THE CORRIDOR: Episode 1
River Road
One of the largest concentrations of petrochemical plants in the country lies along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Petrochemicals are made from fossil fuels. We use them to make a huge range of synthetic materials that are found in almost every part of our daily lives— they are made where people live. Here, amidst houses, schools, and churches, more than 150 plants release toxic pollution into communities that are often poor and black. In this episode, we meet residents and explore what it’s like to live in - and love - a place at the center of our modern consumer culture.
Guests
Shamyra lavgine
Shamyra Lavigne-Davey is a native of St. James, Louisiana and a third generation Human Rights activist. In 2020, Shamyra became the Executive Assistant to the Founder/Director of RISE St. James Louisiana, a faith-based grassroots nonprofit organization fighting for the eradication of petrochemical emissions in the river parishes also known as “Cancer Alley”. Shamyra is a 2023 Young, Gifted, And Green: 40 Under 40 Award recipient and a 2023 and2024 Essence Festival featured panelist. Shamyra currently serves as an Advisor on the Conceptual Committee for the Frontline Resource Institute (FRI).
Jane Patton
Jane Patton (she/her) is the US Fossil Economy Campaign Manager for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), and her work supports the Fossil Economy program in confronting the harmful impacts and false promises of the broader oil and gas economy, including from petrochemicals, agrochemicals, and carbon capture and storage. A lifelong 6th generation Louisianian, Jane just recently relocated to New Mexico, where she's continuing the fight against climate change alongside CIEL and her new neighbors.
Janice fashaw
Credits
The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive Produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Transcript
[00:00] INTRODUCTION
AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.
JANICE: This is my family home. And I got married. And I lived here from a little girl.
JAY: This is Ms. Janice Ferchaud, and I’m in her living room in Saint James, Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans. It’s a blazing hot summer day, so the air conditioner is going strong.
JANICE: So I love the country.
JAY: Me too. I'm a country girl at heart.
JAY: So what was it like growing up here?
JANICE: I loved it because when we were coming up, the people, our ancestors, our grandmothers, and some of us had great grandmother still living when I was younger. And they taught us love and we shared everything.
JAY: Like many people in Saint James, Janice’s family has lived here for generations.
JANICE: My great grandma, my grandma and my dad and mom. And her Mom and them, they all were from Saint James. And when we were younger, I came and lived with my grandmother. She had a bar in the house. And she learned me how to play the piano, in the church. So I grew up here and I raised my kids here and I've been here ever since.
JAY: Janice’s story might be familiar if you grew up in a small town, like I did.
JANICE: I worked as a chef at Waffle House; I worked at Winn-Dixie. I roller skated at Sonic. Everywhere.
JAY: With one major difference: Saint James has more petrochemical plants than just about anywhere else in America. Janice worked there, too.
JANICE: I was a fire watcher. We sit on the buckets inside these tanks and there's a hole and we watch the welders inside the tank. And if those fires start, you blow your horn and you get the welders out of the hole.
JAY: Janice spent about four years working various jobs in the plants. But even though she stopped doing that work years ago, the plants still impact her and her family. They impact pretty much everything about life in this area.
JANICE: In 2016, I was diagnosed with cancer, 2020, I beat the cancer. My sister Joyce, had stage four cancer. Okay. She never smoked a cigarette in her life. Okay. My brother, he had cancer, colon cancer. But he's good. And I had another sister had cancer.
JAY: Ms. Janice can’t say that the plants caused all this cancer but if you spend any time here, almost everyone you talk to knows a lot of people who’ve gotten sick. And most have lived around heavy industry their whole lives.
JANICE: We don't need no more plants, okay? None. We need to get our community back.
JAY: Talking with Ms. Janice was an eye opener for me. My family’s been in North Carolina for centuries, and I was born and raised there. I’m a Southern girl through and through, and Louisiana has always had a special place in my heart.
My grandparents loved New Orleans and we came here often… walking around the French Quarter…looking at riverboats on the Mississippi…eating beignets. New Orleans has always been one of my favorite cities in the world. But despite coming here all my life, I didn’t know anything about what was just upriver - a vast corridor of petrochemical plants.
JAY: Petrochemicals are made from fossil fuels, and we use them to make a huge range of synthetic materials that are found in almost every part of our daily lives.
