‘Fixing a problem we didn’t cause’: the Black Appalachian activists cultivating community power
Appalachia, which spans from southern New York to northern Mississippi, usually evokes images of white working-class people, as depicted in JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But it’s little known to people outside of the region that there’s a robust community of Black organizers who are rewriting the narrative of what it means to be Appalachian.While just 10% of Appalachia is made up of Black residents, they are disproportionately impacted by resource extraction that has led to adverse effects on the environment, health and access to food. But Black activists in Appalachia such as Staysha Quentrill, a midwife and reproductive justice advocate in West Virginia; the Right Rev Marcia Dinkins, an environmental justice advocate in Ohio; and Femeika Elliott, a foodways practictioner in Tennessee are working to improve the wellbeing and safety of the people in their communities.In her work as the founder of the Black Appalachian Coalition (Blac), an environmental justice group, Dinkins said she seeks to “dismantle the romanticized whitewashed narrative around Appalachia”.“When people heard Appalachia, the first thing they thought about was that Appalachia was white, so it invisibilized Black people,” Dinkins said. “Even though they were exploited, they were also excluded from conversations.”‘We’re tasked to fix this problem we didn’t cause’In the moments before she gave birth to her daughter on Juneteenth in 2021, Carmen Squires laid in her bed waiting for Quentrill to arrive at her home in Beckley, West Virginia. As a Black woman, it was important to Squires that a midwife who looked like her “catch the baby” when she arrived into the world.Though a white midwife was already in the room, Squires said that with Quentrill: “I felt more comfortable, if I’m being honest … I feel like it was more relatable.”In a world where microaggressions happen ... having somebody with you that you’ve created a bond with can let those [vigilant] parts of yourself downStaysha Quentrill, midwifeQuentrill, who lived over an hour away, coached her on the phone as she drove to Squires’ house: “Get on your hands and knees and put your butt in the air and try to just blow through your contractions.”As Squires bonded with her baby after the delivery, Quentrill noticed that she was still heavily bleeding and becoming pale. However, the white midwife did not realize the change in Squires’ skin color, because, Quentrill said, midwifery training does not teach “what pale looks like in different people”.Quentrill gave Squires an herbal tincture that raised her blood pressure and helped restore her natural skin color. “I really truly believe, had [Quentrill] not been here,” Squires said, “it could have possibly went a lot different.”Research shows more positive health outcomes and greater satisfaction when patients share the same race or ethnicity as their providers. “In a world where microaggressions happen and racism can be so subtle, having somebody with you that you’ve created a bond with can let those [vigilant] parts of yourself down,” said Quentrill, a 35-year-old mother of seven. “That way you can just be fully present for the birth instead of having some sort of guard up to protect yourself.”Staysha Quentrill, a certified professional midwife, delivers a baby with her child on her back in West Virginia. Photograph: Samantha Holbrook with W+L Unveiled-Birth PhotographyAt 13%, West Virginia has one of the nation’s highest preterm birth rates, or the number of babies born prematurely, so Quentrill said it’s important for patients to have choices in their care. But for parents who want to deliver their babies outside of hospital settings, barriers to access abound. Insurance often doesn’t cover certified nurse midwives or home birth. And with nearly 30% of the state’s population reliant on Medicaid, it can be challenging for Black patients to afford her care.“When it comes to Black and brown midwives, we’re tasked to create care for Black and brown people,” Quentrill said, and to “fix this problem that we didn’t cause”.Ultimately, Quentrill wants patients to have greater access to midwives outside of hospital settings. She recently helped draft a bill in West Virginia that will allow certified professional midwives like her to become licensed instead of certified, which would allow her services to be covered by insurances and Medicaid. West Virginia has many maternity care deserts, areas where people don’t have access to birthing centers or hospitals. Those residents must travel far distances to deliver their babies and they may opt out of receiving prenatal care, she said. “Allowing [certified professional midwives] to be licensed providers would be a way [to] close that gap of the maternity desert. It also would improve outcomes greatly for families.”In the future, Quentrill hopes to find different ways to adjust her services to attract more Black and brown patients, such as offering childbirth classes for free or teaching the parents’ family members how to support them during the birth.She’s already inspired at least one of her clients to take on similar work: Squires, for instance, is now a breastfeeding peer counselor and pursuing her bachelor’s degree in public health. “Having that experience with her,” Squires said, “helped mold me”.