THE SUM OF US
“Flipping Burgers”
Season One, Episode Four
Futuro Studios / Higher Ground Productions / Spotify
Heather McGhee: I want to tell you about somebody I met in Kansas City, Missouri.
Heather McGhee: And there’s Terrence, hey!
Terrence Wise: Hey!
Heather McGhee: Just off your shift. How was it?
Terrence Wise: Crappy!
Heather McGhee: (laughs) Crappy!
Terrence Wise: But we’re working on that. Yeah.
Heather McGhee: Good to see you!
Terrence Wise: Yes, it is, always!
Heather McGhee: His name is Terrence Wise. He grew up in a small town in South Carolina.
Terrence Wise: We was that one mall, one gas station, one grocery store type of city. You know, everyone knew everybody. We stayed in the country a lot. I'm talking dirt roads, still, things of that nature. We run around barefoot. So I grew up in the good old south, you know?
Heather McGhee: He was a top student.
Terrence Wise: And uh everybody in the neighborhood called me at the nerd, the nerd boy, because I read everything I could get my hands on…
Heather McGhee: His mom worked in fast food most of her life, at a Hardee’s. Her paycheck was never enough. So when Terrence was 16, he started working at a Taco Bell making 4.25 an hour, and he and a friend moved into their own apartment. Terrence took on more and more shifts. Eventually he was working so much he had to drop out of school. And even still, he couldn’t afford rent. So when he was 18, he went to live with his uncle in Kansas City. He went back to school – and back to work in fast food.
Terrence Wise: And where did I go? I went back to KFC Taco Bell. One year, two year, three year, four year, yeah. Caught in that cycle again of trying to work your way out of it.
Heather McGhee: 24 years later, he’s made a life for himself in Kansas City. He’s in his early 40s, and he still works in fast food. It’s here in this city where he met Moeisha (Mo) – his fiance of 20 years.
Terrence Wise: And we have three beautiful daughters, Daisy and Dasuna- and the baby Diandria. Yes, we went with the D theme, as you can see.
Heather McGhee: They keep putting off the wedding until they can afford the one they dream of. It’s been hard for Terrence to support his family on the minimum wage. Obviously. But he and his fiance have tried to protect their three daughters from the worst parts of living on the edge with love and a little bit of creativity…
Terrence Wise: I remember when the light just get cut off, we would be like yeah, the storm knocked them out y'all, everybody lights out. No, it's just ours. So we kind of shielded our kids from poverty, poor, we made stuff hype I make a peanut butter jelly sandwich taste like steak, and so they never really thought they were missing out.
Heather McGhee: Terrence blamed himself for his family’s struggle to stay afloat.
Terrence Wise: And I just thought that it was something I was doing wrong. Maybe I wasn't working hard enough.
Heather McGhee: When I was president of the think tank Demos, we crunched the numbers and found that fast food has the biggest average pay gap between CEOs and workers of any industry in America. Over a thousand to one. Terrence would have to work a thousand years to make what a CEO in his industry makes in one. The problem of low paid work in America is not a small one. There are about 50 million people who are making less than ten dollars an hour. Not enough to meet their basic needs. It begs the question: Is the American Dream based on some people doing really well while some are barely making it, often having to compete with their co-workers to try and get ahead? That’s what it felt like to Terrence who said he would often throw co-workers under the bus to try and make himself look better..
Terrence Wise: You know, he ain’t doing his job. You know, he ain’t no hard worker. I am. You know, you just trying to get ahead. You trying to get up there by yourself and you never will by yourself.
Heather McGhee: And yet, Terrence says he loves his job.
Terrence Wise: I love interacting with customers and what I do. Do you know, my company made five billion dollars in profit. My company probably made more than yours.
Heather McGhee: And actually last year McDonald’s made over 7.5 billion dollars in profit. Even though Terrence calls it “my company,” that wealth doesn’t trickle down to him or any of the more than 3 million fast food workers in this country. Recently, there’s been a big push to change that. Well, more than a push. A social movement. One that would change Terrence’s life and his understanding of who was on his side.
