Listen to African American Yewande Salau talk about what it was like to attend graduate school in Ithaca, New York when the Covid-19 pandemic spread in New York. This Queens native shares her thoughts on disparity in equity and how her experience living in Queens differed from living in Ithaca during the pandemic. She recalls the run on toilet paper, the loud fireworks, and the boarded-up businesses. In 2020 while there were thousands of deaths daily due to Covid-19, there were also demonstrations in the Black Lives Matter movement seeking social justice for the unwarranted killings of Black Americans by some men in blue. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of Yewande's interview.
Yewande's first interview will be part of The Zip Code Memory Project, which I'm honored to be in partnership with. The interviews of Queens residents that I record for my oral history project will also be part of The Zip Code Memory Project which "seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods." https://zcmp.org/about/ Thanks Leah Elimeliah for connecting us!
