Black West Virginians say their contributions and needs are not widely known or appreciated by the media or in legislative policy making. In 2022 they are doing more than just speaking out.
In the capitol rotunda, the recent Black-led advocacy event was part policy push and part old time revival.
Rev. Matthew Watts is pastor at Charleston’s Grace Bible Church. He said he wants to see a West Virginia legislative package that would earmark some of the millions of federal COVID-19 relief dollars to go to social and economic recovery for minorities and the poor.
“The pandemic has imposed unprecedented challenges on every institution in American society,” Watts said. “Particularly in the areas of health, housing education, employment and economics.”
To that end, the event featured Rev. Kobi Little, the president of Community Partnerships for Public Health International. He has organized the Mountain State Safe and Healthy Communities Coalition to encourage vaccination in hesitant communities.
“We’re encouraging people to get vaccinated because we know that the vaccines prevent people from being severely ill from COVID, from being hospitalized, and from passing away,” Little said.
The Black-led policy coalition presented the legislature with a series of bills that are already part of state law that they said needed funding, execution, or both. For example, Watts said 2017’s House Bill 2724 that focused on Improving public health and addressing poverty through community development was never funded or executed according to law.
Other examples included Senate Bill 573 from 2004, a minority economic development bill that was never funded or executed and Senate Bill 611, from 2012, a pilot project to improve outcomes for at-risk youth that has ended and needs re-activation.
Sen Owens Brown, D-Ohio, is the first African-American male to serve in the West Virginia Senate. Brown said the issue is not the obvious one.
“But the real struggle, it’s not about black versus white. It’s about rich versus poor,” Brown said. “Frederick Douglass said it’s about the class struggle. What you’re doing today here with the bills and things is about class struggle.”
A longtime community leader in the Northern Panhandle, Ron Scott Jr. was born and raised in a family of community advocates in Wheeling. He founded and directs the Ohio Valley African American Student Association — an organization that “encourages & promotes higher and continued education for Black and Bi-Racial students in the Ohio Valley.” Now he’s the Director of Cultural Diversity and Community Outreach at the YWCA in Wheeling. The mission of the YWCA is, “Eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.”
West Virginia Public Broadcasting met up with him to learn about some of the changes he’s seen in his community in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Ron Scott Jr. is currently helping to coordinate a multi-year plan to address racial issues across public and private high schools throughout Ohio County. And since the killing of George Floyd began with an altercation over a counterfeit 20 dollar bill, the YWCA has also launched what they’re calling “Change for a 20 Challenge” asking community members to donate a 20 dollar bill and post why they donate in social media channels with #Changefora20. Funds are slated to go to scholarships, and programs and events designed to address diversity, human rights, race relations, and ultimately to cultivate unified community.
Glynis Board:The YWCA in Wheeling began in 1906, right? Talk to me about its history of dedication to diversity.
Ron Scott Jr.: I’ve never seen an agency that has “eliminating racism” in their mission statement. That’s it. And it’s before “empowering women.” “Eliminating racism, empowering women…” They did something — they called it the Blue Triangle, during segregation. There weren’t services for black women and children and families. It just didn’t exist. So they went out of their way to make a separate agency called the Blue Triangle that was affiliated with the YWCA and it just served black women and children and families. It was around for a while through segregation stuff through Jim Crow. And I’m amazed that I never learned anything about that. Or it’s never been celebrated — the bravery of an agency like that back then. Because you weren’t getting rewarded for that sort of stuff, then. You weren’t considered a visionary for doing that. You were just breaking the rules. And now they were on the right side of history. So it’s kind of cool to be affiliated with an agency that has historically been on the right side of history.
Board:Have you seen an uptick in interest and in people been coming to you for guidance in the wake of George Floyd’s killing?
Scott: Definitely. And me and a good friend of mine, Jermaine Lucius, we’ve been trying to figure out why this is so different, because the act itself — this isn’t new. Especially not to us. This isn’t a new thing. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I think it may have been the combination of the quarantines from the virus, people just being at home, just watching TV, and it dominating the news stories, and nothing else can take your eyes off. There’s no football games and basketball games; there’s nothing to distract you. So they kind of got to see it, and really let it soak in this time.
And the outpouring and outcry has been incredible to me. I’ve never experienced this kind of outrage from the white community for an issue that, in essence, doesn’t affect them. It’s not like George Floyd was a white guy that was just doing this thing and got murdered. But I’ve been just inundated with, “What can I do?” “How can I make my agency better? My community better?”
