[music]

Suzanne Gaber: How do you see yourself building on the lives of your ancestors?

Speaker 1: Oh, gosh, this is so hard question.

Speaker 2: By first learning about my ancestors.

Speaker 3: I've never really thought about it, but I thank you for bringing it up because now I think I'm going to look into it.

Speaker 4: Success for the family and to keep positive legacy for the family will be a quick answer.

Speaker 5: Funny you should ask that. I wish I could show you my shirt. It says, "I make my ancestors proud." That's what I say. A lot of people ask me, "What does that mean?" I say, "By the way that I carry myself, the things that I do today." I'm going on a cruise tomorrow, and I tell people that this time on this group, I am no longer cargo. I am a passenger, so I make my ancestors proud. There's are so many other things that I do, and I carry that on to my children, and my grandchildren, and to whoever I run across.

[music]

Janae Pierre: It's Notes from America. I'm Janae Pierre, in for Kai Wright. Putting a pen to paper to write about Black liberation was risky in the '60s, to say the least. Our guest today summoned the bravery to do that by leaning on a strong ancestral foundation, and her writing is all the stronger for it. Nikki Giovanni is the subject of a new documentary that takes us back in time and through space, revealing the influence of one of America's most treasured poets. It's called Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. The film spotlights her legacy and celebrates her early work, which provided a strong, militant, unapologetically Black perspective, like in this poem, called Ego Tripping.

[POEM - Nikki Giovanni: Ego Tripping]

I was born in the Congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx

I designed a pyramid so tough

That a star that only glows every 100 years falls

Into the center giving divine, perfect light

I am bad

I sat on the throne

Drinking nectar with Allah

I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe

To cool my thirst

My oldest daughter is Nefertiti

The tears from my birth pains created the Nile

I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned out the Sahara desert

With a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes

I crossed it in two hours

I am a gazelle so swift

So swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three

I gave my son Hannibal an elephant

He gave me Rome for Mother's Day

My strength flows ever on

Janae Pierre: Nikki Giovanni, welcome to the show.

Nikki Giovanni: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Janae Pierre: Let's start with how you got into your work. You have said of yourself, "My dream was not to publish or to even be a writer. My dream was to discover something no one else had thought of. I guess that's why I'm a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does." At the time that you first started writing, what were the things that you were looking to put together that no one else had done just yet?

Nikki Giovanni: I'm always interested in history, and I've been interested in how the enslaved created-- Actually, what I have now recognized the term was a library. Because the spirituals are libraries. They tell the story of how these people came over, created a language because you have to remember that there were many different languages in the African communities that were put together and brought over here and enslaved. They made a way of telling the story and passing the story along, and since they were not allowed to read or write, or create books, or anything, they learned to do it through song.

I saw that was fabulous. You start to think about, "Well, how did this happen, and how did that happen?" You begin to understand, "Oh." One, it's not hard to understand that these were great people, but it's interesting to know that somehow or another, and as we look at, for example, early rap, as we look at Tupac, we realized that he's standing on the shoulders of his ancestors.

Janae Pierre: We'll get to your Thug Life tattoo later in the interview. [chuckles] Just wait for that. In an interview in your late 20s, you said your work was aimed at moving Black narratives and liberation forward not as an opposition or reaction to whiteness, but you wanted to create a revolution that came from Black goodness, right? Black goodness that was rooted in the personal stories of yourself and your family, that really showed that Black people were inherently good people. That's in the first few minutes of this film.

Why was that such an important space for you to function from in a time when it would have been very understandable if your anger came as a reaction to the violence of whiteness in the US during that time?

Nikki Giovanni: I really think that you always have to know your audience. To me, I wanted to talk to Black Americans. My first important poem was called Nikki-Rosa, and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me.

[POEM - Nikki Giovanni: Nikki-Rosa]

Because they never understand

Black love is Black wealth

And they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood

And never understand that all the while I was quite happy

Nikki Giovanni: I didn't think that it was my job to help them to understand that. I think that my job was to remind Black people that Black love is Black wealth. We're not going to chase a green dollar bill, but we're going to chase Black love. That was what was important. Jimmy Baldwin and I talked about that. That was what was important, who you're talking to, and why you're talking to them.

Janae Pierre: One of the other things that comes up quite a bit in this film is that you've always had a deep attachment to music, specifically spirituals. To you, they're an important part of Black liberation and resistance. Where did that love and understanding of music start?

Nikki Giovanni: I'm lucky, and my generation is lucky because we were churchgoers, and many of us, if not most of us, lived with our grandparents, and our grandparents believed in going to church. Sunday morning, you got up and you went to church, but what you heard in church was the spirituals and eventually, the spirituals, as you know, are going to evolve into gospel. There's going to end up being a beat. As we started going to church, we actually were just dealing with the spirituals. Those who know music can identify now, about 1,100 spirituals, and yet, in that 1,100 spirituals that we can identify, not one of them calls for revenge, not one of them calls for any level of harm to other people.