‘Grow it yourself’“I really wanted to be a garden girl,” Knoxville, Tennessee, resident Brandy Nolan said about a 4’x8’ garden bed where she grew fruits and vegetables in her yard. “It was kind of therapeutic for me, so it made me want one.” In the spring of 2024, the 33-year-old took several free classes with the local non-profit Rooted East Knoxville, where she learned about seeding, how to transfer and pot plants, natural remedies for pests like neem oil and the best type of soil and fertilizer to use for particular plants.Last spring, Rooted East installed the bed in her yard, and soon after she had grown watermelons, potatoes, zucchini, squash, onions, peppers, green beans, tomatoes and basil.Femeika Elliott, founder of Rooted East Knoxville, teaching a winter herbalism class in October 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Rooted East Knoxville.The next time Nolan went grocery shopping she realized that everything she needed was in her yard. Additionally, her home-grown bounty didn’t have harmful pesticides. Her mom went on a diet by only eating the vegetables in Nolan’s garden. “You don’t have to worry about if they poison it or put something in it that’s gonna make you sick,” Nolan said. “I was glad to be able to teach my children that if you don’t trust what’s going on, you can always grow it yourself.”Nolan’s family is one of more than 50 who have grown their own gardens with Rooted East’s free beds since 2023. Founded in 2022, Rooted East was born from a group of local community members, including the 32-year-old food activist Femeika Elliott, who had a meal prepping company, but also wanted to teach Black people in the area how to improve their health by growing nourishing food.“We believe that just giving people food is great,” Elliott said, “but it also does not give power fully back to that person. So if we not only give them free food and we teach them how to sustain themselves by growing their own food and learning the complexities of their foodways, they’re able to do a lot more.”skip past newsletter promotionNesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the worldPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionRooted East participant Jasmine Bryant’s garden in June 2023. Photograph: Courtesy of Rooted East KnoxvilleThe non-profit also teaches a range of classes on gardening and healthy cooking at the Black-owned bookstore The Bottom. Volunteer community members and a paid employee at the organization teaches students how to can food, as well as how to cultivate collard and turnip greens, and how to preserve the plants during the winter with covers that shield them from the snow and cold air.Elliott said that she aims to address food apartheid, which she defines as the “systemic denial of access to healthy food” to marginalized communities, caused by zoning laws and development. The participants that she serves live in zip codes that don’t have nearby grocery stores and many of the participants don’t have reliable transportation. The city also recently changed the public transportation route, she said, resulting in fewer bus stops. People sometimes need to travel two hours by bus one way to buy fresh produce, Elliott said: “Our goal is to have access to fresh produce on every walk of East Knoxville.”This winter, the non-profit released a documentary called Roots of Resilience. It includes the voices of Black elders who recalled that prior to the urban renewal process that began in the late 1950s that displaced many Black businesses and residents, many households once grew their own gardens. Community members would also purchase milk or watermelons from each other. In the future, the group plans to host a summer market where families in their home gardening program will be able to barter food that they’ve grown with others in the community.Nolan returned her garden bed to Rooted East when she moved to an apartment complex in the fall. But she said that she hopes to start another small garden on her apartment balcony in the spring and envisions teaching her children everything that she knows about gardening: “It’s a life lesson for me to be able to teach it to them.”‘We don’t always get the win that we want’When Marcia Dinkins’s home in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Warren, Ohio, flooded in 2016, the bishop didn’t know then how much it would change her life. Floodwater in her basement that reached her knees caused mold and fungi to spread throughout her home, exacerbating her son’s asthma and giving him a chronic facial infection. Soon after, she began having allergies and was hospitalized for anaphylactic shock.The Right Rev Marcia Dinkins, the founder of the Black Appalachian Coalition. Photograph: Jon CherryThe health issues inspired Dinkins to educate people on how to mitigate toxins in their own homes. She started working with 32 churches throughout Appalachia, including in Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, to teach community members how to reduce lead by sealing windows and painting over toxic paint in homes. She also recruited nurses at the University of Toledo to test children’s lead levels.As she helped people throughout the region, Dinkins noticed that Black voices were missing from national conversations about environmental justice. In 2021, she founded the Black Appalachian Coalition (Blac), an advocacy group that uses storytelling to drive change in climate and environmental justice in Appalachia.With Blac, she sought to highlight the experiences of Black people who were impacted by air and water pollution. The group helps people advocate for themselves in the face of environmental hazards, she said, by “training individuals how to tell their story from the place of not just their pain, but