I was in a sociology department where Appalachia was a word that I heard all the time. And people were really interested in, like, mountaintop removal and all of that kind of stuff, that environmental history and things like that. And I was like, well, hold on, y'all. Nobody's talking about black people in Appalachia, right? Right. And so that's kind of how I got involved in this work because I'm also, like, living in Knoxville and seeing that there are racial dynamics that that are not being addressed. Right. William, you want to jump in some more and talk more about this? So, yeah, for me, I was born in Knoxville. And so definitely for me, I think growing up, like I never associated even visiting here. I don't think Appalachia was ever

associated, at least to me, with black people. And definitely something that I did not identify with. So there's definitely I believe like a stereotype and a myth that Appalachia is associated with just white people basically. Right. Even to the point where black Appalachians don't see themselves

as being a part of Appalachia. And I'm from a biracial family. My mother is white so i guess i always connected like her with being appalachian but not myself wow that's interesting well i really like well i mean i think that goes go ahead tanya i'm sorry i was just gonna say i think that really goes back to the narratives about the region and out that are generated outside Appalachia and how powerful they are because um we start to like uh live them right it's kind of a like art life imitating art is what it becomes like we see ourselves depicted in a way um and we start to

believe that um I think that makes a lot of sense that even you would see your mom as Appalachian but not yourself right yeah it's I don't I can't even put my finger on maybe as to why but it's just association that I had growing up that Appalachia was like country my mom's country I don't know I was raised in Florida so that's also why I think my identity is a little been disconnected so yeah yeah. Right. Yeah, that's the ticket sold to us. And just thinking about the idea that Appalachian's country, I think when we think about race and we think about

our black experiences, we think rural. I mean, urban areas, right? So it's almost like, well, black people can't be associated with Appalachia because Appalachia is rural, right? That's how we think of Appalachia, or to the point where we can't think of Knoxville or Pittsburgh, which are relatively larger cities than some other places in Appalachia, and we kind of exclude them from Appalachia, right? Because they're more urban

than they are rural. Right. Well, let me ask this. So, for example, what's the difference in, say, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, that association with rurality equals white, ask this like what's so for example what's what's the difference in like say tennessee kentucky west virginia like that association with rurality equals white but like if you were to go to like alabama georgia louisiana all kinds of black folks living in small towns majority you know what i mean like what what what is that what accounts for that disconnect you think that's i think those are that those are places we think of as the deep south, right? So when we think of the deep south, we think black people. And even when you think of, I think people would associate Virginia and even Tennessee and Kentucky with black folks too, but not necessarily the mountain regions of those areas, right? Because like I said, when I came to Knoxville and was dealing with this whole

Appalachian thing, I knew that Knoxville was different from Memphis or even Nashville. And I had never been to Memphis or Nashville, but I knew that blackness there or that space was a complete different space from here. So I don't know. I think it's the civil rights history. Maybe it's like the population, like the percentage of the population too maybe right let me sit nick white come on granddaddy come on granddaddy you're gonna be part of this podcast whether you like it or not um are y'all are any of y'all familiar with Clyde Woods's book Development Arrested? Have you ever heard of it? I know Clyde Woods. I feel like I've read parts of that. He's a black geographer, right? Right. Yeah. He wrote this book about the lower Mississippi Delta and the sort of, you know,

And the sort of, you know, it's kind of mixed with Cedric Robinson's black radical tradition methodology. And he talks about the sort of, you know, black rural development tradition in the Delta region and how over time that got, you know, that was essentially what the planter block, the plantation block was fighting against and trying to bury. And I think that something similar is kind of at work whenever we talk about rural America in general. And, you know, one of the episodes I really liked was, you know, I've already mentioned it already, but I really liked the episode about the Great Migration because you can't talk about political economy in the South without talking about the Great Migration. you would have a 70% increase in blacks coming in from the South, and then 30 years later, by the time 1970 rolls around, 70% of them are gone again. And so I want to sort of zero in on that history a little bit.

Can you talk a little bit about the Great Migration and how it's sort of uniquely and specifically tied to the Appalachian region, Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia? Yeah, I think, you know, like we talked about in the episode, the Great Migration is something that you learn about in school. It's one of the things that we get, right? And we get it sort of like the shell of the Great Migration with no real, it's not a nuanced understanding of it. And I think that's what we try to, you know, that's what we try to do in this episode.

