WCTC: Black History Month: Conversations with Nyle Fort & George Floyd's Family

Location via Zoom: https://wctc.zoom.us/j/97499238920

Selwyn Miles Jones was born and raised in Goldsboro, NC. His parents worked as sharecroppers. In the 1970s, racism down south was tough. It was normal to be called the N-word when working in the tobacco fields. What could one do? His mother and father were uneducated and with very little work experience outside of home. They were too timid and frightened by the white man’s authority to challenge any mistreatment of their kids. If they did, the family would be forced to move out of the sharecropper’s house immediately.

Angela Harrelson, George Floyd’s aunt, grew up in a shack surrounded by tobacco fields in eastern North Carolina, and she was taught by her sharecropper parents how to get along in a country that made black people sit in the back of the bus. She worked the tobacco fields during high school to pay for school clothes, became head cheerleader and won the title of Ms. Congeniality in the local beauty pageant.

NyleFort is a minister, activist, and scholar based in Newark, NJ. He has worked in education, criminal justice, and youth development for over a decade in various capacities including: the national director of Communities Against Militarized Police; founder and co-director of the Organizing Praxis Lab at Princeton University; and lead trainer at Momentum, an activist incubator that builds large-scale social movements in the United States and around the world.