We’re back with new links for a new year (but reaching back into late 2022, while we were on a break). As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

- Tom Stafford, “Local theater group’s new play explores slavery’s legacy,” Dayton.com (January 8, 2023): LINK. “Freedom Flight,” a new play about the underground railroad in Ohio, will tour 20 states after a premiere at CIC member institution Antioch College. The play is based, in part, on original research conducted at CIC member Wittenberg University.
- Julia Martin, “Slavery’s legacy is written all over North Jersey, if you know where to look,” The Bergen Record via Yahoo! News (January 4, 2023): LINK. A reminder that slavery was a national institution—hence the legacies of slavery are a national challenge.
- Avis Wanda McClinton, et al., “Confronting the Legacy of Quaker Slavery,” Friends Journal (January 1, 2023): LINK. “The 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project is a research and educational effort that is a response to the release of newly digitized manumission documents that reside at [CIC member] Haverford College in Pennsylvania.”
- Edward González-Tennant, “Remembering the Rosewood Massacre,” JSTOR Daily (January 1, 2023): LINK. “On January 1, 1923, Rosewood, Florida, was a thriving town of mostly African American residents. Seven days later, it was gone, burned to the ground by a white mob.” At Legacies Partner Austin College, the project team is exploring a similar eruption of racial violence in Sherman, TX, in 1930.
- Don Rogers, “The ‘kind’ slaveholder’s legacy,” The Aspen (Colo.) Times (January 1, 2023): LINK. A reflection on the legacies of slavery in one White family, which includes a history of casual racism but also the efforts of distant relative LBJ to promote civil rights. “In my gut, I don’t feel guilty. I don’t believe the sins of our fathers and mothers are our problem, our burden. But that might only be a vestige of the legacy only slowly diluting as it seeps from one generation to the next, drip by drop.”
- Alex Baumhardt, “How a school project prompted Oregon to rid slavery from its constitution,” Oregon Capital Chronicle (December 28, 2022): LINK. A professor and a group of students from CIC member Willamette University were the driving force behind the recent ballot initiative to remove the “slavery exception” (i.e., as a punishment for crime) from the state constitution.
- Gerry Lanosga, “‘Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do’: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism,” American Journalism 39:4 (2022), pp. 368–391: https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2022.2133024. Explores an unexpected legacy of the antislavery movement: modern investigative journalism. Although the article is behind a paywall, there is a free teaching guide that helps draw the line between abolitionist exposés of the 1850s and Watergate coverage in the 1970s.