BACKGROUND:
This project gives voice to Black birthing people’s stories on how race, gender, and culture congruency in the context of Hoodoo affects their experiences. In the United States, Black birthing people and Black infants have markedly higher mortality rates than their White counterparts (Artiga, 2020). Public health and social science research focus on how systemic racism and social determinants of health as both the source of the problem and the site of the solutions (Singh et al, 2017; Artiga, 2020). These viewpoints disregard the African cultural retention among the Black communities and displayed in the “activist mothering” of Black birthworkers who are increasing in numbers after a half century erasure of Grand Midwives.

OBJECTIVES:
This research attempts to bring Black/African American families “from the margin to the center” (hooks, 2000) by speaking with them and not to them in order to move away from addressing systemic racism as the only solution for improving maternal and infant mortality and morbidity rates.

METHODS:
Individual narrative interviews were conducted on Zoom with eight Black women to answer the research question “How do Black birthing people experience birth with Black birthworkers who are Rootworkers?”

RESULTS:
Through the lens of the PEN-3 Cultural Model and Conjure Feminism – an expansion of Black Feminist Thought which privileges “other ways of knowing” including ancestral knowledge, simultaneity of past, present, and future, and spirit work (i.e. Hoodoo, Rootwork, Conjure), three major themes were derived: Hoodoo in Birthwork, Race Congruency with Birthworkers, and Birthing in Community.

CONCLUSIONS:
This study was a spiraling forward of the necessity of Black birthworkers who are Rootworkers to safeguard Black birth and community healing.

KEY MESSAGE:
As more Black maternal health research and birthing spaces are created, the presence and epistemic knowledge of Black women need to be centered, loved, respected, and protected. French - professional identity