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- Adriana Montes, “Loyola University Maryland acknowledges historical ties to slavery, calls for continued examination,” Catholic Review (January 18, 2024): LINK. CIC member Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore, MD) has officially acknowledged its historical ties to slavery with the release of a 27-page report. Among the findings: the Jesuit institution benefited from the same 1838 sale of slaves that kept Georgetown University afloat. The university now will consider recommendations for repair. Additional coverage from the Baltimore Sun.
- Gerren Keith Gaynor, “Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama was inaugurated as America’s first Black president,” theGrio (January 20, 2024): LINK. A reflection on the first inauguration of Barack Obama and the racial and political backlash that followed: “It is the fear of lost power and control where we are watching in real time a coalition of voters and people who, in their mind, Black and brown people winning is them losing, as opposed to everybody winning together.”
- Lucien Baskin, “Before Brown,” Black Perspectives (January 19, 2024): LINK. Three historians discuss the different dimensions of the long Black Freedom Movement—i.e., before the “classical” Civil Rights Movement inaugurated by the Brown decision in 1954—filling the gaps at the intersection of African American history, social history, and queer history. Part of an ongoing series of Conversations in Black Freedom Studies.
- “Investigating Injustices in the Journal’s History,” New England Journal of Medicine (January 18, 2024): LINK. In this podcast featuring several historians, one of the nation’s leading medical journals continues to examine its historical contributions to medical inequality and racial mythology—including the pernicious argument, especially prevalent in the 19th century, that African Americans and Native Americans were more susceptible to certain diseases.
- Allen C. Guelzo, “Ulysses S. Grant’s Forgotten War,” Washington Monthly (January 16, 2024): LINK. “[Reconstruction failed in the face of] the ugliest versions of white racial rage, with some noteworthy pockets of nobility and civic honor that should be the real focus of American historical memory. One of those pockets surrounds Grant, and the extraordinary contest he waged as president against the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina.”
- Anasa Troutman and Steve Dubb, “Building a City of the Future by Restoring Its Past: A Story from Black Memphis,” Nonprofit Quarterly (January 16, 2024): LINK. How the headquarters of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike (the context for MLK’s assassination) may yet become “a hub for developing a community-based economy in Memphis that is Black-owned, Black-governed, and which sustains a thriving culture rooted in the Black imagination.”
- Devin Thomas O’Shea, “Ivory Perry, the Forgotten Civil Rights Hell-Raiser,” Jacobin (January 15, 2024): LINK. “Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality—but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a relentless war for racial and economic justice.” Perry was a black worker and community activist in St. Louis for three decades (from the 1950s) and the subject of an award-winning biography: George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1989).
- Adria R. Walker, “‘It could foster empathy’: Black archives look to preservation amid growing US history bans,” The Guardian (January 15, 2024): LINK. Discusses the “precarious nature in which some archives that contain irreplaceable documents of Black American history are stored and preserved.”
Two faculty members from CIC member institutions wade into the current “debate” about the origins of the Civil War:
- John Tures, “Evidence shows Civil War fought over slavery,” Maquoketa [Iowa] Sentinel-Press (January 16, 2024): LINK. A political scientist from LaGrange College (LaGrange, GA) discusses the recently politicized debate about the causes of the Civil War. Tures and his students examined the secession documents issued by South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas and could not find the words “states’ rights” or “tariffs.” They did find the word “slave.”
- Mark Malvasi, “Politics, Slavery, and the Civil War,” The Imaginative Conservative (January 18, 2024): LINK. A history professor from Randolph-Macon College (Ashland, VA) reviews the role of slavery as the cause of the Civil War from an explicitly conservative and Christian perspective. “There can be no doubt that slavery was central to all that divided the [N]orthern and the [S]outhern states.”