A day later than usual — but 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.
- Kavon Ward and Hannah Greene, “Where Is My Land? The Struggle for Black Land Recovery,” Nonprofit Quarterly (September 5, 2024): LINK. “By 1997, … Black Americans owned only 1.3 percent of all titled land [in the United States], a 90 percent decline [since 1910].” Policymakers in Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California are considering ways to repair the land theft that has contributed to racial the wealth gap.
- Sean Gallagher, “Enslaved Women’s Resistance to Slavery and Gendered Violence,” Black Perspectives (September 5, 2024): LINK. The reviewer concludes that historian Tamika Y. Nunley’s new book, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime & Clemency in Early Virginia, “contains a sense of hope that frames the resistance of enslaved women as an intellectual heritage. … [E]nslaved women helped develop a higher order of justice grounded in freedom, bodily autonomy, and kinship. The victories for that higher order are few in this nation, but they have and will come.”
- “Memorial artist Sandy Williams IV opens exhibition at Roanoke,” Roanoke College (September 6, 2024): LINK. Roanoke College (Salem, VA), an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies network, is hosting a new exhibition, “Freedom is Not a Metaphor.” The exhibition features work by Williams, a “Richmond-based artist and educator who was selected to design a memorial to enslaved laborers on the Roanoke College campus.” The art challenges viewers to “reconsider the construction and contest action of memory through personal narratives and historical contexts.”
- Randy Rowland, “Opinion: Seward Park’s Link to the Underground Railroad,” South Seattle Emerald (September 5, 2024): LINK. A Seattle, WA, resident reminds her neighbors about the abolitionist career of New Yorker William Seward, namesake of a local park — a reminder that the legacies of slavery, both negative and hopeful, are present in every corner of the country.
- Ian Frazier, “Suffering, Grace and Redemption: How The Bronx Came to Be,” Literary Hub (September 6, 2024): LINK. Frazier’s new history of the Bronx begins with the first Dutch settlers in the 17th century, who “brought enslaved men and women with them almost as soon as they landed.” Archaeological evidence from NYC’s first two centuries “dispel[s] … any notion of the mildness of northern slavery.”
- Doreen St. Félix, “The Messiness of Black Identity,” The New Yorker (September 7, 2024): LINK. The list of terms to describe Americans who can trace their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africa (in historic times) is long and contested. A new term is making its way into the lexicon: “American Descendants of Slavery” or ADOS — a term that would exclude, say, a presidential candidate descended from enslaved Jamaicans. “Most Black Americans don’t espouse the beliefs of ADOS. Plenty of Black Americans also have non-American ethnic identities. But the ADOS dissension is at the extreme end of a kind of conflict that is known as ‘diaspora warring.’”
- Sean Campbell, “Tyre Nichols was brutally killed by five Black police officers. How did we get here?” The Guardian (September 7, 2024): LINK. “To understand the conditions that led to Nichols’s killing [in 2023], one must first understand the history of policing in Memphis… [which began with the antebellum slave patrols that] sought to enforce the racial hierarchy by capturing enslaved Africans who attempted to escape to freedom.”
- Anisa Khalifa, Brianna Atkinson, and Jerad Walker, “Is this the death of DEI?” North Carolina Public Radio (September 5, 2024): LINK. In this podcast from NC Public Radio, a team of higher education reporters investigate the beginning and (perhaps) the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the nation.
- Paul Prescod, “Ernest Calloway Fused Civil Rights and Class Struggle,” Jacobin (September 4, 2024): LINK. A profile of Ernest Calloway (1909–1989), Black labor leader and president of the local NAACP chapter in mid-20th century St. Louis. He led a lifetime of union organizing, electoral campaigns, and civil rights crusading; he believed “that the civil rights movement could not address [the challenges facing urban Black workers] if it didn’t successfully take on economic issues.”
- Victor Luckerson, “How Black Americans in the South Boldly Defied Jim Crow to Build Business Empires of Their Own,” Smithsonian Magazine (September/October 2024): LINK. While more attention has been paid to the northward exodus of African Americans during the Great Migration, Black entrepreneurs who remained in the South “faced obstacles that their Northern peers didn’t — namely, a rigid caste system that cut them out of politics and viewed efforts at prosperity as a threat to white supremacy.”