JAY: Look around you right now. Almost everything you see probably has some kind of petrochemical in it. Your clothes, for example. Unless they're 100% wool or cotton, they’re probably nylon, rayon, or polyester.
JAY: Your lotion and makeup? They probably contain petroleum solvents, oils and jellies. Your phone, both the tech on the inside and the rubber case on the outside, are synthetic.
JAY: Your tables and chairs, even if they aren't made of plastic, are likely covered in synthetic resins and varnishes. Any food you see - what kind of container is it in? Was it grown with synthetic fertilizers?
JAY: Did you take a pill or a vitamin this morning? Are you in a car? Are you in a house?
JAY: Then you're relying on petrochemicals right now. About 70,000 everyday products come from petrochemicals, and petrochemicals are made where people live. People like Ms Janice.
JANICE: Everything you got. Your eyeglasses, your cell phone, your car, everything’s got plastic.
JAY: In this part of Louisiana, and in communities like it all over the world, toxic chemistry happens right across the street.
JAY: We all benefit from the vast number of products made possible by petrochemicals. But the pollution and waste from these industries falls most heavily on the communities where they’re made … communities that are often poor and Black.
JAY: The people in this industrial corridor are breathing in some of the most harmful pollutants in the country. They live with weird smells, bright lights, and loud noises, and they suffer from cancer, asthma, and a host of other ailments that has given this stretch of the Mississippi River a nickname that no one wants: Cancer Alley.
JAY: The more I learned, the more I kept wondering: How did all these plants end up here? And if so many people are getting sick, why hasn’t something been done?
JAY: In this series, we’re going to explore why so much heavy industry ended up here, how it's affecting the people who live here, and what they're doing about it. Everything that’s happening in the industrial corridor today has been shaped by history; from slavery and segregation to huge industrial breakthroughs; from dramatic environmental change to decades of activism and resistance.
JAY: This stretch of river gets referred to by a lot of different names. To the tourism board, this is plantation country or the German coast. For some, these are the River Parishes. For others, it’s chemical or cancer alley. In this series, we’re calling it the corridor.
JAY: This is a story that unfolds in Louisiana, where a fifth of the nation’s petrochemicals are produced. But this isn’t just a story about Louisiana. This is a story about all of us…the things we use, the things we love… and a burden that isn’t being shared equally.
MONTAGE: CANCER ALLEY NEWS CLIPS
JAY: I’m Jaha Nailah Avery and this is The Corridor.
[08:00] A SEGMENT
JAY: If you’ve never been to the industrial corridor of Louisiana, you might be surprised by what you see. There are more than 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants here, many covering hundreds of acres. And nearly everywhere you look, you can see them - massive storage tanks holding oil and gas; cooling towers and pipes; billowing smoke and open flames. But that’s not the only thing you see. There’s also this: vast stretches of greenery…tranquil fishing holes…trees that have stood watch for centuries…majestic white egrets holding court on the shimmering bayous.
JAY: The thing about this place is that it’s pretty rural. The towns here are small, often unincorporated, and spread out. You can see industrial facilities in the distance just about everywhere you look, but you also see houses. Schools. Churches. Communities, just like anywhere else.
SHAMYRA: Saint James is like, very country. Like, we don't have a lot of grocery stores. We only have 1 or 2 red lights, and it's a lot of sugar cane, a lot of flatlands with sugar cane.
JAY: This is Shamyra Lavigne. She lives in Baton Rouge today, but she grew up in Saint James Parish, Louisiana. Parishes are what would be called counties in other states. And the ones along the Mississippi, like Saint James, are collectively known as the River Parishes.
SHAMYRA: I love growing up there because I thought, as a little girl that we were so fortunate to live by the Mississippi River. When I would read about the Mississippi River, I was like, oh, listen, I have that right in the front yard. So I thought I was we were like big time.
JAY: Many of the communities here are located along River Road, a mostly 2 lane road that follows the sharp bends of the Mississippi. Most of the time you can’t see the river, though, because of the levee, which is a grassy hill that’s several stories high. The levee runs for hundreds of miles, and protects the area from flooding. It's also a gathering spot. People here host enormous bonfires on top of the levee on Christmas Eve.
