Legacies links for January 29, 2024: Urban planning, reparations, and the shadow over Haiti

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A 19th-century photograph of two African American men: an older man seated on the right and a younger man leaning on a table to the left. The younger man is holding a violin.
Frederick Douglass (right) sits next to his grandson Joseph Douglass (left). Joseph Douglass was Nettie Washington Douglass’s grandfather. source: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
  • Rachel Garbus, “The ancestors of Nettie Washington Douglass still have stories to teach us. She just hopes we are ready to listen.” Atlanta Magazine (January 24, 2024): LINK. Through the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, Nettie Washington Douglass—a descendant of both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington—connects Douglass’s abolitionist legacy with today’s anti-trafficking movement.
  • Alexa Spencer, “Urban Planning, But Add Some Afrofuturism,” WordinBlack (January 26, 2024): LINK. Black urban planners combine Afrofuturism and practical experience to address the “food deserts, tree inequity, and racist planning practices [that] have left Black neighborhoods devoid of amenities that promote health and well-being.”
  • Betsy Golden Kellem, “Nate Salsbury’s Black America,” JSTOR Daily (January 25, 2024): LINK. Nate Salsbury, a White promoter, took a “living history” exhibit on tour in 1895 to showcase the “[supposedly] genuine Southern Black community and demonstrate Black cultural progress in America, from enslavement to citizenship.” In fact, “Black America was a key development in American reality entertainment, insisting as it did that the whole affair was a true representation of Black life—docile, patriotic, economically supportive—rather than a contrived stage production.”
  • Brandon Hensley, “Black Louisianans Enter a New Political Era,” Capital B News (January 25, 2024): LINK. Louisiana, where 33% of the population is Black, just gained a second majority-Black congressional district. The district includes the city of Opelousas—site of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Reconstruction era—and has some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
  • Saraya Wintersmith, “Researchers will document the history and legacy of enslavement in Boston, reparations task force announces,” WGBH (January 24, 2024): LINK. The city of Boston and its Reparations Task Force have appointed a group of local historians to research and document the city’s role in the slave trade, enslavement in the area, and the legacy and impact of slavery today.
  • Margo Snipe, “The Lessons Medical School Never Taught Her,” Capital B News (January 23, 2024): LINK. Uché Blackstock, a second-generation Black woman physician, reflects on the public health legacy of slavery: “If people don’t have access to safe green space, if they’re living in a high crime area, and don’t feel safe enough to go outside and work out, if they’re living in a chronically disinvested area, that has implications for how healthy our communities are. It’s deeply rooted in the legacy of slavery in this country.”
  • Genoa Barrow, “New Form Asks Hirees If They’re Descendants Of U.S. Slavery,” The Sacramento Observer (January 22, 2024): LINK. “While the fate of reparations for African Americans in California awaits decisions from the governor and other lawmakers, the state already is setting the stage for progress with new disaggregated data collection”—i.e., asking new state employees to identify whether they are descendants of people enslaved in the United States.
  • Leslie M. Alexander, “The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti,” Public Books (January 11, 2024): LINK. Frederick Douglass and other Black activists have praised Haiti’s revolutionary impact for 220 years. Many white Americans have feared and rejected the legacy of a Black nation that was born from an antislavery rebellion. Historian Leslie Alexander captures this complicated history in a quote from Douglass: “Haiti is Black…and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black.” (Note that the last two decades have seen a boom of scholarly interest in the Haitian Revolution.)
  • Rosalind Cummings-Yeates, “A Journey to Discover an African Homeland,” Smithsonian Magazine (January/February 2024): LINK. Roots to Glory, a Maryland-based company, is helping the descendant of enslaved Africans connect with their ancestral lands through heritage tourism.
  • Matt Sandler, “Stand Up and Spout,” The Baffler (January 2024): LINK. What does it mean to resurrect an enslaved Black poet from the 19th century with virtual reality and AI technologies from the 21st century? The author contemplates the “Hortonizer.”

Updates from the CIC Network:

  • William Keller, “F&M Receives $1.4 Million Grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for ‘Reckoning with Lancaster’ Humanities Project,” Franklin & Marshall College (January 24, 2024): LINK. A major grant award from the Mellon Foundation to CIC member Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA) will support a multi-year program of curriculum development and community engagement around issues related to Indigenous populations, the legacies of slavery and abolition in Central Pennsylvania, and refugees and migrants.
  • Julia Shipley, “Haverford, Howard, and Beyond: the search for 413 forgotten Philadelphians,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (January 23, 2024): LINK. CIC member Haverford College (Haverford, PA) is working with researchers from Howard University “to uncover the fates and lives of formerly enslaved African Americans freed in the Philadelphia area between 1765-90.”