The perseverance of Opal Lee: The 'grandmother' of Juneteenth shares a lesson for today

At 98 years old, Opal Lee is still spreading a message of 
patience and love. (Photo by Shayan Asgharnia, TX Monthly)

As a child, she went to school and spent her summers working near Texarkana. Her first job was taking care of the slop jars. As an adult, she raised four children, paid for her college education, and became a teacher.

But at age 89, she set a goal. That goal would send her walking and talking to all sorts of people. She even met with U.S. presidents. And in 2021, she became the "grandmother of Juneteenth," reports Hanif Abdurraqib for Texas Monthly. But Opal Lee isn't finished. At 98 years old, she still believes she has work to do.

The story of why Opal Lee decided to make Juneteenth her life's legacy began in Marshall, Texas, when she was 12 years old. Her family bought a house "on East Annie Street in the Historic Southside neighborhood of Fort Worth," Abdurraqib writes. "On the night of June 19, 1939, a white mob gathered, demanding that the family leave. Lee and her brothers took refuge at a friend’s house a few blocks away while her parents fled under cover of darkness. The mob trashed the home and set it on fire."

When Lee watched President Joe Biden sign Juneteenth into a federal holiday, some might say her work was finished. Abdurraqib explains, "She had actually done the thing she’d set out to do. She’d taken an inciting moment of rage and grief and dedicated her life to healing the wound it had created. … But Lee, who has lived through, endured, and fought for so much … has something unique to offer in an era of renewed crisis."

Lee's tenacity and spirit have led her to change many lives, but her advice is simple: Patience. "The road is long, and you travel on it because the alternative is untenable," Abdurraqib writes. "And you do whatever you can along the way, and you hope some people will maybe join you."

Lee's travels brought her home. She lives in a house built on her family's East Annie Street plot. Abdurraqib adds, "On the front door is a purple wreath. In the center of the wreath is a quote from Lee herself: 'If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love.'" 

Lee's background in Texas meant she was introduced to Juneteenth celebrations early in life. It was part of the region's culture. Once the day became a national holiday, its celebrations and somber remembrances joined together to make the day especially meaningful for black Americans. PBS offers a "beginners guide" for Juneteenth here. 

Friday's quick hits: This bot cleans up; sculpture park honors enslaved people; trying weird veggies; camping trip plan

(The Searial Cleaners photo via Route Fifty)

Almost everyone knows what a litterbug is, but what about a litterbot? In Detroit, a litterbot named BeBot "will sift through the sand and suck out trash like cigarette butts, bottles, food wrappers and other small pieces of plastic to help prevent trash from making its way from the Detroit River, which flows between the U.S. and Canada, into Lake Erie," reports Kaitlyn Levinson of Route Fifty. "The robot is roughly the size of a riding lawn mower and weighs more than 1,300 pounds. It uses a metal grate to sift through the sand and pick up trash as it rolls along beachfronts at about two miles per hour. "

Bernie Sanders of Vermont isn't the only one investigating 4-day work weeks. Educators in Pennsylvania now have the option of a 4-day school week. "Legislation signed into law in December amended the Pennsylvania School Code to eliminate the requirement for a minimum 180 school days, providing 900 or more instruction hours each academic year," reports Valerie Myers of The Erie Times. "Districts now can choose between 180 school days and hourly instruction requirements: 900 for elementary students and 990 for secondary students." Despite the option, a lot of school administrators don't feel ready to sign up.

The Legacy Sites photo

How can Americans confront slavery's part in our national history? A park in Alabama is memorializing this past with art. "Montgomery, Alabama -- once a major trafficking port for enslaved people – opened its new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which features bronze sculptures and historical artifacts that highlight what life was like for enslaved people," reports Mackenzie McCarty of The Christian Science Monitor. "The park culminates in the four-story National Monument to Freedom, inscribed with 122,000 last names that formerly enslaved people chose for themselves after being emancipated."

Guess who's hitting their Earth-loving metrics? U.S. farmers. Daniel Munch of the American Farm Bureau Federation reported on a new study from the Environmental Protection Agency that showed "'U.S. agriculture represents just under 10% of total U.S. emissions when compared to other economic sectors. Overall, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased from 2021 to 2022 by 1.3%, though agricultural emissions dropped 1.8% – the largest decrease of any economic sector.' . . . 2022 marks the lowest U.S. agricultural greenhouse gas emissions since 2012."