from the place of their power, and from the place of the solution”.The organization offers in-person and online workshops where participants answer prompts and are paired with partners to practice reciting their story in a succinct and evocative way, with the ultimate goal of preparing them to speak to politicians or companies that caused environmental harm. One participant whose family experienced ongoing flooding wanted to convince the insurance commission, a state governmental agency that oversees the insurance industry, to make policy changes that ensured her community would be compensated for flood damage. And though the training gave her the confidence to approach the commission, the agency ultimately didn’t budge after a years-long fight.A bus ride through Rubbertown, an industrial area in Louisville, Kentucky, hosted by the Black Appalachian Coalition and Counterstream Media. The event educated participants on the harms of petrochemicals and fossil fuels. Photograph: Jon Cherry“This is the one thing we have to remember in this work, we don’t always get the win that we want. Sometimes it’s the journey,” said Dinkins. “And what this person did win was the fact that she, along with others, were able to come together, build community, and build up a set of voices that spoke out against the injustice that they were experiencing.”Additionally, the group works with residents throughout Appalachia to champion for change at the policy level. For over a year, the group has urged Pennsylvania’s Allegheny county health department to reflect the community’s needs in the county’s air quality program, the Clean Air Fund. The campaign called Freedom to Breathe asks that the county’s program include community members as decision makers and that fund dollars go to people affected by air pollution. Residents can share their experiences of air pollution and pledge their support on the campaign’s website.Their coaching led to a political win in Youngstown, Ohio, where Blac and other community groups helped residents craft their testimonies to speak in favor of a yearlong ban on the thermochemical treatment, gasification or combustion of tires, electronic waste or plastics in the city. In 2023, the city council passed a moratorium on the processes that proponents argued would release pollutants into nearby neighborhoods.In March, the group plans to launch a training program on the art of organizing, which Dinkins said is needed now more than ever. And over the summer, Blac will host its fourth annual policy summit, where attendees are trained on various topics including how to incorporate environmental data into their storytelling. Last year’s summit theme focused on healing and justice, Dinkins said, which meant “we were rising up and we wanted to be seen, and we wanted our stories to be told”.
Robust group of organizers – including midwives, environmental justice advocates and urban gardeners – rewrite what it means to be from the US mountain regionAppalachia, which spans from southern New York to northern Mississippi, usually evokes images of white working-class people, as depicted in JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But it’s little known to people outside of the region that there’s a robust community of Black organizers who are rewriting the narrative of what it means to be Appalachian.While just 10% of Appalachia is made up of Black residents, they are disproportionately impacted by resource extraction that has led to adverse effects on the environment, health and access to food. But Black activists in Appalachia such as Staysha Quentrill, a midwife and reproductive justice advocate in West Virginia; the Right Rev Marcia Dinkins, an environmental justice advocate in Ohio; and Femeika Elliott, a foodways practictioner in Tennessee are working to improve the wellbeing and safety of the people in their communities. Continue reading...
Appalachia, which spans from southern New York to northern Mississippi, usually evokes images of white working-class people, as depicted in JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But it’s little known to people outside of the region that there’s a robust community of Black organizers who are rewriting the narrative of what it means to be Appalachian.
While just 10% of Appalachia is made up of Black residents, they are disproportionately impacted by resource extraction that has led to adverse effects on the environment, health and access to food. But Black activists in Appalachia such as Staysha Quentrill, a midwife and reproductive justice advocate in West Virginia; the Right Rev Marcia Dinkins, an environmental justice advocate in Ohio; and Femeika Elliott, a foodways practictioner in Tennessee are working to improve the wellbeing and safety of the people in their communities.
In her work as the founder of the Black Appalachian Coalition (Blac), an environmental justice group, Dinkins said she seeks to “dismantle the romanticized whitewashed narrative around Appalachia”.
“When people heard Appalachia, the first thing they thought about was that Appalachia was white, so it invisibilized Black people,” Dinkins said. “Even though they were exploited, they were also excluded from conversations.”
‘We’re tasked to fix this problem we didn’t cause’
In the moments before she gave birth to her daughter on Juneteenth in 2021, Carmen Squires laid in her bed waiting for Quentrill to arrive at her home in Beckley, West Virginia. As a Black woman, it was important to Squires that a midwife who looked like her “catch the baby” when she arrived into the world.
