(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues) - Welcome to Almanac North.

I'm Maarja Hewitt.

Black History Month has been underway these last few weeks with local organizations, classrooms, and community members commemorating exceptional African American individuals on their contributions throughout history.

Tonight, we'll expand upon that conversation as well as discuss American Heart Month and the impacts of heart disease in our region.

Well, earlier this week, there were several state senate committee meetings.

On Wednesday, the Education Finance Committee heard testimony from students across the state to hear about the students' experiences at school and in the classroom.

Wednesday also saw the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee hear a bill looking to codify the role of school resource officers as a statute.

Among other things, the bill looks to establish reasonable force limits in schools, define the position more thoroughly, and create a school resource officer model policy.

Thursday, several bills were presented to the Housing and Homelessness Prevention Committee related to tenant's rights and rental protections, including protecting the tenant's rights to contact emergency services without retaliation, tenant's right to repair violations in a residential rental, and a regulating contract for deed transactions between investor, sellers and home buyers.

Now it's time to once again go to a special report from Dennis Anderson from Denny's desk.

Denny.

- Thanks, Maarja.

Valentine's Day, President's Day, Mardi Gras and even Leap Day.

February is certainly home to many things, including American Heart Month.

Now, first established in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, it is a month for raising awareness and considering lifestyle habits that contribute to a costly disease.

How costly is heart disease?

Well, almost 17% of all deaths in Minnesota are due to heart disease, the second leading cause of death in the state right behind cancer.

And nationwide, over $108 billion are spent in annual heart disease related medical costs, including procedures, hospitalizations, rehabilitation, as well as additional economic loss from loss productivity.

Who does heart disease affect?

Recent data shows the heart disease death rate was 50% higher in people who are American Indian compared to Minnesotans overall.

American Indian adults age 35 to 54 die from heart disease at more than three times the rate of all Minnesotans of the very same age.

And African American adults age 35 to 64 die from heart disease at approximately two times the rate of all Minnesotans of the same age.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum, the lowest heart disease death rates in Minnesota are in people who are Asian Pacific Islander and people who are Latinx or Hispanic with death rates 41% and 45% lower than the overall population respectively.

So what can you do to reduce your risk of heart disease?

Well, know your risk.

Knowing your risk can help you make lifestyle changes.

Eat a healthy diet, start making healthy choices that include vegetables daily and less processed foods.

Be physically active, move more.

It's one of the best ways to stay healthy, prevent disease and to age well.

Watch your weight, stay at a healthy weight for you.

Check your blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

These are two main risk factors that could lead to heart disease.

Well, there's a bright side here.

Every year from 2000 through 2021, Minnesota had the lowest overall heart disease death rate in the United States.

While heart disease remains a significant health challenge, advances in medical research, increased awareness, and lifestyle changes are empowering individuals to take control of their heart health.

By staying informed, making healthy choices, and seeking early medical intervention, we work towards a future where heart disease is not the leading cause of death it is today.

Together, we can ensure a healthier, happier tomorrow.

- Thank you, Denny.

With the month of February dedicated to acknowledging and celebrating the historic achievements and contributions of African American people, it is also a time to highlight community organizations with that same mission.

Here to share with us about what programs and important initiatives the Duluth NAACP has been working towards this year is Duluth NAACP president Classie Dudley.

Classie, thank you so much for joining us!

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- It's a pleasure to have you here.

And for those who may be unfamiliar, what is the main objective of the Duluth NAACP?

- Yeah, the NAACP, our mission is to meet the community where they're at and to stop racial biases really with policies and empowerment in the community.

- [Maarja] So how do you do that work?

- Yeah, well, what we did is we did a community needs assessment and really sought value and community input to see the needs.

And what we found were, there were certain departments where we felt that there was either racial bias or racial discrepancy or racial inequities within our community.

So those departments that we saw that in was education, economics, criminal justice, and health.

We also expanded those since we first started, but those were the main objectives when we started out the gate.

- Yeah, so how long has the chapter been around?

- The chapter's been around since 1921.

It came together after the lynchings of Clayton Jackson and McGee.

So yeah, we've been around for quite a while.

