BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Joseph Drew Lanham is an American author, poet, ornithologist and wildlife biologist. Raised in Edgefield, South Carolina, Lanham studied zoology and ecology at Clemson University, where he earned a PhD in 1997 and where he currently holds an endowed chair as an Alumni Distinguished Professor. “His way of seeing and hearing and noticing the present and the history that birds traverse — through our backyards and beyond — is a revelatory way to be present to the world and to life in our time”, says Krista Tippett, host of On Being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj5Q0hpeHT8
Savonala “Savi” Horne is Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers’ Land Loss Prevention Project, a non-profit law firm that has offered, for more than 33 years, legal representation of clients, community economic development, and professional outreach in the effort to promote wealth, land preservation, and rural livelihoods. As a state, regional, and national non-governmental organization leader, she has been instrumental in addressing the needs of Black, Indigenous, People of Color and limited resource farmers and ranchers. She graduated from Rutgers University, School of Law–Newark, New Jersey, and was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1990. https://www.landloss.org/
Chosen by the Early Baseball Era Committee, baseball great John "Buck" O'Neil (1911–2006) will be inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in July 2022. O’Neil was a standout Negro League first baseman and two-time batting champion with the Kansas City Monarchs who went on to become the first African American coach of a major league baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. Though he broke through this significant barrier O’Neil soon realized a need to return to scouting, his first job in the Major Leagues.
With his infectious smile and gentle demeanor, he’s been called the soul of baseball, one of the finest human beings who ever played the game and the voice of the Negro Leagues. But perhaps the greatest thing ever said about him is that he demonstrated that a person could get further in life with love rather than hate.
In the early 1990s Buck O’Neil realized his dream of building the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri so that in his view, the heroes and their incredible story would never be lost.
Margie Eugene-Richard (born 1941 or 1942) is an African American environmental activist. Richard had grown up in the neighborhood of Old Diamond in Norco, Louisiana, in the middle of “Cancer Alley”. She was the first African-American to win the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004, for her successful campaign for relocating people who lived in a community close to a chemical plant in Norco, Louisiana. Margie Eugene-Richard says: “you have to go out and command justice. Somebody has to ask God for the inner strength to be bold.”
“Margie believes in the community leading the way,” says Dr. Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. But as Richard recognizes, community is an elusive thing in post-Katrina New Orleans. “I won't be knocking on doors,” she says, “because there are no doors.”