I thought originally I was going to get a week out of this. And so I’m jumping on whenever I can. Whoever asked me anything, I’m on it. And a week passes, and then two weeks pass, and a month passes and people are still asking me, “What can I do?” And they don’t just want to put a little bandaid on. They’re like, “What can we do that is sustaining?” “How can we change the culture of this agency or this hair salon?” I’ve been speaking to groups that I just didn’t even know, had those kind of concerns.
There was a local hair salon who had an issue that was race related because people were speaking out we’re seeing these things happen and play out in front of us right on TV. So folks bean to speak out and made it tense and uncomfortable in the salon. And the owner asked me to come and speak to all the staff and we just had a great conversation about their views.
Because I don’t ever go into the situation with, “You’re wrong. Let me tell you why.” And so we just kind of flesh out whatever it is they already think, what they already feel, and who they want to be, and how they want to be perceived by other people. So once we fleshed all that out, we then realize places like salons are social hubs. People come there and get more candid than they do in doctors offices and therapists offices. And so being able to do that kind of a presentation and talk at a place like that, it has a ripple effect. And that’s how real change happens. You know, it’s not me standing in front of the city building with a megaphone. It’s having presentations at like hair salons or community centers, places like that. And all these places are asking, they’re saying, “What can we do?”
Board:Is there a common theme in these conversations?
Scott: Well, there’s an underlying theme that a lot of people that reach out to me seem to be working with: the issue of them being perceived a racist sometimes seems to be worse than being one. So what they want to make sure happens is — I don’t want to do or say anything that might make folks believe that I’m a racist, or I just have no real sensitivity or tolerance to anyone different than me. So it’s almost like they want me to come in and we do some assessment of the idea, like, “I’ve been in the city for a long time, and I’ve had a few black employees, and my roommate in college…” So we go through all of that sort of stuff. And it’s like they’re unsure because they’re seeing how the systematic racism has permeated almost every institution that they’ve loved. And now, it’s like — and I don’t know why now — they just seem to see it clearly. And some of them it scares them; some are in denial about it; and others just want to go to action. They’re like, “We got to fix this. I didn’t realize this is how you felt every day.” And they’re ready to go. So I’m like, let’s go then! I’m not slowing down. Not until they are.
Board:I hesitate to use the word “hope,” but how do you feel about the future? Do you think that with this more substantial sort of movement afoot, that there will actually be tangible policy changes and cultural shifts?
Scott: Right now, I think I’m hopeful for attitude shifts, paradigm shifts in thinking, and thinking and personalities — those kind of shifts are definitely happening. And I think we’re gonna to be able to see more of it. But I have begun lately to lose some of the hope because there are certain narratives that are like comfortable shoes to people, you know. And the newest one is the idea that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization that has an agenda that just kill random and innocent white people. I’ve had folks tell me that places are just like war zones now like Beirut and, you know, people don’t want to drive through them anymore. And that narrative, people have adopted it. It’s finally given me a little bit of pause where I can see this starting to lose some traction, because people are believing stuff that they haven’t seen. They haven’t experienced it. No one’s even telling them second or third hand. This is just an abstract idea someone’s just saying and they’re like, “Yes. That’s the case. Let me get back to being comfortable and live in my life. And just give me a few blinders. We need some leagues to come back, we need some games to start, we need something. So I could put these blinders back up and go back to business as usual.”
Because real change is uncomfortable. And for a minute there people were just ready to get uncomfortable. They were ready to hear this conversation. But with this idea that there’s a terrorist group called Black Lives Matter that’s just killing people, randomly and innocent people for no reasons. It just is a ridiculous notion but people are clinging to it. And I think that might slow us down.
I’ve been explaining to people, the Black Lives Matters and it isn’t even an organization in a sense. It’s a movement. It’s a sentiment. It’s an idea. I mean, yeah, they got a website. They got principles. There’s a founder. But so does #MeToo, but there’s not a #MeToo office or a board of directors for the #MeToo movement that could organize… No it’s the idea of it. And it’s one that resonates when you get it. When you understand that what you’re saying is black lives matter as well, too. Just like my life matters Black Lives Matter as well. Once you wrap your mind around it is such a simple sentiment and it’s so easy to get behind. But when you throw a little dose of fear in there people are ready to put the comfortable shoe back on, like, “Okay, they’re killing people. We’re good. We’re gonna stay in the house.”
Board: Well, what about here in West Virginia? I’m curious… I don’t even know what I’m curious about now. Now I’m just like, sad.
