As always, our editorial team encourages 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.
Cultural Expression and the Legacies of Slavery:
- Annabel Keenan, “‘Once you know the history, you see it everywhere’: Nona Faustine on uncovering New York’s uncomfortable past,” The Art Newspaper (May 1, 2024): LINK. “At the Brooklyn Museum, the American photographer’s self-portraits reveal the city’s links to colonialism and slavery that were largely erased.” She is unclothed in some of the photos — including images reproduced in this article — “to make people see me and understand that … [this is] how Africans were brought to this country.”
- “Harlan Bozeman Confronts the Erasure of Black History in the American South,” Catchlight (April 27, 2024): LINK. “The town of Elaine, Arkansas, is still deeply divided along racial lines, leading to a culture of silence and neglect in a community that has yet to fully recover from deadly confrontations like the Elaine Massacre of 1919. Photographer Harlan Bozeman has spent years investigating the legacies of slavery and confronting the erasure of Black culture and its histories in the United States.”
- Karen Valby, “Tackling Ballet’s History of Anti-Blackness as a White Woman,” Literary Hub (April 30, 2024): LINK. A white adoptive mother of two Black daughters (who happen to take ballet lessons) reckons with her disfavored first name and, more important, the legacies of Black women who danced ballet during an era where “the Black body and temperament [were considered to be] unsuited to the classical stage.”
- Amanda Fortini, “She broke racial barriers as a Vegas showgirl. At 97, she’s still dancing,” The Washington Post (April 27, 2024): LINK. Remembering a time when Black bodies were considered to be unsuited for another style of dance.
- Leia Genis, “Shanequa Gay Completes a Work Begun a Century Ago,” Hyperallergic (April 28, 2024): LINK. “Through the agglomeration of techniques and displacement of familial history, [Atlanta artist Shanequa] Gay presents the South as a site of cultural diversity and historical reimagining.” Her work incorporates family photographs into “genre scenes depicting Black people in varying levels of abstraction.”
Aural Histories (Radio and Podcasts):
- Katherine Hafner, “Descendants of Black freedmen carry on oyster harvesting legacy in Suffolk,” NPR (May 1, 2024): LINK. The descendants of enslaved Virginians who found freedom harvesting oysters in Suffolk are fighting to keep their endangered history and culture alive for future generations.
- Diane Orson, “The Witness Stones Project unearths and shares stories of northern slavery,” NPR (May 1, 2024): LINK. Students in New England are uncovering the region’s deep connections to slavery in the archives. The Witness Stones Project has reached more than 14,000 students in five states.
- Leoneda Inge and Rachel McCarthy, “‘Echoes of a Coup’ explores untold history of 1898 Wilmington massacre; Teaching difficult history,” WUNC (May 2, 2024): LINK. A podcast devoted to the race riot (orchestrated by White supremacists) that is “widely considered the only successful coup d’état in United States history.” (You may have heard this when it was first released back in February.)
- Jay Price, “Slavery by another name: New NC historical marker acknowledges post-Civil War convict laborers,” WUNC (May 3, 2024): LINK. The monument to a deadly construction accident in 1882 is also a memorial to the Black convict laborers who built roads and railroads across the South.
An Update from the CIC Network:
- Lexi Faison, “Loyola’s Legacy: Unveiling Hidden Truths of Slavery,” The Greyhound (May 2, 2024): LINK. A student representative on the President’s Task Force Examining Loyola’s Connections to Slavery writes about two years of investigative research at Loyola University Maryland and the institution’s membership in the Universities Studying Slavery consortium.
Other Links:
- Hunter Gilmore, “New book chronicles how U.S. robbed Black Americans of $600 billion in taxes since slavery,” New Pittsburgh Courier (April 27, 2024): LINK. In his new book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, historian Andrew W. Kahrl traces current economic disparities by race (in part) to “systematic siphoning” of wealth “from the Black community through unfair taxes in the aftermath of slavery.”
- Gabriel J. Chin and Paul Finkelman, “The ‘Free White Person’ Clause of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Super-Statute,” William & Mary Law Review 65:5 (April 2024): LINK. From the abstract: “[T]he First Congress limited naturalization to ‘any alien being a free white person.’ The racial restriction, as modified, would remain in effect until 1952, inducing White immigration and discouraging that of others. … [This] resolves the question of the racial attitudes of the Framers — whether or not they supported slavery, a majority of them unambiguously conceived of the United States as a White country.”
- Felice Léon, “Reparations are a regular part of American history — just not for Black people,” The Emancipator (May 2, 2024): LINK. An interview with Harvard professor and former NAACP leader Cornell William Brooks. Brooks and a co-author argue that reparations (i.e., “compensation of harms” by the U.S. government) are not novel or new but “regular and routine — for everybody but Black people.”