Legacies links for November 28, 2022: News from CIC members and other curated links

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In 1937, Japanese émigré Eitaro Ishigaki was commissioned by the WPA to create a pair of murals for the Harlem Courthouse in NYC, including this tribute to the Emancipation of the Slaves. The “controversial” content and Ishigaki’s association with communists led to the paintings’ removal and destruction. photo source: Archives of American Art

Some news from CIC member institutions:

  • “Center’s work honored with historic preservation award,” Roanoke College News (November 23, 2022): LINK. “Roanoke College’s commitment to shedding light on a difficult part of history has been recognized with a 2022 award from the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation. … [The award recognizes] a new walking tour that guides visitors through the history of enslaved labor on Roanoke College’s campus.” Roanoke College is an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies network.
  • James Dissette, “Slaves and Klansmen in the Family: A Chat with Washington College Fellow Edward Ball,” The Talbot Spy (November 19, 2022): LINK. Ball is an award-winning historian of slave-owning and white supremacy (with an honest focus on his own family heritage) and a fellow at Washington College’s Starr Center for the American Experience.
  • Agatha Echenique, “An Overview of the Racial Reconciliation Commission’s Nov. 10 Town Hall,” Hilltop Monitor (November 18, 2022): LINK. An update on William Jewell College’s efforts to “confront the legacy of slavery and systematic racism on our campus.”
  • “Bridgewater College Professor of History Emeritus Studies Emancipation in the Valley,” Bridgewater College (November 17, 2022): LINK. Bridgewater’s Stephen Longenecker “is researching primary sources of African American commemoration of emancipation in an effort to create a digital history project exploring the subject.” He is part of a research team organized by the McCormick Civil War Institute at Shenandoah University (an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies network).

Other links from the past two weeks:

  • Jay Reeves, “Slavery’s ghost haunts cotton gin factory’s transformation,” AP via the Kenosha News (November 22, 2022): LINK. “There’s no painless way to explain the history of a massive brick structure being renovated into apartments in this central Alabama city [Prattville]—a factory that played a key role in the expansion of slavery before the Civil War.”
  • Tracey Teo, “A museum 2,300 years in the making,” BBC Travel (November 21, 2022): LINK. The International African American Museum—which opens in Charleston, SC, in January 2023—”provides a broad context for the African American experience, a narrative that starts with ancient African civilizations and goes through modern times.”
  • Johanna Alonso, “A Building by Any Other Name: New Policies Guide Removal of Controversial Building Names,” Inside Higher Education (November 18, 2022): LINK. Discusses efforts by CIC member University of Richmond and other colleges to rename buildings that commemorate slaveholders, white supremacists, and other unsavory historical figures.  
  • Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Grimke Sisters and the Indelible Stain of Slavery,” The Atlantic (December 2022): LINK. In this review of Kerri K. Greenidge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022), Faust explores the intergenerational trauma of slavery as it played out in a unique family of slaveholders, abolitionists, and former slaves.