And we relied heavily on Corita Brown's Gone Home for a lot of that episode. And I think that the point of that book, when we talk about great migrations, even when we think about what we learned in college, even beyond high school, it's a very black folks left the South and went to the North narrative. It's very, they were escaping Jim Crow and the North somehow seemed to be a better place, right? And the North was no better in terms of, like, their issues of race, but this industrial revolution that was happening was, you know, we saw, like, factories and different work opportunity in these spaces that were drawing people to those northern cities, right?

But the same thing is what brought people to Appalachia, right? In coal mining towns and with the railroads, the development of the railroads, right? But I think when we look at this, when we look at Appalachia and understand the Great Migration through looking at this lens, we saw that it was sort of like, it wasn't that straight shot. It wasn't that straight south-north shot, but there were some detours along the way, right? Or some layover stops along the way, and Appalachia was important for that layover stop.

And what's important is that that layover period is really important in what Appalachia became today right like that that um that where am I going with this William jump in oh okay save me so uh I think for like this the whole idea about the great migration particularly in some of the stuff that I've been looking at recently is is how temporary the migration in and out of the coalfields was. And for the vast majority of the people that came in and out of the coalfield counties, most of them only stayed for a little while and bounced back out and continued on up north or to other places. And that was something that was echoed to me by some of the people I interviewed for the Eastern Kentucky Social Club.

They would say, like, yeah, we've got all these people in the social club, and all these people migrated to Detroit and Chicago in the 50s and 60s. But the vast majority of the people that came through, say, Lynch, for example, would only stay for like a year or two and then they would go back out. And I found some of that in some of the records, like the school records here in East Tennessee. And indications of like these two or three students would show up and they would be from Harlan County or they'd be from Wise County, Virginia or Tazewell County or Russell County. And so and then they then they were gone. something that was really important to me. In regards to the migration, I think the economy that you operated in, your base economy, determined where you could go or where you even wanted to go. For a lot of these families, they ended up being primarily farming families.

If you're in East Tennessee or some of the places that had flatland, you could probably do a little bit better, um, than, than going on up to Chicago. And one other thing I want to kind of point out, and I don't know how to tie it together, but, uh, we'd been researching this. There's this at one, once upon a time, there was a black school in black community and in Eatson and Hancock County, Tennessee, or on the border of Hancock and Hawkins County, Tennessee, just north of Clinch Mountain. And it's really close to Scott County, Virginia. But I was digging. There's the McKinney family that was there for a really long time,

and they set up the school, and they taught the kids in that valley for a while. And we were digging, and we were talking to old people, trying to figure out valley for a while and we were digging and we're talking to old people trying to figure out and so eventually we're like well where the hell did they go to like i don't know any of these mckinney's the mckinney's i knew were not these motherfuckers so like where did they go to and um and then finally some old lady was like oh they all went to detroit and i was like oh oh. What is interesting to me, though, is that, like, people are living their lives. Like, we look at it now as history and we kind of see the patterns.

But people just like living, you know. So, like, you know, when it be like you are. And again, like what people are responding to is one, like racism. And two, like what people are responding to is one, like racism and two, like the need for work and like to take care of your families. And so wherever that wherever that takes you or whatever journey you have to go on to get it, you know, I think that that's that's what people are doing. And even now, like some people are making the argument that like the great migration never ended because, you know, black folks are moving back south. And so it's just like, again, people are living, people are searching for how to, again, escape racism and how to take care of their families and, you know, make a living. And I think that's what we're seeing even with what's happening now in this movement back south.

So, yeah, I don't know. Did we cover your question? I mean, kind of what I was driving at, and I didn't do a great job of baking it into the question itself, but you can't tell the story of extractive industry in Appalachia without telling the story of how black people came into the region and why that is and how they were exploited in coal mines and in these extractive industries. And I just think it's interesting because, you know, Tom had this on the sort of outline he sent me, but, you know, a lot of people, it's like were saying um at the very beginning of the episode in keshi about how you know uh they sort of have this idea of appalachia as this place where or you were talking about topography because there was topography there was uh