With googly eyes, most veggies look more approachable.
(Adobe Stock photo)

Some vegetables get a bad rap: Okra is slimy. Eggplants look more like purple slugs than food. Rutabagas don't even sound like a food. But what if there was a way to make those strange foods approachable? Even edible. "It's hard to be intimidated by celeriac — or rutabaga, radicchio, eggplant or okra — when it's wiggling googly eyes at you," reports Rebekah Denn of The Washington Post. Chef and food educator Becky Selengut "began pasting eyes on produce while teaching a 'Misunderstood Vegetables' cooking class and writing a related new cookbook."

Don't let raccoons, bugs, lumpy ground or lackluster meals ruin your summer camping trip. A great camping trip starts with solid planning, "so you'll return home with great memories," writes Alex Temblador for National Geographic. "We’ve created a list of all the items you’ll need. . . . From clothes to kitchen supplies and gear to help you sleep." Find the checklist here.

More than 100 species of birds will have their names changed -- no longer to be named for humans

The new bird names will help birders identify species.
(Photo by Eric Wengert, Alamy)

In the late 1600s, Shakespeare's starry-eyed Juliet pondered, "What's in a name?" It's a shame that a more reasonable person (instead of Romeo) didn't respond with, "A whole heck of a lot."

Unless one is dazed or tased by love, names matter, even for birds. "The American Ornithological Society has committed to replacing all bird names derived from people to redress the recognition of historical figures with racist or colonial pasts," reports Katrina Miller of The New York Times. These names, the society said in a statement, "can be harmful, exclusive and detract from 'the focus, appreciation or consideration of the birds themselves.'"

In all, the change will rename "more than 100 avian species across the Americas," including "birds such as Audubon's shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the southeastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition . . . . The Scott's oriole, a black-and-yellow bird inhabiting the Southwest and Mexico, will also receive a new moniker, which will sever ties to the U.S. Civil War general Winfield Scott, who oversaw the forced relocation of Indigenous peoples in 1838 that eventually became the Trail of Tears."

"'We're really doing this to address some historic wrongs,'" said Judith Scarl, the executive director of the American Ornithological Society. Scarl added that the change would help "engage even more people in enjoying and protecting and studying birds." Miller reports. "Advocates of this change believe that many English common names for birds are 'isolating and demeaning reminders of oppression, slavery and genocide,' according to a petition in 2020 that was addressed to the American Ornithological Society. The petition was written by Bird Names For Birds, an initiative founded by two ornithologists."

Some birders were uncertain about the changes. Jeff Marks, an ornithologist at the Montana Bird Advocacy, told Miller, "I'm not super enthusiastic about it, but neither am I super disappointed about it. . . . We'll lose a little bit of knowledge about some key people in the history of ornithology, and that saddens me. But maybe in the scheme of things, that's just not that big of a deal."

Jordan Rutter, one of the founders of Bird Names For Birds, "said the petition was inspired by what became a momentous encounter in Central Park in 2020, when a white woman falsely reported to police that Christian Cooper, a Black birder, was threatening her," Miller reports. "The Central Park encounter. . . spurred an avalanche of similar initiatives in the sciences against the backdrop of a nationwide racial reckoning." Cooper's fame has led him to host a National Geographic birding show. He told Miller: "There's no reason to have a person's name attached to a bird, because it doesn't tell you anything about the bird."

Christian Nationalists: A personal telling and a history that dates to the Doctrine of Discovery over 500 years ago

"I was raised in a church of terrorists. The preacher pounded on the lectern while he boomed that all queers deserved to die, that mixed marriages were going to lead to the downfall of 'our way of life,'" Appalachian Kentucky author Silas House writes for Time. 

Silas House (Berea College photo)

House grew up in a family of Christian Nationalists: "I knew by then that I was gay and for that alone I’d surely be left behind when everyone I knew was whisked away in the Rapture, God’s chosen people disappearing 'in the twinkling of an eye.' Although I felt tremendous love in that church, I also realized how quickly that love would be extinguished if they knew who I really was."
House said that his childhood nightmares are alive today, "In North Carolina Lt. Gov. and pastor Mark Robinson has said that being gay or transgender is 'filth,' 'garbage' and 'perversion.' House said he lives in fear of what this country might be like should Christian Nationalists gain control: "It will be a country where women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people of other faiths will be stripped of their rights in laws justified by scripture."
How does Christian Nationalism gives one group power to terrorizes another? Laura Harbert Allen reports on this question in 100 Days in Appalachia: "Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, believes many Christians, especially white Christians, have a responsibility to understand a concept known as the Doctrine of Discovery, based on a papal bull or decree issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493."
“The basic idea was that Europeans, who were Christian, had the blessings of the church and the authority of the state to so-called discover any of the lands that were occupied by non-Christian, non-European people,” Jones told Allen, "And when they did they had the right to dominate those people and confiscate those lands.”

