Legacies links for September 13, 2022: Black Flight, Flying Africans, reparations, and more

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As part of Chicago’s Humanities 2020 Week, CIC member Lake Forest College hosted an outdoor installation designed to “elevate the stories of indigenous people and people of color.” Follow link for more details.
  • Greg Pasciuto, “The Flying Africans: Returning Home in African American Folklore,” The Collector (September 12, 2022): LINK. Discusses the continuities between African and African American cultural expressions, embodied in stories about “flying Africans” that helped some enslaved people and their descendants “cope with the traumatic experience of slavery.”
  • Jacob Fischler, “Confronting history, Congress studies addition of lynching sites to National Park System,” Virginia Mercury (September 12, 2022): LINK. “The U.S. House is considering a bill that would put lynching sites in western Tennessee on track to become part of the National Park Service, part of a trend this year of Congress using the agency to advance discussions of the nation’s troubled and often violent racial history.”
  • Martha Mercer, “‘A vestige of slavery’: Why advocates are fighting to make prison labor voluntary,” Fast Company (September 8, 2022): LINK. “The nation’s racial reckoning of the past few years has prompted a reevaluation of penal labor as a legacy of slavery, spurring people to question whether incarcerated people should be required to work in 2022.”
  • Jerusalem Demsas, “What’s Causing Black Flight?,” The Atlantic (September 6, 2022): LINK. In a reversal of the Great Migration, many Black people are leaving cities in the North, Midwest, and West for the suburbs—or even returning to the South. “The demographic shift from cities to suburbs illuminates many stories: of families moving to opportunity, of inequality replicating itself when they get there, and of the people left behind.”
  • “Reparations could heal America,” Vox (September 1–15, 2022): LINK. A series of four podcasts “explor[ing] how reparations have worked globally and what they might look like for Black Americans in the United States.”
  • Kiana Cox and Khadijah Edwards, “Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen,” Pew Research Center (August 30, 2022): LINK. Section 3 of this extensive report on recent survey research focuses on Black Americans’ attitudes about reparations for slavery. 77% of Black adults say that “descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, such as given land or money.”