Heather McGhee: Especially after he met someone unexpected. A white woman, named Bridget.
Bridget Hughes: Because I'm flipping burgers, I'm somehow less than. And for many years, like I was trapped in that mentality.
Heather McGhee: This story is about her and Terrence. About two minimum wage workers - one white and one Black - living in one of the country’s most segregated cities. It’s a story about a movement that helped them discover that they had the power to fix together what nobody can fix alone.
Heather McGhee: From Higher Ground and Futuro Studios, I’m your host Heather McGhee. And this is The Sum Of Us, a podcast documenting my journey around the United States, in search of hope and solidarity.
Heather McGhee: At the same time that Terrence was struggling in Kansas City, fast food workers in New York were deciding to organize.
<Archival> Democracy Now: Fast food workers walked off the job, to hold a series of rallies and picket lines Thursday in what's been called the largest series of worker actions ever to hit the country's fast food industry.
Heather McGhee: New York Fast food workers launched a movement in 2012 for 15 dollars an hour and a union. They called themselves The Fight for 15. And the movement has only grown since…including to Kansas City, with an organization called Stand Up KC.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: Kansas City’s got your back, and I’ll keep fighting here and wherever the fight takes me until we win 15 and a union!
<Archival> Stand Up KC: …Fight back! When worker’s rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!
Heather McGhee: The first time Terrence heard about the fight for 15, he’d just had an argument with Mo.
Terrence Wise: It was a Sunday me and Mo, fiance, arguing about bills. I'm already working two jobs. My solution on that day was to get a third one. And that day, uh, that's when workers came in and uh, started talking to me about a movement.
Heather McGhee: At the time he was working at Burger King. And he was in the lobby sweeping floors when he heard people walk in. He looks up to greet customers, but sees they’re all wearing fast food uniforms.
Terrence Wise: I'm looking at them like, what, that’s a weird clique. Melissa had the green subway shirt on with the Subway. Then I saw the McDonald's logo, the other dude had the Domino's shirt on. I'm like, what kind of clique is this?
Heather McGhee: And this clique of fast food workers tells Terrence they’re with a group called Stand Up Kansas City. They ask Terrence if he’d like to make a living wage? Would he like 15 dollars an hour? How about benefits? Terrence hadn’t seen a dentist in over a decade, so yeah, he was sold. He signed up and began organizing right there, that day.
Terrence Wise: Dang I didn't waste a beat. So I took the little paper to the back, got everybody's like, asked them, started with the same rap they gave me…
Heather McGhee: He took the sign up sheet back to the kitchen. And gave the same pitch. While that might seem small, it was the moment Terrence realized he wasn’t alone. That was his first step toward becoming a leader in the fight for 15.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: I know that poverty is not once in a lifetime, it's passed on from generation to generation to the next generation. And how do I know that? Because that's my American story y’all.
Terrence Wise: So when we started organizing fast food workers, the lowest paid workers in the country and started to lift up from the bottom, we really told the story of the working class.
Heather McGhee: As it’s grown this movement has attracted retail workers, medical assistants, even adjunct professors -- but fast food workers are leading this movement.
And for people who have the job that our society respects the least, the burger flipper,
to stand up together and say in a collective voice, “I am worth more!” It's been a game changer.
Heather McGhee: And here in Kansas City, the way they organized was something I’d never seen before. Stand Up KC’s approach to the minimum wage fight prioritized fighting racism. Their very first protest banner read “UNITED AGAINST RACISM: GOOD JOBS FOR ALL.” Another one: “RACIAL UNITY NOW: WE WON’T FIGHT EACH OTHER.”
