Legacies links for April 8, 2024: Slavery’s Piled Wealth, Black Jesus, and Hidden Music

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Drawing shows a dance in a country tavern, showing people drinking and dancing while an African American man plays a fiddle.
Scene from a country tavern produced by John Lewis Krimmel (c. 1820). Black fiddlers, both free and enslaved, were a common sight in antebellum America. source: Library of Congress
  • Bill O’Driscoll, “Book on slavery’s wealth touches prominent Pittsburgh philanthropists,” WESA (April 2, 2024): LINK. “A new book [The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations] about the riches earned from American slavery and passed down through generations traces how the ancestors of a prominent Pittsburgh family were involved in this vast historical wrong.”
  • Virginia Raguin, “In 1877, a stained-glass window depicted Jesus as Black for the first time—a scholar of visual images unpacks its history and significance,” The Conversation (April 5, 2024): LINK. A window depicting a Black Jesus, donated to a white New England church, speaks to a moment in the history of emancipation and retrenchment from equality.
  • Brian Fraga, “Realities of US racism demand deeper commitment from bishops, say Black Catholics,” National Catholic Reporter (April 3, 2024): LINK. “Black Catholic leaders, intellectuals, writers and activists … [argue] that the current realities pertaining to racism demand a deeper commitment from the U.S. Catholic bishops” than the current Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism.
  • Ileana Najarro, “How AP African American Studies Works in a State That Limits Teaching About Race,” Education Week (March 29, 2024): LINK. A high school in Kentucky—which is one of 18 states restricting instruction about race in America—is one of the few in the state to offer the new AP African American Studies course. The local teacher is backed by a statewide group launched in 2023 to train teachers and share resources about Black history.
  • Jill Filipovic, “The Civil War never ended,” The New Statesman (April 3, 2024): LINK. The author argues that “[t]he pre-Civil War South was not a democracy, nor did it aspire to be. It was, and wanted to continue being, a harshly authoritarian state. … These ideas have never disappeared. They were the justification for Jim Crow, America’s racial apartheid system, and for voting rules that first formally prevented most Americans from voting, and later kept racial minorities and black Americans from their legal right to cast a ballot. You hear echoes of them now in conservative talking points….”
  • Sean Kim Butorac, “Commentary: Echoes of slavery,” The Sun Chronicle (April 2, 2024): LINK. Attempts by the state government of Texas to nullify federal law—such as Senate Bill 4 (which authorizes racial profiling of Latinos)— echo the conflict over slavery before the Civil War. The author, who teaches at CIC member North Central College (Naperville, Ill.), looks back at the 1823 Negro Seaman Act, passed by South Carolina in the wake of the Denmark Vesey rebellion, which restricted the immigration of Black sailors into the state.
  • Isabel Ferrer, “In a museum, the Netherlands reflects on its colonial past and recognizes that it has progressed because of slavery,” El País (April 3, 2024): LINK. After several decades of activism on behalf of African diaspora communities from former Dutch colonies in South American and the Caribbean, a National Museum of Slavery is slated to open in 2030. The museum will explore the Dutch role in the international slave trade of the 17th–19th centuries.

Updates from the CIC Network:

  • Diane Orson, “A once-enslaved man’s music was hidden for centuries. Go on a journey to rediscover his melodies,” Connecticut Public Radio (March 15, 2024): LINK. Manuscripts including music composed in 1817 by fiddler Sawney Freeman—who was born into slavery—have been discovered in the Watkinson Library at CIC member Trinity College (Hartford, Conn.). This is part of the renewed interest in Connecticut’s legacies of slavery.
  • Katherine Itoh, “George Floyd scholarship accused of discriminating against non-Black students in federal complaint,” NBC News (March 29, 2024): LINK. According to the conservative Legal Insurrection Foundation, the George Floyd Memorial Scholarship offered by CIC member North Central University (Minneapolis, Minn.) violates the Civil Rights Act by restricting eligibility to Black applicants.