Cotton in My Hands: Grandmama’nem and the Making of the Global Cotton Kingdom

Cotton built the modern world. Before it clothed bodies or balanced ledgers, it bound together land and labor, faith and finance, sweat and survival. In Cotton in My Hands, Dr. C. Sade Turnipseed invites audiences to reconsider cotton not as a closed chapter of the past, but as a living force—one that shaped the global economy while leaving the people who powered it largely unnamed.

At the center of this story is grandmama’nem—a term honoring ancestors of all genders whose labor, knowledge, and endurance sustained cotton regimes across continents. Their hands cultivated fields, fueled factories, and anchored financial systems stretching from the Mississippi Delta to the Atlantic world and beyond, even as their lives were largely erased from historical memory. Drawing on her expertise in cotton history and the global political economy, Dr. Turnipseed examines cotton as both commodity and culture. Anchored by the Leo & Gloria McGee Fine Art Collection, her presentation traces the continuum from field labor to global capital, revealing how cotton pickers transformed coerced labor into systems of survival, collective care, and moral economy. In this telling, they emerge not as marginal figures, but as discerning architects of the modern world—whose sweat equity and spiritual contributions demand historical truth-telling and ethical reckoning in today’s global economy.

Speakers Expertise:

Dr. C. Sade Turnipseed is an internationally respected public historian whose work centers the Mississippi Delta as America’s original Cotton Kingdom and a foundational site of African American history, culture, and resistance. Named Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Educator of the Year, she is widely recognized for translating rigorous scholarship into accessible public humanities programming. Dr. Turnipseed’s research explores Black labor, freedom-making traditions, music, memory, and civic courage. She is the author of LIL B: and His Tale of Survival and Field Hollers and Freedom Songs, and serves as Executive Director of Khafre, Inc., a Mississippi Delta–based nonprofit dedicated to establishing a national monument honoring the Cotton Pickers of the American South. Her lectures invite audiences to engage Mississippi history through inclusive storytelling, truth-telling, and shared reflection.