"Until the early 18th century, killing Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans was based on religion. Christians killing 'heathens' and 'heretics,' after all, was a historic fact long before the colonization of the New World," writes Allen. "According to Yale professor Phillip Gorski as enslaved and Indigenous people started to convert to Christianity, the justification for their treatment became skin color." UPDATE, Nov. 10: The Rev. Russell Moore, editor of Christianity Today, defines Christian nationalism as "the use of Christian doctrines or symbols for the maintenance of an ethnic or a national identity. . . . It's anti-democratic by nature." Moore spoke to New Yorker Editor David Remnick in a podcast interview.

Research project combats stereotypes about where poverty exists in America; interactive map shows county-level data

Click here for interactive map of Index of Deep Disadvantage

Researchers from the University of Michigan and Princeton University recently released research that combats common misconceptions about poverty being mainly an urban problem. The Index of Deep Disadvantage measures income, health and social mobility in each U.S. county along with the 500 largest cities. "While the most advantaged communities in the U.S. rank alongside the most developed parts of the world, those struggling the hardest measure up with countries like North Korea and Bangladesh," Jan Pytalski reports for The Daily Yonder.

Of the 100 most disadvantaged communities, 80 are rural. Of the top 100 most disadvantaged counties, 21 contained tribal lands, and 19 were in rural Mississippi and had majority African American populations, Pytalski reports.

Luke Shaefar, a faculty director of Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan and one of the project's lead researchers, said the findings revealed misconceptions of rural poverty that must be corrected before effective solutions can be designed. He noted that funding dedicated to reducing poverty is disproportionately distributed to urban areas.

"We were really struck when we put [our] map up against the map of the concentration of enslavement. Not just the overall clusterings are the same, but even the concentration is the same," Shaefer told Pytalski. These correlations have long been known to those familiar with the history of plantation slavery, the Mississippi Delta and the Black Belt (a term both geologic and demographic), and the correlations don't fit in Kentucky and Tennessee, which have smaller black populations.

Index of Deep Disadvantage in the South next to a map showing slavery distribution across southern states.
(source: University of Michigan)

In addition to statistical work, the researchers conducted direct research. "Researchers were sent to the communities, staying for several weeks at a time, collecting stories and learning first hand of people’s experiences. It allowed for a fresh and eye-opening perspective," Pytalski reports.

Direct engagement was important, Shaefer said, because without it, the researchers might miss important parts of the picture. For instance, researchers found that some households couldn't participate in disaster relief and other programs because the owners had inherited their homes without a clear title proving ownership. Another researcher found that a free health clinic wasn't helping some people in need because they didn't have the transportation to get there, Pytalski reports. And many rural residents had little trust in the government or its ability to help.

Trump's success in rural South followed a pattern of economic populism that dates back over 100 years

President Trump's success in the 2016 election, especially in the rural South, follows an economic and social pattern that has existed in some states for more than 100 years, reports The Economist. In Alabama, for example, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton 63 percent to 35 percent, the state's "yeomen farmers, and their descendants, have sporadically risen up against the plantation class and its modern equivalents, typically when hardship rallied them to a charismatic leader’s standard."

In some counties Trump won in landslides, taking Winston County, Alabama, with 90 percent of the vote, The Economist reports. Many of the same counties that overwhelmingly supported Trump also did the same for Andrew Jackson. "Like Trump, these yeoman farmers venerated Jackson, the brutal, populist president from 1829 to 1837." Ed Bridges, retired director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, said "the hill-country yeomanry were the 'descendants of the serfs and peasants of Europe' and 'feared the rise of a new aristocracy.'" (Economist graphic)

Clinton won almost all of the state's counties with black populations of more than 50 percent, but populism in Alabama "has not always been driven by prejudice, as might be supposed," reports the British magazine which has a usually nameless writer based in the South. "It was powered as much by a sense that government was a racket and politicians tools of the plutocracy, a deep and often reasonable conviction."

Winston County, one of the poorest counties, then and now, in one the poorest states, only had 14 slave owners at the start of the Civil War, reports The Economist. In Double Springs, the county seat, "A statue outside the courthouse depicts a hybrid Yankee and rebel soldier (most such monuments in the South mourn only Johnny Reb)."

The article also explores elections for governor that showed some of the same divisions between urbanites and rural populists, and notes, "It isn’t only Alabama. The political histories of Georgia and North Carolina, through which the Federal Road also ran, can be charted on similar maps, with the same ancient cultural divisions between uplands and lowlands, and between regions where slaves were numerous and where there were few." Don Dodd, a local historian in Winston County, said "The descendants of Alabama’s yeoman farmers are, like their forebears, 'tired of people looking down on them'."

