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Hello and welcome back to the African Roots Podcast!
This is Angela Walton-Raji and you can reach me at africanrootspodcast@gmail.com
Lot of events coming up for summer:
Baltimore African American Historical Society is hosting its annual summer picnic on Saturday June 4, at Banneker State Park in Baltimore County. For more info go to the chapter website.
Juneteenth season is upon us. This is the time of celebration of the abolishment of the institution of slavery in America and although the origins of this celebration is Texas, it is a sentiment that we all share.
Some interesting Juneteenth sites:
Juneteenth Galveston < -------- Where it all began!
Juneteenth Ft. Smith Arkansas
Juneteenth, Houston TX
Juneteenth West TX
Juneteenth, El Paso TX
Juneteenth, Phoenix
Juneteenth, Tuscon AZ
Juneteenth, Los Angeles
Juneteenth Amarillo TX
Juneteenth Southwest Louisiana
Events:
Registration has just opened up for FGS Conference in August 2010 in Knoxville TN August 18-21 For early registration.
I often speak about how important it is to research the history and legacy of your community. Well I have a found a group of folks out west who are capturing African American presence in the state of Oregon.
The website that I found was one devoted to Oregon Black Pioneer history. I must applaud them for what they are doing. On that website are two videos worth watching pertaining providing a small synopsis of some of Oregon’s black pioneers. This is wonderful information and the work of the Black Northwest Pioneers website is clearly an ongoing one. I have also noted how there has been an effort to provide headstones for those cases where some were buried without markers. Those with an interest in black presences on the western frontier are strongly urged to explore this site.
Interesting Oral History Projects:Special thanks to some excellent work by Timothy Pinnick. He has decided to take a look at the vast array of oral history interviews of African Americans, many of which are just not known to the larger public. On his Black Coalminer Heritage site, he has taken a look at some of the oral history projects that have been undertaken over the years, and he plans to highlight them and bring them to the attention of the larger community.
For example—he took a project undertaken by Melissa Walker in 1962 where she interviewed several hundred farmers about their lives, the changes in their lives and their adaptation to that change. Over 100 people in her project were black farmers of the south. Timothy on his own website put those names into a database and made a index of those black farmers and the states where they lived.
One can click on the link and find an alpha list of those farmers with their name, state where they lived and farmed and their year of birth. The farmers were from :AR, AL, GA, FL, LA, MS, NC, SC, TX, VA.
The PDF of his index is certainly worth investigating.
He also provides links to two other oral history projects of African Americans and both should be visited. One oral history project resides on University of Illinois Springfield website.
The University of Louisville Oral History Center also conducted a series of interviews with citizens from the African American community. The interviews rest online at the University of Louisville website and one can listen to them directly. There are 26 interviews and they are easy to access.
This weekend is Memorial Day Weekend.
If you live near your ancestral home, perhaps it is time to restore the old Decoration day tradition, visiting the gravesites of loved ones, seeing that their resting places are in good shape and tending to them if they need work. If you are fortunate to have loved ones in a well kept cemetery—have you considered documenting that burial ground? That’s right pull out the digital camera, and take photos—of each headstone. With sites like Find a Grave, you can easily upload them and preserve the fact that your ancestors rest where they rest. Disasters, whether natural or man made—can happen, and documenting these burial sites can be a small step towards preservation and care and information for the next generation
Well thanks for listening. I appreciate you and hope that you will continue to do what you do as you tell that family story.
In the meantime, keep researching, keep documenting and keep sharing what you find.
i COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW THE SLAVES IN TEXAS DIDN’T KNOW THEY HAD BEEN FREE FOR TWO YEARS.