Growing up in Texas, Ronnie Green’s great-grandmother taught him to fish. She’d wear a dress and go after crappie, bluegills and gasper goos (freshwater drum) with a spinning rod. When Green, a professional bass angler and the host of World Fishing Network’s A Fishing Story with Ronnie Green, interviewed African American fishing pioneer Alfred Williams, it turned out that Williams’ great-grandmother had taught him to pull channel cats out of the Pearl River with a cane pole as a boy in Mississippi.
America’s fishing history has an underrecorded chapter of Black women fishing the lakes and rivers of the South since well before the Civil War. “Native American women taught a lot of African American women to fish. It was a means to get food,” says Green, who is 53 and lives in Tampa, Florida, landing in the Sunshine State in 2007. “It wasn’t considered a high-society thing. But a lot of women enjoyed it. It was their way to get away from everything that was going on.
“I learned a lot from my great-grandmother about that,” he adds. “Then when I had some incredible people on the show, I’d hear the same anecdotal evidence about how their great-grandmother or grandmother