<Archival> Stand Up Kc: Fran: The fight against racism and white supremacy, and the fight for workers’ power and economic justice are deeply tied together. Protester: Tell ‘em, Fran, tell ‘em…
Heather McGhee: What was so interesting to me was that they were making racism the MAIN point in their fight for higher wages. The workers see racism as something deeply rooted in our low-wage economy. Reinforced on the job every day. To keep people from uniting. Stand Up KC needed strength in numbers to leverage what they all wanted: a living wage, benefits and a union. But they’d only get that collective power if people from different backgrounds could see themselves in each other.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: Richard: We are black, white and brown workers. We are gay and straight workers, we are immigrant and native born workers. We represent a new American working class, we are building a multiracial movement of workers fighting for equality and justice for all. Protester: Yes…
Heather McGhee: And what was even more significant, was that they were doing this multiracial organizing - that put racism front and center - in Kansas City, one of the most segregated cities in the country. Fast food workers here had to organize across race to build power, which meant organizing across the spinal cord of the city - Troost Avenue.
Heather McGhee: That's a nice playground.
Joaquin Cotler: Nice basketball court up on the hill too.
Nicole Rothwell: Wow, these homes are huge.
Heather McGhee: Driving along Troost Avenue, you see the signs of the dividing line between Black and white Kansas City. In the 1920s, housing developers and lawmakers forced Black residents to live on the East side of Troost. In fact, It’s here, in Kansas City where the national blueprint for redlining was actually created denying loans and investments to Black neighborhoods across the country.
Terrence Wise: And on the east side where I lived, you had, uh, you know, dilapidated buildings, liquor store, gun store, pawn shop, every corner. Houses were raggedy. And on the west side of Troost, you would see the nice million dollar homes…
Heather McGhee: Right on Troost Avenue is also where Stand Up KC put it’s headquarters. So you’ve got this group of white, Black, and brown workers building a labor movement focused on dismantling racism in the very same spot where redlining was born. It was a hot summer day in 2014 at an aging church on Troost. Where workers from across the city crowded in to meet for the very first time.
Terrence Wise: I can remember our very first organizing committee meeting, meeting at a church right at the dividing line, you see Black workers, white workers, brown workers, Latino workers, workers that I've worked with for years but never been in a space like this.
Heather McGhee: Troost Avenue - known also as the Troost Wall - was erected as a racial barrier, but on this day it brought people together. People like Terrence…
Terrence Wise: And workers that I never met in my life like Bridget Hughes, and uh, this was my first time seeing Bridget, you know, and I'm like, What is this white lady doing here?
Heather McGhee: Bridget worked at Burger King. Like Terrence, she had built a career in fast food, and she loved her job.
Bridget Hughes: I don't spend very much time in the kitchen itself. I'm not a very great cook at home (laughs), let alone, you know, in a restaurant. I can admit that about myself, but I just I love interacting with different people. I mean, I get people from all walks of life that come.
Heather McGhee: But unlike Terrence she wasn’t quick to join Stand Up KC. On this day in the church along Troost Avenue, she stood in the back, skeptical. She thought there was no way anybody would ever pay people like her 15 dollars an hour. She mainly came to the meeting for the free pizza.
Bridget Hughes: I found a corner and I stood there and I'm not going to be able to relate to these people. I'll stand here. I'll listen, I'll eat some pizza, I'll go home.
Heather McGhee: Bridget didn’t believe in the movement. Her family had been telling her an age-old divide and conquer story. Where people of color and immigrants are the enemy.
Bridget Hughes: I grew up in a very narrow minded, traditional family that, you know, had some of these same, like, views that are going on in society today of - there is no commonality between me and a black worker or, you know, the Latino workers are taking all the jobs.
Heather McGhee: Bridget, like many Americans, especially white Americans, had bought into the lie of the zero-sum racial hierarchy. The idea that there’s a ladder of human value. And a dollar more in a brown or Black person’s pocket must mean a dollar less in hers. But this first meeting opened Bridget’s eyes to a different story about our country.