Hearing that every Sunday in church, it became a part of you. It made sense to you. Why wouldn't it make sense? I've always loved Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. Can you imagine you're a slave, and you're creating this song? As we know, most of these spirituals, the copyrights have been stolen from us, but it was the slaves who created that, who said, "No, this is what I'm going to do."

[SONG - Anthony J. Showalter: Leaning on the Everlasting Arms]

Safe and secure from all alarms

Leaning, leaning

Leaning on the everlasting arms

Nikki Giovanni: I love that. I'm going to lean on the everlasting arms. Not today or tomorrow, but the everlasting arms. Now you're going to end up with somebody like Irving Berlin, and I'm not against Mr. Berlin, who's going to say, "I'm going to love you like nobody's loved you, come rain or come shine." And it goes with, "Not for today, not for the week, but for always." That's just the same thing as the Everlasting Arms. He did. Mr. Berlin heard what Black people were singing, and turned it into something that he could make out of it. I'm not against him, I'm just saying that that's what happened.

If you look at Mr. Gershwin, George Gershwin, Summertime, that's Black people singing. He went down to Charleston, and he spent over a year listening to what Black people had to say and how we had to say it. I think it's fabulous.

Janae Pierre: When was the last time you were moved by an old spiritual?

Nikki Giovanni: I'm moved by them constantly. Javon Jackson and I just did an album. He named it, I didn't, called The Gospel according to Nikki Giovanni, but the one song on it is actually not a gospel tune. It's, in fact, the song called Night Song, because Nina Simone was a good friend of mine, and that was one of her favorite songs. Night Song, again, was not traditionally a spiritual, but it really is, in another way of saying, "This is the life that I'm leading." Of course, the line that I always think of Nina when I hear it, "Where do I belong?" I think there's just, again, you're finding people looking for, "Where are we, and where do we belong? Where do we get our strength from?" I think that's important.

I feel sorry for the kids, by the way, who don't go to church, because I think they're missing a lot of our history.

Janae Pierre: Yes, I agree. I grew up in the church. I often tell people now even in this post-pandemic world, I still miss going to church. Virtual church doesn't hit the same.

Nikki Giovanni: That's true.

Janae Pierre: Early in your career, no one wanted to publish you. You said that no one was interested in a Black girl writing militant poetry. You were able to actually publish yourself. Tell me about that. What was that process like back then?

Nikki Giovanni: I was living in New York because I had a scholarship to Columbia University, and I was working on a book. It wasn't that I was rejected, it's that I simply thought no one cared. If you think no one cares, then why did you ask? I didn't want to submit my work to a publisher and they would reject it. That didn't make sense. I was living uptown, but I knew some people who were living in the village, and I knew several young men as it were, who were working for bigger companies, but they published. They had printing presses. It was a question of asking them what would I need to do in order to have, say, 100 books? Explaining that 100 books would cost them however much they decided it would cost.

Then, I thought, "Okay, we can do that." Because if I can come up with 100 books for $100, then if I'm reasonable and I try to be, and I would say this to anybody, "Separate your business from your creativity." Once you do that, then you've got a business. You've got a small business. I thought if I could get 100 books, I could sell them for $1 a piece and I could break even, but and it's a big but, on the next 100 books, it would only cost me $50 because the plates had already been made, so then I could sell another 100 books for the same $1, but I would be $50 to the good.

Now, anybody that knows anything about poetry knows you're never going to be rich if you're a poet. I never thought, "Oh, I'm going to make money doing this." I just thought, "I'm going to find a way to keep breaking even."

Janae Pierre: Looking back at that now, what did it mean to not wait for a publisher or wait for someone to do that for you to get your message and your book out there?

Nikki Giovanni: I just didn't see the point. It's a different world now. The youngsters come up and they make money. They went about it very differently. I think we just wanted to be able to say what we believed and what we thought was important. We found various ways through the churches, through the communities. We found a bunch of ways to have our say.

Janae Pierre: Let's talk about how the film was made, because you share so many pieces of your life with us, and I'm truly grateful for it. How did Joe Brewster and Michelle Alexander gain access to you? Because I know you don't really like people. [laughs] What did it take to trust them? How was this whole experience?

Nikki Giovanni: They called and asked Jenny, who runs my calendar, "We'd like to do this film on Nikki. What are you thinking?" She thought it would be a good idea, and I said, "No, because documentaries are done when people are dead. I'm not young, but I'm not that old." I called my attorney and I've known Gloria longer than anybody on Earth, and I said, "Well, Jenny wants to do it, but what are you thinking?" She said, "Oh, yes, you have to do it." I was outvoted. My office is run by three people, and two of them just outvoted me. It was like, "Okay." What I did was I stepped back. I think that that was the most important thing that happened to Going To Mars.

