EDITOR’S NOTE: Here are three stories in WestVirginiaVille’s Black History Month coverage:
BLACK HISTORY 1: ‘I was first-class in my own mind”: How a kid named Joe Turner from West Virginia coal mine country got jazzed by legendary ace pilot Chuck Yeager and a boyhood friend who went on to become a war hero —and find his own way by heading into the sky. A reprint of a 2019 “100 Days in Appalachia” story on Turner’s induction into the WV Aviation Hall of Fame, followed by an excerpt from Joe’s memoir of growing up in West Virginia.
BLACK HISTORY 2: ‘Rosa Parks’ feet did not hurt:’ Rosa Parks was neither tired, frail, nor old when she she helped crack open a new chapter in the American Civil Rights Movement, by refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Sassa Wilkes, who painted the icon’s face for her “100 Badass Women” portrait series, rains fire on the deliberate misreading of an activist who knew exactly what she was doing.
BLACK HISTORY 3: ‘It was an idea whose time had come’: View our 2020 mini-doc, “WHAT’S IN A NAME: A West Virginia Community Confronts a Confederate Legacy,” which delves into America’s deeply embedded, institutional racism and the effort to strip Confederate general Stonewall Jackson’s name from a school in a mostly Black neighborhood in West Virginia’s capital city. The mini-documentary has been added to the 2021 Phoenix Film Fest in Toronto.
‘It was an idea whose time had come’
The WestVirginiaVille mini-documentary, “WHAT’S IN A NAME: A West Virginia Community Confronts a Confederate Legacy” (below), begins with this Summer’s successful effort to strip Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s name from a middle school in West Virginia’s capital city. But the video goes on to take a much deeper dive. Through wide-ranging interviews, the video considers the systemic, institutional racism that has bedeviled America since its founding.
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NOTE: See this link for more a transcript of the video plus classroom and group resource for further discussion of racism.
FOR TEACHERS and GROUPS INTERESTED IN USING THE VIDEO: Below are some suggested resources plus a video transcript. If you wish to use the video for your own discussions, here is the YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wwJnvR2hcmA.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE AN .mp4 of the video to re-post to your own site or archive, e-mail us at: heythere@westvirginiaville.com. NOTE: We are making the video available for use at no cost, but under the Creative Commons “Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND” license. This allows you to download and share the video with the credit line—’A WestVirginiaVille.com original video’—but not to change the video in any way or use it for commercial purposes. See more on the license terms here.
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