Baltimore Community Fellowships
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Photo: Bruce Weller for the Open Society Foundations
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Baltimore, Maryland
2010
Meshelle Foreman Shields was born in Park Heights and moved to the northwest suburbs of the city as a child. Consequently, she straddled two worlds: Her African-American family on one side; her white schoolmates and neighbors on the other.
“I was invited to bat mitzvahs and sweet 16 parties in the suburbs and played Double Dutch in the city,” Foreman Shields says. “And my (white) classmates were distinctly aware of what countries their ancestors came from. If you asked them, they’d say, ‘I’m Italian or Irish, or I’m a Hungarian Jew.’ They’d found a way to hold on to their identity and their self-awareness.”
Once she became an adult, Foreman Shields was troubled by the way girls from her old Park Heights neighborhood—just two or three miles away—had no such connection to their ancestry.
So she started “GoalDIGGERS: The Sankofa Project,” encouraging African-American girls, ages 14 to 18, to study their heritage all the way back to their African, Native American or other ancestors.
“I’m introducing 15 girls from the southern Park Heights community to an intensive combination of anthropology, ancestry and heritage research, and the science of DNA testing,” Foreman Shields says. “The intention is to teach them the West African Sankofa principle of reaching back in our past to those things which are good, and pressing toward the future.”
The young women will trace their family trees, using ancestry.com. They will attend cultural performances, lectures and exhibits here and in other cities. And at the end of the program, each girl will have her maternal DNA tested, and travel to Ghana, West Africa for 10 days, visiting slave castles, historical sites and a contemporary university “to see how developed and creative and intelligent these brothers and sisters—who are close to their age—are,” she says.
Foreman Shields nurtures her humorous side most days as a professional comedian. “MESHELLE, ‘The Indie-Mom of Comedy,’” has been seen on Nickelodeon’s “Search for the Funniest Mom in America,” and Martin Lawrence’s “The First Amendment Stand Up.” But, to this wife and mother of three, youth identity is no laughing matter.
Many of the girls in the neighborhood Foreman Shields will target are exposed to a barrage of negative outcomes. They are more likely to drop out of school or become teenaged mothers, and their neighborhood has higher rates of health and educational disparities than many others in the city.
“The worst of it is the apathy,” she says. “Too many of these young women are totally convinced that this is all that they’ve ever been and all that they’ll ever be.”
By linking the girls to the “beauty, majesty and power” of their ancestry, Foreman Shields believes they will develop a broader sense of identity.
“It deconstructs this whole notion of just being a girl from Baltimore. You’re not just from Baltimore; you’re not just black; you’re not just African American; you’re not just a girl from the West side or from Park Heights,” says Foreman Shields.
