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.
Politics
- Keisha N. Blain, “How Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1964 DNC Speech Paved the Way for Kamala Harris,” TIME (August 22, 2024): LINK. Remembering Hamer’s historic appearance at the 1964 DNC, Keisha N. Blain draws parallels between Hamer’s time and our own: “State governments are … still engaging in efforts to limit voting access and employing underhanded measures to attempt to alter election results. … [But there is] a unique opportunity to make real Hamer’s vision of building an inclusive democracy for all.”
- “US Congress members’ wealth statistically linked with ancestors’ slaveholding practices,” Phys.org (August 21, 2024): LINK. “According to a new study, as of April 2021, US Congress members whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more people had a net worth that was five times higher than that of legislators whose ancestors did not have slaves.”
- David Escobar, “Repairing the damage of racial injustice,” Adirondack Explorer (August 21, 2024): LINK. “As the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies begins examining the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in New York, longtime activist Alice Green wants to ensure Black history in the Adirondacks is part of the conversation.”
- Bennett Parten, “Not a Mere Rhetorical Flourish,” History News Network (August 20, 2024): LINK. “[Abolitionists were] the original ‘human rights’ advocates. The phrase human rights was itself a product of the antislavery movement.”
- Keisha N. Blain, “The Civil Rights Movement and Kamala Harris’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy (August 19, 2024): LINK. The Civil Rights Movement was part of a long tradition of African Americans fighting for civil rights at home and abroad. This tradition — plus two parents who were born in British colonies — helps shape Kamala Harris’s approach to foreign affairs.
- Luke Granville, “Resilience and Domination: Resonances of Racial Slavery in Refugee Exclusion,” International Studies Quarterly 6:3 (September 2024): https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae116. This scholarly articles explores how the current discourse about “resilient refugees” — invoked by many international humanitarian organizations — actually “resonates with arguments offered in defense of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States.”
Monuments
- “John Lewis statue unveiled at spot where Confederate monument once stood,” The Grio (August 25, 2024): LINK. Local civil rights organizations around Decatur, Georgia, have been working for several years to remove an obelisk dedicated to the Confederacy. Their efforts have culminated in a bronze statue of civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis, erected in the prominent space once taken by the Confederate memorial.
- Krystal Nurse, “America’s newest monuments unveil a different look at the nation’s past,” USA Today (August 25, 2024): LINK. “Four years after momentum kicked in for removing Confederate monuments in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, historians and families of prominent national and Black figures have started permanently memorializing their histories, signifying a shift in who gets honored.”
- Moriah Ballard, “‘Slavery is Still Legal’: Newly unveiled mural in Cuney Homes draws attention to modernized captive labor,” Click2Houston (August 22, 2024): LINK. A new mural in Houston, Texas, “Slavery is Still Legal,” serves as a “visual and emotional representation of the ongoing exploitation of incarcerated labor under the 13th Amendment’s exception clause.”
Segregated Schools
- Jennifer Berry Hawes, “In a Town Full of Segregation Academies, One Black Family Grapples With the Best School Choice for Their Daughter,” ProPublica (August 22, 2024): LINK. Macon, Georgia, is still home to several private schools that began as “segregation academies” and remain nearly all white. Meanwhile, “most of Macon’s public schools are nearly all Black — and, because of the city’s persistent wealth gap, they grapple with concentrations of poverty.”
- ”School choice and a history of segregation collide as one Florida county shutters its rural schools,” The Grio (August 25, 2024): LINK. With the explosion of school choice in Florida, public schools — especially in rural counties like Madison (on the Georgia border) — are struggling to remain open and must now consider how to integrate students that have been racially and economically segregated for generations.
- Melissa Hellmann, “Ron DeSantis banned lessons on racism in Florida public schools. ‘Freedom schools’ fill the gaps,” The Guardian (August 24, 2024): LINK. In Florida, where the governor has signed legislation that effectively prohibits schools from teaching about structural racism and banned some curricular materials and an AP course on African American history, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) has started “freedom schools” to fill in the resulting gaps.