5 minute read
NCCU Alumna Promotes Hip-Hop, Getting Happy and Farming
rystal E. Taylor ’05, wears many hats.
She’s CEO and founder of The Underground Collective, which provides a creative platform for artists in the hip-hop culture and spawned the Beats n Bars Festival, which debuted in 2015.
Taylor is executive director and founder of Get Happy, a nonprofit that helps communities of color find healing and happiness in nontraditional methods.
She is the mother of 5-year-old Mansa Alee Godwin.
Moreover, the North Carolina Central (NCCU) graduate is a fourth-generation farmer.
“When I tell people I’m a farmer they’re kind of surprised, but they know I’m a serious person and wouldn’t joke about that,” said Taylor, who earned a business administration degree from NCCU. Dannie and Agnes Mae Tatum, her late maternal grandparents, raised food on the farm and sold it to their community members,” Taylor said.
“They earned enough money to send my momma to medical school. They raised four children off doing what they could do, what they had to do," Taylor said.
After Taylor’s grandparents died, the farm went unattended. Her mother, who earned her undergraduate degree from NCCU, and her mother’s siblings had their own lives, and farming didn’t exactly fit into their plans.
Yet Taylor never forgot watching her grandparents sell food from their farm when she was a little girl growing up in Clinton, North Carolina – or the way people seemed to depend on it. After researching the plight of Black farmers in the United States, Taylor contacted her uncles to gauge their interest in resurrecting the farm. They were glad she did. Taylor and her uncle, Donald Tatum, have been tackling the farm as best they can, but it hasn’t been easy. Taylor lives two hours away in Durham, and Tatum lives about four hours away in Virginia. Even so, Tatum recently remodeled the farmhouse, and Taylor gets to Clinton when she can to pitch in.
“I’m hoping to get to a place with Underground Collective where I can take some time to devote to the farm,” she said. “The farm is really where I want to be. My company is great. I enjoy it. But I’m 40 years old and have a 5-year-old. I find refuge and peace on the land, and can work from there. I enjoy riding on the tractor, rolling my hands in the dirt and growing things.”
Taylor said the first time she drove a tractor, she started at 8 a.m. and bushhogged (cleared) about eight acres.
When she called it quits at sunset, she was simultaneously exhausted, excited and liberated.
She wants to resuscitate the farm to honor her grandparents and to have something to leave her son. In the past her family farmed wheat and other crops, but nowadays Taylor and Tatum are experimenting with specialty garlic and considering raising asparagus.
Shawn Sullivan of Durham has known Taylor since hiring her as his administrative assistant at Blue Cross Blue Shield several years ago. He said she is good at motivating people, making them feel appreciated and holding them accountable.
He’s not surprised by her plans to revive the farm and remembers watching her serve as director of wholesale and farmer relations at Durham’s Black Farmers Market.
If he has one concern, it’s that Taylor is spreading herself too thin. Even so, he said, given her tenacity and indomitable spirit, he won’t be surprised if she is successful with the farm.
Neither will Derrick Ward of Fayetteville, who met Taylor at a wedding a decade ago and was intrigued by her passion for hip hop and Black culture. Her plans for the farm make sense given what he knows about her drive and determination.
“It’s amazing, especially … with food being a hot commodity because nowadays everything is manufactured and mass produced,” Ward said. “To see that drive toward ensuring her family farm survives and continues to move forward, I think it’s important. I definitely respect and have an appreciation for that because I know it’s not easy.”
Like Sullivan, Ward is aware of the many enterprises in which Taylor’s involved. What is most impressive, he said, is how she includes her son.
“He’s a big part of what she does, and I think it’s amazing to grow up around that and to see that,” Ward said.
Taylor, named to Triangle Business Journal’s 2024 Women in Business class, said she exposes her son to as much as she can. For example, when she curated the opening of N.C. Freedom Park in Raleigh for Gov. Roy Cooper in 2023, Mansa joined her in the governor’s mansion.
Taylor said one impetus for the farm is to show her son the rewards that can come from hard work. She hopes by the end of 2024 she’ll be evenly splitting her time between Durham and Clinton.
And just how quickly does she foresee things progressing?
“I’d like to think in 2025 we could have our first farm-to-table dinner.”
