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- Robert Greene II, “Black Women Public Intellectuals in U.S. History and Culture,” African American Intellectual History Society (December 1, 2023): LINK. Two historians from CIC member Monmouth University (West Long Branch, NJ) have released a new volume, A Seat at the Table (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023), that challenges ideas about the intersection of intellectual history and Black women’s history.
- “Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm,” Points South (November 30, 2023): LINK. In this podcast, “journalist Brittany Brown tells the story of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, a radical cooperative initiative that sought to bring food sovereignty to northern Mississippi.”
- Walker Mimms, “‘Southern/Modern’: Rediscovering the Radical Art Below the Mason-Dixon Line,” New York Times (November 30, 2023): LINK. A “daring and revisionist show” at the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA) argues that “[i]n the first half of the 20th century, socially conscious artists in the South were great innovators, reflecting on race, progress and the disappearing plantocracy.” The exhibit features Black and White artists.
- Livia Gershorn, “When Enslaved Virginians Demanded the Right to Read,” JSTOR Daily (November 27, 2023): LINK. In 1723, enslaved Virginians wrote (illegally) to the new Anglican Bishop of London to report that they were being treated with cruelty when they were supposed to have been baptized and Christianized.
- Liam Knox, “Affirmative Action Is Dead. How About Reparations?” Insider Higher Ed (November 27, 2023): LINK. “As the Supreme Court debated whether to strike down affirmative action last spring, Justice Brett Kavanaugh posed a surprising question to an expert witness: Should a benefit given to descendants of slaves — whether a cash payment or something less concrete, like preferential treatment in college admissions — be considered race-based?”
- “College Partners with Jones Memorial Library to Explore Legacies of Slavery,” Randolph College (November 26, 2023): LINK. A team of researchers at CIC member Randolph College (Lynchburg, VA) is working with the local genealogy library to “explore the region’s legacy of slavery and fill in information gaps related to African Americans in Lynchburg.” The focus of the project, “Lynchburg: Named,” is a ledger book from the 1830s that belonged to a notorious local slave-trader. (Earlier this year, the project team participated in a Public History Institute at Yale University as part of the Legacies of American Slavery initiative.)
- Sarah Enelow-Snyder, “One of the biggest U.S. slave markets finally reckons with its past,” Stars and Stripes (November 26, 2023): LINK. Natchez, Mississippi, the site of the largest slave-trading market in the state, is full of the former homes of plantation owners and slave quarters. But in the last 10 years, Black Southerners have begun to reclaim the space, forcing many plantations and estates to reckon with their histories of slavery.
- Vann R. Newkirk II, “How the Negro Spritual Changed American Popular Music — and America Itself,” The Atlantic (November 13, 2023): LINK. Since 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers have persevered and popularized what are now known as Negro spirituals. Fisk University itself is a legacy of Radical Reconstruction, as well as being an HBCU, a CIC member, and an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies of American Slavery network.
Events:
- On December 13 (4:30pm-6:00pm EST), the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University will host a panel discussion on “Reckoning with Slavery in US Intellectual History and in the University.” The event will be live and live-streamed. Moderated by David Blight, the panel discussion will focus on the shifting ways that elite universities, their founders, and their faculty members have used, benefited from, and understood the story of North American slavery. You can register here!