I said, "Okay, if we're going to let them do it, then let them do it." I play cards, by the way. I played a game called Bid Whist. Teaching people to play the game, they said, "What do you think is the most important thing?" I said, "Trusting your partner. No matter what it is, you have to trust your partner." In something like creating this documentary, I had to trust them. If I didn't trust them, then I should have stopped it.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Coming up, more of my conversation with Nikki Giovanni. She'll share why book bans bothered her when they first rolled out in some schools. It's not for the reason you may assume. That's just ahead.

[music]

Janae Pierre: It is Notes from America. I'm Janae Pierre in for Kai Wright. My guest is renowned poet, activist, and educator, Nikki Giovanni. I asked her to give us a special reading of a poem that inspired the title of a new documentary about her life. The poem is Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars).

[POEM - Nikki Giovanni: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars)]

We're going to Mars

Because Peary couldn't go to the North Pole without Matthew Henson

Because Chicago couldn't be a city without Jean Baptiste DuSable

Because George Washington Carver and his peanut were the right partners for Booker T.

It's a life-seeking thing

We're going to Mars because whatever is wrong with us will not get right with us

So we journey forth carrying the same baggage

But every now and then leaving one little bitty thing behind

Maybe drop torturing Hunchbacks here

Maybe drop lynching Billy Budd there

Maybe not whipping Uncle Tom to death

Maybe resisting global war

Nikki Giovanni: That whole poem came from the fact that we had Africans being brought across a ocean, which they didn't know all the way on the other side. They were coming from someplace they knew, through someplace they did not know to someplace they didn't know. I had a realization, that's what space travel is, going from someplace we know, which is Earth through someplace we don't know, which is the galaxy to something we haven't been at and that would be Mars or Jupiter or Saturn or wherever it is we land.

I thought, "Oh, so we need Black people to teach Earth how to find its way through the galaxy." Maybe finding our way through the galaxy, we'll find our way to how to get along on Earth.

Janae Pierre: I want to talk a bit more about this comparison of space exploration to the middle passage. Did watching space travel help you understand your own experience as a Black woman in the US in a new way?

Nikki Giovanni: I've always loved space. I've always loved the stars. I shared a bedroom with my sister, and I don't know why, but she wanted the inside bed that was closer to the rest of the house and gave me the bed with the window because the bedroom only had one window. I would just sit and look at the stars, and I would think, "Well, they're saying something." I'm not into physics. I'm not a scientist, but I kept thinking, "Every night, if I can see the stars, they're telling me something." The question is how do you listen to the stars? How do you see what they're trying to say? How do you find your way into the stars? If you found your way there, what would you find?

Janae Pierre: Part of your work now is attempting to get more Black women involved in space exploration and physics more broadly. Why is Black women's participation in space so important to you?

Nikki Giovanni: Black American women are about the only people that get along with everybody. You can take a Black American woman and she will find a way to get along with everybody. I know if we can get along with everybody on Earth, we'll be able to get along with everybody in space or in the galaxy, I should say. I've always laughed because Black women, the first thing-- I don't know about you and your grandmother, but my grand, the first thing that they say to you-- When you meet a Black American woman, the first thing she says is, "Come on, baby. Are you hungry?"

Because first thing she does is to feed you. I can see a Black American woman in space running into another life form and saying that. "Come on, baby. Are you hungry? Come on in." Of course, feeding them and giving them something to drink and then saying, "Where you from? Oh, where you go to school?" You know how Black women, they treat everybody the same. I love us for that. I think that that's so important to think about, where are we from? We are from Earth. We bring that pride and that love with us. We don't mind meeting people. Black American women are not afraid of anything.

When we look at the civil rights movement, I have a great respect for Dr. King, as does the world, but it was Rosa Parks who said, "No, I'm not getting up." Knowing that her life was going to be threatened and knowing that she had stood a good chance, actually, of being killed. It was Ms. Parks once the bus boycott started. It was the women who got up before dawn and made lunch for the men so that they did not have to get on the bus to go to get their lunch. It was the women who did that. We forget. When we look at Black Lives Matter, to bring it up to date, it was three women who said, "No, Black Lives Matter." They took that concept and that understanding that's gone around the globe.

Janae Pierre: Absolutely. We can certainly bring that same energy to Mars along with a six-pack of beer, as you mentioned in the film. [chuckles]

Nikki Giovanni: I don't drink beer, but my mother did. Even for me, who doesn't like it, it's even a question of, "Well, let's have a beer." Because there's something friendly about that. There's something that you can meet people with a beer that you can't meet them any other way.

