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Texas Memorials:
- Ashanté M. Reese, “Texas’s First College for Black Women Lies in Ruins. Can It Find a New Purpose?” Texas Monthly (April 11, 2024): LINK. “In a small East Texas town, Mary Allen College offered opportunity to thousands of Black women, and later men, for nearly nine decades. It’s been shuttered since 1977, but efforts are underway to restore it.”
- Patrick Michels, “New Markers Remember Enslaved People Brought to Texas by Sea,” Texas Monthly (April 18, 2024): LINK. A new marker, sponsored by the Florida-based Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, memorializes the illegal smuggling of at least eight Black British freedmen who were re-sold into bondage in Texas in 1836.
Recent News from CIC Members in Maryland:
- Lilly Price, “Goucher College to memorialize enslaved people, Indigenous tribes who lived where campus now stands,” Baltimore Sun (April 12, 2024): LINK. CIC member Goucher College (Baltimore, MD) is working with the National Park Service and local Black community to commemorate the lives of the enslaved people that once worked the plantation that became Goucher. The next steps: a multistage memorial to the lives of enslaved people, historical markers on campus, and a public exhibit this fall.
- Rick Hutzell, “St. John’s College is reckoning with its racist past. That includes Francis Scott Key.” Baltimore Banner (April 16, 2024): LINK. As Baltimore recovers from the destruction of the Key Bridge, CIC member St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), is reckoning with the legacy of the bridge’s namesake: Francis Scott Key, who graduated from the college in 1796. During his complicated public career, Key represented enslaved people seeking freedom through the courts, prosecuted abolitionists as a district attorney, supported “colonization” (i.e., shipping enslaved people back to Africa), and wrote the national anthem.
Other Links:
- Adria R. Walker, “‘I Gullah Geechee, too’: the educators keeping a language of enslaved Africans alive,” The Guardian (April 20, 2024): LINK. Gullah Geechee people—descendants of enslaved Africans who live on islands along the nation’s southeast coast—have a unique dialect and culture that’s at risk of eradication. Academics, researchers, and museum professionals rely on community support to help the Gullah Geechee preserve their heritage.
- Livia Gershon, “Taking Slavery West in the 1850s,” JSTOR (April 20, 2024): LINK. As a U.S. senator, future Confederate president Jefferson Davis argued for the westward expansion of slavery. Hoping to enhance the economic and political ties between the South and the West, he pushed for the first transcontinental railway (along a southerly route between South Carolina and southern California) and the acquisition of territory through the Gadsden Purchase. Davis’s ambitions ultimately failed.
- Toby Sells, “Bills Against Reparations Before House, Senate,” Memphis Flyer (April 17, 2024): LINK. In February 2023, the Shelby County Commissioners (i.e., greater Memphis, TN) approved a $5 million study of reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans. Now, Republican politicians are trying to halt the effort because “[reparations] can never enhance community healing and unity.”
- Harseerat Dhillon, “Reckoning with History’s Impact: Financial Institutions and Reparations for American Enslavement,” North Carolina Banking Institute (April 15, 2024): LINK. This scholarly article examines how early financial institutions in the United States used enslaved people as collateral for mortgages and explores whether payments of reparations for this practice is necessary or feasible.
- Eddie S. Glaude, “The Fantasy of a Lily-White America,” Time (April 15, 2024): LINK. Reflecting on Ralph Ellison’s 1970 essay, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks,” the author considers the “fantasy of a lily-white America … [which] involves not only the desire to rid the nation of Black and brown people, but aims to banish us and the issue of race from the nation’s moral conscience.”
- “Alabama House votes to recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday—with a twist,” Alabama Political Reporter (April 12, 2024): LINK. The Alabama House of Representatives recently passed HB4, a bill that acknowledges Juneteenth as a state holiday. However, the bill “does not require state offices to close on Juneteenth. Instead, state employees must choose between taking the day off for Juneteenth or for Jefferson Davis’ Birthday, another state holiday observed [in June].”
- Nada Hassanein, “To close racial gap in maternal health, some states take aim at implicit bias,” Louisiana Illuminator (April 7, 2024): LINK. Black women in the United States are nearly three times more likely to die of maternal health complications than white women. Since 2019, five states have enacted laws that mandate implicit bias training for maternal health care providers, but passing laws has not led to immediate change.