Early Screening
Saves Lives.
Joe Greene has spent five years telling every Black man in North Carolina the thing that saved his own life. This is his story — and his fight.
Begin
Everybody already knew his name.
Twenty years of shows and stages — Asheville411, Southern Boy Entertainment, the promoter who brought Slick Rick and Red Grant to town. A youth mentor with My Daddy Taught Me That. The first African-American member of the Harrah’s Cherokee Center board. A father of three.
Joe, still waking from anesthesia, learning his first colonoscopy had found stage 3 colon cancer. He was 40 years old. Uninsured, in the middle of a pandemic, carrying a tumor the size of a tennis ball.
“I wouldn’t be here if I had waited until I was 45.”
Surgery. Twelve rounds. A hundred pounds.
Emergency surgery took the tumor. Six months of chemotherapy took a hundred pounds off him, ending November 11, 2021. Radiation came after. And when doctors offered a second round of chemo as the only option left, Joe said no — found his own phase-one immunotherapy trial — and kept going.
“I’m thankful to be here. I’m gonna keep fighting.”
He turned a hospital chair into a pulpit.
ESSL — Early Screening Saves Lives. Two best-selling books. A foundation. A one-man campaign to get Black men screened at 40 instead of 45. Nearly five hundred people have gotten a colonoscopy because of his story.
“If you don’t advocate for yourself, who will?”
The next chapter isn’t his.
It’s yours.
Joe fights so the people he loves — and the strangers he’s never met — never sit where he sat. One appointment. That’s the whole ask.
