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Morgan State University students conducting research on the African Diaspora worked with Eddie Conway and the Coalition of Friends on the urban farm in Gilmor homes
Story Transcript
Eddie Conway: Welcome to the Real News. I’m Eddie Conway, and I’m coming to you from Baltimore Gilmore Homes. I’m here with a number of Morgan State University students and two of their professors. They’re down here in the Gilmor Homes community to help with the Urban Garden and to just do something that help the community in terms of activities. The camera will be following them around as they do a little bit of hard labor, and every once in a while, it’ll flash on me sitting on the side somewhere. Angela McMillan Howell: My students and I are here today as part of the Benjamin Quarles Institute Summer Research Program. This program is geared towards preparing the next generation of scholars and PhDs from Morgan State University and the College of Liberal Arts. Each of them is doing fantastic research on all aspects of the African Diaspora, particularly on Baltimore, Maryland, and using sources such as the Afro-American Newspaper to illuminate different issues. We have students working on everything from gay rights issues in the 1980s and ’90s during the height of the HIV AIDS crisis to students who are working on the use of language and its perpetuation of race in the media. Today, we’ve been touring the Real News Network and also working here with the Coalition of Friends at Gilmor Homes and the accompanying Garden Flats, and the reason why we brought our students here is because we really want them to have a grounded sense of what it means to be a scholar and particularly a scholar activist so that they believe that when they earn their degrees and they are teaching the next generation of students, they understand how their research fits into the everyday lives of disenfranchised groups, how they can be a mouthpiece for students of color and people of color, communities of color all over the world, and to just give them a sense of doing something for someone else. This is our last week of the program, so this is an exciting capstone experience that I know they will never forget.