
Reclaiming History: Crystal Good’s Black by God
In this “Love Louder” feature, Crystal Good discusses her mission to amplify Black Appalachian stories through community journalism and cultural preservation.
Crystal Good and I grew up a few years and a few miles apart in southern West Virginia—she in St. Albans and I across the Kanawha River in Cross Lanes. But I did not know her, or her work, until I was well into adulthood.
I came across her 2012 poetry collection, Valley Girl, and found myself back in the same “Chemical Valley” where we grew up. In a lot of ways, Crystal feels like a literary big sibling to me. Her work led me to discover her community of writers—the Affrilachian Poets, which is now the longest standing primarily African American writers’ group in the country, founded in 1991 by the accomplished and broadly influential Kentucky poet Frank X Walker. The Affrilachians for decades have asserted their belonging in the mountains and on the shelves of libraries and bookshops. Their community, in turn, helped me to understand my own literary place on the Appalachian bookshelf—as a part of the LGBTQ+ community and as a child of Indian immigrants.
But where I left Appalachia and never returned, Crystal has allowed the push/pull of Appalachian existence to inform her life’s trajectory. Despite stints in New York and Los Angeles, she has made a home for herself in West Virginia, and committed herself to the work of fighting for both communities and policies that enable Black West Virginians to thrive.
Crystal wears so many hats: editor, poet, activist, policy advocate, community organizer. She also holds what she calls the “completely made up but totally real office” of Social Media Senator for the Digital District of West Virginia.
But for our purposes here, she is the founder and editor of Black by God: The West Virginian, a community-led news organization that centers the experiences of Black West Virginians. This in a state whose population is ninety percent white and whose last Black-owned newspaper closed its doors nineteen years ago. And the work she does at Black by God merits all the loud love we can send her way.

Neema Avashia: So if you were going to explain Black By God to somebody who had never kind of encountered it, how would you?
Crystal Good: We’re a digital media storytelling platform. We are a newspaper. We do journalism, and we center the stories of black Appalachians. When I was 17 years old, I tried to buy the last black newspaper in West Virginia [Charleston’s Beacon Digest]. My dad went over to Mr. [Stephen} Starks and asked him if I could buy the paper. But Mr. Starks wouldn’t sell me the paper. He said I could sell ads for him, but I was like, “Oh, hell, no!” So something inside of me, since I’ve been seventeen, has been like, you need to own a paper.
Fast forward to 2020, when I actually did launch the paper. This is a long held dream, a long held purpose. It’s hard. And sometimes I get really pissy, and I wanna quit, but I have to remember that there’s a seventeen-year-old girl in here that’s way smarter than I am that knew this was gonna happen. Leaning into your dreams is what BBG represents for me. I’m trying to give it all the love and legs and support that I can, so that I can take that next step, which is the vision that I’ve held for myself since, like second grade. I want to write for a TV show. I want to write Black and brown Appalachian characters into everything.
NA: I feel like that’s the direct response to the erasure of Black history.
CG: Yeah. Because one black Appalachian character on any sort of mainstream show or movie, and we’ll change so much perception.
NA: We grew up just a couple of miles from each other. But I think your Appalachia and my Appalachia are somewhat different in nature, and so I wondered if you could talk about the Appalachia you grew up in.
CG: Well, you know, when you’re in something, you don’t really pay attention to it. We can’t really see where we are until we step out of it. My world changed when I was about when I was twelve and started modeling. I met an Indian American friend, and she was the only other brown girl in the modeling scene. We were kindred spirits, and we knew we were pushing against the beauty aesthetic. We knew we were pretty girls, but we were just in this sea of whiteness. So her presence there with me and that sort of pain really just made me feel like I belonged.
That entry into modeling really helped change my worldview, because once I was able to really start working, in New York, I could see the European girls. And those girls would not be the homecoming queen at St. Albans High School. They would have been considered weird-looking. Yet these women were beautiful. In the modeling world, as prejudiced as it is, there’s some just basic beauty aesthetics that are not like our Appalachian, homecoming-queen, all-American look. And so that really opened up my world. And I held on to that.
At twelve, I knew I wanted to be a creative. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a storyteller. And modeling was creative. It was fashion; it was makeup; it was a team working on a shot—all these different elements and characters I could play with. And when I look back, it was really my saving grace.
I was molested by my stepfather...and he was a white man. That really started to show me the true power of white men in small towns or white men in the world, because he got away with it.
