What Wakes Me Up/Moccasin Tracks presents:
What Wakes Me Up 2 Ana Edwards History of America
Our guest is the storied Ana Edwards. This was recorded at Richmond Friends Meeting in May, 2024 when Peace & Social Concerns invited her to tell the history of racism in Richmond and in Virginia.
Ana Edwards founded and led the Friends of Mali, a project of the Richmond Sister Cities Commission formed to promote education and cultural engagement between the cities of Richmond, Virginia and Segou, Mali, which continues today.
She founded and led the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project whose mission is to draw the connections of past to present into a stronger web of knowledge and planning for the future. This Reclamation Project began with the Defenders of Freedom, Justice and Equality and is still engaged in the community struggle to preserve and memorialize historic Shockoe Bottom through the establishment of a nine-acre memorial park and educational campus.
From 2005-2013, Edwards produced and hosted DefendersLIVE, a local news/talk radio program on WRIR 97.3 LP FM, and since 2005 has served om the editorial board of The Virginia Defender, a quarterly community newspaper, along with her husband, founding editor and publisher Phil Wilayto.
Ana managed a weekly farmers market as a nutrition education program an early childhood education center with its origins in neighborhood-centered social services. This was the first farmers market to work through the process of making SNAP bendfits, Food Stamps currency for fresh local foods. Before that, she was communications director for Homeward, Richmond’s coordinating agency for homeless services.
Ana Edwards also sat on the Future of Richmond’s Past Planning Committee (2011-2015) which produced and coordinated programming to commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Emancipation.
She served on the Planning Committee of the East Marshall Street Well Project, established by the VCU Office of the President in 2013 to help determine the best way to study, memorialize and rebury the human remains found in an early 19th century well during the construction the VCU Hermes Kontos Medical Building in 1994. These are the remains of humans used as cadavers in the study of medicine at the university, and they are mostly the remains of African Americans, many taken from fresh graves in the nearby African burying grounds. An anthropologist named Dan Mouer told me about his experience being called in as an advisor in this literally ghoulish tale. A ghoul is a graverobber, and these bodies were likely paid for by the medical school.
A year or so ago, Ana Edwards left her position as Public historian and museum educator for the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia to accept a position as Curriculum Coordinator and Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where she teaches Introduction to Race & Racism in the US. I can’t imagine anyone more informed about the subject than she, Tune in, you may want to take notes.
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Sunny Gardener What Wakes Me Up/Moccasin Tracks February 25th, 2025
Posted In: Local, Music Shows, News
Tags: Defenders, FJE, history, race, racism, VCU, vcuhealth