your america i'm your host the right reverend david clark and i'm more than happy to come into your home today and to  the blessings of god in your life for i believe the entrance of god's everlasting word to give of life the day i am extremely happy for my guest today she is the recipient of the black history achievement award two thousand and six and she is an amazing innovator in the history around the wear on i'm talking about new history i had the opportunity years ago to meet alex haley who was the contributor of roots and we fellowship at norfolk state university and he told me that in years to come there will be some greater innovators in the history industry that will bring four of the legend of african american history and like you thank you i mean she's known all over the where all for her contribution to history education  and i'm just so excited i just don't know what to do i don't usually have icons like dr black but she's here with us and she will share her experience  i believe she's doing some amazing things in history that we have never never seen before for a very long time we've heard about the c the cotton industry but dr black is going to share with us about the rice industry and the history of how african americans have made a contribution so i'm just excited my dear to have you were first tell me this everybody has mentors when you graduated from high school who was the first mentor that really paid the proper do in your career  oh that's a good question i would say that my first mentor was my mother dr dorothy fields who is herself a historian and an archivist and institution builder she founded a community archives in miami florida and one of my first jobs maybe my only job as a child was interviewing her aunts and uncles and conducting oral histories and mom would give me a tape recorder and she would give me some questions and she would say go talk to uncle sammy or uncle fred kin or bird and ask them these questions about their lives and after a while a short while i began to go off script and so after doing these interviews with my great  uncle starting with questions my mother wrote i started to ask my own questions and so mom was always a mentor to me she taught me to question things and then when you teach a child to question and then they actually question that's another story she taught me to interact with people in a certain way in a way that i was never afraid to go up to someone and say this is who i am and this is what i'm interested in and i'd like to know more about how you got to be where you are mom taught me many things about interacting with the world and navigating so i would have to say that my mom was my first mentor  after college i developed a number of mentors in college ok and i graduated from him or university in atlanta and i was a history major there  think because of my influence and because of my early training i always knew that i wanted to be a historian and so i went to undergraduate with a history with knowing my major in with this path already i was an interesting child i already knew what i wanted to do and i did it graduated a year early from high school and just you know was on my path so once i got to him marie registered as a history major and took advantage of every single opportunity that was available and we had a program where you could take your professor to lunch for the dining hall and i took a number of professors went to lunch and i asked them all kinds of questions that i would probably be overhauled to get for my students you know i was but that was the beginning of mentors who with whom i had relationships with through graduate school in the early part of my career several of them are retired now were preparing for retirement  and so i kept going back to those people as i plan to go to graduate school i knew i wanted to write history i didn't know what history i wanted to write i knew it was going to be black history i didn't know it was going to start  and one of my mentors informed me about a summer study abroad scholarship called the coutinho scholarship where you could get a couple thousand dollars to go abroad and conduct your own research project up until that point in this was probably one nine hundred ninety two so it's been it's been a while and having an anniversary this year you all of the students who had held  scholarship going to europe and i decided to go to west africa where and i i went to syria leo and i won the scholarship i went to syria leone and decided at that point that the history i was going to write was going to begin in pre colonial west africa i also decided at that point that it was going to branch into the new world right so i went to africa and i decided to go to graduate school and to really route myself in pre colonial west african history but to look at the diaspora through that lens of west africa did you realize at that time that you would have a focus and rice about an hour south of charleston and i knew that my grandparents spoke a language that i didn't understand that i was always very curious about i didn't know it had a name i didn't know it was  that when i was it my grandparents house and my great grandmother's house where we spend a week at the end of every summer i couldn't understand a thing so i wanted to go to the place where i could learn more about that language and reading with my mentors they gave me special reading because i was too i was too when you have a busy child you have to keep the child busy so they kept me busy with leone where i had read the ancestors of the gullah geechee were from and that's what i applied for for the scholarship at emory and i got it and i did a summer study abroad in syria leone in one thousand nine hundred two and this was the summer before my senior semester because i graduated from emory earlier also i was just there for one semester in my last year and then i moved on so that's well  let me ask you this you won an award choice award yes off the same material you studied for lanas specializes in rice mainly in the plantation economy mainly in south carolina but peter branches into asia as well myself working in africa and branching into the us south and dagmar schaffer who works on rice in china we edited co edited a book after hosting a conference at the max planck institute in it what is it rice new histories global networks and new histories and it won a choice book award for twenty fifteen and it just came out in paperback a couple of a couple years ago amazing up a month ago but when did you do your own book well i my dissertation research so when i went to graduate school i decided to focus on rice in that region of west africa syria leone  liberia i spent a year in guinea and i lived with and studied among rice elder rice farmers in the region and published from that research which began as my dissertation i revised it and published deep roots rice farmers in west africa and the african diaspora in two thousand and eight now you heard about what i heard about black rice eat in this country in the twentieth and twenty first century is actually in a rises set tiva variety from asia and much of the rice that's grown even today in