not slavery or anything and so people start to have this idea that Appalachia is this place where some of those dynamics were never reproduced. And so it becomes swept under the rug. When in all reality, in all actuality, we know that's not the case. You know what's crazy about that? Terrence, let me interject real quick. Growing up and going to Eastern Kentucky schools, the first time I think I had heard mention of Appalachian slavery, particularly where the coal mines are concerned, is from this book that came out in the 1890s that was the autobiography of this jailer of Letcher County,

our home county. And I'm reading this, and he's got this, the whole thing is like really self-mythologizing. In fact on our last time we got out and did some live shows, me and Terrence did a whole like routine about this guy. But his name was Fess Whitaker and he's got this crazy quote in there that says that, you know, I hated to

let my, and there was like a slur referred to his slave go, but when the greatest man that ever lived, Abraham Lincoln, says, you have to, you have to. And I was like, and this guy was from Knott County, Kentucky, because I had never heard anything in school mentioned about that ever. Right.

You know, like, it's wild that it took, like, I was an embarrassing age before I really investigated, interrogated that question. I remember there's a quote and I don't I want to say it's by I don't know who it's by. I want to say, but but it's something to the extent that like Appalachia doesn't have the race problem that the rest of America has. It has like color, like class, like class problems, right? So you get to excuse Appalachia from having conversations about race and racism because we don't have a race problem because we don't have black people, right? So if we don't have black people,

we don't have to talk about race. We just have class issues, right? Well, and I think that kind of what I was driving at there is that the two are intertwined. Very much so. You can't tell the story of one without telling the story of the other and and yeah you're you're exactly right in cash they they you know then launder it as this idea of uh well yeah it's the white working class that's the

the main issue here and in fact you know what's what's actually going on is um what you're seeing is the reproduction of race and class and people don't uh they they for whatever reason need to believe that that's not the case here yeah or it's an either or proposition and not like when you're talking about the working class you're disproportionately talking about black women you know right so right yeah well i mean the whole war on poverty was can essentially be boiled down to trying to whitewash poverty in america just to like bring it here um put a camera on like the dirtiest kids you could find and um it's yeah we don't have to unpack and it and it hasn't it hasn't served Appalachia any.

It hasn't been like, even the white folks in Appalachia, it hasn't served any real purpose to be framed in this way and for this to be the dominant narrative of the region. Yeah, you're exactly right. Exactly right. Tom, do you have something that you wanted to talk in here? Well, I wanted to kind of get into a little bit about, again, sort of that myth-making. I think, you know, really how I got interested in it was I think maybe that was gosh maybe 2017 when you gave that talk at the First Baptist Church

in Weinsberg about you were doing something about lynching at the time and we were like you know we go to those you were ordained as a minister that day right but it was powerful because so we're there and usually i've been going to the mlk day programming in whitesburg for i mean as long as i've been moved back home and it's usually

this whole thing about you know it's crazy we've never really had problems with racism around here and i think you probably saw some of that that day too, you know, it was like that. And then Willie just jumps in with this very, like all this crazy stuff about lynching that nobody had any idea about or worse, people just wanted to deny the existence of. But I wanted to sort of talk about those things a little bit, like how that like, and in relationship to the deep South, that like why? Like, you know, I was in my 20s before I really knew about slavery in eastern Kentucky. But I was in my 20s for I knew about lynching and all these sorts of things and like how that sort of gets glossed over in this whole conversation. And why? I think that's an interesting question.

Sorry, I think I'm lagging so hard. My favorite quote from William that day is, he said, was the best myth busting was, you know, that romanticized Cherokee mammal you all like to talk about is probably a black woman. I like to talk about, it's probably a black woman. And I just feel like a horror fell on the crowd. These older church people. White church people. It's different. Blonde people spot out. Well, I got in trouble with that shit in London, Kentucky.

They invited me to come do the MLK talk and I said something to that effect and there's people there's some people waiting on me whenever I got done and let me tell you young man I was like it's not personal I'm just saying oh my goodness probably so I had to cut I had to slow that one down i can't i have to be careful now no they were saying it's a whole other thing about cherokee mammal like you know yeah very attached to their cherokee mammal heritage heritage. Yeah, I think that in the way that sort of white identity is constructed and reproduced in Appalachia, it does this sort of double motion where you have to, on one hand, say that your Mamaw was Cherokee,

and on the other hand, say that we never had any sort of racism here, we never had slavery or anything like that. I think it is involved in the very specific way that white identity is reproduced, in my opinion. I think that it's really interesting for me, after spending a lot of time digging into a lot of this stuff in particularly rural areas, to a lot of this stuff in particularly rural areas. I've come to kind of this conclusion that the base foundation of our region, like eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia and upper east Tennessee, specifically apart from the indigenous folks that were already here, was this, the older families were these mixed families.

