As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
Place and the Legacies of Slavery:
- Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana and Freeden Blume Oeur, “Gentrification in Philadelphia: How W. E. B. Du Bois Predicted Neighborhood Changes 125 Years Ago Still Matters,” Newsone (May 3, 2024): LINK. When Du Bois penned The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, he offered valuable hints about why many historically Black Philadelphia neighborhoods appear they way they do today. Du Bois’ predictions and concerns—from disinvestment to gentrification—hold lessons for community members today.
- Chesapeake Conservancy, “New Chesapeake Map Released: 65 Historically Black Beaches and Other Places of Black Historical Significance,” The Baynet (May 6, 2024): LINK. “A new story map chronicles 65 historically Black beaches and other places of Black historical significance in the Chesapeake Bay watershed…[highlighting] places spanning from the landing of the first enslaved Africans in English-occupied North America to the creation of Black entertainment venues during the time of Jim Crow.”
- Mia Jackson, “The National Urban League Comes Home,” New York Times (May 6, 2024): LINK. The National Urban League is moving from Lower Manhattan back to Harlem, where it was founded in 1910. The large new headquarters will include NYC’s first museum devoted to the Civil Rights Movement in the North.
- Campbell Robertson, “Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names,” New York Times (May 10, 2024): LINK. When conservatives won open seats on the Shenandoah County school board in Virginia, they vowed to restore the names of two schools named for Confederate generals: Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High. The district becomes the first in the nation to return Confederate names to schools that were renamed following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
- Allison Weiss, “Toward Equity in Metadata: How Sandy Spring Museum Adopted Restorative Cataloguing Practices,” American Alliance of Museums (May 3, 2024): LINK. In one small town in Maryland, scholars, community members, and descendants of Black residents are working together to correct racially-skewed cataloging practices in the local archives through a new initiative, Equity in Metadata.
“Hidden” Black Histories:
- Melissa Noel, “Hidden Figures of Healthcare: Meet The Black Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis,” Essence (May 7, 2024): LINK. Maria Smilios’s recent book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis (2023), sheds light on the contributions of Black nurses who battled tuberculosis in a Staten Island sanatorium between the Great Depression and the 1960s.
- Larry Tye, “How Black Female Jazz Performers Confronted a Racist and Misogynistic World,” Literary Hub (May 7, 2024): LINK. The author’s new book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America (2024), also discusses some of the pathbreaking Black women in jazz: “While African-American jazzmen had a hard time on the road, be it finding accommodations or earning a living wage, African-American jazzwomen had it tougher.”
- Salamishah Tillet, “She Was No ‘Mammy,’” The Atlantic (May 8, 2024): LINK. The story behind Gordon Parks’ iconic 1942 portrait of Ella Watson, an African American domestic worker in Washington, D.C., helps provide a richer understanding of Black women workers during the depths of the segregation era.
- Latria Graham, “Masters of the Green: The Black Caddies of Augusta National,” Garden & Gun (April/May 2024): LINK. We know, the Masters Tournament was last month—but this is still a timely story about the all-Black corps of caddies that worked at Augusta National for five decades (until 1982). The golf course is on the site of an orchard tended by enslaved workers.
- Dave Kindy, “They were born into slavery. Then they won the first Kentucky Derby,” Washington Post (May 4, 2024): LINK. We missed the Kentucky Derby, too—a horse race inaugurated in 1875 that was dominated by “Black turfmen [mostly former slaves] … before Jim Crow changed everything.”
Update from the CIC Network:
- Abby Dodge, “William Jewell College addresses its history of slavery, segregation through freedom walk,” KSHB (May 6, 2024): LINK. CIC member William Jewell College (Liberty, MO) has placed four plaques around campus honoring the college’s first African American students and employees, while also acknowledging the enslaved people who built the campus and the slaveholders who financed the institution in its earliest years. The college’s Racial Reconciliation Commission is working on additional historical documentation.
- Gabrielle Isaac Allison and Cheryl Butler-Brayboy, “Students, Faculty Expand Research on Reparations for JCSU,” Johnson C. Smith University (May 6, 2024): LINK. A team of students and faculty members at Johnson C. Smith University (Charlotte, NC)—a CIC member and HBCU founded in 1867 to educate the formerly enslaved—are preparing arguments for reparations from the state of North Carolina to repair historic gaps in public funding for Black and white institutions of higher learning.
- Madeline Thigpen, “We Need More Prison Education Programs, But Is the Money There?” Capital B News (May 2, 2024): LINK. Both Georgia State University and CIC member Morehouse College have led initiatives to provide college classes for incarcerated men (mostly Black men) in Georgia state prisons. While public funding for the Georgia State initiative has dwindled, Morehouse is expanding its efforts.