Last week The Kitchen Sisters — like hundreds of other arts and media organizations across the country — received word from the National Endowment for the Arts that our 2025 grant award has been terminated at the behest of the Trump administration. Our $25,000 grant was for the production of a further round of stories for our public radio and podcast series, The Keepers, stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, historians, curators, and collectors — guardians of history, protectors of civil society and freedom of speech. This round of stories was in part focused on naturalists as keepers, the observers and preservers of the natural world. 

It is with deep sadness and much love that we write to tell you that Amazing Grace Mulloy died on May 2, surrounded by her devoted family. Grace was 101-years-old and bowled til the end, making a final farewell to the lanes just two weeks before she passed. 

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve. On May 18, 1896 the Supreme Court ruled on the Plessy v. Ferguson case establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation. In 2022, 125 years after his arrest, the Louisiana Board of Pardons voted unanimously to recommend that Homer Plessy be pardoned for his crime. The pardon was spearheaded by Keith Plessy, a descendent of Homer Plessy, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great granddaughter of John Howard Ferguson, the convicting judge in the case.

George Foreman passed away on March 21, 2025. Two decades ago, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about immigrants and homeless people, who didn’t have an official kitchens, using the George Foreman Grill to make meals and a home. Did George Foreman know about this? We called him up to find out.

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the Mojave desert. In listening to this interview recorded 44 years ago we are struck by how Jeanne’s memories of those years — the sense of fear, of families being separated, of innocent people being terrorized, hunted — resonate with what is happening in our country today. 

The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex

Deep thanks to all of you who support the work of The Kitchen Sisters. Without your collaboration and contributions, our stories, internship, and mentoring program would not be possible.