PBS News Student Reporting Labs, our journalism training program, takes us to a family farm in Upper Marlborough, Maryland, to meet Cameron Oglesby. They bring you the story of her family’s struggle to hold onto their land, which inspired her to want to tell stories of environmental justice.
Geoff Bennett:
Finally tonight, a story from PBS News Student Reporting Labs, our high school journalism training program. They take us to a family farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., to meet Cameron Oglesby, who explains how her family struggled to hold on to its land and inspired her to want to tell stories of environmental justice.
Cameron Oglesby, Environmental Justice Advocate:
We’re coming up on our centennial year. Our farm is turning 100 in March.
This is what it’s all about. I have received so much of my own familial history just in sitting down to conversations learning from my nana.
Woman:
Look at me.
Cameron Oglesby:
Oh, you don’t know when this was?
Woman:
Yes, we picketed in Baltimore and downtown D.C. at the capitol.
Cameron Oglesby:
I remember when I was a kid, and my nana would be going out in the garden or she would be using her own vegetables to make things. I was just absolutely obsessed with everything she was doing out here.
Woman:
They were full of berries.
Cameron Oglesby:
Land is wealth in this country, and I have seen that right stripped away from so many people for no other factor than they are descendant of enslaved peoples or that they are indigenous.
Some of the challenges the farm has dealt with include my great-great-grandfather had to sell-off portions of the land just to maintain it. In more recent years, my uncle and my nana have contended with someone trying to build a prison next door, trying to set up facilities that would generally reduce our quality of life.
We have been very fortunate that every attempt to do that has been thwarted in a way that allows us to continue to use the property as we would like to and as we are entitled to. I think that’s sort of the connection that helps me bring a different perspective to the work that I do.
As an oral historian, I can point back to my own people and say I know exactly what you are going through, and I want to help you protect this for yourselves.
We are archiving something that people’s children and their descendants can go back to forever. The Environmental Justice Oral History Project is a repository that I founded to tell a comprehensive, resilience-based, joy-based story of environmental justice communities in the U.S. South.
It’s really critical that we understand the power of storytelling to get people riled up and to make people cry and to give people joy and to really bring out the emotions that undergird all movement work.
The fact that we have this untouched property here, I can’t even put into words what it means and how unheard of it feels. I need to protect this place. I need to invest in this place. This place needs to persist. It is a symbol that is the most fundamental right. Land is wealth in this country. That’s that generational wealth, man.
It’s really solidified for me how important it is for me to be picking up this torch and keeping that work going.