The Mullinses and the Collinses and the Goinses and the Gibsons. These are some of the older families in our region, the Baileys, and they're all over the place still today. And these families, from my perspective, And these families, from my perspective, made these mixed families of mulatto and Africans and Native American remnant, Native American folks and white folks, mostly white women, I've come to find out, were a significant component of the population of this region before the English kind of started stumbling away across the mountain in droves. So that's my perspective. Maybe one day I'll have a bunch of data to back it up, but I think that the more I dig and pick, the more these things look the same.

And I think we've done talking about like how these things get pushed away. And I think we do a good job. it's definitely a phenomenon in East Tennessee where people do a good job of not, of suppressing and not talking about things generally within their families, whether, you know, uncle John is, is doing some weird shit to the kids or like, um,

uh, you know, such and such as baby is actually by somebody else. Um, uh, we do a good job and we overlay that stuff on top of everything that happens. And so like the kind of the Bible gets laid on top of all things to smother the ugly. And and I think in order for there to be proper etiquette in town, you got to have those things enforced in a lot of ways.

And I think that a very stark example of that and an easy example of that is like the whole Mlungin thing where you had all these families that were of mixed race, obviously of African descent also, but they had created this very forcible narrative that they are not and were not African or black. And that was the, that narrative and those stories were like, I mean, for good reason,

you didn't want to get killed or ran out of town or your shit stolen. So, uh, that shit was like pounded into people's families. And I think that that as an example is like the way that these things get lost. People just stop talking about them, suppress them for so long and they stop talking about it. Does that make sense? No, I think that I think that there's a thing there because also, I mean, the fact that like, you know,

because also, I mean, the fact that, like, you know, that Appalachia's here, over here in the mountains, it doesn't exclude you from, like, what's going on, like, the general sentiment in the country, right? And, like, issues of race are still, like, you know what I mean? We're coming out of, we're talking about coming out of slavery. We're talking about Jim Crow America. Like, even as if we are not participating in the system at the same level that everyone else is, it's still the general ideology of everywhere. Right. And so like being black is not good anywhere. You know what I'm saying? So, of course, we don't want to talk about that. Of course, we don't want to we don't want to acknowledge if we have some black relatives somewhere. knowledge if we have some black relative somewhere. And over the course of time, like if we don't see black and if African-Americans, if we don't have like a huge African-American population in a place,

then we can kind of think that it's insignificant, right? And then outside of black folks, people don't talk about race. If African-Americans are not at the table or like a part of the conversation, race is not a thing. We kind of treat whiteness as if it is not race. Right. And so you don't have to get into conversations about these things because it's not a thing we deal with. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely.

The Melanja thing is interesting because it's it's you kind of see like sort of echoes of that with like the jessica krug or the rachel dolezal stuff all that that sort of thing like you could draw kind of a through line of like this sort of anti-blackness that's sort of inherent but like also like this weird thing where white folks also want to like have a piece of like an oppressed identity now sort of you know what i mean but like not so much that they have to like really live in that you know what i mean but just enough to where they can like you know put their card in like the oppression olympics or something like that because that maybe because they don't have any like real experiences to call their own or whatever it is.

But I've always thought that was interesting in connection to the Melungeon thing. It's pretty well established that if you were claiming Melungeon ancestry, the truth is you probably had African relatives, probably West African, Sub-Saharan African slave relatives. But no, we're Turkish, we're Armenian, we're whatever it is. We're the lost tribe of Israel or whatever it's it's we're turkish we're armenian we're you know what whatever it is tribe of israel or whatever it's like yeah but the melange thing is really interesting because um there's um in in the like i was around like in the about 96 97 like the brent kennedy's book came out and there was a whole bunch of stuff going on in East Tennessee.