NA: You wrote in Feminine Collective about growing up as a Black child in a white household. Your father was Black, and your mother and her second husband, your stepfather, were white.
CG: I was molested by my stepfather from ages five to fifteen. That’s a long time. And he was a white man. That—and my mother being white—really started to show me the true power of white men in small towns or white men in the world, because he got away with it. So many people turned their eyes. They didn’t want to believe it. So much of my maternal family’s whiteness really kept me in harm. Their whiteness was more important to them, on so many occasions, than me.
I can look back and see that so clearly. And I just love on my little self, because that trauma was already happening, and then I was also trying to navigate race in a place where people are just like, “Just pass. Just pass.”
I graduated [from high school] in ’92. So I’m definitely a part of the hip hop generation. Black power and Black pride, and how to carry yourself. All this stuff that was woven into this beautiful era of hip hop, and how it saved me. It gave me a connection to Black community. It gave me a way out, right? It gave me so much joy. We would gather around and listen to a tape together. We didn’t have the internet. These things, you didn’t come by easily. You had to get the one cassette that was in the record store. You had to borrow from your cousin.
These beautiful mechanisms of survival stepped in, right? Black culture has kind of just always stepped in and given me a big hug.
NA: Who are the people who served as the bridges to Black culture for you?
CG: I think I built my own bridge, to be honest. When I was fifteen, my mother kind of woke up to the reality that we were living with this monster of a husband—who she had picked. She got her mind clear and decided to get out of that relationship. So she sent me to Tallahassee, Florida, to live with my grandfather. And he gave me one rule when I moved in with him in Tallahassee, Florida. Now, mind you, I’m fleeing from like a child molester. But anyway, the one rule was I cannot tell anybody that I’m Black. I can be Eskimo. I can be Indian, I can be native American. I could be Hawaiian, I could be Hispanic. He thought of all kinds of things that I could be besides Black, right? And I thought, “Wow. Being Black is terrible.” I didn’t know what world I was stepping into. Why would he tell me this? I’m getting ready to go to a new town, a new school. I knew everything, right? But I couldn’t be Black.
But I was coming from a small town, Saint Albans, West Virginia, where there were only six of us. So I was thinking it wasn’t going to be too much of an obstacle. I was wrong. My world changed at fifteen, when I went to Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida. I remember the first day very clearly. This group of Black girls walked up to me, and they got in my face, and I was like, “Oh, shit is about to pop, right?” But these Black girls walked up, and they just wanted to let me know that I was not white, right? They were the children of professors at FAMU, at Florida State. These were very, very, very middle-upper-class Black people, which was something that I had been told did not exist. To be Black was to be poor. I’m like, “Wait a minute. These people got more money than my granddaddy. They got elevators and swimming pools and art, and the whole family goes on a trip on an airplane. They are the Huxtables. This is The Cosby Show I’ve stepped into.
My peers would sit down with me and teach me books, and teach me what they knew, and teach me Bible verses, and teach me everything that I needed to do to have this inner compass of where to be proud of my Blackness, to understand my history, to understand what’s happening. That was such a beautiful experience.
But then I had to come home. I had to come back to West Virginia. My mother had divorced my stepfather, and this is where my Appalachian identity started to really shape. Because Appalachian was the only category that included everybody. It included my white granddaddy and his racism. It included my Black family. It included everything for me. And that was what I came home with from Tallahassee. I had this very strong sense of my Black identity, but I could never really explain to other people where I was from, and why I was so attached to West Virginia.
I found a community, I found love, I found family, and I found purpose. I found it all when I found Affrilachia. Affrilachia was inclusive, and that gave me so much peace.
I didn’t have the language for how much I loved home, because it was conflicted for me. Is home my stepdaddy and my mom? Or is home that little girl in St. Albans just riding her bike, getting a gnat in her eye, hooking up with her friends, walking through the cemetery? My whole West Virginia childhood was this beautiful experience of being in nature everywhere that I went, being in this green, picking the neighbors’ flowers, finding a path. I was very busy out in the world with my friends, and I treasure that now, looking back.