west africa is the arise everything else comes all the varieties come from one of those two species well thank you we can take a break right now some of the best minds in america are doing more than imagine the american dream foundation seeking to find cures for life without brain disease isn't just something we can imagine something we can on this show dr heather feels black welcome again and i notice that life matters doesn't matter to slave owners or does it matter to slave employee does it matter to who does it matter to after living on the plea plantation can you give me some insight i think i can i think that it's a question that's very contemporary today but it's also a historical question yes and if we look back to the period of an slave meant no black life did not matter one of the reasons why i wanted to write a requiem for rice and it's not really for rice the requiem is actually for the africans who were enslaved on rice plantations is to highlight the suffering to highlight the sacrifices that were made in the u s we think primarily i think about cotton plantations there were a lot of cotton plantations in the south and in the deep south there were also cut into bacco there were also a lot of there were also a number of rice plantations in the south carolina in georgia low country and the death rates on these rice plantations were second only in the world to sugar plantations rates death rates because of the nature of growing this crop but also because of the environment we're talking about growing rice in the swamps with swamps that are full of standing water and in that water were pests whether they were snakes or alligators there were also mosquitos and malaria there was it was called black water so the water quality was very poor and a lot of children died of gastrointestinal diseases diarrhea of some sort stomach worms adults as well as children but especially children dying of malaria and the working conditions in the living conditions were very very poor as i mentioned i was trained in africa as an african is that i am an african is i work on both sides of the atlantic and when i first started working in south carolina i was appalled to see registers of in slave people and the number of people who died on rice plantations and in places like along the savannah river in georgia we're talking ninety percent of children dying before they were fifteen years old in places on plantations along this river in slavers built this slave quarters right next to the rice fields well ninety percent of those children died before they were fifteen and it just boggled my mind because in west africa farming is sustainable farming is based was based on family labor you're not going to work your family to death right and rice fields were located pretty far out particularly the swamp rice field because of the standing water that were needed to irrigate the fields so does black did black live matter in antebellum south carolina and georgia on rice plantations the answer is no because the labor was enslaved the labor in many ways was exhausted exhaustible so people could be worked to death sleep people were purchased and brought to replace them and i should say it's the one part of the us if you look at sort of birth and death rate since the one part of the u s pop in slave population that does not reproduce itself in the us is the only enslaved population in the new world where that did reproduce itself more but more death than birth that's interesting and that's depressing you seem to be a spirit of confusion when to out america many are asking the question should black history be abolished it seems after you see what's going on in this rectum of rice definitely should be abolished but this would as you address it yes no i think we need to tell everybody's story and i think that the tendency is to only want to tell happy stories stories of victories stories where we're we have overcome and i think those stories of struggle and suffering and sacrifice are just as important they're not as they don't make people feel good necessarily but i think in order to have a complete understanding of where we've been in order to chart the course of where we're going we have to tell it all  did you have any more comment to say about under ideal circumstances and so they spread throughout the world where is arises lab rema the african rice varieties they grow better in really marginal conditions so if you don't have enough rain varieties would grow they would grow right under ideal conditions they're not going to yield as much as the asian varieties but when conditions are not with a lot can you show me some pictures of the plantation one of the plantation like our f there is an event that i'm anticipating and i'm inviting the whole world to come to charleston and to observe this particular event and there's a lot of things that we go i know and and the first thing is music yes can west trevor west yes i will say that trevor and i were brought together by jonathan green and jonathan who is an internationally renowned artist in  charleston based in charleston had worked before with trevor and brought us together to execute what we call the requiem for rise the preview of the requiem will take place in on october twenty second there are two we've been scheduled the low country rice culture project will have a requiem for rice preview at mother emmanuel church at three p m and the color of music black the color of music festival will have a world premiere of and buried and more and unmarked which is hi it's the overture that will become the music dot org website those of us who are in the pittsburgh area could actually see a sneak peek of an buried unmourned unmarked and really we would love for you to be a part of the development of the requiem next thursday september twenty first on carnegie mellon's campus at the melon institute auditorium we have a local string quartet that will play and buried  unmarked we will also have to amazing actors vanessa german shepherds own vanessa german and jason shavers will do a dramatic reading of excerpts from the which i wrote is the text on which the requiem is based and this is the first time that trevor weston the composer and i are starting to put the words in the music together share not together together because we have not written the lyrics yet but we're we're we're there getting closer every day and they'll be a discussion afterwards we really hope people will stay and engage with us and share their thoughts about the music to share their thoughts about the libretto because we are writing as we speak and the world premiere of requiem for rise will take place in twenty eighteen and i will say that carnegie mellon is in the early stages of planning to bring the requiem to pittsburgh in twenty eight teams probably in the fall semester twenty teen so we have a lot going on and we are literally in the studio at our computers writing right now and finishing the work again i'd like to thank you so much for coming and changing your busy schedule to in your life thank you for looking this way my prayer for god's eternal blessings will be manifested in your life as you continue to walk the