Janae Pierre: Absolutely. In the documentary, you mentioned that you had a complicated relationship with your dad, Gus, and that influenced your understanding of Black men, particularly watching the relationship between your parents. You even said this of your parents' relationship, "It was a stormy relationship at some points, but we know that deprivation gives us stormy relationships." What does that mean to you?

Nikki Giovanni: I finally had to realize that their marriage was none of my business. I know people whose parents have gotten divorced and they've been upset about it, and you say, "What are you upset about? You weren't married to either one of them." Some things are your business and some things aren't. It was difficult dealing with my father, so the best thing to do was for one of us to leave. Since this was his home and his wife, though I was his child, he didn't own me. I was able to go and live with my grandmother, which I was very proud of. I lived with my grandmother until I went to college. That was very good.

Ultimately, he had a stroke and I was, oh, I think about 33 or 34. I really forget the year. He had a stroke and Mommy called me and said, "Your father had a stroke." I was like, "So?" I realized she didn't call me because of his stroke. She called me because she needed a daughter. I moved back home, but I just didn't want to live in his house. I thought the best thing we can do to make me happy now is for me to buy a house, which is what I did. I bought a house and I said to him, "We're moving." He said, "I don't want to move." I said, "Fine, then stay here." Mommy and my son, Thomas, and the dog, and I are moving, and we're moving into my house. I thought that it was important that he understood that. When we moved, the situation changed and it became my house. Since it was my house, it ran by my rules. That was important because it made everybody happy.

Janae Pierre: You wrote this poem, I Married My Mother. At what point did you indeed marry your mother?

Nikki Giovanni: When she called me that day. I used to say that to Mommy, though. I said, "I don't know why--" After Gus was dead, and I said, "You should have married me." She said, "Well, then if I had married you, how would I have gotten you?" I said, "I don't know. We're smart. We would've figured something out." I laughed with her about it because essentially Mommy and I lived together for the last 20 years of her life, and essentially that's who I was married to. It was my mother.

Janae Pierre: 20 years, that's a healthy marriage.

Nikki Giovanni: It worked because Mommy knew that I don't like opinions, I still don't. I knew that she wasn't interested in my judgment, and I don't judge and I still don't. We got along very well.

Janae Pierre: I want to talk a bit about matriarchy and motherhood. You got a tattoo in honor of Afeni Shakur, Tupac's mother. I told you we'd come back to that Thug Life tattoo. Can you tell me about that tattoo and your relationship with Afeni?

Nikki Giovanni: When he was shot, and it was one of those things you kind of know that somebody was probably going to try to kill Tupac because he was too important. We're still talking about Tupac. There are a lot of rappers that we've totally forgotten who are totally unimportant, and we are still talking about what Tupac tried to do. When he was shot, I worried because I thought, "Oh, it's a good chance he's not going to pull through." Pac is the same age as my son, Thomas. I had some idea of what it might feel like for Afeni to be losing her son. There's nothing you can do. You can say, "Oh, I'm really sorry," or what do they say? "We are going to keep you in our thoughts and prayers."

Nobody wants to hear that crap because you're losing your child. There was nothing that I wanted to say, but I was trying to think of something to do, and I thought, "Oh, well, Paci had a Thug Life tattoo across his abdomen." I'm too old to have anything across my abdomen, but I thought, "I'll put a thug life tattoo," and I ended up putting it on my arm. I was going to put it on my face, but my mother said, "Well, if you put it on your face, you won't be able to see it." "Oh, you're right, I won't." I did want to be able to see it. It's on my left arm here.

I didn't know that that Afeni would ever know that I had it because I didn't know her. Someone took a photo of it, and somehow it got put in the New York Times. She saw it and wrote me a really just lovely note thanking me for loving her son. I thought, "Yes, of course, I do." I'm not the only one who loved him. Of course, Afeni was a Black panther, an important person. All of this comes together with what we hope our children can do.

[music]

Janae Pierre: This is a big one. We're getting towards the end of our conversation here, but this is something that really triggers me, and that's book bands. Now, we're going to get into that, but I quickly want to talk about your new children's book. In September of last year, you had a new book come out called A Library. On top of all of your poetry that a lot of us have read and studied during our college years, you've written quite a few children's books. What drew you to that type of writing?

Nikki Giovanni: First of all, I really love A Library. That's a wonderful book. I wrote it for my grandmother. No book should be banned. It's just that simple because the innocent cannot be corrupted. Somebody said, "Oh, they're doing sexual things. This book has too much sex in it." The non-sexual children don't know that. I remember my grandparents, and I'm writing about that, my grandparents were really wonderful people. I would wash dishes when I lived with them. Grandpa would sit with me and tell me stories. One day he said to me, "You know, Nikki, I only wanted to kiss your grandmother."

