Backyard party in South Side Richmond an exercise in Black networking (2024)

With a trunk-load of degrees, including a doctorate in sociology, David Miller is a former schoolteacher who is an adviser to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on programs promoting fatherhood.

It’s a subject on which Miller, a Baltimore native who lives in Washington, D.C., also focuses on in his other line of work: author of children’s books.

“I write books because I’m trying to compete with cellphones,” said Miller, who was in Richmond on Saturday for Happily Natural, a Black-oriented festival with the feel of a family-oriented backyard party that is as much about networking and community building as it is about art and culture.

“Our children are spending too much time on cellphones and tablets. Picking up a book and going to the library are not activities that families tend to be involved in anymore.”

The author of nine self-published books, Miller said he grew up in a conventional setting — with a mother and a father, whom Miller looked after in his final years and who encouraged his son to complete college and pursue graduate degrees.

Parents — in particular, fathers, Miller’s interest — can be a supportive presence in their children’s lives even if they’re on their own. It’s a theme of one of Miller’s books, the latest of which is entitled “Ida B., the Beekeeper.”

Happily Natural, started 21 years ago by Duron Chavis, a self-styled “farmer-activist,” is a daylong event — staged in Richmond’s heavily Black south-of-the-James Manchester neighborhood, in an easily overlooked field that is said to have been family-owned for more than a century.

“I look at it as a family occasion, of sorts — brothers and sisters, Black and Brown, from all over the country, convening in Richmond, Virginia, on topics of social justice,” said Chavis, adding that Happily Natural in recent years has typically attracted 1,000 to 1,200 people.

Later, in remarks to festivalgoers, Chavis spoke to the event’s principal thrust: strengthening the Black community by forging new relationships and developing self-sufficiency and skills useful for all, or — as he put it — “further entangling ourselves.”

Sheltered from the steamy summer sun beneath brightly colored canopies were some 40 food and clothing vendors; government, trade and community representatives; and advisers on everything from raising cannabis, or marijuana — small quantities of which are legal in Virginia for personal use — to careers in health care.

Todd Winters, a non-practicing lawyer who lives in North Chesterfield and is originally from Michigan, helps people organize their “grow” — that is, the four cannabis plants permitted an individual.

“My business is the public business — cannabis,” said Winters, whose trade name is Sherlock Jonez. “I style myself as a consultant, educator, advocate.”

Three friends who graduated from James Madison University, where they joined the Theta Nu chapter of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority formed 104 years ago at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., set up a table where they helped people register to vote.

Stephanie Gamble of Reston, Loleeta Crews of Virginia Beach and Shenika Lightfoot of Chester turned out in their sorority colors — royal blue and pure white — and did little to conceal their enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris, who could become the first woman and first Black woman to achieve the presidency.

Harris, too, belongs to a sorority — Alpha Kappa Alpha, also founded at Howard, where she was an undergraduate.

“We just want to get you registered,” Lightfoot said. “Your affiliation doesn’t matter.”

And Obar Moyo, in a black T-shirt, shiny black shoes and fresh bib overalls, traveled from Petersburg, where he tends to a five-acre farm from which the residents of 200 houses draw produce. A farmer and carpenter, Moyo — with a bristly gray beard — was giving people pointers on raising vegetable gardens.

“People in the city don’t have to put grass in their backyards,” Moyo said, “because they can’t eat it.”