Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We don’t have any links directly related to this important legacy of slavery, but we did not want the annniversary to pass unnoticed! 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
- Amanda Bellows, “The Forgotten Black Explorers Who Transformed Americans’ Understanding of the Wilderness,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 28, 2024): LINK. “For too long, the public and scholars alike have overlooked American adventurers from diverse backgrounds whose discoveries shaped the nation’s history. The time has come to fully recover their stories and acknowledge their contributions.” The article discusses the contributions of Black explorers from the 16th through the 19th century.
- Katy Abrams, “‘Freedom Walk’ Addresses Historical Injustices,” Insight Into Diversity (July 2, 2024): LINK. CIC member institution William Jewell College (Liberty, Missouri) has created a series of commemorative plaques on campus as part of a broader initiative to acknowledge and rectify the college’s historical ties to slavery and segregation.
- Max Felker-Kantor, “White Suburbs and Drug Wars,” Public Books (July 3, 2024): LINK. America’s drug war always “comes back to racism,” according to historian Matthew D. Lassiter’s new book, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023). The book is an effort to “[reorient] the traditional narrative of the drug war — away from the cities where the war was at its most punitive and to the suburbs where the war was designed to be preventive.”
- Jewel Wicker, “The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Is Preserving Spaces Crucial to Understanding Black History,” Capital B News (July 3, 2024): LINK. Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, reflects on the purpose of cultural preservation and what it means to fund DEI initiatives.
Memory
- Tykesha Spivey Burton, “A Lesser-Known Black History Museum Is Getting a Facelift and Deserved Attention,” Afar (July 2, 2024): LINK. “The Freedom House Museum [in Alexandria, Virginia] was a former slave-holding pen for one of the country’s largest slave trading companies. Today, it’s a National Historic Landmark and a museum intent on sharing that difficult past.”
- Jordan Nathaniel Fenster, “Connecticut slavery cases cited in modern legal arguments being tracked by database,” Connecticut Post (June 30, 2024): LINK. A new project, “Citing Slavery,” aims to collect all of the legal cases that dealt directly with questions of slavery and the later legal proceedings and decisions that cite them as precedent. The organizer reckons that “18 percent of all published American [legal] cases are within two steps of a slave case, either cites one directly or cites one that cites one.”
- Matthew Allen, “July 4th’s Cognitive Dissonance: For Black People, It May Be A Day Off, But Is It A Day of Independence?” Newsone (July 4, 2024): LINK. The questions that Frederick Douglass posed in 1852 (“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”) still resonates today: “When Americans are expected to observe and celebrate the 4th of July as Independence Day, there are many Black Americans who cry, ‘Whose Independence Day?’”
- Laura A. Macaluso and Karim M. Tiro, “There’s Still More to Learn From the Debate Over American Monuments,” Time (July 2, 2024): LINK. The fate of a statue of Gen. Philip Schuyler — politician, Revolutionary War hero, and slaveholder — is being debated in Albany, NY. “Schuyler is a reminder of how the things we rightly celebrate about that period are intertwined with the things from which we recoil. We continue to grapple with the paradox.”
Wealth
- Paul Connell, “A ‘New View’ of America’s Original Sin: Induced Innovation and Slavery in the Antebellum United States,” SSRN (June 26, 2024): LINK. From the abstract: “This paper conducts a textual analysis of the U.S. patents granted between 1836 and 1877 to provide evidence of the impact that slavery had on the direction of technological progress in the southern United States … because the prospect of earning capital gains on ‘slave capital’ increased the returns to labor-augmenting technologies in the South as compared to the North, the institution of slavery had a significant impact in directing Southern technological innovation away from capital-intense production techniques, which may be an important factor in explaining the difference in trajectories of industrial development across the two regions.”
- Kyle T. Mays, “Rethinking Reparations: Why Rejecting Capitalism, Generational Wealth, and Private Property is the Path Forward for African Americans,” Beacon Broadside (June 27, 2024): LINK. The author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021) argues: “Private property should not be the goal of reparations; it should be justice and a complete banishment of private property as well as a fundamental critique of American capitalism.”
Faith
- Katherine Kelaidis, “Orthodox Christianity and American Slavery,” Public Orthodoxy (June 28, 2024): LINK. The director of Chicago’s National Hellenic Museum argues that “There is something incredibly odd in supposing that 19th-century innocence (or more commonly, 19th-century absence) in some way absolves Orthodox Christians from a very 21st-century moral reckoning with slavery and racism, one of the most important acts of communal repentance demanded of our age.”
- Kevin M. Burton, “Revelation, Slavery, and America’s Dragon Heart,” Spectrum Magazine (June 28, 2024): LINK. Seventh-day Adventism had uniquely American origins in the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening. Many pioneers of this faith were abolitionists who equated the “lamblike beast” of the Book of Revelation with America’s tendencies to deny “civil liberties to racial minorities and religious liberties to religious minorities”; they also believed that slavery “served as paramount proof” of America’s hypocrisy.
- Max Harden, “Dowagiac [Michigan] pastor co-authors book exploring history of faith, race in America,” Leader Publications (July 2, 2024): LINK. The new book is Awakening to Justice: Faithful Voices from the Abolitionist Past (InterVarsity Press, 2024) and the author is Christopher Momany, a small-town Methodist pastor, scholar, and member of the Dialogue on Race and Faith Project. His contribution draws upon a forgotten abolitionist manuscript found in the archives of CIC member Adrian College (Adrian, MI).