SHAMYRA: Saint James is the type of community that is hospitable. The people there are incredible. It’s one of those places where you wave and speak to everyone. People don’t typically move into St James. You are typically born in St James. Your parents live there. Your grandparents live there.
JAY: About half of the residents of St James Parish are Black, many descended from the enslaved Africans that made white landowners rich off sugarcane in the 19th century. Sugarcane is still grown in abundance here. Fields of it stretch far into the distance. But today, many of those fields lie in the shadow of massive petrochemical plants. The plants loom over everything here, and they're only getting bigger.
SHAMYRA: One of my fondest memories would be the football games on Friday nights at Saint James High School, which was down the street from my mom's house and from where I grew up. And for those football games, we would have cars lined up all up and down the river road and everywhere. It was like a Saints game on Friday nights because we didn't have much. So football games was like such a big deal. My mom worked at the ticket booths to get in, so it was such a tradition. And since then, that school has been sold to a industry,
JAY: The parish sold the land to a private company in 2015.
SHAMYRA: And they moved the school 15 minutes away into the next district. So, now we passed by where the high school was and it's now coke methanol, which is a methanol plant that is also polluting our community.
JAY: Methanol is used to make all kinds of things, from plastic to plywood. It doesn’t have to come from fossil fuels, but the plant in St. James makes methanol from natural gas. It was built here to be close to the gas pipelines all over the River Parishes. That methanol plant almost completely erased the school. You can still see the remains of the football field and the baseball diamond. The street leading into the plant is still called Wildcat St, the mascot of St James High. This isn't the only piece of the community that’s been absorbed by industry.
SHAMYRA: And also our post office…they sold our post office to industry.
JAY: The little post office is now a laboratory, and the mailboxes and PO boxes have been replaced by ‘authorized personnel’ signs, and machinery for testing the purity of crude oil.
SHAMYRA: It's as if industry is taking over the fifth district, where I'm from.
JAY: There are more than a dozen plants in Saint James alone, most of them located in neighborhoods where the population is majority Black. Exxon Mobil and Marathon are both here. So is America’s Styrenics, which makes a plastic called polystyrene. You’ve probably got a lot of it in your house right now, because it’s in all kinds of everyday items, from styrofoam to coffee lids.
JAY: But even though most of us use products made from petrochemicals all the time, not many of us experience the effects of the process of making them every day. Shamyra’s mom did her best to keep her family safe.
SHAMYRA: And growing up, we knew that we were not supposed to drink out of the faucet. We knew that. I knew that as a little girl…. like something's in the water. So I remember being young and drinking out of bottled water when I was little, because it was a thing.
SHAMYRA: And I think back in those moments, me growing up and just being outside so much, and the smells and the dust, you know, all those things come back to you when you start learning about what's really going on.
JAY: What’s really going on is pollution: the chemical byproducts of heavy industry. And it's way more pollution than most of us have to live with.
SHAMYRA: You can park your car in Saint James. Go inside, come back out. You're going to have a layer of dust on your car. Like a little orange, flaky dust. So you can see the pollution. You can smell it. You can just walk outside and smell it.
JAY: The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that these communities are exposed to some of the most dangerous air pollution in the country. Babies here are more likely to be premature and underweight. In 2016, residents living near one chemical plant were told by EPA that they were ten times more likely to get cancer than the average person in Louisiana.
JAY: But while the statistics are helpful, the people here don’t need them to know that something is wrong. They can smell it. They can see it.
SHAMYRA: And some of it is not visible. That’s the ones that are even worse. The particulate matter is so small you can’t see it, but it’s super deadly and super dangerous.
JAY: Everyone I met here has had cancer, or knows someone who has.
MONTAGE OF VOICES
MELVIN: My mom passed away. She had breast cancer. And my grandmother also, and my grandfather, he had one lung taken out from working in the plant. And he died. And then my brother, he was working in the plants all his life, and he was a hard worker, and he contracted a liver disease from working with benzene. And he died.
ANASTASIA: My momma had cancer, Uncle Lawrence died with cancer, Uncle Albert, had cancer, My Uncle Melvin had cancer.
ORALEE: I got a lot of my cousins had cancer.
