This piece was originally published by the Ohio Valley ReSource. By now it’s become a familiar scene: Marchers fill the streets with placards proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” and chants fill the air as the demonstrators recite the names of those lost. But there’s something different about some of these protests […]

The myth that Appalachia is uniformly White lingers, but communities of “Affrilachians” were documented in the 1930s. This article was originally published by YES! Magazine in March 2018. Black folks have a gift for complicating the stories that Americans like to tell about themselves. Our presence, for instance, makes it […]

New allegations surfaced in a lawsuit after ProPublica’s investigation of Koch Foods in Mississippi. The company denies discriminating against Black farmers. Once or twice every year since 2005, a Black farmer in Philadelphia, Mississippi, reached out to one of the country’s largest chicken companies about starting to work with it. […]

Author Crystal Wilkinson is the 2019 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. Wilkinson’s second book Water Street was chosen by the West Virginia Library Commission as this year’s One Book One West Virginia common read. Wilkinson was born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1962, but she grew up in Kentucky with her grandparents Silas and Christine Wilkinson. […]

The jet dropped like a silvery stone out of the sky overtop West Virginia’s capital city. It evened out just over the Kanawha River and roared down its length, water flashing in the jet’s wake.  Crazily, the pilot charged toward a bridge over the river. Was he going to pull […]

When Cicero Fain began working on his Ph.D., he took a deep look at the black community in Huntington, West Virginia. He wanted to understand where it began and what helped it to thrive. That research ultimately became his new book “Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story.” One major factor that […]