Scott: Don’t be sad. There’s good stuff. There’s still people — like tonight at five I’m speaking to a group in St. Clairsville. That didn’t exist maybe a month ago. All the stuff was going on. One woman had an interest, so she gathered up people who had an interest, and they want to … they just want to have a conversation to see if there’s more that they can learn, or if they can do better, and I love the idea that someone can still be teachable, nowadays. You can be a grown adult with kids, a successful job, and still say, “There’s stuff, I just don’t get still, and you might be able to help me get it.” And that’s fantastic. Because they’re not looking at that as a weakness. They’re just ready to go.
There are now more students of color at some universities and colleges in the U.S. In the past decade at Western Illinois University, the non-white student population nearly tripled to one-third of the enrollment. The change helped fill classrooms and satisfy the school’s mission. But it’s part of what pushed the school’s first African-American president out of his job.
Check out Jack Stripling’s “Fear of a Black Campus: How an ugly campaign to force out an African American president exposed racial fault lines in a mostly white town.”
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Derek Akal, 22, grew up in the famed coalfields of Harlan County, Kentucky. He’s a bit over six feet tall, he’s black, and he has an athlete’s build. Neat curls of black hair rise off the top of his head, and on his chin, he keeps a closely-trimmed mustache and goatee.
I first interviewed Derek in October 2016. At that time, he said he was trying to become a Kentucky state trooper, but also making plans to move to Texas to work on an oil rig.
By November, Derek still had one plan to find work near home, and another plan to move West, but both plans had changed. Now, he was following a lead on a lineman job that would have him climbing utility poles and making plans to move to California after his birthday, in March.
Plans Through the Whole Alphabet
For Derek, changing plans is part of the plan. When I asked Derek what would be the first thing he’d want people to hear from him in this story, this is what he told me:
“It’s okay if you want to stay. It’s also okay if you want to leave. But if you’re going to leave, then make sure you always have more than three plans. Plan A, plan B, plan C— you’ve got to have through the whole alphabet!”
Derek has had a lots of ideas about what he could do at home, and he’s told me he would stay home if his mom or grandma asked him to, but the plans Derek has gotten most excited about all involve him moving somewhere far away.
“That’s where I might have a future. I know I’m young, but I’m ready to get out there and do a lot.”
Plan A: Football Dreams
Derek was raised primarily by his granddad, his grandma and his mom.
“Because his father wasn’t around. His grandfather was his father,” said his mother, Katina Akal.
When Derek was a junior in high school, his granddad passed away.
Credit courtesy Derek Akal
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Derek Akal with his grandmother and mom
His grandma and his mom said they noticed that Derek became more withdrawn. He started to focus more intensely on a goal his granddad had pushed him toward— excelling at sports to hopefully earn a college scholarship.
You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive
His senior year, after a summer dedicated to working out, Derek became a football star. “I got defensive player of the year. I got four district championships, and I got three regional championships. You know, I dedicated all that [to] my granddad.”
Harlan County High School’s football field is called Coal Miner’s Memorial Stadium. It has huge metal bleachers on two sides, and a giant modern scoreboard behind the end zone. It’s in a beautiful spot, a patch of flat land that was blasted out of the wooded hillsides that surround it.
When Derek and I visited in November, the leaves were at their most colorful. A gym class was playing flag football, and the sound of gunshots told us someone was out hunting nearby.
Derek started to get nostalgic, remembering how he used to feel back when he played here as a Harlan County Black Bear. He told me about times his blood and tears fell onto the turf. He told me about walking onto the field before games, in front of a roaring crowd that would sing along to the country hit “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
In the deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky
That’s the place where I trace my bloodline
And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone
You’ll never leave Harlan alive
“I’m not a big fan of country music,”Derek said, “but you know it got me pumped up like crazy. I love it.”
The last game of the season, Derek got hurt. Some of his teammates had the opponent’s running back held up, so Derek charged in to help make the tackle.
“As soon as I hit him, my head cocked all the way back, and I felt the back of my head touch my back. I broke my neck— I broke my C1 and my C2… If I hadn’t gotten hurt I’d be playing for a bowl game right now with a D1 college.”
Going Away to College
Derek was in a neck brace for four months, but he was still getting college scholarships to play more football. He accepted a scholarship to attend the University of the Cumberlands, in Williamsburg Kentucky. It’s only two hours from Derek’s home in Harlan County, but the college draws students from all across the country.
There, Derek sometimes felt like an outsider. In Williamsburg, he stood out for the way he talked— for his Harlan county accent.
Many of his classmates were surprised that someone who looks like him, a clean-cut and fashionably dressed black man, could be from rural Kentucky.
“They’d be like, ‘oh where [are] you from?
And I’d say, ‘Two hours away in the mountains.’
And first thing, they be like, ‘You serious? You don’t even look like you’re from Kentucky! You look like you’re from Georgia or Florida or New York City, city places like that.’