LOUIS: My father in law, he had prostate cancer. Then he had colon cancer and then he had bladder cancer. He died.
ORALEE: We got a high high concentration of cancer through here. That’s why it’s called Cancer Alley.
JAY: Not everyone who lives in the River Parishes is against the plants. Some work at the plants or have family members who do. And a lot of vital community resources receive funding from the plants.
JAY: But when you live in a place nicknamed Cancer Alley, Shamyra says it’s easy to worry constantly about getting bad news.
SHAMYRA: When are you going to learn that somebody you love has cancer? That type of bad news comes frequently. We just got some Monday. A lady just died of cancer and we didn't even know she had cancer till she died.
JAY: All this disease and her own experiences growing up in St James led Shamyra to activism. It runs in the family. Her grandparents fought for civil rights. Her mother, Sharon Lavigne, started the organization Rise St James and has led the way in fighting pollution. Together, they are working to fight for their home and the health of their community.
SHAMYRA: It is critical to remain focused on what you visualize for your community, and remember why you're doing it. And thinking about my nieces and nephews, my family members, my aunts and uncles, thinking about them what keeps us going.
JAY: Shamyra loves this place, and many other people do too. It's home. And it's not just the land itself, but also the inheritance that this land holds. An inheritance full of family lore passed down at kitchen tables, of family recipes shared by elders, of Saturday trips to the beauty salon and mornings at Sunday school the next day.
JAY: Driving around the River Parishes, you see constant reminders of past and present: Centuries old live oaks alongside acres of concrete and gigantic metal platforms; plantation homes surrounded by fences and storage tanks; brick buildings that once housed classrooms and stores now adorned with signs for Valero, Exxon, and Marathon. And people who can trace their lineage back centuries. This landscape carries history that has helped to shape everything that’s happening now.
SHAMYRA: Our ancestors have been here for generations and generations. It's the history of our community. It's it's the love of our community, and it's our ancestors who were on this land, building this land, working on the plantations in our community who deserve for us to be living a healthy life here in the same community that they fought for, and also the community, the parts of our community that. Our freed ancestors once they were freed, created and built.
JAY: The people who live in the corridor know their health is at risk…it’s impossible not to. But this is their home, where they have memories and family… and where they want to have a future.
SHAMYRA: I don't think people deserve to live like this, and I don't think people that look like me deserve to be dealing with this and living in this. I think people deserve to breathe clean air and have clean water. it's a state of emergency. And something has to be done. Something has to be done.
JAY: We’ll have more after this short break.
Break
[19:35] B SEGMENT
JAY: So how am I feeling about this? I'm a little nervous. I'm excited. It's going to be interesting to see it from the sky.
JAY: Welcome back, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery, and I’m on my way to Lakefront Airport in New Orleans to take a flight over all of the corridor, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
JAY: So I'm looking for a flight line.
GPS: Turn left onto Julius EPP, Blanca Street, and turn right into the parking lot.
JAY: Southern Louisiana is super flat, which makes it hard to get a sense of scale. I want to get a better perspective on what’s happening in the corridor.
JAY Flight line first aviation is what I'm looking for. Here I am. Here says terminal.
JAY: I park and head into the hangar.
JAY: Oh my gosh, I hope I'm not going to be in a plane that little. The plane I'm looking at right now looks so scary.
JAY: The plane is the kind one person can drag around by hand…which is what our pilot is doing right now.
JAY: So is this our plane?
LANCE: Yeah, this is it.
JAY: Cool.
JAY: I climb into the plane and buckle my seatbelt.
ENGINE STARTING AND CHUGGING
JAY: We’re taking off, out over New Orleans. Out the window, I can see the canals and levees that shape the neighborhoods of the city. Some houses still have blue tarps on their roofs, leftovers from past hurricanes. And wow… the Mississippi River. It’s big and sparkling and majestic. Everything else looks so tiny compared to it.
JAY: It’s no accident that people and industry are concentrated along the Mississippi. It’s always been a highway of commerce, and I can see massive ships heading up and down right now.
JAY: As we fly outside the city, one story shotgun and ranch houses dot the landscape. On both sides of the river, I can also see fields and fields of green: Sugarcane. Hundreds of sugarcane plantations once lined this stretch of the river. Dozens are still here, and it’s easy to spot them from above.