You know, my granddaddy, racist as he was, said to me, “You don’t even know anything about West Virginia,” and I thought, “Well, who the hell are you?” He kind of lit a fire under me to prove him wrong. I kind of just started studying and finding myself. But I found a community, I found love, I found family, and I found purpose. I found it all when I found Affrilachia. Everybody could be included in that, because Affrilachia is Appalachia. That means I don’t have to leave my mom and my granddaddy and all that out. I don’t have to leave my brown girlfriend at the modeling school. Affrilachia was inclusive, and that gave me so much peace.
NA: What do you feel is different about Appalachia now, compared to the Appalachia that you grew up in?
CG: Well, we’ve lived through a lot as a country. My teenage years were the O.J. Simpson years. We were dealing with racism in school. We were punching people. We were fighting. I think these kids now have been through Barack Obama. They’ve been through George Floyd. They’ve been through so much that their fight is a little different.
In my work with Black By God: The West Virginian, I’m thinking a lot about how I am—and you are—the integration generation. We are the first generation of Americans that are fully integrated. Because my grandparents went to segregated schools. My parents went to segregated schools.
I think a lot about that—and what we’ve lost as a result. During segregation, there was a Black club. There was a Black liquor spot. There were Black parties. It was segregated, but you could still go find your community. You could find accountability in that community. You could find fashion, you could find music. You could find the best dance, you could find people, and you could find your elders. You could find all those things. And so I think, as the integration generation, we’ve lost some of those core community tenets that held us.
That’s what I’m trying to do with Black By God—create a place, even though it’s a mental space or virtual space, for the tradition of Black excellence. The tradition of “you better be the best.”
NA: This makes me think that integration in places like West Virginia is especially complicated, because the numbers are so skewed in terms of population. Ninety percent of the state’s population is white. A real loss of cultural moorings happens when you’re integrating in places where people of color make up such a small percentage of the population. It’s not really integration. It’s immersion into the dominant culture.
CG: There you go!
NA: Something I’ve thought about a lot about is how much erasure of Black history I experienced in my K-12 education. We didn’t learn about Blair Mountain. Nobody talked about the Niagara Movement forming in Harper’s Ferry, Booker T. Washington being born in Malden. Slavery at Kanawha Salines. The story of Black history in West Virginia was intentionally deleted from the story that I learned. I don’t know if that was particular to my schooling, or if that was an experience you also had in your schooling.

CG: I did, but like I said, when I came back from Tallahassee, I was fifteen and so full of Black power. When I came back to St. Albans to go to high school, I went gangbusters. I started a newsletter. I started a club called Harambe. I watched the Black teachers in my school create a path and open doors for me like nobody’s business. I was very fortunate that I had Black teachers, which is so wild because it didn’t really happen in a small town. I even had a Black woman principal for elementary school. They had the gifted program. Whenever the kids would go to the gifted program, I would say, “What do you all do there?” And they said they read books, and they made plays. And I was like, I want to do that. So I just started going to the gifted program. And my principal, Miss Morrison, a Black woman, she said, “This child is curious. Let her stay. She ain’t bothering nobody. Doesn’t matter that she didn’t pass that gifted test.”
Black women created a path for me. When I came back and started the Harambe Club, and really started wanting to teach Black history and share this West Virginia history, the Black women teachers made a way for me. They’re the ones that fought the principal so I could have a billboard in the hallway. I’ve been kind of gangbusters about sharing that history for a long time, because it has made such a difference in my posture in the world—being proud and knowing that I have a legacy to step into.

NA: You’ve been building that legacy, too, not only with the news outlet of Black By God, but also by helping organize events like Black Policy Day at the state capitol. Hoppy Kercheval put you on his radio show this year. (Kercheval is considered the “dean” of West Virginia radio hosts, and his talk show is influential statewide.)
CG: For years, I’ve never been on Hoppy’s show. It didn’t matter when I testified at the U.S. Senate. It didn’t matter if I was on the Anthony Bourdain show. It didn’t matter what I did, Hoppy was not inviting me as a guest. But this one particular day, we were doing Black Policy Day. And the Capitol was just full of Black people. He was like, “Okay, I’d like to talk to the organizers of Black Policy Day.” So we did. The first thing Hoppy does when we sit down is kind of bait me about how tense it is in the capital for us. He asks, “How are people receiving Black Policy Day?” And I’m looking at him like, “You see that line of food over there, Hoppy? Everybody in the capitol is loving Black Policy Day. They come out of their office, they get a plate of food.”