And so I was around a lot of that at Clinch Valley College, it used to be called. I never really hear like the conversation about Melungeon families and Melungeon identity and Melungeon does never discusses race. It's never a racial discussion when that's the thing that made that designated these families as this group that designated them as Melungeons. The only thing that designated them as Melungeons is it was race. It wasn't like nothing else there's nothing else so I'm like why why isn't this conversation happening it's like I don't know they ain't black oh dude sorry get it William it's just it's just kind of funny to me that it's like what just on the face of it what's more, that you had an ancestor that was enslaved here, or that there was an ancestor that was part of a shipwrecked group of Iranian pirates or something like that?

It's kind of patently ridiculous on the face of it. Well, I always looked at, we're in the Western Hemisphere, and there's something that we share. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, there's some things that we share and it's Native American, Africans, Europeans, all fucking in different like combinations and different forms of consent. And then you have, I mean,

the Western hemisphere's history is pretty similar from the top to the bottom. So yeah, that's true sure yeah um tanya did you have anything you wanted to i'll just i just wanted to um lift what william was saying about the data and how so much of what you all of the work it looks like you're doing is is the very unsexy, dusty, just like shit work of digging through files and reading tons of papers and piecing together a story that just hasn't been told. And especially recently on your all social media, you've been doing these county spotlights of migration data that have been really wild to look at so I was wondering

if you would just say a little bit about that and kind of what that process is like and how hard that is I'm sure I mean even a lot of stuff you post I'm just like it has to be so painful to just be not if your name is William Isom like this all the time but and connected to that this guy thrives on this stuff yeah before we wrap up i really want to hear about the work you all do to like lift up the beautiful um work of people like um buford delaney and and others yeah it's um so there's i, a couple of things. The stories are tough a lot of the times. I think we do these community history days where we sit down with community members all day long and scan in their stuff and do oral histories. And we had a particularly long day in Bristol back when you could go talk to old people in Bristol. Um, back before,

back when you could go talk to old people in person. And, um, I left, you know, it was a long day, but then I left doing oral histories all day long. And I left and I was like,

man, I'm sore, hurting a little bit. I've been sitting in that chair. And so I got, uh, there was a masseuse in knoxville and so i went i was like man i'm gonna go get a massage you know i'm gonna do it up and

then um she got to like rubbing my shoulders and i i fucking lost it like i like you were crying i was just like boohoo and i was like and i was like oh that's not from driving. Yeah, you were holding it. Yeah, so it's like, so that was a moment for me where I was like, oh, I have to pay attention to this. I'm not just absorbing historical stories. Like I'm, yeah, it's fucked up. And I'm carrying it back home. Let's go. Let's go to the house.

And so, but the data, just a quick note about that we a lot of this stuff i helped put together is stuff that i wish existed for my family and so uh lots of times when we come up with ideas i'm like i'm like yeah like i wish like in the back of my head subconsciously, I'm like, I wish I had this when I was trying to like research my family stuff, or I wish my family had this, this kind of information. It's kind of the motivation, like in the back of my head for doing this. And the census data stuff came about because of that. I was like, you know,

what's a really useful tool for families would be if they had the slate the 1860 slave schedule and the 1860 census data for free people of color and then the 1870 free people of color census data for each county so basically what we're doing we're going into those two decades and pulling out the black people and basically creating a black census for those counties, county specific, because there's a bridge that's really hard for people to cross. you know, after the Civil War to before the Civil War when chattel slavery was still a thing. And so that bridge is the hardest hunk for people, black folks researching their history to kind of cross. And so that's a mechanism I thought, I hope will be useful for folks. And we actually got some money from the 400-Year Commission to be able to do that work. And Kathleen Kelly is the sole person

that's responsible for doing that that's what she does uh all day every day and then i go in and clean it up and put it together and it is very dry so it's it's like how do i make a meme that makes this look interesting that's my task while kathleen kelly is doing the labor making fucking memes. Oh my goodness. Well, I mean, I guess we're probably coming towards the end here, so maybe we can start either wrapping things up or we can start tackling the really big

questions that take 20 or 30 minutes to answer. But so like, yeah, so maybe just to sort of start wrapping things up here, I kind of just wanted to pick y'all's brains a little bit on, and this is a very big question,

but what does the black experience in Appalachia and the way that it is normally sort of constructed and reproduced, what do you think it says about America as a, you know, as a whole, I'm not saying that the whole history of America or anything,

but maybe just where we're at right now. Um, is there any sort of larger things we can, we can take away and, and make pertinent to our current moment? Hmm. It is a big question. It's a big question very big question the only reason i ask is you know a lot of the podcast has been you know in the very first episode you dialed in on um all of the Emancipation Day celebrations just from this summer

and the sort of context that all of this sits in with the pandemic and with George Floyd and the protests and everything. Can you ask the question again? Okay. Just so I can like...