Though a white midwife was already in the room, Squires said that with Quentrill: “I felt more comfortable, if I’m being honest … I feel like it was more relatable.”
Quentrill, who lived over an hour away, coached her on the phone as she drove to Squires’ house: “Get on your hands and knees and put your butt in the air and try to just blow through your contractions.”
As Squires bonded with her baby after the delivery, Quentrill noticed that she was still heavily bleeding and becoming pale. However, the white midwife did not realize the change in Squires’ skin color, because, Quentrill said, midwifery training does not teach “what pale looks like in different people”.
Quentrill gave Squires an herbal tincture that raised her blood pressure and helped restore her natural skin color. “I really truly believe, had [Quentrill] not been here,” Squires said, “it could have possibly went a lot different.”
Research shows more positive health outcomes and greater satisfaction when patients share the same race or ethnicity as their providers. “In a world where microaggressions happen and racism can be so subtle, having somebody with you that you’ve created a bond with can let those [vigilant] parts of yourself down,” said Quentrill, a 35-year-old mother of seven. “That way you can just be fully present for the birth instead of having some sort of guard up to protect yourself.”
At 13%, West Virginia has one of the nation’s highest preterm birth rates, or the number of babies born prematurely, so Quentrill said it’s important for patients to have choices in their care. But for parents who want to deliver their babies outside of hospital settings, barriers to access abound. Insurance often doesn’t cover certified nurse midwives or home birth. And with nearly 30% of the state’s population reliant on Medicaid, it can be challenging for Black patients to afford her care.
“When it comes to Black and brown midwives, we’re tasked to create care for Black and brown people,” Quentrill said, and to “fix this problem that we didn’t cause”.
Ultimately, Quentrill wants patients to have greater access to midwives outside of hospital settings. She recently helped draft a bill in West Virginia that will allow certified professional midwives like her to become licensed instead of certified, which would allow her services to be covered by insurances and Medicaid. West Virginia has many maternity care deserts, areas where people don’t have access to birthing centers or hospitals. Those residents must travel far distances to deliver their babies and they may opt out of receiving prenatal care, she said. “Allowing [certified professional midwives] to be licensed providers would be a way [to] close that gap of the maternity desert. It also would improve outcomes greatly for families.”
In the future, Quentrill hopes to find different ways to adjust her services to attract more Black and brown patients, such as offering childbirth classes for free or teaching the parents’ family members how to support them during the birth.
She’s already inspired at least one of her clients to take on similar work: Squires, for instance, is now a breastfeeding peer counselor and pursuing her bachelor’s degree in public health. “Having that experience with her,” Squires said, “helped mold me”.
‘Grow it yourself’
“I really wanted to be a garden girl,” Knoxville, Tennessee, resident Brandy Nolan said about a 4’x8’ garden bed where she grew fruits and vegetables in her yard. “It was kind of therapeutic for me, so it made me want one.” In the spring of 2024, the 33-year-old took several free classes with the local non-profit Rooted East Knoxville, where she learned about seeding, how to transfer and pot plants, natural remedies for pests like neem oil and the best type of soil and fertilizer to use for particular plants.
Last spring, Rooted East installed the bed in her yard, and soon after she had grown watermelons, potatoes, zucchini, squash, onions, peppers, green beans, tomatoes and basil.
The next time Nolan went grocery shopping she realized that everything she needed was in her yard. Additionally, her home-grown bounty didn’t have harmful pesticides. Her mom went on a diet by only eating the vegetables in Nolan’s garden. “You don’t have to worry about if they poison it or put something in it that’s gonna make you sick,” Nolan said. “I was glad to be able to teach my children that if you don’t trust what’s going on, you can always grow it yourself.”
Nolan’s family is one of more than 50 who have grown their own gardens with Rooted East’s free beds since 2023. Founded in 2022, Rooted East was born from a group of local community members, including the 32-year-old food activist Femeika Elliott, who had a meal prepping company, but also wanted to teach Black people in the area how to improve their health by growing nourishing food.
“We believe that just giving people food is great,” Elliott said, “but it also does not give power fully back to that person. So if we not only give them free food and we teach them how to sustain themselves by growing their own food and learning the complexities of their foodways, they’re able to do a lot more.”
after newsletter promotion
The non-profit also teaches a range of classes on gardening and healthy cooking at the Black-owned bookstore The Bottom. Volunteer community members and a paid employee at the organization teaches students how to can food, as well as how to cultivate collard and turnip greens, and how to preserve the plants during the winter with covers that shield them from the snow and cold air.
