In this episode, we talk with sisters Alice Jones and Corrine Antoinette Smith. Alice and Corinne are the granddaughters of Corinne Antoinette Tureaud, great aunt of our earlier guest, AP Turead Jr., but a great aunt whom he never knew.

They were strangers to each other because in a moment of economic crisis when the elder Corinne was a young woman, she and three of her sisters Louise, Carmen, and Virginia, decided to leave the Tureaud family and live the rest of their lives as white women. The other eight siblings stayed. While that choice was known to all twelve siblings, they decided to mostly keep it a secret from future generations.

Over a century later, Alice bought her sister, Corinne, an Ancestry DNA subscription for Christmas, and the results raised questions for the sisters. Through their own genealogical search, the two of them managed to reconnect with their long-lost relatives. Over a century after four sisters made this choice, the Tureaud family has been reunited. They held the first complete family reunion in over 100 years in New Orleans in the summer of 2022. What follows is Alice and Corinne’s story, and in many ways their grandmother, Corinne Antoinette Tureaud’s story, of unequal opportunity in America.

This month's episode is about Marie McGruder, a fifth-generation descendant of Charles McGruder, and great granddaughter of Charles McGruder, Jr. who Marie believes was the first Black landowner in Greene County, Alabama. After emancipation, the McGruder family joined together, purchasing and then farming large homesteads that were home to multiple groups of relatives. But as each generation grew larger and moved further from the land, the ability to manage this distant homestead also became a strain on relationships among relatives, which ultimately led the fourth-generation descendants (Marie’s father’s generation) to make the difficult decision to sell the land. After receiving a check in the mail in 2020 for her share of a property sale, Marie made a series of decisions that led her to reassemble over 100 acres of her great grandfather Charles Jr.’s original landholdings. She has spent the last year creating a business plan to make profitable use of the land that could also chart a new course for heirs' property throughout the South. Heirs' property is land that never went through a formal succession, and often leaves inheriting family members without important legal protections that would otherwise be in place. What follows is the story of 300 acres in Greene County, AL and Marie’s story of unequal opportunity in America. 

In this episode, we are talking with Angela Kyle about her family’s multi-generational connection to Carpenter’s Creek in Pensacola, Florida. Angela’s great, great grandfather, Fred Hudgins, bought 10 acres of land adjacent to the creek in 1901. That land was inherited by his wife, Jennie Hudgins, and two acres of that land (the part that is not adjacent to Carpenter’s Creek) remains in the family today. The other 8 acres, which included the Creek access, were sold by her great grandparents, Sim and Minnie Dawson, in 1956, seven years after Jennie’s death. After the sale, that land was redeveloped as an all-white subdivision in an area that came to be known as Spring Hill. According to a 1959 letter to the editor, prominent Pensacola businessman, town leader, and member of the KKK, TT Wentworth, promised continued public access to Carpenter’s Creek when it was sold. The creek had come to be used for baptisms for Black churches on Sundays and recreation by both Blacks and Whites throughout the week. This access was especially important for the Black community because their options for recreation and religious gathering places were severely constrained by segregation. Mr. Wentworth reneged on that promise, and Carpenter’s Creek was cut off from all Pensacolans, but especially its black community for the last 66 years. But thanks to the 2012 Restore ACT, and the concerted efforts of a number of local residents, including Angela and her mother, Carpenter’s Creek is enjoying something of a renewal. Angela has joined us today to share this story, her family’s story, of Carpenter’s Creek and unequal opportunity in America.