Bridget Hughes: This was the first time in my life I had seen so many people of so many different backgrounds in the same room. And at that point, even before anyone got up and spoke or anything, I kind of felt this shift in my mindset where I suddenly became the person who said, we need this everywhere. I want to walk out of my front door and see this in my neighborhood.
Heather McGhee: It was at this first meeting that Bridget heard something that changed her forever. A Latina woman named Reina shared her story of struggling to raise three kids in rundown housing, dealing with a disrespectful boss. For the first time in Bridget’s life she saw herself in someone who wasn’t white like her.
Bridget Hughes: So to hear this woman and her story, and she's not a criminal, she's not trying to steal anything. She's trying to support three children. She's trying to give her kids a better life, the same goal that I have for me and my family. And to hear her say that and be able to relate to her, that is what affected me. That is what let me know. I need to be a part of this.
Heather McGhee: OK, so you see this woman, you hear her story, so some people might say, well, yeah, but there's women like the woman who spoke up at the meeting everywhere, they probably worked with you. They went to school with you. Why didn't you see their humanity before?
Bridget Hughes: It was kind of this situation where I was being told, Oh, you're in a better position because you're making a dollar more than she is or you're in a better position because you're respected more than the Black worker. I was taught that my situation was somehow better than theirs because I was white.
Heather McGhee: Before she started organizing, that was the way Bridget saw the world. She was just a rung above people of color – and she held onto that. But people like Reyna, and what she would learn from Terence would change Bridget. And together, they would change history.
Heather McGhee: When Bridget and Terrence first saw each other, they didn’t think they had anything in common but as they got to know each other they started to see parallels. Both loved school.
Terrence Wise: I remember teachers telling me in school like, you're going, you're going to be somebody. You're going to do great things.
Bridget Hughes: I was a straight-A student. I was in honor roll, National Honor Society...
Heather McGhee: Both dropped out of high school to take jobs in fast food to support their families.
Terrence Wise: Just worked my way right out of school and uh, yeah, I was always like, man…I'm a stack up I'm going to go back to school don’t worry then 1 year turned to 2, 3, 4.
Bridget Hughes: I mean, I was the kid that everyone thought was going to do great things and then to see myself as not doing those things, it was very heartbreaking for me.
Heather McGhee: Both of them bought into the mentality that to get ahead, they had to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. And if they didn’t, well it was their fault.
Terrence Wise: One thing I embodied growing up that I look at today and I don't agree with is that I was like it’s all up to me. If I…I gotta pull myself up. If I’m gonna do anything it’s gonna be on me and nobody else. You know what I’m saying, you’re trying to do all this solo, dolo, trying to get ahead by yourself like I gotta find a way to come up here.
Bridget Hughes: I was never angry with the hand that I was dealt, I was never angry with the fact that my mom was struggling to feed us. It was always angry with myself. I had done something wrong. This was my fault.
Heather McGhee: Decades in fast food robbed them of their feeling that they’d become something. When you’re at the bottom of an economy’s hierarchy of human value, it’s hard to believe you have any power to change anything about your life, much less about one of the most profitable industries in America. So there were real moments of doubt in Terrence and Bridget’s journey.
Heather McGhee: Like when Terrence was working at Burger King and StandUp KC planned a march in front of his workplace.
Terrence Wise: And then I'm like, OK, we're going to march through the city and they're like, we're marching to Burger King right around the corner and I'm like, the Burger King I work at? We're going in front of my store? And at that time, uh, fear kicked in big time. I went in the bathroom and hid behind the doors…
Heather McGhee: He waited for everyone to line up outside the church for the march. Then he found his then six-year-old daughter outside waiting for him.