JAY: Louisiana still produces a lot of sugar. But from the air, it’s abundantly clear that a newer industry has taken root along this stretch of river. Fields that once grew crops now sprout massive pipes and tanks.
JAY: We pass over plants that make steel, plants that refine oil, and plants that make fertilizer. We fly over the largest ammonia plant in the U.S. I’m looking down at the places where many of the things we use in daily life begin their transformation from raw material.
JAY: With some plants, you can tell what they make just by what color they are. Piles of fluorescent yellow sulphur, like neon sand dunes, mark a fertilizer plant. At a bend in the river, I see a whole group of buildings blanketed in red dust. It’s an aluminum plant and that dust is bauxite, the raw ore that aluminum is made from. Nearby, I can see several big waste ponds, also red. And just beyond that, people’s homes.
JAY: Our patterns of consumption are written on the landscape of the corridor. And the Mississippi is at the center of it all, the main artery in a vast network for extracting, refining, storing, and transporting materials - first sugarcane, now oil and natural gas. And from those fossil fuels come a vast range of synthetic materials made from petroleum: petrochemicals.
JAY: Most petrochemicals aren’t something you buy straight off the shelf. But they are in almost everything you do buy.
JANE: Petrochemicals are everywhere… They are the basis of, glues and detergents and, plastics, like water bottles and phone cases and eyeglasses and headphones. I'm looking at the headphones on your ears.
JAY: This is Jane Patton, campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law.
They're also things like fertilizers and pesticides. Both the industrial pesticides and the ones that you spray on your kids before you go in the woods, like, these are all petrochemicals. There's petrochemicals in your shampoo. There's petrochemicals in your makeup. There's petrochemicals in your clothes. Probably.
JAY: All of these products start out roughly the same way. Oil and gas are refined and separated into the basic building blocks of chemistry. Some of these you’ve probably heard of, like ammonia. But others you might not have. They have names like benzene, ethylene, and xylene. And these get further refined, mixed, and processed into an array of fancy molecules that make your phone waterproof, your pants stretchy, your glue sticky, and your soap sudsy.
JANE: The average person probably doesn't wash their hair thinking, oh, man, I love these petrochemicals. But part of what makes shampoos so good is the surfactants that are in them. And those surfactants are petrochemicals, and they break down grease and they break down dirt.
JAY: Lots of really useful things have come from petrochemicals. And while this is a story mostly about the negative impacts of how petrochemicals are made, we can’t ignore the fact that some of the things made from them literally save lives. Think about a hospital - Plastic syringes, rubber surgical gloves, IV tubes, medical devices like stents. Even the medicine we take comes inside a petrochemical polymer pill. Plastics also keep us safe in cars - air bags and seat belts depend on them. In a lot of ways, plastics really have been a miracle of modern life. But all those advantages came at a big cost in how they are made.
JANE: the production of petrochemicals is devastating to local communities. It is devastating to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who live in this world, who live in the shadow, in the blast zone downwind from a petrochemical facility.
JAY: All industrial processes produce byproducts and waste that live somewhere on the landscape.
JAY: In the corridor, they are released into the air, stored underground, deposited in huge pits, buried in landfills, and piped into the Mississippi River. And the places where the manufacturing itself is happening, the plants, are big, loud, smelly, and bright.
JANE: If you go in your backyard in any suburban area on the other side of your fence, there's another neighbor, right? There's another house, another backyard. What we're talking about is on the other side of that fence, a tank farm on the other side of that fence, a very loud, very smelly, very bright petrochemical plant, literally on the other side of that fence. And those smells are not just an inconvenience. They cause headaches. They cause skin and eye irritation. They can cause long term neurological deficits, not to mention mental health problems.
JAY: One day, I stopped by an ammonia plant in St James.
JAY: I could actually hear this plant inside the car as I was passing by and my windows were up, so I stopped. Rolled the windows down and just sat here to really hear what people that live nearby are hearing every day and night.
TAPE OF AMMONIA PLANT
JAY: Imagine this beside your house, all day, every day. That’s the reality for tens of thousands of people here.