I'm washing dishes and thinking, "Well, what's wrong with that? He only wanted to kiss her once. What's the big deal?" She would always say, "John Brown," that was his name. "John Brown, if I had let you kiss me, you would've never married me." I thought, "Well, Colleen, I kissed her and we're not married. I was too young." You cannot corrupt the innocent. I was old before I realized that that was a metaphor, that it wasn't kissing that he had in mind. I had to laugh about it because you cannot corrupt the innocent. One of the things that people are trying to block from the books is some of the things that happened.

Our governor here in in Virginia is saying, "Well, nobody wants to read about slavery. It upsets the youngsters." It didn't upset the youngsters as much as it upset the people who were enslaved. Of course, white people should know that they did that because they did. It's not a big deal. It's just, it was done. You can't hide it because somehow somebody wants to say, "Well, we didn't mean it." Of course, you meant to. It's just like the policemen, if you put your knee on somebody's neck and they can't breathe. Of course, those policemen meant to kill that young man. Of course, they did, and they should have to hear about it.

You can't keep saying, "Well, I'm not going to talk about it and it'll go away." The two men who murdered Emmett Till and his mother, Mrs. Till, the best thing that happened was that she said, "I want the world to see what they did to my son." By showing the world, if somebody had said, and many people did, "Oh, don't show that. Close that casket, it'll upset people." It didn't upset people as much as it upset Emmett to be beaten to death. As much as it upset Mamie to have to look at her son. Why shouldn't you have to hear that this was done?

Janae Pierre: As we talk about libraries and the importance of books at a young age, we have to talk about the recent book banning in the US and in Florida. As a writer, I'm sure that it's been so hard for you to watch, and in fact, your books have also been banned from the education system in Florida. I'm wondering, how did it feel to see that happen?

Nikki Giovanni: Well, first, let me be honest. When they started banning books, I thought, "Well, banned books are a bad idea." The Nazis did that, everybody knows they had the big night, they burned the books. We know that people burned books because as Lewis Michaux who owned the National Memorial Library, he said, "Black is beautiful, but knowledge is power." We can see that every time a dictatorship wants to come in, they ban or burn books. When it started with DeSantis in Florida, and they're banning books. I'm saying, "Well, I guess I'm going to get banned." Then none of my books got banned. Toni Morrison's books got banned. Alice Walker's got-- People I knew, their books were being banned.

Janae Pierre: [chuckles] Were you jealous?

Nikki Giovanni: My books should be banned. I'm mean. I talk about people. What is it? I started to write and write them. Why aren't you banning my books? I write really terrible books. I thought, "Well, perhaps I shouldn't do that. I had to laugh at myself. I told [unintelligible 00:27:39] I said, "I do not understand why they're not banning my books." Then about a month later, I got banned. It's like, "Yes, okay. That's important." If they're going to ban books, you want to be on the side of those who are being banned. We laughed about it. You have to laugh at some of this stuff because as there are banned books, there are people who are hiding books.

Right now, there are people who are putting books away so that the Nazis in Florida, or the Nazis in Germany, or wherever you find a bunch of Nazis who are trying to ban books. The school boards here, I live here in Virginia who are trying to ban books. There are other people who are putting books away, who are hiding the books so that their children and their children's friends can come by and read them. We know this. There's a history of that, too. You have to laugh. Because if you don't laugh at some of these people, they'll make you crazy.

Janae Pierre: For sure. Are you worried about the impact those bannings will have on the next generation, be it Black kids or Brown kids?

Nikki Giovanni: I worry more about what happens to white kids because the Black kids are going to get and will get and will always get the story. We started this conversation, if you recall, with the enslaved telling their story through the spirituals and through those spirituals, building a musical, really, library. They were able to pass the story down. We will always pass our stories down. It's the white kids that don't know what's going on. Then as they find out, "Oh my goodness, look at what we've become," then they're the ones that have to correct it.

Janae Pierre: I absolutely love it when you say, "I'm just a poet. No one's going to listen to me." You're a legendary poet, and I'm sure you hear that far too many times. You're also a teacher and you have been for a while. Is that a lane that you always saw yourself in?

Nikki Giovanni: I think that it's just important, and I think that I'm just a poet because it keeps me from being made crazy. It keeps me from thinking, "Oh, I'm important." It keeps me from thinking, "Well, I better hurry up." When I go to a book signing, I will be there until the last person who wants something signed gets it signed. People will say, "Oh you got to go, they're waiting for you, they want to give you dinner, they want--" Hey, I didn't care. The person who was at the back of the line has stood there, and I'm going to stand there. I'm going to be there until that line is empty. That's what you do, you do your duty.

Janae Pierre: Nikki Giovanni is the subject of the new documentary Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. For those in New York City, you can see the film now exclusively at Film Forum. It'll be on HBO in the coming months. Nikki, it was an honor and a pleasure.

