Welcome to Mississippi
Carlton Turner, Sipp Culture
The following poem was offered by Carlton Turner during the opening board moment at the Grantmakers in the Arts December Board Meeting in Jackson and Utica, Mississippi. Shared as both a welcome and an invitation, it helped ground our time together in place, spirit, and relationship. We are deeply grateful to Carlton for this generous offering and for his willingness to extend it to the full GIA membership during a milestone year in our organization’s history.
Fun fact
It takes 20 years for an acorn to grow into a mature oak tree that can produce its own seeds
I am father of Jonathan, Xiauna Lin, and Tristan Ali
Husband to Brandi Turner
I am son of Emmett and Genevia Turner,
Grandson of Samuel and Epsie Roberts,
Great Grandson of Will and Eliza Broadwater, James and Leonia Roberts
Great Great Grandson of Bob Roberts and Rosa Chatman, Gus and Sarah Terry, and Edmond and Alice Broadwater
Great Great Great Grandson of Samuel Broadwater and Barbery Kea, George and Lucy Kidd, James and Easter Roberts
Ancestors Bob, Rosa, Edmond, Alice, Barbery, George, Lucy, James and Easter were all born into bondage.
On my momma’s momma’s side, I’m part of the fifth of eight generations of Mississippians
I don’t have papers to prove it, but I have heard whispers that my momma’s daddy’s folks have always been here on this land, Native Mississippians.
I speak their names today to remind myself that it took all of these beautiful and resilient humans to transcend a life unfit for their beauty
to create the beautiful lives of those I get to call family.
Ashe
I remember.
I remember performing with my brother Maurice at this little poetry spot called Highlights on the North side of Jackson in 2001 and having a woman named Carolyn approach us after a set and ask if we had ever heard of Alternate ROOTS, we hadn’t.
But, If I were to think back to a single night that had the most significant shift in my life path it might be that night
That fork in the road would lead to being mentored by John O’Neal, Nayo Watkins, Alice Lovelace, and Carol Bebelle.
It would lead to sharing stages with Jonathan Baptiste, Trombone Shorty, Courtney Bryan and Sunni Patterson.
Spending years traveling back and forth to Appalachia to learn from Dr. Reagan and Tufara at Highlander and Dudley, Dee, and Mimi at Appalshop and Linda at Carpetbag before discovering my Turner family lineage goes back to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It would lead back to Jackson to learn from Bob Moses and sit at the feet of Hollis Watkins Muhammad and learn alongside C. Leigh McInnis.
This marks my 20th year in the GIA community.
I remember my first GIA experience
It was in Pasadena, California. It was 2005.
Culture Jam: Friction, Fusion, Synergy
GIA on the precipice of its 20th anniversary
I remember trying to find myself in an oversized ballroom filled with blue hairs with lifted pinkies and way too many forks.
I remember not feeling like this place, this crowd, this organization, was for me
And I remember vowing not to return to this feeling, or to this place again
But I also remember Walter Mosley spotting me and two other twenty-something Black first-timers and inviting us to sit at his VIP table for his keynote.
I remember each time someone approached his table to bask in his celebrity
Mr. Mosley would introduce each of us like we were the important ones.
Cause we were important.
This Southern Black man who writes books about subversive ordinary Black superheroes making the lives of regular Black folks livable gave me a tiny bit of hope that I too could be an ordinary superhero in my own way
I remember Claudine Brown organizing get-togethers for dozens of artisans, optimists, and activists in some, too tiny New York sized apartment to speak hope into the future.
She was my mentor and role model .
She demonstrated how you could be in philanthropy and not be of it.
She carved out a space for me.
Invited me to spaces that I would never find on my own.
Through her strategic cultural organizing and leadership development she would seed the transformation of this body that brings us to this place today (See arts culture and social justice network).
Ashe.
I remember becoming the ED of a 33-year-old organization at the age of 34.
I remember not being ready.
I remember the feeling of too many meetings, too many airports and banquet dinners.
I remember not moving to Atlanta when all Black people were moving to Atlanta.
