My latest: Working to keep land in Black family hands

Dear friends,

This radiant image is of Ebony Woodruff, a Louisiana attorney on a mission. I am eager to share her story with you this week.

https://apeaceofmymind.org/2025/09/04/ebony-woodruff/

When Ebony entered law school, she was planning to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said. 

But the faculty at Southern University Law Center, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged students to return to their communities and make a difference. Their words stuck with her after graduation. Ebony combined her passion for food and her concern for civil rights—and found her place fighting Black land loss. 

The phrase “land loss” sounds a bit clinical. The reality is brutal. Almost all the hard-earned acreage that Black Americans acquired after the Civil War has been forced from them by mob violence, bank and government discrimination, and harmful inheritance laws. According to one study, Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997. Ebony’s work focuses on a piece of the inheritance system that enables predatory developers to force land out of family hands.

I interviewed Ebony in New Orleans this summer for “Still Here,” a multimedia series published by the storytelling project A Peace of My Mind. I learned so much about how the law, when applied in a world tainted by inequalities, can strip away a family’s multigenerational wealth. 

Check it out at the link above. Or listen on your podcast app. It’s a good listen. 

My partner on this project is photographer John Noltner, A Peace of My Mind’s founder and director. With this interview, I discovered how far John will travel for a beautiful image.

Before we met Ebony, John had asked her about possible locations for her portrait. She mentioned a sugarcane field two hours away, but added that there were also closer fields. John wanted to take the photograph at a place that held special meaning for her. So we caravanned 130 miles to a farm in New Iberia owned by June and Angie Provost. The Provosts, who were featured in the 1619 Project podcast, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture over systemic racism against Black farmers. Now they have created a heritage center that hosts workshops, exhibits, and community events centered around land stewardship.

You can see from the photo above that Ebony and John’s instincts were right.

Here’s a sunset selfie that John took with Ebony, the Provosts (making peace signs), his summer interns and me:

Plus, what I’m reading:

• Katy Reckdahl on giving birth in New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina, and a full-circle moment 20 years later.

• Hilton Als on coming out at Columbia in the early 1980s. This one fascinated me because Als and I are the same age and attended private universities six miles apart. Yet our experiences were so different. His world: “Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) … In those days, professors addressed you by your surname.” Mine: not that.

What I’m listening to:

The Homework Machine, a series from the Teachlab podcast about the impact of artificial intelligence on K-12 education. Produced by Jesse Dukes.

Some journalism by my talented current and former students:

• Jothi Gupta, writing in The Mill about a playground murder in Manchester, England that remains contentious almost 40 years later.

• Riya Sharma, writing in the Tampa Bay Times about how state-government decisions are keeping children underfed during the summer.

• Andrew Long, writing in The Assembly about what happens to fandom when college athletics become more professional.

• Natalie Alms’ reporting on federal tech policy for Nextgov, like this article on how the Trump administration is deleting environmental information and this one on cuts to a disease tracking system.

Back next week with Episode 4 of “Still Here”: my interviews with Alex Kolker, an oceanographer who made a revealing discovery during the COVID-19 lockdown, and Prasanta Subudhi, a scientist developing rice that will endure climate change. See you Sept. 11.

All best,

Barry Yeoman