Nikki Giovanni: Thank you very much.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Just ahead, another Black woman cementing her place in history. Meet ethical fashion activist Kimberly McGlonn in conversation with Kai Wright. That's next.

[music]

Rahima Nasa: Hi, everyone. My name is Rahima, and I help produce the show. I want to remind you that if you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Here's how. First, you can email us. The address is notes@wnyc.org. Second, you can send us a voice message. Go to notesfromamerica.org and click on the green button that says "start recording". Finally, you can reach us on Twitter and Instagram. The handle for both is noteswithkai. However you want to reach us, we'd love to hear from you and maybe use your message on the show. All right, thanks. Talk to you soon.

Janae Pierre: This is Notes from America with Kai Wright. I'm Janae Pierre in for Kai, who brings us a special conversation from the intersection of fashion and history.

Kai Wright: I've got these old photos of my grandparents that I really enjoy. Literally sepia-toned snapshots taken in the '60s when they were about my age. Kids out of the house, looking relaxed and proud of their many accomplishments in life. Or I don't know, that's what I imagine they're thinking about anyway. Who knows what's actually on their minds? It's so easy to romanticize somebody else's past. I bring up these photos because, for some reason, when I look at them, my eyes are always drawn to their clothes.

[music]

Kai Wright: To my grandmother's long sleeveless A-line dresses, my grandfather's tight clip ties, the sturdy fabrics. I do not know why I am so fixated on their fashion choices, but I met someone recently who shares this curiosity.

Kimberly McGlonn: I am Dr. Kimberly McGlonn. I'm the founder and CEO of Grant Blvd, my first company, and Blk Ivy Thrift.

Kai Wright: These are both fashion businesses. I visited Kimberly at her Black Ivy Store in West Philadelphia to learn about the relationship between fashion, justice, and the history of Black Americans. The conversation is part of an ongoing series we are calling Black History Is Now.

Kimberly McGlonn: We are in a neighborhood that used to be called the Black Bottom, actually, it's a part of Philadelphia's history that is not often talked about. It used to be a predominantly Black neighborhood that lost its heart through gentrification.

Kai Wright: We are literally on the corner of-- What are we?

Kimberly McGlonn: 36 in Lancaster. We put ourselves in a historical timeline. We're about four blocks away from Dr. King gave a speech to 10,000 people in 1963 advocating for labor rights and for living wages, and so that that history sits really front and center for me in thinking about what the significance of this project is.

Kai Wright: She gave me a tour around her small shop which is housed in a converted car garage. When the stores open, the front wall rolls up to fully open the space onto Philly's busy streets, clanking trolley and all.

[background noise]

Kimberly McGlonn: When you come in, you see on the walls in the stucco a constellation of artifacts. There's a copy of the 1968 Life Magazine capturing the decade. There's a copy of prints from the Library of Congress of figures from the era like Angela Davis and sncc. There's a photo of Bernie Sanders who in 1972 was working to integrate housing at the University of Chicago. I wanted people to feel like they were being transported back into the 1950s and '60s.

Kai Wright: Amongst the artifacts I'm looking at, there's James Baldwin talking to Nina Simone and there's several of the iconic "I Am A Man" posters from the Memphis sanitation workers strike. This whole thing is rooted in the civil rights movement. Help me understand that. Explain how this connects to that initiative.

Kimberly McGlonn: For this particular project, I wanted to tell a story of how style has always been a part of the way in which we communicate our values. Dr. King's decision to wear denim in the North was an intentional act of solidarity of farm workers in the South. I wanted to bring us back into an awareness of the stories that our garments can tell. I wanted to also reinvigorate our energetic alignment and appreciation for an era which brought about all of the pivots that we needed and that we're still fighting really, really hard. I hope there's a growing sense of urgency around preserving.

Kai Wright: The stories our garments tell. I asked Kimberly to try and show me what she meant by that, so we started picking through the clothing racks.

Kimberly McGlonn: This garment is one that, as I said, it captures all of the attention to detail that's really so central to how people were thinking about design in this era. We also see a piece that I definitely think we would've seen on Coretta Scott King. It feels like an autumn afternoon. This is a dress that I'm holding up that again has that darting and the eyelet, has a beautiful belt that has been preserved despite the fact that this garment is probably close to 70 years old. All the movement that a fabric like of chiffon would offer.

Kai Wright: This is a 70-year-old garment?

Kimberly McGlonn: Yes, 70-year-old garment.

Kai Wright: Wow.

Kimberly McGlonn: Yes, 70-year-old garment.

Kai Wright: You said you probably would've seen it on Coretta Scott King. Why do you say that?