Making the choice to stay in my community and raise my youngins in the only place I ever called home.
A home that still holds the honor and stigma of being the birthplace of the blues.
You know this is Medgar’s and Fannie Lou’s place.
The place that made Nina say Goddamn.
The place that birthed Muddy Waters and the King (BB not Elvis) and James Earl and Margaret Walker (ashe),
and Oprah and Kiese.
This place that birthed the Dobbs decision.
This place, both magical and malignant.
This place where the pressure to smile in the face of those who plot against has been known to turn pearly whites into diamond grills.
This place where the pressure to smile in the face of those who plot against has been known to turn pearly whites into diamond grills.
This place where the pressure to smile in the face of those who plot against has been known to turn pearly whites into diamond grills!
This place where, for the last nine years, I have worked alongside my wife and partner on a twenty-year mission to plant the seeds of generational transformation in and around our home.
This place, where love is an action verb.
And loving is exhausting work.
Yes, we work hard to make you feel at home.
To make sure everything is as good as we can make it.
Because Southern Hospitality is real
And the stakes are always high.
Because we don’t want your visit,
whether it's your first or your fourteenth,
to reinforce any of the many negative stereotypes about our intelligence or the rhythm of our dialect.
Yes, we do this even for folks we know and love and we know love us.
Because the stakes are getting increasingly higher.
Because we know you and we love you and we need to you speak of our genius in the many spaces we are never invited to speak for ourselves.
It takes 20 years for an acorn to grow into a mature oak tree that can produce its own seeds.
It is a testament to time and intention and change that I sit at this table with all of you beautiful humans in Mississippi in 2025, as a member of this organization that I have been around for twenty years, that I vowed to never return to, to grow into an ordinary superhero in my own way to make space for hope to sprout from increasingly fertile soil and grow a generation of ordinary superheroes.
Welcome home, ya’ll!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlton Turner, Lead Artist / Co Director, Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture), works across the country as a performing artist, arts advocate, policy shaper, lecturer, consultant, and facilitator. Carlton is co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production. The MCCP uses arts and agriculture to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi, where he lives with his wife Brandi and three children.
Carlton is also co-founder and co-artistic director, along with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction). M.U.G.A.B.E.E. is a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling. His current work is River Sols, a new play being developed in collaboration with Pangea World Theater that explores race, identity, class, faith, and difference across African American and South Asian communities through the lens of the river.
Carlton is currently on the board of First People’s Fund, Imagining America, the Center for Media Justice, Project South for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, and Grantmakers in the Arts. Carlton is a member of the We Shall Overcome Fund Advisory Committee at the Highlander Center for Research and Education, a steering committee member of the Arts x Culture x Social Justice Network, a former Network of Ensemble Theaters steering committee member, and the former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS.
Carlton is a 2017-18 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and a Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts. He is also a member of the Rural Wealth Lab at RUPRI (Rural Policy Research Institute) and an advisor to the Kresge Foundation’s FreshLo Initiative. In 2018, Carlton was awarded the Sidney Yates Award for Advocacy in the Performing Arts by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Carlton has also received the M. Edgar Rosenblum award for outstanding contribution to Ensemble Theater (2011) and the Otto René Castillo Awards for Political Theatre (2015). In 2013 Carlton was named to o the Kennedy Center honors Artist Advisory Board.
Cover Photo: Tree-covered backyard of the Sipp Culture Community Center, Utica, Mississippi. Photo by Ericka Jones-Craven.
ABOUT GIA’s 40th ANNIVERSARY
Grantmakers in the Arts celebrated its 40th Anniversary in 2025. Formally founded in 1985, GIA began as the only national organization dedicated solely to philanthropy in arts and culture. It served private-sector arts grantmakers and created space for open, candid dialogue to strengthen grantmaking practices and deepen understanding of how the arts contribute to society and community life. In the decades since, GIA has grown and evolved, clarifying and strengthening its commitment to supporting the cultural funding sector anchored in racial equity and justice and cultural and economic self-determination.