- So what are some, you know, that's a long history, over a hundred years.

What are some of the key achievements, milestones over that time?

- Yeah, well, a bunch of different things.

Since I've been president, you know, we have created a community crisis response that's within the city, but separate from police.

So it's not punitive meeting people and the needs of the community without putting any harm with punitive things like jail time or sentencing.

We also have been a strong advocate for people needing racial help or equity advancement within different departments, whether that be a student feeling that they were mistreated because of their race in school, or like currently we've been working on the Stephen Cooper case where we are prosecuting an innocent man at our local city, our, excuse me, our local county attorney's office.

- So you touched on education a little bit.

How do you interact with youth and help out youth in the community?

- Yeah, well, we do a few different things.

I think obviously if we look at what the youth need, a lot of it is to support their families and their parents.

And a lot of the work we do is institutionalized and policy driven.

So if we see, for example, we saw that there was higher rates of student resource or school resource officers giving tickets to Black and brown students than they were to white students.

So that's kind of the work we do to mitigate why is this happening and pretty much stop like (indistinct) pipeline that we're seeing in our community.

We also have Axo, which helps students within whatever they're interested in, whether that's communications or science or basketball or entrepreneur or culinary arts.

We have them compete locally for scholarships and then we can send them to the national NAACP convention for anything that they win.

- Oh, cool.

How does the chapter collaborate with other organizations within our region?

- Yeah, well, our community is small, but I would say that the Duluth Double, the Duluth branch NAACP is the largest NAACP in the state of Minnesota.

So we have a lot of roots with other organizations or community members, be non-profit, be Black led or a business versus a for-profit.

We're touching everybody and everything.

A lot of our work we do is intersectional.

So it means while it might not affect you directly, it affects somebody within your network or a sector of where you are.

So it would be almost impossible for me to name everybody we've worked with because we touch the lives of literally everybody.

- Do you have any upcoming events or projects that we should let people at home know about it they they could get involved with?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So I always recommend people to go to our website and email us and join a committee.

Literally, we have everything that you could imagine.

We're working on it because race relations touches on everything.

It was how our country was founded upon.

So if they have an interest in healthcare, we have that committee.

If they're interested in the housing discrepancies we're having, we have that there.

So we house a lot of things like that.

Most recently, one of our initiatives is IET, which is ignite epower transform, something that I take really close to heart because growing up here, there wasn't a lot of positive representation.

You know, when you're talking about Black History Month and what we are studying here and what our historical achievements are, often focused on adversity that African American and African heritage folks have experienced.

And so having something that's positive is what IET is looking at, looking at history from where we started and not just us from being slaves in the community, which is not what our history is.

- Well, Classie, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Now we'll take a look at our region's Black history with Reverend Anthony Galloway of St. Mark A.M.E. Church.

We'll hear about the church's historic past, the origin story behind Black History Month, and talk about how history is still being made today.

Producer Megan McGarvey brings us this story.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - Well, you're here at the historic St. Mark A.M.E. church.

It's the third oldest Black congregation in the state of Minnesota.

It is the gathering space for after the 1921 Duluth Lynchings, a place where W. E. B.

Du Bois came and spoke after those events.

And it's been part of the Black community here in Duluth for a long time.

So every Black History Month, we make sure that everybody in our congregations know the history of Black History Month.

It started as Negro History Week with Carter G. Woodson in the '20s.

And it was designed to be a space to correct this narrative that many African heritage people, people period across the country were receiving that only have an understanding of African Americans, at the time in particular, or African heritage people through a lens of slavery.

And he is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

We're inventors.

There's cultural art forms, there's all these things.

And so it's supposed to be a symposium week to kickstart a year of ensuring that all of that update and understanding is part of our regular scholastic parlance.

When the nation begins to celebrate Black History Month, that was something that was already present inside the culture.

So that's when the nation awakens to this celebration in February, which is supposed to kickstart, it's supposed to be like a symposium acceleration ramp, where we just look inward for a second and celebrate all of those things and then take that learning to the rest of our lives throughout the course of the year.

And the obligation was that if you can expect that to happen in African American culture and community, that we should be able to also attend to when other communities celebrate their cultural heritage because it behooves me.

