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Aryana Noroozi
Community members joined a discussion led by Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds and Hardy Brown II about Black history, the origin of Black Voice News and their work as local government watchdogs. The conversation chronicled the legacy of Black Voice News and examined community stories told through text, data, visuals and mapping mediums.
Black Voice News photojournalist Aryana Noroozi set up a pop-up news station to capture portraits and conduct interview sessions with attendees to learn more about their family history, connection to the IE and personal celebration of Black history. As Black History Month 2024 comes to a close, Black history in the Inland Empire occurs every day. Check out what the community had to say about their lifelong celebrations of Black history in their pop-up sessions below.
Jeannette Roberts, 65, Sherina Roberts, 34, and Journie Bland, 6, are three generations that each call San Bernardino home. Jeannette’s parents moved to the region from Alabama and Oklahoma. Her connection to the community started at a young age as she recalled watching the drill team at SB Valley College with her late mother. She cherishes the Black Cultural Foundation, especially the Inghram Library as she knew Dorothy Inghram personally.
Jeannette Roberts said her favorite memory of celebrating Black history was the parade held every year near her home. Sherina Roberts also shared this as one of her favorite memories, fondly recounting getting up early with family and friends to watch.
Journie Bland said she recognized Martin Luther King Jr. on a shirt after learning about him in school.
“[I hope that they] introduce her generation to [reading] the newspaper… It’s nothing like getting that newspaper. That’s what this is all about – the newspapers, [to] have it in your hand,” said Jeanneatte Roberts, about Bland’s generation.
Sherina Roberts used to work for Cheryl Brown, Publisher Emeritus of the Black Voice News, when she was a California Assembly member, making calls for her office.
“I hope we come together more,” Roberts said about the Black community today. “[It’s] Such a negative world, we need to try to come back as one.”
April Anteur moved to Ontario from Los Angeles with her family in 1994, then to the City of San Bernardino in 2001, where they have been ever since.
Anteur cherishes being together with her family and hopes where she currently lives continues to stay safe and walkable.
When it comes to Black history, “We can do absolutely everything,” Anteur said. “There’s nothing that we can’t do given the opportunity and taking it. We’re going to excel.”
Janita Moore’s mother moved to San Bernardino when she was five years old in 1969. Moore’s grandmother came to Blythe, California in 1949 with her parents who were sharecroppers from Arkansas.
“My family has always celebrated our Blackness and always made it a priority to make sure that we were a part of a community where we celebrated our culture, we celebrated our history, and just made sure that we knew who we were,” Moore said about her upbringing in San Bernardino.
She added that while a teacher at Hardy Brown College Prep, she shared her passion for Black history with her students. Today she works in education policy.
“We could always use more unity. The world is very divisive. We find that within the Black culture, that the world is just a smaller version, a more colorful version of the actual world that we live in,” Moore said. “It’s important to have conversations that are hard, and that are leading people to make their own choices about how to fit into the diaspora.”
Moore learned Black history in school, but was surrounded by it when she came home. She recalled always seeing photographs, magazines and a Black encyclopedia that her grandmother and mother’s God mom whom she called Joanne Dion, an organist at a Church in San Bernardino, would share with her.
“I was always surrounded by an understanding of Black history so it taught me just [to] seek it more,” Moore said.
Denise Davis and Aaron Shorter became engaged last November and are celebrating their child’s first birthday in March. Davis came to the Inland Empire from Las Vegas in 2002 to attend college and Shorter moved from Indianapolis to Perris when he was two years old.
“One of the things I love most about our families is that we have a lot of shared values. Obviously, [from] different backgrounds, different life experiences, but really shared values around equity, social justice and inclusion,” Davis said.
“I just really hope people really start seeing some equity,” Shorter said about his hopes for the Black community and humanity as a whole. “The state that our country is in [we’re] seeing a lot of rights and freedoms and things being challenged, if not taken away… I hope people don’t get led astray.” He urged everyone to vote.
Davis attended a diverse high school in Las Vegas where she remembered Black history being taught, but her strongest memories of Black history came from her uncle at home.
“His parents were leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in Las Vegas. His mom was actually the first Black show girl on the Las Vegas Strip,” she said. “Growing up celebrating holidays with them, talking with them over dinner about what they went through to help desegregate the Las Vegas Strip has always been really powerful for me.”
Andre Harrington, Kathryn Ervin and Kristi Papailler, natives of Washington D.C., Detroit and Louisville respectively, each found a home in the Inland Empire after joining California State University, San Bernardino’s (CSUSB) theater department. They are the only three Black professors within the department.
Harrington said he was reminded of Black history during a recent morning while cooking with a cast iron skillet. He remembered when a colleague, a UCLA anthropologist, “spoke about her grandmother that walked from Tennessee to northern California and brought the frying pan,” he said. “So, the tenacity, the longevity of a frying pan — that’s what I thought about today.”
Ervin moved to the region in 1989 as the first Black faculty member of CSUSB’s theater department. She served twice as chair of the department. “I cherish our longevity, strength and resiliency, and especially this year,” Ervin said about the Black community. “I am struck by how we keep on keeping on in spite of everything that’s going on. There’s a lot to be thankful for and there are people still doing the work.”
Growing up, most of Ervin’s knowledge of Black history came from church.
“It wasn’t a thing [in school] when I was growing up until much later, so Black history was when you went to church and they told you who graduated and why we’re proud of them, who joined the service and so every first was named in church.”
Andrea Shorter came to the region as a child, with her brother Aaron, from Indianapolis in 1979 when her father took a job in telecommunications to build cable infrastructure as the area developed.
Shorter said that there are few Black folks in the region that had the means to connect people and build a community movement like the Brown family, referring to Hardy and Cheryl Brown, publishers emeritus of Black Voice News and their children, including Dr. Paulette Brown Hinds and Hardy Brown II, hosts of the day’s event.
“The Black Voice has just grown in such a way that it’s so multidimensional to me, how it’s developed. It’s really thought outside of the box in a number of ways in terms of how it’s integrating and how it serves communities,” Shorter said.
If you enjoyed this special feature please watch for upcoming events! If you have topics you would like to come together and discuss in a future community pop-up session, please contact aryana@blackvoicenews.com.
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