Terrence Wise: And uh, I grab her hand and I grab a sign and we fall in behind at the back of the march. And while everybody's shouting the chants “Everywhere we go! What do we want? 15 in a union! I'm just lip syncing.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: (chanting)
Terrence Wise: My daughter looked up at me and she was like, Daddy, are you scared? And at that moment, I grabbed her hand, marched all the way to the front of the line with my signs and started being loud and proud to show her that I wasn't afraid and that I was ready to take this fight on. And uh, I've been at the front of marches and leading the way ever since.
Heather McGhee: Bridget was also afraid before her first strike.
Bridget Hughes: I was terrified. My hands were shaking. And I mean we got into the parking lot of the McDonald's, and I wasn't even working for McDonald's. But for some reason, I was scared. I was like, you know, my boss is going to see me, I'm going to get fired.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: (chanting)
Bridget Hughes: And Terrence got up to the podium and he spoke.
<Archival> Stand Up KC: And just like my experience, my mother worked 30 years in this $200 billion industry. And just like my mother, I have no health care, no voice on the job, no retirement to look forward to. And that just ain't right, is it?
<Archival> Stand Up Kc: (chanting) This is what democracy looks like…
Bridget Hughes: And you know, it's not right that we go to work every day and we feed thousands and thousands of people and yet we go home and we can't feed our families.
Heather McGhee: Terrence - once someone who hid in the bathroom - now on the mic leading the march had been the one to give Bridget the strength to stand up and demand more.
Bridget Hughes: And in the midst of that, something just kind of came over me like I can't even explain or put into words the feeling, but literally it was just like a weight that I had carried my entire life just kind of lifted off of me. I was no longer scared. The person who started in the back was now in the front right alongside Terrence, you know, hollerin’ and chantin’. I didn't even know all the words, but I was saying something, I was- I was loud. I don't know, ever since then, I've just been right up there with Terrence, you know, keeping the fight going.
Heather McGhee: Over the next couple of years, Terrence and Bridget started meeting and planning other actions with other Stand Up KC organizers, thinking bigger. They set their sights on raising the minimum wage for the whole city. They showed up at more protests. Took part in more strikes. Each risk taken, building their courage to take on a powerful opposition. Even shutting down a highway on a National Day of Action.
Terrence Wise: And I can remember it was a hot, hot day outside and us linking arms in front of the McDonald's, the American flags waving proudly.
<Archival> NBC News: (chants)
Terrence Wise: We moved from in front of the McDonald's into a highway exit ramp nearby the store, and we all just sat right down in the middle of the exit ramp and blocked the highway. No one's getting on. No one's getting off, traffic, business done for the day.
Heather McGhee: Organizing put them in situations and alongside people, they never imagined before, like when Terrence found himself holding a white man’s hand.
Terrence Wise: We was on strike somewhere. And I just grabbed the white worker's hand. You’ve never done that in your life. Hold a white man's hand. Talking about, you’re going to march or do anything together. That's when it really hit me, I think. But yea, the movement changes you.
Heather McGhee: Something so simple. A hand in a hand. But it took so much. Overcoming the lines of race. The idea of what men do and don't do. Of what you deserve and how you can get ahead. Going against ingrained notions of who’s on your side and who isn’t. When I talk to low paid workers, they’ll often say yeah, they want more money, benefits, reliable schedules, but it always seems to come back to this issue of respect. Something about paying people poverty wages seems to give bosses permission to be disrespectful and abusive. The data shows us food service has been one of the industries with the highest number of harassment charges. When Terrence worked at Burger King, he had a Latina coworker named Susie who was always being targeted by the boss. The boss would say things like:
Terrence Wise: You need to move faster. You're moving too slow. You should just go back to Mexico. She just yelling stuff out, just anything that came to her mind to berate Susie. And as Susie’s making the Whoppers, I can visually see her face. You could see the tears drop. I saw one hit the Whopper paper of the sandwich she was…(chokes up) So she would say all of these racist, mean things to Susie that you just know wasn't right.
Heather McGhee: Terrence and coworkers met back up at the church on Troost Avenue and came up with a plan to stand up to their boss.