JANE: These are people who have to know how to shelter in place. These are mamas who have to know how to tape the edges of the doorframe when the alarm goes off at the chemical plant down the road. These are families who have to think about whether or not they need a gas mask to go outside, because they live down the street from a petrochemical plant. You know, these are these are our young women who are losing their hair and don't know why. And it's because there's chemicals in the water. You know, this is the the actual lived reality of petrochemicals.
JAY: There are safer ways to make and process chemicals, but they cost more money, take more time, and often need specialized equipment. There’s a reason you often find petrochemical companies setting up and moving to places where environmental regulations are less strict. The companies and the politicians who help make it happen all say they are just giving me, you, and everyone else what we’re asking for: more stuff, more petrochemicals. And they say that if we closed our plants in the US, all of it would just get made in a dirtier way, in some other country.
JAY: I reached out to many of these plants for interviews - to the parent companies like Valero, Shell, Dow, and DuPont, as well as to their individual facilities in the corridor, but I never got a response.
JAY: These are businesses that bring in a lot of money. And fossil fuel companies are betting that even if we use less oil and gas for energy, we’ll still need more and more of it for every other part of our daily lives. Oil and gas account for about a quarter of Louisiana’s economy. It’s made some people rich and powerful, but at the expense of many others—and the winners and the losers in this equation are not evenly distributed.
JANE: The concentration of people who live around the petrochemical plants has a racial character. It has an economic and class character. You don't live here and not see that. That's obvious.
JAY: Louisiana’s chemical corridor is full of Black communities. And it’s full of Black communities because of another profitable industry, slavery. Many people here see that industry as a kind of blueprint for this one.
JANE: You can literally lay a map from the early 1800s of the Louisiana of the Mississippi River that maps all the plantations. You can lay it on top of a map today and see the same property lines. Some of these plants and facilities have the same names as the plantations. The mosaic plant is called the Uncle Sam plant because it's built on what was the Uncle Sam plantation.
JAY: Those matching property lines aren’t a coincidence. Many of the white people who owned large plots of land during slavery eventually sold them to the oil and gas industry. For the formerly enslaved people who stayed and created communities in the River Parishes, political and economic power remained in the hands of white people.
MUSIC CUE
JAY: The corridor is a place where industry and exploitation have co-existed for centuries. Where the descendants of enslaved people who survived some of the most bloody and horrific conditions in the sugarcane fields are now dying because of another industry, an industry that promised to bring prosperity to their communities.
JANE: Louisiana's economy and its land use policies have been built around extraction. They've always been built around industrial facilities. I mean, that's what a plantation is. It's industrial agriculture. And now we have industrial agriculture, and we have industrial petrochemicals, and we have industrial oil refineries.
JAY: Petrochemicals modernized the world economy in the 20th century. They fueled a vision of a future filled with conveniences, innovations, and luxuries available to more people for less money. Better living through chemistry.
DUPONT AD
JAY: The world that advertisers imagined in the 1950s? We’re living in it now. Yeah, we don’t have flying cars and homes on the moon, but our lives are rich in synthetic materials made with advanced technology and produced in abundance.
JAY: And the place where much of this future took shape was along the last 100 miles of the biggest river in America .
JAY: There’s a lot of stories told about the corridor. Stories told by company leaders about birthing the future, by politicians about economic prosperity, and by tour guides on plantations about a mythic past. But in this series we’re going to focus on how and why these plants ended up here and what the people who live here are doing about it. While not everyone here is against the plants, I’m going to focus on the people who want things to change. People, like Shamyra Lavigne, who can’t ignore the impacts of petrochemicals, because it's literally next door.
SHAMYRA: Come see what it's like. Come smell it. You're going to get nauseous smelling it. It's in your face like it's not a secret is in your face. It's a death sentence is a death sentence at this point. It is.
JAY: We all use petrochemicals. It's nearly inescapable in modern life. But the cost of this for our air, our water, and for entire communities is not equally shared. People in the corridor are paying for it with their lives.
JAY: Next time on The Corridor:
JOY: So in this in this history is like is traumatic. Yes. But it's also hella interesting.But we as black Americans and we like even not even and but especially in small communities like mine, we have the most compelling stories. Your strongest strength is your story.
JAY: The story of the first industry to come to the corridor.
Credits
AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
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