I’m sitting here like, ‘No man, I’m from Harlan County Kentucky!’”
That wasn’t the only discomfort Derek felt with being a young black man in Williamsburg. Derek said his feelings about the town soured after he and a friend had their car searched by police twice in one week.
“We gave [the police] the license and everything, and he was like, ‘oh, I thought you guys had stuff on y’all.’ I can’t read minds, but seeing a couple of black guys together, I feel like we got profiled right there.”
Things on the football field weren’t going great either. Two games into the season, Derek’s neck started bother him again. He became afraid that playing more football could make his spinal injury become more severe. “I didn’t want to play no more,” Derek said, “because, you know, I want to be able to walk.”
Derek was homesick, and he didn’t want to get deeper in student debt, so he decided to drop out and move back home.
What Now?
Derek’s mom says that when he got home, he was afraid that she and his grandma would be disappointed in him, but she understood where he was coming from. ” “I said,‘look, college is not for everybody. Do what you feel like you want to do.’”
“Go do something,” his grandma urged him. She said, she worries there aren’t jobs in Lynch; she would like him to get out if it means he can find work. “Go get yourself a job. I don’t want him to stick around here, walking these streets.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
Derek’s mother agrees. “I’d rather for him to go find work and be a productive member of society. I’d rather him do that than stay here and be miserable, because I can see it already. I want him to go somewhere that he can be happy.”
Derek’s mommas, as he calls them, instilled in him a drive to get out of Appalachia and find opportunity elsewhere. “I got it in my head that I can make it out, and be something for myself, by myself.”
Derek’s not the first person in his family to have that thought. In the next chapter of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay, we’re going to hear more about how the hunt for better work and a better life has affected Derek’s family and community for generations.
This story was produced by WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley ReSource, which is made possible with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Music in the audio version of this story was provided by Marisa Anderson. We’ll hear the next part of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay story next week, here on Inside Appalachia.
HHOMA invites the public to speak about issues that affect their community, like economic concerns, housing, education and health. Those concerns will then be relayed to Governor Jim Justice.
The listening tour is also expected to stop in Huntington and Jefferson County later this year.
Dr. William White, the executive director of the Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs, says by traveling across the state, it will give other West Virginians the opportunity to voice any concerns, such as the state’s work force.
“Not only am I looking to get women and minorities in the work place, but I’m also looking to get all folks in the workplace,” Dr. White said.
The timing of the event follows violent protests by white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, but White says the listening tour has been months in the making.
“We want to be proactive, we don’t want the same kinds of things to happen in West Virginia that happened in Charlottesville,” he said.
The Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs is a state agency named after a civil rights leader who lived in Huntington and helped advance fairness and equality in West Virginia.
Thursday’s event in Weirton will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Mary H. Weir Public Library in Weirton.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and StoryCorps have teamed up for a series of conversations about religious faith told by West Virginians. We’ll be bringing you these conversations over the next few weeks. We begin the series with Ronald English and James Patterson. Both men are ministers in Charleston. They also share the experience of challenging racism during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
“I remember teachers telling you that you had to be twice as smart and twice as quick as your white counterparts just to make it,” recalled James Patterson, who was born in 1952 in Maxton, North Carolina.
When he was in the 11th grade, his school was integrated. “That’s where we had this proliferation of academies, particularly Christian academies, that were white only. Because there were white people who decided they were not going to send their kids to school with us.”
Ronald English served as assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. “I gave the prayer at his funeral, which was one of the saddest moments of my life.”
In this conversation English and Patterson talk about the connection between black churches and the Civil Rights Movement. “The black church was the bastion of liberation. It was what black folk felt they controlled,” said English.
“And the black preacher was not under the control of the white establishment. And therefore the source of the movement, it’s no accident that it came out of the church and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist preacher. And that’s because it was ingrained in the wood of the black church, that it would be about the business of liberating folk.”
Patterson said his work as a minister has been shaped by his experiences of growing up in the deep south, where he experienced racism, and by his belief that religious faith could help bring about social change.
“I believe that we are called, not only to fight what we consider sin, from a theological perspective, but we are called to fight injustice, and we are called to fight inequality, and we are called to fight evil, in whichever way it comes. That’s my calling,” said Patterson.
This interview was recorded as part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a partnership of the national nonprofit, StoryCorps, and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. This story was recorded in Charleston, West Virginia and was produced by Dan Collison.
The director of the American Pilgrimage Project is Paul Elie. Adelina Lancianese, Anjuli Munjal, Christina Stanton, Gautam Srikishan and Maura Johnson also contributed to this story.
