DERRICK EVANS
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DERRICK EVANS *
TURKEY CREEK COMMUNITY
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Derrick Christopher Evans is an educator, historian, community builder and humanitarian. He is a sixth-generation native of coastal Mississippi’s historic Turkey Creek community, founded during southern Reconstruction (1866) by his previously enslaved African-American ancestors. He also descends from the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, a Native American people of extraordinary defiance and endurance since European colonization.
Evans earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History, African-American Studies and Education from Boston College, where he taught U.S. Civil Rights History from 1992 to 2005. He taught middle school U.S. History and Social Studies as a Boston Public School teacher from 1991 to 2001, and has taught undergraduate history, social science and humanities courses at Roxbury Community College and Harvard College. In 1997, he co-founded Epiphany School, a full-service and tuition-free independent middle school for low-income children and families from Boston neighborhoods.
In 2003, Evans founded Turkey Creek Community Initiatives to conserve and restore the culture, ecology and self-determination of his ancestral community, watershed, and coastal estuary. Evans’ efforts to protect Turkey Creek are told in Mahan’s documentary Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek (2013). In the decade following the film’s release, the community’s efforts have garnered significant support and recognition, including: millions in Restore Act funds were designated for habitat restoration and conservation in the 30,000-acre Turkey Creek watershed; the National Park Service provided a preservation grant of $500 million to restore create a museum celebrating community, civil rights and labor history (the “Yaryan” museum received the Best of the South award from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and a Heritage Award from the Mississippi Heritage Trust); and the historic segregated Turkey Creek school and Headstart property was acquired for restoration and use for teaching and learning holistic and self-determined community stewardship.
Evans' work to foster strategic movements for community self-determination has extended well beyond Turkey Creek. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Evans became a co-founding Managing Advisor of the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health (GCF), which directs financial, technical and collegial support to local groups seeking authentic community recovery and resilience amid the Gulf South’s contemporary trends of major social, cultural and environmental displacement. He also co-founded (with Leah Mahan and GCF) BRIDGE THE GULF, an interactive Web-based platform for community advocates, journalists and storytellers; the Steps Coalition based in Biloxi, Mississippi; and Community Stewards of Malcolm X Park in Boston. Malcolm X Park is a vital part of Evans’ adopted neighborhood in Boston, where he has established roots going back to the 1980s. Evans restored four blighted apartment buildings and several vacant lots on his street in Boston’s historic but under-served Roxbury community – without the displacement or erasure of a single family, elder, architectural detail, or neighborhood land-use goal. He worked closely with seven people under the age of 40 – all of them his former students, tenants or a neighbor’s child – to help them become homeowners on the street.
Evans has been the recipient of numerous honors, including being named a River Hero by the River Network and a Taking Nature Black Environmental Champion by Nature Forward. He has been an invited speaker at numerous events including a keynote address at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. -