University of Mississippi removes state flag that includes Confederate flag symbol

A student-led protest led the University of Mississippi on Monday to quietly take down the state flag—which includes the Confederate flag in one corner—from campus, reports University of Mississippi News. "The flag will be preserved in the University Archives along with resolutions from students, faculty and staff calling for its removal."

"On Oct. 20, the student senate voted 33-15-1 to request that the university remove the flag," reports University of Mississippi News. Interim Chancellor Morris Stocks, who in June joined state and university officials in calling for a change in the state flag, told the News, “The University of Mississippi community came to the realization years ago that the Confederate battle flag did not represent many of our core values, such as civility and respect for others. Since that time, we have become a stronger and better university. We join other leaders in our state who are calling for a change in the state flag.”

For years Jackson State University, Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University, "all historically black universities, have long not flown the flag," Royce Swayze reports for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Miss.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, who has said it is unlikely the state flag will change, said in a statement "that publicly funded institutions should respect Mississippi law since it grants the state flag 'all the respect and ceremonious etiquette given the American flag,'" Swayze writes. "According to Section 37-13-13 of Mississippi law, the flag 'shall be displayed in close proximity to the school building at all times during the hours of daylight when the school is in session when the weather will permit without damage to the flag . . . It shall be the duty of the board of trustees of the school district to provide for the flags and their display.” But the law does not reference institutions of higher learning.

Rural Ohio town founded by freed slave as an integrated community is losing its racial identity

A rural progressive western Ohio town that was racially integrated ahead of its time is in danger of losing that history, as the aging black population is dying and white residents are buying the property, Kevin Williams reports for The Washington Post. Longtown, Ohio, was founded by James Clemens, a freed Virginia slave of black, white and Native American ancestry who became a became prosperous farmer in Ohio. (Wikipedia map: Darke County, Ohio)

"Clemens’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson is working to save his family’s heritage," Williams writes. "Though his eyes are blue and his skin is pale, Connor Keiser, 22, said that his childhood is filled with memories of 'cousins of all colors' playing in the pastures at the family farm." Keiser is like many current residents, who appear to be white but are actually of mixed race. Keiser prefers to call himself "colored." He told Williams, “I know who I am and what I am. I may look white—my appearance is white—but my insides are not. I know I am not white.”

"So Keiser has hit the road to appeal for money," Williams writes. "He’s been drawing big crowds to area libraries with his presentation about the racial harmony of Longtown and the desperate need to preserve it." He told Williams, “I don’t think the public was aware this was here. Black history is not talked about a lot in general, and I think [the fact] that we have that kind of history means something to a lot of people.”

Clemens and his wife Sophia, who was also mixed race, "served as a beacon to other integrationists, as well as runaway and freed slaves looking for succor and education during and after the Civil War," Williams writes. They served as conductors for the Underground Railroad and "built a mixed-race town that numbered close to 1,000 people at its peak in the 1880s. But Longtown began to falter after World War II, when residents were forced to seek help from bankers to modernize their farms. Today, only a handful of families remain." The latest census showed that Darke County was 97.7 percent white. (Read more)

PBS to rebroadcast 'The Civil War'; first episode looks at impact of slavery on war

Supporters of the Confederate flag say it represents heritage, not hate, a claim disputed by Civil War historians. The flag has been at the heart of controversy since the June 17 murders of nine African Americans in a historic Charleston, S.C., church and the arrest of a white suspect with ties to hate crimes. Since the shootings, some have called for banning the flag, others have rallied behind it and disputes continue about what the flag means and how the Civil War is taught in classrooms in relation to slavery. (Slaves working in the sweet potato fields on the Hopkinson plantation, South Carolina, 1862)

That makes this the perfect time for PBS to broadcast a completely restored version of the nine-part series, "The Civil War," by Ken Burns. The series, which begins airing on Sept. 7, will offer a great opportunity for rural newspapers to write about the war and get lively discussions going in the community about what it means locally and nationally.

The first episode, "The Cause," gets right to the heart of the impact historians believe slavery had on the war. Here's a description of the episode: "Beginning with a searing indictment of slavery, this first episode dramatically evokes the causes of the war, from the Cotton Kingdom of the South to the northern abolitionists who opposed it. Here are the burning questions of Union and states' rights, John Brown at Harpers Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the firing on Fort Sumter and the jubilant rush to arms on both sides. Along the way the series' major figures are introduced: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and a host of lesser-known but equally vivid characters. The episode comes to a climax with the disastrous Union defeat at Manassas, Va., where both sides learn it is to be a very long war."