{"id":181338,"date":"2023-01-27T14:43:26","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T14:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.internetsociety.org\/?page_id=181338"},"modified":"2025-09-10T10:42:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:42:28","slug":"tuskegees-jesup-cyber-wagon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.internetsociety.org\/issues\/community-networks\/success-stories\/tuskegee\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuskegee\u2019s Jesup Cyber Wagon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Tuskegee\u2019s Jesup Cyber Wagon:
Revisiting a Groundbreaking
Idea to Tackle Historic Inequalities<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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More than 100 years ago, George Washington Carver saw inequity in farming in the rural areas in Alabama, in the southeast United States. Resources were scarce, but Washington saw a deeper problem. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Many Black rural farmers were tied to their land, unable to travel to learn new farming techniques or attend practical demonstrations. Without the ability to keep up with modern agricultural practices, a gap could grow, with the farmers no longer able to sustain themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this problem in mind, Carver, a professor and head of the Department of Agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute, designed the Jesup Agricultural Wagon: a mule-drawn \u201cmoveable school\u201d that brought agricultural education to Black rural farmers. It came equipped with tools to harvest the land, like plows, fertilizers, and seeds, as well as demonstration items like plants and soil samples. Within its first few months of operation, the Jesup Wagon was able to reach more than 2,000 people per month. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carver, who had been born into slavery during the last years of the Civil War, knew well the opportunities education could bring, and the barriers many Black communities faced to learning and accessing new technologies. It\u2019s an inequity that persists today, over a century later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Jesup Cyber Wagon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Modern Internet can feel like a given in the United States, but areas that have traditionally been bereft of resources and federal, state, and regional support are often left in the cyber dark, even in the 21st<\/sup> century. So where traditional solutions fail to meet people’s challenges, a local entrepreneur is bringing Internet connectivity to his community through a community network. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boyd Stephens is a network operator for Netelysis. He also spearheaded the Jesup Cyber Wagon Community Network. It all started when he stumbled upon the Expanding Potential in Communities (EPIC) Grant<\/a> by the Internet Society and Truist Financial. He wasn\u2019t looking for an extra project, and almost passed it by, but Stephens saw it as an opportunity to address the connectivity challenges Black communities were facing in Tuskegee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne day, I\u2019m perusing some of my favorite websites, and I see this Truist opportunity. I read down into the minutia and I say, \u2018shucks this has our name written right on it, this is what we live, sleep, dream, and exist for professionally,\u2019\u201d Stephens says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The compelling drive is to empower people, both economically and socially to give them a voice. Because no one can tell your story the way you can tell your story, and this wonderful network of networks, the Internet, allows you to do a pretty good job of that.\u201d <\/div>