The late autumn wind began to bite during the 1838 Black Metropolis walking tour last year, but historian Michiko Quinones warmed the 10 participants with stories of riches, a riot and secret dealings in Philly’s antebellum Black community. “Some 20,000 Black people lived in Philadelphia in the late 1830s,” Quinones said. “The 1838 census showed
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In a photo, Morgan Burrell stands on the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, flexes her bicep, and looks down in reverence as the sun catches her shadow. The Philly entrepreneur created her online fitness, coaching, and mindset business, Get Mo Phit (Physically Healthy & Internally Tenacious) with the goal of helping women transform their overall
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Watch how We Love Philly’s program at One Arts Center is teaching students how to heal themselves and their communities through mindfulness and entrepreneurship and what the school district can learn from this program. Read the full story here.
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When you approach the storefronts at 52nd and Warren streets, just off Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, you might notice the handcrafted facades of One Art Community Center’s Earthship-style building, which uses glass bottles and cans placed in cement to provide structure and light. In the center’s backyard, a group of students are working on
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Tucked into a little corner of Germantown, there’s a backyard garden unlike any other. At the entrance there’s a black-and-white sign with a combined triangle and circle logo. After passing through the barbed-wire gate, there’s a stone path passing several trees and plants along the side of the house. In the back, a circular garden
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Years ago, my parents told Miss Farber, a white 60ish teacher at the elementary school in our Black working-class neighborhood, that when my brother and I graduated they would enroll us in a junior high program for gifted students. “There’s a Hebrew element at that school,” Miss Farber said, “and your children won’t make it.”
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Tapeta Mayson, Philadelphia’s 2020-2021 poet laureate, knows that residents of Germantown can have mixed feelings about water. The area is susceptible to flooding during heavy rains and the loss and displacement that sometimes comes as a result. A native of Liberia who grew up in North Philly and Germantown, Mayson—in addition to being a poet—is
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On a cold February morning, a new birding group huddled up at the John James Audubon Center in Audubon, Montgomery County. Though there’s nothing remarkable about birders getting together at the museum, the former home of America’s most famous birder, what was remarkable was what they were celebrating—the launch of a more accessible kind of
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Wei Chen grimaces and shakes his head when talking about how it’s been a hard year for many in Philly’s Asian community. “It’s at the point where many of our elders are afraid to go out,” says Chen, 30, civic engagement coordinator for Asian Americans United (AAU). Wei Chen of Asian Americans United under the
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When Tya Winn was in college, she was the only Black female student out of 500 in her architecture program. “Five days a week, I’d have class until 6 p.m., and I’m the only Black female. It was alienating. When I’d come home from class, I never had someone who I could talk to that
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Calvin Keeys didn’t see many people like him working in conservation. “Growing up I didn’t have a lot of Black naturalists to look up to,” Keeys says. When his father brought home information about MobilizeGreen, an internship program at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum that connects young BIPOC people with careers in
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