Yeah. Are there any sort of... From what you've researched so far, what you've found and what you are working towards in future episodes, are there any sort of takeaways that we can use to either learn more about America where we're currently at or where we're going? Or, I don't know, that might be too vague of a question I think it's definite it's a it's a huge question and there are a lot of different parts that we can look at this question I think one of the things that I always sort of sit with out of my own research on black folks in Knoxville is that Appalachia as much as there are place-specific experiences that are important to highlight, for one, helping us to reimagine and rethink about Appalachia in general to kind of shift the narrative

and to make it more a richer narrative of the region. It's also, I'm also cautious about making Appalachia exceptional, right? I believe that what we see in Appalachia, what we see in terms of the black experience in this region is not very much different from what we see in black experience in any part of America. It might help us to understand nuances a little bit better, but black folks are dealing with the same issues regardless of where in America we live. Issues of race and racism is something that, and that's why I said when we think about great migration as leaving the north, leaving the south

and going north, going to the north didn't lead us to freedom. And that's why a lot of times people are returning back to the south, right? And it's the same thing with Appalachia. Like there's no space in this, everything under the Canada border is the south, right? And Appalachia is way up South, right? And so for me, as much as I want to look at this region and to see how we can rethink this region or reimagine this region by understanding the Black experience in the region, I want to also say that there's nothing exceptional about the region in terms of issues of race and racism in America. But I also understand that there are those histories that you were talking about, those histories of racial mixing and cultural mixing that are important and I think that need to be highlighted. And we see them in the contemporary period in things like protests in the region, right?

Small towns. There's something there that I haven't been able to dig in into a ton of, but it's percolating. And maybe, William, you could talk more about that or whatever. Well, I would say even that history of historically mixed families is not unique to the region either. You could pick anywhere in the South and you'd find those same communities. And so I think you said it best, so I'm going to just leave it there. Okay.

Well, there goes that. You came up with a very good answer to a very mediocre question. I try. I try. Thanks. You're pretty good. You're pretty good. I'll tell you this, Terrence.

That was the gist of my dissertation. I think that's what I took away from it. So I gave you what I've been sitting with for a long time. So good. The abstract. That's great. Well, so yeah, I think we're probably towards the end here um you know and then so i guess i just want to open it up to tom and tanya if you guys have anything

you want to um you know clarify ask get out there before we start wrapping things up jump in there T I'm trying to formulate Matt well I definitely want y'all to plug all the places that people should be following y'all and supporting you and like I mentioned before I would love to hear about the projects that are kind of in the works or like your all's favorite pieces of the Black in Appalachia media project that have really been about the joy of the black experience. Um, like for instance,

I mentioned, uh, Buford Delaney, I may not be saying his name, right. But, um, from the, the artists from Knoxville, I was in Detroit in February. It's like the last trip I took. And at the Institute, the art Institute up there, the place uh that houses the um diego riviera murals just like incredible incredible breathtaking works um also while i was there they had a um a collection of detroit residents own personal black art collections and so it was like a borrowed collection um which was like a pretty cool representation of um what uh local black detroit people communities had

collected of their own art and there were several buford delaney pieces and i would not have known anything about him and i was able to just like really appreciate those in a whole different way because of your work um so even though i know a lot of this is really painful um stuff to go through there's also you've you've been documenting so much of the joy um and beauty of what black people have done in this region yeah I think um upcoming things that we're kind of cooking on, and I'll let Nkeshi talk about upcoming podcast things, thingies, stuffs. We're continuing to do, you know, the census data work, and we're working on a lot of these historically, some of these black school narratives, trying to flush out the history of that stuff in Carter County and Hancock County, Tennessee. And so we're continuing to work on that.