Terrence Wise: We knew that it was important for Susie to kind of lead the way. We had Susie stand up, talk about how it made her feel and had everyone talk about how it made it feel, how disrespectful it was. Some even talked about how they had been talked down to in the past and uh, berated just as Susie.
Heather McGhee: Terrence, Susie and their coworkers got this manager fired. Small but crucial wins like this one were having a ripple effect across the entire city. But the growing movement would soon face its biggest challenge yet.
Heather McGhee: In 2015, Terrence, Bridget, and Standup KC were ready for their biggest confrontation yet.
<Archival> 41 Action News: Fast food workers are rallying for $15 an hour wages right in front of City Hall. They’ve actually been camped out on these steps for the past several days. They’ve gone without food in this hot summer heat, and right now they tell me this is only the beginning, they’re begging the city to change the minimum wage…
Terrence Wise: It was like a hundred degrees on this summer day, y'all. Picture this. Right down out in front of City Hall, there were tents pitched up, signs. Even the little statue out front of City Hall was decorated, and it was a true picture of America. It was Black workers out there, white workers, Hispanic workers, civil rights leaders, union leaders, faith leaders all camped out 24 hours for a week.
Heather McGhee: Taking a page from Occupy Wall Street’s playbook, the fight for 15 organizers pitched their tents for a week in front of City Hall.
<Archival> Stand Up KC...That are fighting for justice, am I right!? (cheers) Alright. Say after me. Don’t believe the lies! Unionize! (fade out)
Heather McGhee: They went on a hunger strike, they confronted City Council members, talked to journalists, and every day as Kansas Citians passed by they made their demands clear. Inspired by this action and the power of Stand Up KC’s cross-racial movement, two years later Kansas Citians voted to double the city’s minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour by 2022. Kansas City became one of the first of seven cities in the country to raise the minimum wage to 15.
Bridget Hughes: And I mean, that day I was just so ecstatic to see, like all this hard work we've done all these years and we finally got this.
Heather McGhee: But the celebration was short-lived. In 2015, The Republican state legislature passed a law forbidding cities across Missouri from increasing the minimum wage higher than the state’s. And in 2017, they made it even stricter.
<Archival> The Kansas City Star: The city of Kansas City does not have the authority to adopt a local minimum wage ordinance in excess of the state's minimum wage.
Heather McGhee: This is a legal tactic that other states have also used to try and stop the fight for 15.
Bridget Hughes: And as devastating as it was that that also showed me how badly our government wants to keep workers down, how badly our government wants to keep us separated.
Heather McGhee: That’s why this fight in Kansas City and statewide in Missouri is far from over. Despite setbacks like these preemptions laws, the fight for 15 has had some astounding successes across the country. In 2015 some of the biggest low wage employers agreed to raise their base pay.
<Archival> PBS NewsHour: Big corporations like Walmart have also begun shifting their pay scales upward. McDonald’s increased starting pay by a dollar an hour at locations it owns.
Heather McGhee: As a result of these companies increasing their hourly wages, now many fast food workers - including Terrence - make 15 dollars or more. And some 30 states have voted to increase their minimum wages. Even Missouri’s statewide minimum has gone up, heading for $12 an hour next year. A decade after the very first fast food strike, the movement has lifted the pay of at least 26 million low paid workers – from all industries – by 150 billion dollars. With half of that going to workers of color who have been at the forefront of the movement.
Terrence Wise: I came to realize and it was only through the movement that uh, we get more together than we do apart. So nowadays, when I go to work and I clock in what I have that's greatly different from in the past, is hope.
Bridget Hughes: Being a part of this movement, really showed me that these are false narratives really kind of woke something up inside of me and then I was like, I have to educate other white people because I think that genuinely there is a huge population of white Americans who believe that they're not racists and they do want equality, but that they really don't understand what that looks like or how we are different. You know, how is the Black worker treated different? How is the Hispanic worker treated different?
