"The Center for Black Southern Culture is where history, agriculture, art, culture, and community meet to tell our story in our own words, rhythms, and visions."

The South has long been a place of struggle and triumph for Black communities. From blues and soul music to civil rights and beyond, Memphis stands at the crossroads of history and innovation. The Center for Black Southern Culture was founded to ensure that these ways of life are prioritized, protected, preserved, and practiced as both relics of the past and current living legacies.

OUR MISSION

We honor, reclaim, protect, defend, preserve, revitalize, and reimagine Black Southern cultural ways of life through love, history, land, food, art, culture, story, and environment for collective healing and liberation.

We build sacred intergenerational space for memory, creativity, and justice to thrive in soil, spirit, and soul of community.

OUR VISION

We foresee a future where arts and agriculture move together to foster dignity, health, and wealth for black families in the deep South.

Proven through practices of intergenerational knowledge transfer, land-based economic pipelines, cultural preservation, and natural conservation rituals that keep resources and stories in our communities.

Our Founding Story

The Center for Black Southern Culture was born out of a simple but urgent belief that the voices, traditions, and creativity of Black folks in the South deserve not only to be preserved, but reclaimed, defended, celebrated, amplified, and passed on to future generations.

In the spirit of our grandparents and parents who lived close to the land, cooked from scratch, quilted, prayed, and passed down stories, the seeds were planted long before its founding. Those teachings from Memphis and Mason, Tennessee to Mobile, AL, visits to Anguila, MS and beyond inspired the creation of the Center for Black Southern Culture (501c3) at the corner of Charlotte & Pickens LLC, two sister entities carrying one vision of rebirthing the cultural ways of Black Southern life.

Founded in Memphis, Tennessee, a city at the crossroads of music, history, and resistance, the Center was founded by Brittney Shelby Sessoms, a culture keeper, folklorist, multi-passionate creative, and community member who saw a need for a dedicated space where Black Southern identity could be honored in all its depth and diversity.

Unlike many, our work didn’t begin with funding nor a formal program, but instead the community’s call to action. In 2019, we began operating through This Lentil Life. That dream quickly grew into hands-on community work: cooking for the community, herbal education in schools, family workshops, and teaching urban agriculture, cultural foodways, and environmental stewardship that had been passed down for generations.

By 2021, we launched our first website, hosted community programs, and began formalizing our work under the name Charlotte & Pickens, chosen to honor our ancestors and their legacy of resilience and creativity. In 2022, we laid loved ones to rest while deepening our commitment to preserve memory, land, and culture. In 2024, we became both a Voqal Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow in 2025, gaining the support needed to grow the vision and institution.

We have always been intentional on remembering and reclaiming what has been lying dormant and seemingly lost: land, natural resources, farming, textiles, food, music, art, and story. Our hearts have always been set on reconnecting what has seemingly been rightfully displaced: families, communities, traditions, stories, creativity, culture, and health. We reimagine what is possible for Black futures rooted in justice, abundance, and joy.

Too often, the narrative of the Black South is reduced to pain or stereotypes, while the beauty, resilience, and innovation of its people are overlooked. The Center exists to change that through gatherings that combine music, storytelling, and dialogue. In these moments, we realize that when people are given space to see themselves fully, their power multiplies. The Center for Black Southern Culture was established to be that space.

We seek to build a place where art, culture, history, and community intersect. A place where the legacy of Black Southern culture is remembered and practiced to actively shape the present and the future.

While we are positioned locally, we reach outward to tell the story of the Deep South in the ways, words, rhythms, and visions of black southern folks.

Meet our Founder,

Brittney Shelby Sessoms

Grounded in the timeless traditions of Black Southern culture, Brittney Shelby Sessoms is weaving new narratives of community resilience as the founder and CEO of The Center for Black Southern Culture at the corner of Charlotte & Pickens. Her upbringing at the intersections of Charlotte St. in Walker Homes of Memphis, TN, Pickens Rd. in Mason, TN, Mobile, AL, and childhood visits to the Delta of Anguila, MS nurtured the wisdom of her grannies, father, and godmother informs her work with ancestral depth, elder wisdom, and lived authenticity.

Through her enterprise, Brittney revitalizes generational knowledge to address urgent needs in food justice, cultural reclamation, preservation, conservation, and community healing. Her innovative approach creates spaces where land, food, environment, wellbeing, and folklore converge, fostering resilience and sovereignty for future generations. Her pioneering work has garnered international attention, earning her recognition as a 2025 Echoing Green Fellow, 2024 Voqal Fellow, and other social institutions. Often dubbed the “youngest big mama or madea” of her generation, Brittney is charting a transformative path where home, heritage, and hope flourish together.