And I think for me, a lot of the stuff about the schools is really kind of uplifting and positive kind of work because you see these community members come together and make something out of nothing, which I think is really always really inspiring for me to see and the things that people are able to create and do and how some of these schools like proliferated teachers out of them that then went into other rural communities and taught and how the black communities like moved. There was incredible movement between like Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, uh, Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina. Like people were moving all the time and between those places. And so those, those are some of the stories that I want to flush out. Um, and we're working on now, uh, we're working

on a Knoxville college documentary about the historically black college working on now, uh, we're working on a Knoxville college documentary about the historically black college that was in, uh, Morristown that's coming up and we've been getting some of our films translated into Spanish, Spanish subtitles for some of them. And, uh, we just got the short film about Leslie Riddle, uh, translated into Spanish for Spanish subtitles and which I've always wanted to do. It's really fucking cool to be able to have something like that translated into another language.

And that's one of the stories that I think is really exciting for me, is how this guy who was a rounder. He had shootouts and all kinds of crazy stuff in Kingsport. But he participated in the creation of country music with the Carter family. And without him, the Carter family wouldn't have had what they had. So I think that that's a really inspiring story for me. inspiring story for me. And I'll to say, no matter

where you scratch in this, in our region, there's a good, vast, black history narrative anywhere. You could walk out your door and I guarantee on your street that there's something

there. And that's inspiring for me too because everywhere i look there i am no everywhere talk about the podcast let me shut the fuck up this guy oh my god uh the podcast um you know i guess one of the cool things for us is just how much work, you know, William and others have put into building the initiative. And so there's so much for us to choose from in terms of content. What we're working on for this season, a couple of things we have that we're cooking up right now.

We're working on an episode about the historic elections of Amelia Parker, who's a city councilwoman here in Knoxville. We're working on a Halloween episode where these folks are taking me extremely out of my comfort zone. We're working on a food episode for the holidays, something maybe that deals with the relationship between black Appalachians and native folks from the region for maybe around Thanksgiving. Those are some of the ones that we've got along the way. Of course, we're going to have to tackle slavery in the region. Didn't really want to start there, but it's coming.

Nikki Giovanni. Nikki Giovanni, yeah. We did a really amazing interview with Nikki Giovanni. We also had a really cool interview. Yes, we had a cool interview with Deesha Philia from Pittsburgh. So we're excited about those. And then, you know, yesterday, last night, there was an email from some some folks that did some read that did a children's book on a black woman in Knoxville who voted for the first time in 1919. So I'm curious to explore that.

We've had people reach out to us with episode ideas, and we really love those. Unfortunately, we don't always get to respond to them, but that one is definitely one that I want to see where it will take us. So we've got some good stuff cooking up. And like I said, because there's so much content and so much work that's already been done, so much research gathered and, you know, stories collected, we have tons to pull from. That's awesome. That is incredible. A funny connection. Amelia Parker, you mentioned the councilwoman in Knoxville, right? Her dad actually leads a black church community here in Hazard. I've worked with him several times. So yeah, that's a Pan-Appalachian family. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. I know she's mentioned her dad and I think, I don't know, I didn't know that he was a

religious leader, but I feel like he was on a city council or something at some point, wasn't he? I don't know anyways i wouldn't i mean i would believe that he yeah he's very he's very involved with politics around here he um he even went up for obama's inauguration but they say he's a very political man okay tell tanya about the the interview with the the book lady the secret Lives of Church Ladies. Oh, yeah. So we read this. We read and interviewed Deesha Philia on her new book. It's called

The Secret Lives of the Church Ladies. And she lives in Pittsburgh. She's not from Pittsburgh, but she lives in Pittsburgh. And we had an opportunity to talk with her. First of all, the book is something special.

If you are into short stories, if you are a church lady yourself, it is spicy, but subtle. So I'll give you that much. But it is an amazing piece of work and she is fun. So yeah, if you're into that sort of stuff, check her out. She might be a good person for y'all to know as well. She's been getting, because she's published with West Virginia University Press, she's been getting welcomed into the Appalachian family. So yeah. What was her name again?

Deesha Filial. Okay, cool. Well, you guys have done a great job a really bright uh black and appalachia are you are y'all on any other streaming services we are on all of the platforms all of everywhere where you can buy listen take get podcast we're there we're there we're all all the places um and of course our social media is a lot. I don't have to pay for books anymore, which is nice. Yes, all the free things.

Whatever perks we can get, we want them. I want them. And less than cash yellow mean road, then I'll buy it. Well, listen, it's coming. It's coming. We're working on that. We're cooking that up. Well, it's great to hear go check that

out on social media and on your streaming services william isom dr nkeshi elamine angela dennis thank you