Black History Month is almost over but we still have so much to share! As always, we encourage you to pass this post along to friends, students, colleagues, etc.; as always, a link here does not necessarily mean agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
- VOTE NOW: Every year, the Virginia Association of Museums identifies “Virginia’s Top 10 Endangered Artifacts” and invites people to vote for their favorite. One of the candidates this year is the Seth Woodroof Account Book, held by the Jones Memorial Library in Lynchburg, VA: “a handwritten, 72-page leather journal that documents the first and last names of more than 200 enslaved persons in Lynchburg, Virginia for the period 1834-1840. Containing the full names of enslaved persons, it provides a valuable bridge to meaningfully connect descendants with their enslaved ancestors for a full generation before the end of the Civil War and emancipation.” The library is working with students and faculty from CIC member Randolph College to help interpret this artifact.
- “Conn participates in Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon,” Connecticut College (February 21, 2024): LINK. Students from CIC member Connecticut College (New London, CT) joined a nationwide crowdsourcing effort to transcribe letters written to and by Frederick Douglass.
- Elon Cook Lee and Lawana Holland-Moore, “Coming Together with the Descendant Communities Social Innovation Lab,” National Trust for Historic Preservation (February 15, 2024): LINK. Last spring, descendant communities from across the country met at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture for place-specific discussions about the legacy of slavery.
- Nicholas Mitchell, “Want to learn how to respond to fascism? Study Black history.” MSNBC (February 19, 2024): LINK. The author says: “As a professor of curriculum studies [at the University of Kansas] and a scholar of bigotry, I’ve found it shocking how many Americans reduce the Jim Crow period to grainy images of segregated water fountains, bus boycotts and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line about the content of character.” He argues that “[t]o study the history of Black Americans between the Civil War and the 1960s is to study a mass resistance to fascism.”
- Rodney Coates, “Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South — thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation,” The Conversation (February 20, 2024): LINK. A sociologist reflects on the legacy of segregated water fountains from the Jim Crow era, the physical remains of which can still be found in places like Ellisville, Mississippi.
- Melissa Noel, “Did You Know Texas Had Its Own ‘Harriet Tubman’ Who Helped Enslaved Black People Escape to Mexico?” Essence (February 21, 2024): LINK. A new exhibit at UT–Austin tells the story of Silvia Hector Webber and her family (who bought her freedom for 800 acres of land). Her home became a stop on the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape from Texas to Mexico, which outlawed slavery in 1837.
- Luona Lin, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Kiley Hurst, and Dana Braga, “Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools,” Pew Research Center (February 22, 2024): LINK. A wide-ranging survey of teachers and students found that “Most teachers (64%) say students should learn that the legacy of slavery still affects the position of Black people in American society today. About a quarter (23%) say students should learn that slavery is part of American history but no longer affects the position of Black people in American society.” Take a deeper dive into the student responses here.
- Livia Gershon, “Suppressing the Black Vote in 1811,” JSTOR Daily (February 23, 2024): LINK. In the early 19th century, Black men in New York were a significant political force until a state constitutional convention halted Black suffrage in 1821.
- “Retracing Their Steps,” NPR (February 23, 2024): LINK. Three segments from NPR’s TED Radio Hour discuss the history of racial inequality in the United States: “Remembering the lives of enslaved people by sleeping where they once lived”; “Visiting the plantation where her ancestors were enslaved”; and “How moving back to the South could give Black Americans’ vote more power.”
- George Yancy, “What Is It About Black History that Frightens the Hell Out of the Far Right?” Truthout (February 24, 2024): LINK. Two Black philosophers (Yancey and Molefi Kete Asante) in conversation. Asante argues that “Black history challenges cultural hegemony and makes visible that which was deliberately or ignorantly made invisible; in other words, all that we know about African Americans today is the results of a demanding African American insistence that our history be available to everyone.”