This week is Juneteenth, but it’s always a good time to consider the legacies of American slavery. 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.
Juneteenth:
- Meilan Solly, “Why Juneteenth, the U.S.’s Second Independence Day, Is a Federal Holiday,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 7, 2024): LINK. Juneteenth may have been signed into law as a national holiday in 2021, but the law arrived just as debates erupted surrounding how students teach about the nation’s history.
- “NEH Virtual Bookshelf: Juneteenth,” National Endowment for the Humanities (June 7, 2024): LINK. “[A] selection of NEH-funded projects and resources related to Juneteenth and Black Americans’ ongoing fight for freedom.”
- Linda Blackford, “Kentucky’s role in slaves’ emancipation: ‘Camp Nelson is our Canada,’” Lexington Herald Leader (June 13, 2024): LINK. African American men from Kentucky who enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Civil War were stationed in Galveston, Texas, when Gen. Gordon Granger issued his General No. 3, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation. Ironically, because Kentucky had not joined the Confederacy, “it could still keep people in slavery and enthusiastically did so.”
- Elijah Decious, “Iowa once had a thriving, majority Black town. Here’s how Buxton celebrated emancipation before Juneteenth,” The [Cedar Rapids, IA] Gazette (June 14, 2024): LINK. Long before Juneteenth became a holiday outside of Texas, “people across Iowa celebrated Emancipation Day, a precursor holiday that initially commemorated the freedom of enslaved people in the British West Indies.” This article focuses on the majority-Black town of Buxton, IA, which rose and fell as a mining community c. 1900–1920.
Memory:
- Doug Hoke, “Oklahoma Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit of Tulsa Race Massacre survivors seeking reparations,” NBC News (June 12, 2024): LINK. The Oklahoma Supreme Court “dismissed a lawsuit of the last two survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dampening the hope of advocates for racial justice that the government would make amends for one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history.”
- Bethany Bell, “Fragments of Freedom in the Fine Print: Navigating the New Articles of Enslavement Collection,” Ancestry (June 11, 2024): LINK. Ancestry, the genealogy website, has released a database of 38,000 newspaper articles containing the names, ages, physical descriptions and locations of more than 183,000 enslaved people in the United States—free for anyone to access online. This essay describes some of the ways to use the database, while warning that “Newspaper ads involving enslaved people are complicated sources. They don’t tell whole stories and the information that they do contain tends to be reductive.”
- Ava Chatlosh, “Project to unearth history of enslaved people turns up more than 4,000 records in Macon,” The Macon Telegraph (June 11, 2024): LINK. The trove of newspaper articles in Ancestry’s new “Articles of Enslavement” database includes the names of 4,360 enslaved Georgians, which local historians are already using to fill gaps in the state’s historical records.
Legacy:
- David A. Love, “A study says Black people believe ‘racial conspiracy theories.’ Given this country’s history, can you blame us?” The Grio (June 13, 2024): LINK. Commentary on a new study from the Pew Research Center, which found that “majorities of Black people believe in ‘racial conspiracy theories,’ specifically that American institutions are designed to hold them back.”
- Marcela García, “The new reality of racial segregation in Mass. schools,” Boston Globe (June 10, 2024): LINK. “Segregation is alive and well in Massachusetts. More than 225,000 students attend segregated or intensely segregated nonwhite schools, those where the nonwhite student population represents at least 71 percent of the total.”
- Trevor Logan, “American slavery wasn’t just a white man’s business—new research shows how white women profited, too,” The Conversation (June 10, 2024): LINK. A myth has persisted that white women were not active enslavers, but researchers point to this truth: “Slavery gave white women in the South significantly more economic independence than those in the North, and they used this freedom with remarkable regularity.”
- “Local Outsiders: On Growing Up Black in Appalachia,” Literary Hub (June 10, 2024): LINK. In an oral history excerpted from Katrina Powell’s new edited volume, Beginning Again: Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia, Mekyah Davis reflects on the “double consciousness” necessary for an African American man to survive in a mostly-white Appalachian town. (See our recent blog post for more on the history of race relations in Appalachia.)