Coming soon is the podcast series "A Colored Girl Speaks: Meditations on Race and Other Magical Things." Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I have journeyed through colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own.

In this 13-episode series, as my biography unfolds in ordinary and profound ways on the edges of the American promise, I gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, see the website www.andreahunter.com, and connect with us on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

A Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team:

Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer

Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist

Vernonia Thornton, Announcer

Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I journeyed colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own. It was a near hypertensive crisis that led me to gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please visit the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

References, Resources, and Copyright

• Drylongso: African American vernacular, adopted from the Gullah dialect, means ordinary, customary, plain, or every day. Also, can be used to describe something previously rare becoming commonplace. See also John L. Gwaltney (1993). Drylongso: A self-portrait of Black America. New York: New Press
• ·Glossolalia are utterances approximating words and speech, usually produced during states of intense religious experience, as in “speaking in tongues."
• I’m Glad Salvation is Free. Hymn written by Isaac Watts (b. 1674 – d.1748), performed by Manual Lloyd.

A Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team:

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

I revisit what was but I do not long for an American past or seek the romanticisms of a segregated ethnic enclave. I go home to places where I been for the same reasons all those people left my Aunt Fannie to be guardian of so many memories—to know I am, and we were.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please visit the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

References, Resources, and Copyright

• Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Recognized as one of the most well-known Negro (African American) spirituals dating to the era of slavery in the United States. 
• Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (track 14)., performed by Odetta at Carnegie Hall, 1960. Courtesy of Concord Music Group.

A Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team:

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

A generation beyond enslavement and into the twentieth century, my family sought freedom’s promise, something more than the American Dream. Gathered are fragments of stories told on the way of saying something else---stories of nation, family, and the tenaciousness of will

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please visit the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

References, Resources, and Copyright

• Marion Post Wolcott, an American photographer, was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, during the Great Depression, 1938 – 1942. Wolcott, M. P. (2008). The photographs of Marion Post Wolcott. London: Giles.
• Shotgun house, a common southern housing architectural style during the 1920’s, had a rectangular and narrow shape with front and back doors in straight alignment with one another.
• 1928 Florida hurricane, also known as the Okeechobee Hurricane, was a category 4-5 storm, killed at least 2,500 people in the state, of these nearly 30% were black. Victims were also buried (set afire) in mass graves due to the heat and health considerations. This is also the storm that Zora Neale Hurston references in her book, Their Eyes were Watching God. See also Nicole S. Brochu,  Florida’s forgotten storm: 1928 Hurricane. The Sun Sentinel (September 14, 2003).; See Eliot Kleinberg (2016) Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928. Florida Historical Society Press.
• 1945 Homestead Hurricane hit Homestead, Florida on September 15. 1945. Wind gusts up to 150 mph, and sustained winds from 130 mph to 140 mph have been reported. This was also my aunts' birthday, who was rendered unconscious by flying debris, she was 14 on that day.
• The Great War: World War I or the First World War. Fought in Europe from July 28, 1914 until November 11, 1918, and the United States entered the work in April 1917. It is estimated that 350,00 to 400,00 black men were enlisted in the U.S. Army.
• The 1918 Flu Epidemic, also known as The Spanish Flu, affected over 500 million people, and global death toll is estimated at between 17 and 50 million globally, and up to 675,000 Americans died. See John M. Berry, The great influenza: The story of the deadliest plague in history. Viking Press (2004).
• Camp Devens, U.S Army base built in 1917, located in Massachusetts, was at the epicenter of the virulent second wave of the pandemic. See Catherine Arnold, Pandemic: Eyewitness accounts of the greatest medical holocaust in modern history. St. Martin Press (2018). Byerly C. R. (2010). The U.S. military and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Public health reports (Washington, D.C. 1974), 125 Suppl3, 82–91.

A Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

My mother was not afraid of anything, and by that, I mean she did not fear the powerful. In the wake of the killing of four little girls like me, she pushed the color line with me in tow. I was to be on the frontlines of a movement, and so were all the other Negro children of my generation in the South who were called to do something that had not yet been done, something the nation still was not yet quite ready to do.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please see the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

References, Resources, and Copyright

• Hurricane Andrew was a destructive Category 5 storm, highest sustained winds 175 mph, that struck South Florida in August 1992, the eyewall moved across Homestead and Florida City which sustained substantial damage. Hurricane Andrew Fact Sheet | III. (2017). Property damage $27. 3billion (192, US), and 65 deaths.
• Fort Valley State College A public and historically black university in Fort Valley, Georgia. Founded in 1895.
• Jim Crow was a popular character in 19th century ministry, where white men donned blackface and enacted the character in entertainment shows. See A. Costly (2019). A Brief History of Jim Crow - Constitutional Rights Foundation; and Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University. Jim Crow later referred to de facto social customs and de jure state and local laws in the southern United States that codified racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans and other non-whites in education, transportation, housing, employment and recreation,  first enacted in the 19th century (after Reconstruction) through the early 20th century.
• The Sixteenth Street Baptist St. Church, Birmingham, AL. was a large and prominent church in the African American community. Youth participating in The Children Crusade met here and left from this church for their march (May 1963). In September 1963, the church was bombed by white supremacist terrorist group killing four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. See George, D., McKinstry, C., McKinstry, C. M. (2011). While the world watched: A Birmingham bombing survivor comes of age During the Civil Rights Movement: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., and Four Little Girls, Spike Lee, Director. 

The Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

I was queen of the May Day festivities and, like so many things in the colored world in which I was raised it was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance. As a kindergartener, I did not racially mark this moment because whiteness was immaterial to me, but this would not be so for long as more history was to be made.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, see the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

References, Resources, and Copyright

•  The bunny hop is a popular novelty dance of the 1950s and 1960s, with a song.
• May Day: Spring festival recognized as a public holiday celebrated on May 1st commonly celebrated at Negro schools. See May Day: America’s traditional radical, and complicated holiday, Part I. National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/may-day-americas-traditional-radical-complicated-holiday-part-1%20%20expand.
• Can can is a creolin and tulle slip worn to create bellowing skirt, most often worn under fancy dresses for girls.
• Afro-American Life-Insurance Company founded in 1901 by Abraham Lincoln Lewis and his associates. A.L. Lewis, b. 1865 – 1947, would be Florida’s first black millionaire. In 1935, he purchased 200 -acre tract along the Atlantic Ocean, which he named American Beach, It was a thriving vacation spot for African Americans, from the 1930s to the 1950s. American Beach including homes, beach rentals, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses.
•  Ariel is a character in the Danish fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, written by Hans Christian Andersen first published in 1837. The character was popularized in the 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid. In the original tale, to walk and to dance on her new legs caused excruciating pain, as if daggers.

The Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

I first laid claim to social protest on a walk from the “white” elementary school, as we still called it. I encountered two white boys with BB rifles aimed at my head; they fired, and I refused to run. All these years later, I wonder what it will take to walk the last mile of the way.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please visit the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

The Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants

My elders had seen everything there was to fear, and they knew that the power that resided in man was not the power of God. Because of them, I know what wisdom means and the gentleness of humility, and I know what only a communion with the dead can tell.

For more on A Colored Girl Speaks, please visit the website, www.andreahunter.com, and connect with me on Twitter @IamAndreaHunter and subscribe to this podcast.

We also invite you to share your stories and meditations, and to ask for those stories not yet given.

 References, Resources, and Copyright

• The Holy Ghost referenced in the Christian faith as God, and the third member of the trinity, The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost (Spirit).
• A Charge to Keep I Have is a hymn by Charles Wesley first published in 1762. Discipleship Ministries. (2019). History of Hymns.
• A Charge to Keep I Have. Performed by an untitled church congregation
• Zora Neale Hurston, African American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. Author of the groundbreaking 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The Colored Girl Speaks Podcast Team

• Andrea Hunter, Essayist and Producer
• Tiera Chiama Moore Narrator, Co-Producer and Vocal Artist
• Vernonia Thornton, Announcer
• Jamonica Brown and Deanna Floyd, Production Assistants