HIKE Visionary Lab

An afternoon with Terry Buffington.

Building Rooms

Resilience, Survival, Trauma, and Courage

She grew up under Jim Crow in Mississippi, went back as an anthropologist to document it, and is going to read you what she found.

Then the room talks. Not a Q&A. A real conversation about what gets built when you're locked out of everything, and what you're building now.

When

Saturday, November 14th, 2026 (time TBD)

Venue

TBC

Admission

$35

When you're shut out of every room, you build your own.

When Black people were excluded from political, economic, educational, and social spaces, families and communities built rooms of their own: homes, churches, businesses, gardens, kitchens, beauty shops, gathering places, and spaces for memory.

These rooms did not erase trauma. They helped people survive it, preserve dignity, develop courage, and prepare the next generation to demand more.

This workshop is about how that is done.

Terry Buffington

Anthropologist · Archivist · Terry Buffington Foundation

Your guest of honor

She lived it, then she went back and wrote it down.

Terry Buffington grew up under Jim Crow in West Point, Mississippi. She returned as an anthropologist, rebuilding trust in a place that had every reason not to talk, sitting through fish fries and church suppers and living-room interviews until people told her the truth about what had happened there.

She has spent decades keeping the record. Her personal collection documenting the Civil Rights era now lives in Special Collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

There are not many people left who can do all three: live it, document it, and sit in a room in Spokane and talk with you about it.

The archive: Personal Civil Rights collection held at UNC Chapel Hill Special Collections
The manuscript: Born Under Jim Crow — unpublished; lived experience, oral history, cultural anthropology
The foundation: Terry Buffington Foundation, promoting the culture and contributions of African American history

Why you want to be there

You'll leave with more than you came in with.

A story you'll be telling for years

You will have sat ten feet from a woman who grew up under Jim Crow, went back as an anthropologist, and got her own community to tell her the truth. Not a documentary. Not a syllabus. Her, in a chair, answering when you ask. There are very few rooms left where that is possible.

A frame you can put over your own work

"What room is this, and who can enter it?" is the question you'll walk out with. Put it over your business, your team, your family, your church, this city. It reorganizes what you're looking at. That's the takeaway you'll still be using in March.

Your own answer, said out loud to a witness

Twelve minutes, two or three people, one question: what have you built, and what are you building next. Most of us never say that to anyone. Saying it out loud, to someone who heard the same stories you just heard, is what turns a thought into a plan.

Proof that the cycle is survivable

Terry's material is not comfort. It's evidence. People built under conditions far worse than yours and their rooms are still standing. You leave with less panic and more precedent — which is a different thing from hope, and more useful.

Support this event

What this room needs

You

Nothing works without a room full of people. Save your seat and bring someone who would never have found this on their own.

Community Partners

The conversation is only as good as who is in it. If you know who belongs in this room, invite them.

Become a Partner

About these events

What is the Visionary Lab?

The HIKE Visionary Lab is where we look hard at systems that weren't built for us, and then do the harder part: work out what we'd build instead, and how.

Without science fiction, we wouldn't have cell phones. Somebody had to imagine it before anyone could build it. This room is the space for the vision. The people in it are the engineers of the new future.

Check out our other labs

The Terry Buffington Foundation is an American cultural anthropology organization that promotes the study of cultural anthropology and social activism to bring to light Southern and black experiences during the Civil Rights Movement to the present.

Their mission is to promote the culture and contributions of Black people in American history through community-building events and collaborative efforts, which make the organization open to anyone and everyone.