Kimberly McGlonn: I think about the Sunday's best attire. That idea that when we think about iconic women like Coretta Scott but her contemporaries, her peers in that moment, how they were thinking about how to use their dress outside of the work week to tell a story of dignity, and this dress conveys that. It's got this really elegant cinch waistline and this mini-length length to the skirt. All of that, I think, confers a sense of self-possession which I think is one of the things that Black folk in particular have always had to figure out how to navigate in a country so intent on stripping us of humanity and dignity, of self possession, of self-ownership. I think they were seeking to reaffirm that through daily wear.

Kai Wright: Say more about that. What that performance was for them, or was it a performance? Is that the way you talk about it?

Kimberly McGlonn: I think it was a performance to the extent that many of us are using costumes or using the costumng of clothes to to tell a story about a persona in a day or an emotionality that we feel in a day. I think in this era, there was certainly a fashion sense that aligned with wanting to tell a story of elegance, of class, of intellect. So much of my understanding of these things came from a book Black Ivy.

Kai Wright: That's a design book put together by the London-based fashion writer Jason Jules and published in the US a couple of years ago. In the book, Jules compiles and contextualizes iconic photos of Black men during the civil rights era wearing these classically preppy outfits.

Kimberly McGlonn: James Baldwin, Gordon Parks, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, how these Black male creatives were thinking about how to put their own spin on Ivy style. Very much so aware that there were these ivy and ivory walls that sought to segregate them and still recognizing that they could do those things and make it fresh. That they could take those same garments and add soul.

Kai Wright: Even before Kimberly found Jason Jules's book, she had been preoccupied with the civil rights era and the way Black people just moved through space in that time, how they physically navigated the world. I get that, maybe it's something about being a certain age when those people, their young versions of your parents and your grandparents.

Kimberly McGlonn: I always knew through my own deep respect for thinkers like James Baldwin, and thinkers like Lorraine Hansberry, and performers like Nina Simon, I was always hyper-aware of just how challenging it was and remains to sit at the intersection of being Black and of knowing, of being a woman and of knowing. When I say "knowing" I mean to be aware of the ways in which all of these institutional, structural apparati work to create a sense of defeat. I always loved how in that era, it seemed as though there was a real vocal effort to conquer being defeated.

Kai Wright: You will not make me bow.

Kimberly McGlonn: You will not. I will not be defeated. I will not be defeated. I like the idea of being able to celebrate that in a garment. I love that spirit, for me, of being able to choose a garment. Everything leading up to the civil rights movement, late 1960s, where Black folk could choose nothing. Seven days a week having no choice, not over your elected officials, no choice over the nature of your work or the relationship you'd have with your employee, your employer, excuse me. No choice over the nature of the schools your kids would go to or how well they'd be funded.

I think that fashion became one of the first visual ways that you could exercise choice. I love that idea of being able to play with pattern, and with color, and with shape, and with movement, and with texture, and using garments as a canvas for expressing questing for freedom.

Kai Wright: When I look at pictures of my grandparents-- And my grandparents, but certainly both my grandfathers died. I never knew them. They died young. When I look at pictures of my grandparents from that time, there is something so intoxicated. They're always dressed. They're standing around the house, and they are always dressed. There's a photo of my mother's mother that I keep near my desk and she's got these pearls on. It's everything I know about Carrie Thompson is in those pearls. [laughs] The quiet defiance. To be honest, I hadn't previously really thought actively about the way they were dressed until this conversation.

[music]

Kai Wright: I want to talk about you a little bit more. I want to read a phrase that has some meaning in your life. I just want to hear you react to it. The quote is, "You didn't lose because you weren't good enough. What you had to say wasn't what they wanted to hear."

Kimberly McGlonn: It's one of the most powerful moments in my relationship with my dad. I grew up on the north side of Milwaukee like 98% of Black folk in Milwaukee do. Many of us are great migration kids. Many of us grew up in households where our parents spoke like Southerners because they were the descendants of Southerners. As a little girl, middle schooler, one of the things I was involved in, this is in the early '90s, was forensics, which is public performance. It wasn't like theater kid, but it was like theater kid, Jason.

[laughter] It meant that you had to commit to memory of peace, and then you'd have to perform it with enthusiasm like you'd never performed before over and over again. The piece that I chose in seventh grade, so this is the early '90s, was a poem about Harriet Tubman. I remember I printed it on mint green paper, and it was covered in-- What is that plastic thing you cover things in?

Kai Wright: Laminate.

Kimberly McGlonn: Laminate.

Kai Wright: Yes, the laminate.

Kimberly McGlonn: [laughs] It was laminated. I would carry it from place to place. I got really good at it. I got so good at performing that piece around Milwaukee that I made it that year in seventh grade to state finals. That meant that my dad drove me to the final competition, and we got done with it. I came in third, not bad. Admittedly not bad. When we left that competition on the drive home, my dad, he's a bit of a poet and sometimes a little on the stoic side. He really didn't say very much until we got a good ways away before he shared with me that, it was like a random out-the-blue comment a reflection.