But I said, “Hoppy, whenever we start talking about amazing Black West Virginians and what they’ve done, everybody starts to celebrate that. lt’s not Black people’s Booker T. Washington. It’s West Virginia’s. West Virginia’s Leon Sullivan. It’s West Virginia’s Katherine Johnson.”
And I watch people take pride in that, because you know what white people in West Virginia need? Those stories of success, of resilience, of ambition—almost more than Black people do—in West Virginia. Because it’s been so deeply degraded, as we’ve seen with the J.D. Vance narratives. You pick any great Black person out of West Virginia Black history and that stands as a model for everybody. And I think that’s a bit of a shift. So I said to Hoppy, “I find that when I share Black history, everybody celebrates it.” And then I just asked him, “Hoppy, how do you feel right now? How do you feel in this sea of Blackness?” He said, “I feel amazing. I feel this is wonderful.” Yes, you feel love, you feel connection, you feel community, and those are the things that I’m working hard to make sure exist so that I can keep myself anchored in a place.
As an elder, I’m in a place to be able to hold space and just to keep building. I’m very proud of what I’ve done, but I also recognize I’ve just scratched the surface.
On one hand, all West Virginians like to hold up examples of Black excellence, the wealth of writers, thinkers, musicians, athletes—there’s just so much to be proud of there. At the same time, you have a legislature that tries to prevent the teaching of accurate history.
NA: On one hand, all West Virginians like to hold up examples of Black excellence, the wealth of writers, thinkers, musicians, athletes—there’s just so much to be proud of there. At the same time, you have a legislature that tries to prevent the teaching of accurate history. You have a legislature that supports the banning of books, and we know that by and large, when people are banning books, they’re banning books by writers of color and queer writers. That’s who they’re going after, by and large. How do you make meaning of the fact that we can do both of these things at the same time? We can have a policy agenda that is very much about limiting people’s access to Black history or limiting Black folk’s ability to be free from discrimination in the workplace. And also, we can also put the statue of Katherine Johnson at State College.
CG: I make sense of it because I found purpose with BBG, and especially in building a food system. So when I think about survival, and I think about politics, listen, I can go get in a fight every day. You can pull your hair out. You can be shocked and awed. You can be in grief. You could be in just deep concern, which I’ve done for decades on multiple issues.
If I keep looking over there, I’m going to always be scared. I’m always going to be in a fight. This white-power presence is so thick, and we can’t do anything about it. Instead, I found purpose with BBG. I found a way to create community, to connect people, to give them resources that are important for their daily lives.
NA: I was just thinking about [Eastern Kentucky Mutual Aid founder] Misty Skaggs, who I talked to a couple of months ago, who was talking about how electoral politics have never been the solution for marginalized groups in Appalachia. So if you throw all your money there, or you put all your hope there, it’s just a failed place to put it, because it’s never proven to be true that it’s done anything for you.
CG: Yeah, and with Black policy work, we don’t get funding. I’m sick and tired of showing up to a room where I’m the leader—and everybody else is in the room because they work for a nonprofit that wants them to support Black Policy Day. And they get paid. But not the three black women leading it. Insanity, right? It just gives you great pause. We’re always pointing to that evil, mean, scary Republican over there, but our allies need to be asking, “What more can we be doing over here?”
NA: Yeah. We make choices with how we spend our money.
CG: And how we spend our time and how we resource people. What can we do proactively in these policy spaces besides always being in the resistance, right? And then what can we do with the people we trust to build something together—whether that’s a food system, whether that’s a business, whether that’s buying property. It’s not rocket science—how people have been doing things for a long time. If this majority community is not gonna have you in it, then the minority community finds a way. But I think because of the integration generation, we don’t know how to do that. It’s in us, but not as a practice. This past weekend. I turned 50, had an amazing birthday. My whole secret plan was to get all of the children that I helped raise, and with my community of mothers, and let them see their beauty, their talent. And let them feel home. They weren’t that excited about coming back to West Virginia with their mom and dad for Miss Crystal’s fiftieth birthday party, because, you know, you’re twenty-three. That might be fun, might not. But they all had an amazing time, and they all feel a greater sense of pride.
They all fell back in love with West Virginia. Even the ones that still live here, they fell in love with the sense of this community that you belong to, that you’ll always have with you wherever you are, and that you always have a place to come home to.
