Keith Rushing
speaker
315 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Keith Rushing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
How to Be a Better Human · How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing) · 27 Jul 2026
podcast
Soon after ABC first aired the TV series Roots, my seventh grade teacher asked us to pursue our own mini-Roots projects.
We had to ask our oldest living relatives about the oldest ancestors they could remember.
The story of Alex Haley's family, tracing back to an African ancestor named Kuntukente, who came to America from the Gambia, had sparked tremendous interest in origin stories among Black people.
Although the book later proved fictional, for African Americans, it ignited conversations about slavery and particularly the origins of ancestors who were captured and bound for the United States aboard ships carrying the enslaved.
Aunt Angie, short for Agnes, seemed like the perfect fit for my assignment.
At the time, she was 80 years old.
Born in 1897, she was the oldest of my grandmother's five siblings who were all born on the family farm in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
My parents invited Aunt Adgie, who lived not far away in Jamaica, Queens, over to our house in Springfield Gardens to spend the night.
As we sat mostly in silence around the kitchen table, she racked her brain, digging up names long buried in her memory.
Her mother would add them to the family tree spread out in front of her.
Adgie remembered many cousins in the surnames of people who married into the family.
Mom remembered names she had heard and people she may have met who lived in the South, not New York City, where we lived.
Aunt Angie could go back as far as her grandparents, St.
Coe and Margaret Molly Christopher.
I later learned they were born into bondage on a cotton plantation in Hilton Head in the 1840s.
After St.
Coe served in the Civil War among the U.S.
College troops, they transitioned to life as freed people.
That knowledge would surface decades later, however, after archival documents revealed details of St.
Coe's life during and after the war.
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