We’re back from our conference in Memphis on Independent Colleges and the Legacies of Slavery! Did you miss the sessions that were streamed live? No problem — you can watch them here.
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.
The Politics of Race (Local, State, National):
- Taryn Luna, “Newsom signs formal apology for California’s role in slavery,” Los Angeles Times (September 26, 2024): LINK. While the governor of California has apologized for the state’s role in slavery and for a legacy of racism against Black people, activists are still disappointed that the governor has vetoed reparations bills.
- Anasa Troutman, “Being and Building Beloved Community: The Intersection of Culture and Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly (September 25, 2024): LINK. The rise, fall, and perhaps rise again of a Black neighborhood in Memphis, TN, starting with Robert Reed Church, who was “[b]orn enslaved in Mississippi, [but] by the turn of the 20th century … had amassed a real estate fortune and became the South’s — and maybe the United States’ — first Black millionaire.”
- Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, “How Racist Policies Destroyed Public Housing and Created the American Suburbs,” Literary Hub (September 25, 2024): LINK. “World War II reorganized the economy and geography of the United States” by attracting many descendants of the enslaved to Northern and Western cities. Then, the postwar era was marked by the displacement and dispossession of Black and brown neighborhoods: “From 1949 to 1974, the United States redeveloped over 550 square miles of urban land and displaced 300,000 households, up to 1.2 million people.”
- Candice Norwood and Mariel Padilla, “The complicated legacy of the 1994 crime bill,” The 19th (September 16, 2024): LINK. “[The 1994 crime bill] faced wide criticism for expanding policing and harsh criminal punishments that fell hardest on Black and Brown communities. Often overlooked is the effect it had on arrests and incarceration of children and the rise of the school-to-prison pipeline.” Part of the longer history of race and policing in America.
- Joseph Williams, “Missouri Executed Marcellus Williams, Despite Evidence He Wasn’t Guilty,” Word in Black (September 26, 2024): LINK. Marcellus Williams repeatedly maintained his innocence while on Death Row for 25 years. Missouri executed him last week, drawing new attention to racial fault lines in the criminal justice system: “Although Black people are 13% of the population, they make up 42% of all Death Row inmates…. Black defendants are more likely to receive a death sentence for capital murder than whites particularly if the victim was white.”
Cultural Creativity:
- Karin Fischer, “How a Group of Amateurs Rewrote the History of America’s Pastime,” Chronicle of Higher Education (September 27, 2024): LINK (may require a free account to read). A dedicated group of volunteers has worked to document and preserve the history of the Negro Leagues — a part of the Jim Crow era that was, until this year, excluded from the official records of major league baseball.
- Patricia Leigh Brown, “Stirring Up an Indigo Revival Where Slave Cabins Still Stand,” New York Times (September 19, 2024): LINK. Artists, a monk, and an educator (among others) are helping to revive indigo cultivation in South Carolina — but not before reckoning with the dyestuff’s difficult history as one of the original crops raised by enslaved labor: “‘Indigo was the product of a system of forced labor … one could choose to ignore that history as a painful reminder of past problems, or embrace it as a vehicle for telling a more inclusive story about our shared past.”
- Shameekia Shantel Johnson, “Charting a Better World Through Malcolm X’s New York,” Hyperallergic (September 17, 2024): LINK. “A new essay collection contextualizes [Malcolm X’s] life through the physical spaces that nurtured him, like [Japanese-American activist] Yuri Kochiyama’s apartment-turned-community center” in Harlem.
Updates from the Network:
- Jayla Moody Marshall, “Grinnell to Dedicate New Residence Hall to Oldest Living Graduate and First Black Alumna,” Diverse: Issues in Education Education (September 25, 2024): LINK. CIC member Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa), has dedicated a new residence hall to pioneering Black alumna Edith Renfrow Smith (born 1914, graduated in 1937). The naming was spurred by a “research and recognition group … [that] includes faculty, students, alumni, and townspeople committed to bringing visibility to Smith and other African Americans who have called Grinnell home since 1854.”
- Gwendolyn Glenn, “HBCUs experience a surge following ban on affirmative action in admissions policies,” WUNC (September 17, 2024): LINK. At HBCUs like CIC member Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, “officials say the number of applicants they received for first-year students increased from just over 4,900 last year to about 7,500 this year.”
Other Links:
- Felice J. Freyer, “Researchers tried to fix a racist lung test. It got complicated.” Harvard Public Health Weekly (September 18, 2024): LINK. Researchers are analyzing how race skews decision-making in medicine: “Because lower lung function was seen as ‘normal’ for a Black person, Black patients were less likely to be diagnosed properly or treated as aggressively as White patients with a similar condition.”
- Timothy Messer-Kruse, “‘In the White Interest,’” History News Network (September 18, 2024): LINK. After considering the controversial 1619 Project and both conservative and liberal ideas about the founders and slavery, Messer-Kruse concludes that “In the end, we can’t easily embrace the founders as unsuccessful abolitionists, as conservatives may wish, nor can we simply paint them as architects of the slave nation America would become in the 19th century.”
- “A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore,” AP via The Grio (September 18, 2024): LINK. Grenada, Mississippi, has taken down a Confederate monument that has proven divisive for a town with a majority Black (but still 40% white) population. Now, the monument has been moved to an obscure spot behind a fire station.