Renee Shakespeare

“Everything I learn, I’ll share it with you,” Renee Shakespeare says, and that is how her radio show, “The Drinking Gourd,” began.

In 2003, the now 45-year-old Jacksonian went to a conference about the Underground Railroad in Baton Rouge, La., looking for genealogists to get help in finding her roots—a difficult task, she says, when African-American family research is so vastly different from (and more difficult than) searching for the roots of a Caucasian family in the United States.

At this conference, she learned that Natchez was the site of the second largest slave market in the U.S. at one time. “I should not have been able to grow up in Mississippi and wait until I was very old and crusty to find out that information. … I was not only shocked: I was very angry,” Shakespeare says.

She couldn’t believe she hadn’t been taught this history in school. Even Haley Barbour’s recent bill to put civil rights history in the curriculum doesn’t require civil rights to be taught, but only allows it, she says.

When she got back to Jackson, she went directly to WMPR—where she was employed part-time doing their accounting—and talked to station manager Charles Evers. She really had it out with him, she says, and told him that, of all stations, there should be a show on WMPR that would teach black history.

“If you feel that strongly about something, you ought to do something,’” Shakespeare recalls Evers telling her. “He sort of challenged me.”

On the show, “I’m the conductor, and my other people are stationmasters,” Shakespeare says. She, Ken Stiggers, Sheila Ware, Theresa Kearns and Angela Raji take listeners on an imaginary ride on the Underground Railroad every Thursday night at 6:30 p.m.

Now a full-time sales employee at WMPR, Shakespeare also sits on the board of the South Jackson Foundation—recently started by Marshand Crisler—which works to reverse deterioration in the area and begin rebuilding. Buy Jackson is the marketing arm of the South Jackson Foundation.

“It’s not that we don’t want you to spend your money in Madison or Rankin County, but if you live in Jackson, you need to start here. … If charity begins at home, it’s time for us to be a little bit more charitable in our own home,” Shakespeare says.

Shakespeare is also working to promote the Equal Human and Civil Rights Commemorations Act, which requires that every public dollar spent to maintain Confederate history be matched to preserve the history of the black experience in Mississippi.

“Ultimately, we’re all responsible for our own education,” she says.

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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.