He said, "You didn't not come in first because you weren't the best. You didn't come in first because they weren't ready for what you had to say." That's how I've always been, I feel. Even as an emerging young adult because of my awareness, there was always a firm solidarity with like, "Look, equity matters, access matters, liberation is worth pursuing." I was a teacher, that was with me, it's been with me.

Kai Wright: Though, once Kimberly and I got to talking about family and walking down childhood memory lanes, she also mentioned in passing, actually, a really tough turn her childhood took in the years after that competition. When she was 14 years old, she and her siblings were separated from both of their parents. I asked if she wanted to talk about that.

Kimberly McGlonn: My mother really fell into a really deep depression and she thought that the safest place for her to be would be away. She got an apartment and she didn't make a plan to accommodate us, my sisters and I. Then my dad, he really tried to figure out how to be present, but he medicated the collapse of his family with crack cocaine, which was still very much a part of the landscape of the Northside Milwaukee in the '90s. He was alive but he was gone. By the time I was 17, I was couch surfing and figuring out how to land on the couch of the parents of my friends.

I was saved in a lot of ways by guardian angels, teachers and guidance counselors, and a woman who I still call Umi, who became surrogate parent figures, who believed in me.

Kai Wright: What did that mean for you? How do you think that part of your life shaped you?

Kimberly McGlonn: I think that suffering is really fertile soil for cultivating compassion and tenderness and grace for people. I think that of all of the professional, all of the creative work that I've done, all of the community building that I've done, it's really in alignment with all that I've learned about creating space and learning how to forgive and learning how to recognize that none of us are heroes or villains. We do things that are heroic. We do things that someone else might perceive as villainous in a moment. That the only way that we survive is by extending the grace to people that we need extended to us. I think the only way that I arrived at that is from having to learn how to continuously practice grace and tenderness.

[music]

Kai Wright: Kimberly's vintage store in Philly or Shoppable Museum, as she prefers to call it, it's not her first foray into socially conscious fashion business. In 2017, she created a clothing manufacturer called Grant Boulevard, also based out of Philly. Its mission is to create jobs for women who have been incarcerated or who have experienced homelessness by making sustainably sourced garments. Really with this business, Kimberly just wants to make fashion consumers change our whole relationship to the clothes we wear. You talked about this a little before, but I just want to prod you to do it again about what we as consumers coming into a shop looking at our garments and thinking about the relationship to labor. What you're trying to get consumers to think about.

Kimberly McGlonn: That's a beautiful question because that's the work. When you walk into Black Ivy, you're going to see this visual story of these figures that these thought leaders that have been so central to how I've come to read the world. When you walk into Grant Boulevard, you're going to see a cost formula. I want you to recognize that when you are buying something, that there's a formula that determines what you're paying for it. For a lot of companies, there's no sensibility around labor. We really don't even know how much very much of anything costs. Most of us don't realize that when you buy a garment that's $5, that garment was made where someone, often an adolescent girl, in the case of the Uyghurs in China, who are absolute slaves.

For those of us who say that we align ourselves with freedom, for those of us who say that we believe in human rights, when our garments are sitting antipathetically to that, we are destroying our moral high ground. What I hope consumers will think about in choosing Grant Boulevard is that we're trying to build something that's replicable. All across this country, we have people who are saying we need to address crime. We have very few people who are thinking about how do we solve for poverty. I'm optimistic that this project of partnering with cities and partnering with nonprofits to identify folk disproportionately Black and Brown women who have been neglected at every turn, that we can provide a safe culture to begin again. That we can get consumers to invest differently in their own cities, in their own neighbors, in a way that feels and looks beautiful.

Kai Wright: That is an inspiring thought and a great place to stop. I really appreciate this. I am going to have to shop your shop before I get out of here.

Kimberly McGlonn: Let's go [crosstalk 00:49:36] looking right. Okay?

Kai Wright: It's really an inspiring story, and I thank you for the time, Kimberly.

Kimberly McGlonn: Thank you so much.

[music]

Kai Wright: Kimberly McGlonn is the owner of Black Ivy Thrift and the clothing manufacturer Grant Boulevard, both businesses based in Philadelphia. I spoke to her as part of our Black History Is Now series. We're talking to people who have been provoked and inspired by something in Black history and have set out to bring that history forward into the future. You can find previous segments by going to notesfromamerica.org and look for the specials tab.

Janae Pierre: Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios. Find us wherever you get your podcast and @noteswithkai on Instagram. Mixing this week by Mike Kuchman and Alan Goffinski. Theme music by Jared Paul. Our team also includes Karen Frillman, Suzanne Gaber, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, David Norville, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. André Robert Lee is our executive producer. I'm Janae Pierre sitting in this week for Kai Wright. Thanks for listening.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.