Heather McGhee: The last time I met up with Terrence in Kansas City it was at the church on Troost. We climbed up several flights of creaky, wooden stairs into the room where he and Bridget met those years ago. The windows of the room face Troost Avenue.
Terrence Wise: On the walls is, simply put, our history…
Heather McGhee: On every inch of the walls are photos of Fannie Lou Hamer, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and signs for the fight for 15. I asked him what he saw for his future.
Terrence Wise: I can envision that day where it's a union stamp right under that M and I can see that, not only McDonald's, but the entire working class as a whole. You gotta have a vision and then I'd be like shoot for the Moon and if you don't hit it you’ll land among the stars bro, but you gotta go big, bro, you gotta have that kind of dream.
Heather McGhee: You know, something I’ve learned is that it’s hard for people to believe in a different future if they don’t see how things have changed, for the better, in the past. I think that’s why workers decorated the Stand Up KC office with images of people like them -- an Alabama seamstress, a California cotton picker, a Mississippi sharecropper -- who stood up and changed history.
Terrence Wise: I look at those who came before me, even when I think about Rosa Parks, she could've died refusing to get up out of that seat. When they marched in the civil rights movement, when women stood up and fought for the right to vote, I know they left some of those meetings, those organizing meetings like, we're not all going to be back here to talk about this. They internalize that they knew that. Even Dr. King knew doing some marches and when he go to cities, people would die. That's the kind of cloth we cut from as people.
Heather McGhee: That’s the kind of cloth we’re cut from as people. I love that. Terrence draws inspiration from civil rights icons. And Bridget, who found her courage from leaders like Terrence, is inspiring other workers to take a stand in Kansas City. That’s the power of solidarity. The people you thought were so different, become your own. Your people. Not because they look like you. But because they stand with you.
<Archival> Stand Up KC...Yeah! (cheers) (fade out)
PROMO
Heather McGhee: Next time on The Sum of Us…
Heather McGhee: We visit Lewiston, Maine, where a way of life has been losing ground: the family farm.
Charlie Hilliard: I feel it would be impossible for anybody to start today if they didn't have it somehow left to them down through the generations
Heather McGhee: And it’s even harder to start a farm when you’re a refugee. Like the Somali Bantu people who are trying to continue their farming traditions in THE whitest state in the nation.
Muhidin Libah: We are just using our strength to produce food, which is the easiest way that we know. People have like 6-7 tractors in one farm. I don't know what they do with that!
Heather McGhee: How communities have come together to help a group of refugees chart a new path for farming in Maine.
Heather McGhee: On our next episode.
CREDITS
Heather McGhee: From Higher Ground, this is The Sum of Us. Created and hosted by me, Heather McGhee, and produced by Futuro Studios.
Heather McGhee: Our producers are Cassim Shepard, Ryan Kailath, Emilce Quiroz, Joaquin Cotler and Juan Diego Ramirez, with help from Liliana Ruiz, Sophia Lo, Susanna Kemp and Alissa Vladimir.
Heather McGhee: Our Senior Producers are Nicole Rothwell, Jeanne Montalvo, and Fernanda Echavarri.
Heather McGhee: We’re edited by Sandy Rattley and Maria Garcia.
Heather McGhee: Executive produced for Futuro by Marlon Bishop.
Heather McGhee: Mixing by Stephanie Lebow and Julia Caruso.
Heather McGhee: Research by Lynn Kanter and Carolyn Lipka.
Heather McGhee: Executive producers for Higher Ground are: Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman, Anna Holmes, and Janae Marable. Jenna Levin is our editorial assistant.
Heather McGhee: Executive producers for Spotify are: Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, Julie McNamara and Corinne Gilliard.
Heather McGhee: Our original music and theme song is by Thee Sacred Souls.
Heather McGhee: Join us for the next episode of The Sum of Us, a podcast in search of hope and solidarity.
Sonic ID: Futuro