It benefits everybody to have their cultural heritage celebrated in that way.

As long as your cultural heritage is not built around supremacy and subjugation of other peoples.

There's a beautiful adventure to just bringing the thoughts to the table and being willing to change those thoughts when you're presented with some data that makes sense instead of just trying to protect something that was because it was, especially if it hasn't benefited you or the folks around you.

I encounter white students all the time, white community members all the time who will come to church.

They'll learn about different history, they'll make different connections, and they'll have these aha moments and leave so frustrated that they didn't have access to that data for many reasons because it wasn't taught.

And we can't put all the blame on teachers 'cause we all are supposed to be in the business of teaching, let's just be clear.

Or because I didn't have experience with it or because my peer group is so monocultural or monoracial that I don't actually have the interactions that would bring different perspectives to me.

Some important things that we kind of reorient back to the original purpose for Negro History Week, number one, yes, we're gonna lift up individuals who do amazing things.

Some of the people who were principal in the COVID vaccine coming out as early as it did were Black scientists.

George Bonga spoke multiple languages, negotiated between communities, a powerhouse.

I mean, all the stuff Paul Bunion did.

Like this is a person who actually did some of those things and would travel up and down between here and Fort Snelling that I think need to be lifted up.

Ethel Ray Nance who broke several color barriers working in city government and around this area and is partly responsible for W. E. B.

Du Bois coming here.

I also gotta lift up Tony Stone, who's the first woman to play professional baseball.

It's Twin Cities area.

We don't understand that we have Black firsts in our own era that we think would've happened a long time ago, but it would be the 2000's till we get the first Black county commissioner in the state of Minnesota, which was Tony Carter, (indistinct) Tony Carter.

We're in Duluth and Janet Kennedy's the first Black city council person in the history of this city.

It's really amazing to understand that there's history that's so recent that it shocks folks to know that we're still in the space of Black first.

There's no way that we're gonna know it all.

I think the hopeful thing for me going forward is that more and more folks are unwilling to ignore the truth in that reality.

I think that's part of why some folks in our society are trying to push out what can be learned or taught and have that because they're finding that this thing that I've built my identity around isn't real and I need to protect that as much as possible.

And what I'm seeing is more and more folks going, eh, we are gonna be okay.

The sky's not falling because I acknowledge that yes, there were slaves in the United States and yes, our economy was built on slavery in the United States.

The sky isn't falling.

Like that's not the thing gonna be the thing that changes and reorients everything around.

So my hope is that there are more and more people who are seeing that the way that we've told our own history has been so incomplete across the table that there must be something different.

And it seems like there's a growing openness to tell stories that we haven't told, even at the same time as some folks are trying to stop us from telling the stories that need to be told.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - We've been examining history and health this episode and with Women's Month just around the corner, we have Dr. Verna Thornton from Community Memorial Hospital in the studio with us tonight.

Welcome, Dr. Thornton.

Thank you so much for being here.

- Well, thank you for having me.

- Dr. T, as your friends call you.

- Absolutely.

- It's such a pleasure to have you here.

Now maybe we could start with a little story about you, kind of where your medical journey began and where you're from.

- Well, believe it or not, my medical journey began in Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born and raised.

Grew up, I was a little sickly as a child and pretty much was in and out the doctor's office quite a bit.

And you probably have heard this story from several people in healthcare, but my interest in medicine was piqued by just average doctor's visits.

And I was one of those girls who was always really fascinated by science and math even long before STEM became a thing and was always into dissecting earthworms and looking at roadkill and things of that nature.

And people might think that was a little strange, but I love the animal kingdom, the world and how the connectivity between nature and the body worked.

- And so then what drew you to women's healthcare?

- Women's healthcare piqued my interest because especially as an obstetrician gynecologist, I got a chance to do pretty much several different areas and specialties of medicine all in one practice.

As an obstetrician, I obviously got to take care of pregnant women and deliver babies.

As a gynecologist, I had the opportunity to care for women's healthcare issues and to perform surgery.

Family planning of course is a big part of my specialty and even psychiatry because there are quite a few issues with women's healthcare that are linked to mental wellbeing.