Elliott said that she aims to address food apartheid, which she defines as the “systemic denial of access to healthy food” to marginalized communities, caused by zoning laws and development. The participants that she serves live in zip codes that don’t have nearby grocery stores and many of the participants don’t have reliable transportation. The city also recently changed the public transportation route, she said, resulting in fewer bus stops. People sometimes need to travel two hours by bus one way to buy fresh produce, Elliott said: “Our goal is to have access to fresh produce on every walk of East Knoxville.”
This winter, the non-profit released a documentary called Roots of Resilience. It includes the voices of Black elders who recalled that prior to the urban renewal process that began in the late 1950s that displaced many Black businesses and residents, many households once grew their own gardens. Community members would also purchase milk or watermelons from each other. In the future, the group plans to host a summer market where families in their home gardening program will be able to barter food that they’ve grown with others in the community.
Nolan returned her garden bed to Rooted East when she moved to an apartment complex in the fall. But she said that she hopes to start another small garden on her apartment balcony in the spring and envisions teaching her children everything that she knows about gardening: “It’s a life lesson for me to be able to teach it to them.”
‘We don’t always get the win that we want’
When Marcia Dinkins’s home in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Warren, Ohio, flooded in 2016, the bishop didn’t know then how much it would change her life. Floodwater in her basement that reached her knees caused mold and fungi to spread throughout her home, exacerbating her son’s asthma and giving him a chronic facial infection. Soon after, she began having allergies and was hospitalized for anaphylactic shock.
The health issues inspired Dinkins to educate people on how to mitigate toxins in their own homes. She started working with 32 churches throughout Appalachia, including in Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, to teach community members how to reduce lead by sealing windows and painting over toxic paint in homes. She also recruited nurses at the University of Toledo to test children’s lead levels.
As she helped people throughout the region, Dinkins noticed that Black voices were missing from national conversations about environmental justice. In 2021, she founded the Black Appalachian Coalition (Blac), an advocacy group that uses storytelling to drive change in climate and environmental justice in Appalachia.
With Blac, she sought to highlight the experiences of Black people who were impacted by air and water pollution. The group helps people advocate for themselves in the face of environmental hazards, she said, by “training individuals how to tell their story from the place of not just their pain, but from the place of their power, and from the place of the solution”.
The organization offers in-person and online workshops where participants answer prompts and are paired with partners to practice reciting their story in a succinct and evocative way, with the ultimate goal of preparing them to speak to politicians or companies that caused environmental harm. One participant whose family experienced ongoing flooding wanted to convince the insurance commission, a state governmental agency that oversees the insurance industry, to make policy changes that ensured her community would be compensated for flood damage. And though the training gave her the confidence to approach the commission, the agency ultimately didn’t budge after a years-long fight.
“This is the one thing we have to remember in this work, we don’t always get the win that we want. Sometimes it’s the journey,” said Dinkins. “And what this person did win was the fact that she, along with others, were able to come together, build community, and build up a set of voices that spoke out against the injustice that they were experiencing.”
Additionally, the group works with residents throughout Appalachia to champion for change at the policy level. For over a year, the group has urged Pennsylvania’s Allegheny county health department to reflect the community’s needs in the county’s air quality program, the Clean Air Fund. The campaign called Freedom to Breathe asks that the county’s program include community members as decision makers and that fund dollars go to people affected by air pollution. Residents can share their experiences of air pollution and pledge their support on the campaign’s website.
Their coaching led to a political win in Youngstown, Ohio, where Blac and other community groups helped residents craft their testimonies to speak in favor of a yearlong ban on the thermochemical treatment, gasification or combustion of tires, electronic waste or plastics in the city. In 2023, the city council passed a moratorium on the processes that proponents argued would release pollutants into nearby neighborhoods.
In March, the group plans to launch a training program on the art of organizing, which Dinkins said is needed now more than ever. And over the summer, Blac will host its fourth annual policy summit, where attendees are trained on various topics including how to incorporate environmental data into their storytelling. Last year’s summit theme focused on healing and justice, Dinkins said, which meant “we were rising up and we wanted to be seen, and we wanted our stories to be told”.