by Dr. C. Sade Turnipseed, MS/MBA/PhD
Founder, Young Publishers Network (YPN)
There was a time when education did not always happen inside classrooms.
Long before computers and smartboards, before standardized testing and lecture halls, our communities had already built universities of their own.
There were front porches.
There were kitchen tables.
There were church pews.
There were fields stretching beneath Mississippi skies.
There were grandmothers shelling peas beneath fading sunlight and grandfathers sitting beneath shade trees with stories tucked inside weathered hands.
There were songs floating through the evening air.
There was wisdom.
There was memory.
There was history.
For many of us throughout Mississippi, throughout America, and throughout the African Diaspora, learning looked different.
Stories became textbooks. Songs became lessons. Grandmama’nem became professors.
Somewhere along the way, we began treating knowledge as if it lived only inside buildings and books.
But our communities knew differently.
They understood that education was never simply about information.
Education was about identity.
Education was about responsibility.
Education was about survival.
As a university professor who has taught at three Historically Black Colleges and Universities, both within Africa and throughout the African Diaspora, the first assignment in my classroom has always seemed deceptively simple:
Go home and talk to Grandmama’nem … in order to introduce yourself to your colleagues in the class.
Students sometimes laugh.
Some look confused.
Others wonder what such an assignment has to do with higher education.
Everything.
Because before we understand the world around us, we must understand ourselves.
Before we understand history, we must understand our place within it.
Before we transform communities, we must understand the communities that transformed us.
The ancient principle of Know Thyself remains foundational to everything we do.
That principle lives at the center of The Turnipseed Chronicles.
This publication exists because communities carry stories too important to lose.
It exists because elders are living libraries.
It exists because memory itself is sacred.
It exists because history does not disappear all at once.
It disappears one untold story at a time.
The Turnipseed Chronicles also serves as home to movements and initiatives rooted in preservation and possibility:
The Young Publishers Network, where young people become authors, storytellers, historians, and memory keepers.
Front Porch University, where culture becomes curriculum and publishing becomes ownership.
And The Seeds of Hope Garden, where children learn that memory lives not only in stories but also in seeds, gardens, kitchens, and traditions carried across generations.
Within those gardens, we redefine SOUL Food:
S — Sustainable
O — Organic
U — Unprocessed
L — Living on the knowledge of Grandmama’nem
Because seeds and stories are not so different.
Both require care.
Both require patience.
Both require faith.
And when nurtured properly, both feed generations.
The Turnipseed Chronicles is not simply a publication.
It is a witness.
It is an archive.
It is a declaration.
It is a place where memory and future sit together on the same front porch.
We invite you to listen.
We invite you to remember.
We invite you to tell your story.
And we invite you to help preserve the stories that built us.
Because the future grows from remembering.
The land remembers and so do we!