So I can put on several different hats all within one profession.

- Yeah, it's all connected.

- Absolutely.

- How does it feel to be someone that young girls in the community can look up to?

- Wow, it's really a big privilege.

I stand on the shoulders of many giants and all the women who were before me.

And I look now as someone that I do want younger women to model after me in terms of just understanding with hard work, dreams can be achieved and that you don't necessarily have to follow the path of traditional women's roles.

You know, being a physician now, more and more women are certainly entering the field.

I even have a daughter who's a doctor.

- Oh, wow.

- Yes.

- Oh, that has to be special.

- It is, it is.

- So during your time in medicine, how has women's health and the landscape changed?

- Wow, it's really changed.

I've been post-residency in practice since 1991, so I'm entering as of July 1st, it'll be my 33rd year of practice.

Don't let my baby face fool you.

But certainly we see more women entering the field.

When I became a resident right out of medical school at Emory University, a fair portion of the men who are physicians in obstetrics and gynecology were, and also residents again were males.

And so more and more females started getting into the field and the majority of doctors in training now to become OBGYNs are women.

So that in terms of representation has certainly changed in terms of the landscape.

And just, I can tell you, medications and surgical procedures have definitely morphed in the 30 plus years of my practice.

We've gone from laparoscopic simple procedures now to robotics.

Certain medications we have.

Before, weight loss was just dieting.

We have medications now we can give people to help manage their menstrual cycles, endometriosis and so forth.

So quite a bit has changed.

- Going back to the expansion of representation in the field, how important is it to have that representation, that diversity with the medical field, with doctors, nurses?

- Yes, I think it's very important.

It's very important because while we don't denigrate our male companions and our male colleagues, certainly women can relate to women physicians.

We have the same biological parts.

We experience the same conditions.

So it is a little bit easier to look another woman in the eye and to say, I understand about your menstrual cramps, I understand about the difficulty you're having getting pregnant, I understand about your hot flashes.

So having women in this field, and you know, especially if we were to also look at the minority representation, there are certain conditions that are unique to certain socioeconomic status groups as well as certain, shall we say, minority groups, that it does help to have representation to identify with your patients better.

- Yeah, you know, since it is Black History Month, are there any particular health issues or trends within the African American community that you feel need more attention or awareness?

- Without question.

We know that unfortunately amongst African heritage, women who are pregnant, they're three to four times more likely to suffer from morbidity and mortality related to pregnancy and childbirth.

We've seen this trend all around the nation and it's problematic.

And so of course we do need a little more cultural sensitivity within our specialty and within the practice and actual delivery of healthcare for women, especially women of color, indigenous, Latino, and especially African heritage women.

- And final question, what do you enjoy most about your field and working with patients?

- Absolutely, I'm a people person, if you can't tell that by now- - [Maarja] Yeah, it's obvious.

- I absolutely love sitting down and talking with my patients.

I don't see my relationship with patients as just being a physical encounter.

I want to know my patients and I do get to know many of my patients.

I know about their children, their pets, their lifestyles.

And I think it really adds to the patient physician relationship.

- Well, Dr. T, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

- Thank you for having me.

- Before we go, let's take a look at what you might be getting up to this weekend.

Do you wanna do hair and makeup for TV and film?

Saturday and Sunday in Chisholm, this two day workshop from the Upper Midwest Film Office will review the practical skills needed to work in the industry.

Saturday from nine to five and Sunday from nine to three.

Saturday in Superior, participate in an upcycle fashion workshop from 12 to 2:30 PM.

Create clothes or accessories from repurposed materials and clothes while hanging out with other creative people.

Fabric patches, jewelry making supplies, glue, paint, tape and more will be provided.

But you are encouraged to bring your own materials to use or share.

Creative consultants and helpers will be on hand to assist, share tips and ideas.

And on Sunday in Superior, the UWS Black Student Union is hosting its annual Soul Food Dinner in the Yellow Jacket Union great room starting at 5:00 PM.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) I'm Maarja Hewitt.

Thank you for joining us on Almanac North.

I'll see you next time, good night.

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