I want them to feel the beauty of West Virginia and the fact that you can just roll in and see a hundred people that you know or that know you. Just going in Kroger’s. Just that fun stuff of coming home. Going to waterfalls and hiking and being in the country, and breathing good air. They all fell back in love with West Virginia. Even the ones that still live here, they fell in love with the sense of this community that you belong to, that you’ll always have with you wherever you are, and that you always have a place to come home.
NA: I don’t think that really exists in meaningful ways for a lot of people outside of Appalachia. That kind of community. I feel like I’ve been chasing it ever since I left, and I can’t find it. But with BBG, you’re creating it, I think. You do a lot—editing, writing poetry, lobbying...
CG: I can do all the policy work. I can do all the advocacy work. I can work, work, work, work, work. Or I can write one song, write one poem. Anybody can do one thing that impacts culture. And you can change things. I mean, look at you, one book, right? Like how one book can change so much. So I think when I get mad at advocacy and policy work, I can just kick it and then just be like, I’m an artist.
NA: A hundred percent. But I also think the other thing that’s so powerful about the work you do at Black By God is the community reporting piece, right?
CG: Yeah. Folk reporters. It’s a necessity. We don’t have enough reporters here. We don’t have people to cover the public meetings, so they don’t get covered. And that’s where all the action happens. That’s where they sneak everything through. Nobody’s watching. And you know if anybody wants to be a folk reporter for me, I break it down as simply as this: when you go into a room you change the room. If you go into any City Council meeting, dog catchers’ meeting, Public Service Commission. You’ve never been there before. They know you’ve never been there before. They don’t know who you are. Why do you have a tablet? Why do you have a computer? What are you doing here? Right? You change the room just by being a witness, and that really is the call for folk reporters—to just ask people to be a witness in their own communities. Then we can figure out how to get that messaging out, whether that’s a tweet, whether that’s a photo of the agenda, whether that’s a full-blown essay, or whether that’s an op-ed. We give people many, many tools. But the first tool is you just got to show up and pay attention.
NA: What do you tell people who want to be involved with the policy work?
CG: Sometimes, I think, in policy work, we make it too complicated. We tell people you gotta do all these things. Nope, you ain’t got to do nothing but put your shirt and your shoes on. Drive down to the meeting and sit there and watch these people talk for hours, and then know that whatever you report out on your Facebook is so potent. I don’t really care about a viral tweet: what the hell is that going to do for me? Is it going to bring me some money? Maybe, but probably not. But if I have Miss Suzy and Miss Janet and Mr. Joe, and they’re all saying the same thing about something that happened, if they all have something that they want to share, that’s how the potency builds, and that’s how the trust builds. I think that’s the thing with Black By God is we have to have the trust of the people. If I don’t have the trust of the people, I don’t have anything.
NA: Yeah. But I also think that you are showing that the way you get your stories centered in the narrative is by taking control of the narrative. You don’t wait for somebody else to center you.
CG: Right, because they’re never going to.
NA: I think there’s just so much power in modeling that for people: we’re going to tell our stories. We’re not going to leave it to anybody else. We’re going to do it ourselves. What do you feel is the most surprising thing that’s happened for you in your work with BBG?
CG: It’s hard to put metrics around all of the things that Black By God has done, how it’s connected people, how it’s opened doors for people. So I just hope we can keep building. The surprise is that it works right. That this little black newspaper in West Virginia keeps going. We started in 2020. I’m still here, right?

NA: Especially in a context where so many other media sources are closing.
CG: We need fresh people, and then we also need people to know what you know. You have to share the knowledge and wisdom. In being an Affrilachian poet, being a Black poet in America—and understanding how lineage works and understanding that my responsibility is not just to create good work but to pass that torch and create opportunities for other poets—those are the rules, period. And I feel the same way with Black By God and journalism more broadly. I have a lot of experience, and West Virginia institutional knowledge, and I have to share that. I don’t want to just be on some board or on this committee for a thousand years. If you pay attention, I’m always trying to drag somebody into these spaces. And that’s not just because I need support and help, it’s because I want to share and show, because my wealth is in my network, in the people I know.
I know that it’s valuable. I couldn’t even put a price on the social capital, and so I share that, and how I hope to be an example for other people. There’s a thing that is very Appalachian that we’re skipping sometimes, and that’s the need for apprenticeship. And that’s the way that we know how to bring people in.
NA: I think your approach can also keep younger people engaged.
CG: I trust the young people so much. I really do.

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About the author
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It has been called “a timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “a graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.