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.
- “Remembering an Actual Stolen Election—and the Terror of a White Supremacist Coup,” Mother Jones (November 2, 2024): LINK. In audio format, Mother Jones takes a look back at how white supremacists overtook the North Carolina legislature in 1898, passing laws that segregated white and Black people in housing, trains, schools, libraries, and other public spaces, sowing the seeds of the Jim Crow era.
- Kirstin Butler, “Inside the Bygone World of Wilmington’s Black Elite,” PBS (October 30, 2024): LINK. “In lace and gabardine, cravats and crinolines, African Americans in … [North Carolina’s] then-largest city used photos to record their success within a society still circumscribed by white supremacy.”
- Janell Ross, “At a North Carolina HBCU, Black Students Get Out the Vote,” Capital B News (October 31, 2024): LINK. At HBCU and CIC member Johnson C. Smith University (Charlotte, NC), students have committed to mobilizing Black voters around a number of issues in the swing state.
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, “How Will White Women Vote? It’s a Question With a Fraught History.” The New York Times (November 2, 2024): LINK. The 1619 Project’s author reflects on the closely contested election and a major bloc that has typically voted Republican: white women.
- Chris Osuh, “Project reveals UK sites where black Americans fought to end slavery,” The Guardian (November 1, 2024): LINK. “The story of how black Americans came to Britain to fight slavery has still not been fully recognised. The Missing Pieces Project aims to shed new light on the struggle by charting the locations on the lecture tours of 19th-century activists.”
- Eimear Flanagan, “Show celebrates Belfast’s anti-slavery heritage,” BBC (October 25, 2024): LINK. A live show and musical celebration commemorates a UK city’s opposition to the slave trade and celebrates its Black community and links to Frederick Douglass.
- Petula Dvorak, “More than 100 years late, lynchings get a hearing,” The Washington Post (October 28, 2024): LINK. “[A] Black woman [threw] her arms around the White descendant of an enslaver, a woman who had nervously and earnestly stood before an audience in a historic, Black church and apologized for her ancestors’ role in American slavery.”
- “Inside a 1760 schoolhouse for Black children is a complicated history of slavery and resilience,” The Grio (November 1, 2024): LINK. “A Virginia museum has nearly finished restoring the nation’s oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children, where hundreds of mostly enslaved students learned to read through a curriculum that justified slavery.”
- Dave Collins, “New Haven rejected plans for a Black college in 1831. Generations later, it’s considered an apology,” AP News (October 26, 2024): LINK. 193 years later, New Haven’s leaders are considering a public apology for the harm that was done when the city’s white male landowners rejected plans for what would have been the nation’s first African American college.
- Ralph Douglas West, “The Rejection of CRT in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Black Perspectives (October 30, 2024): LINK. In June 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a resolution that permitted the use of Critical Race Theory as a tool of sociological analysis. In 2020, six SBC seminaries rejected the resolution. The author, a Baptist minister, links these contemporary conversations with SBC’s role in continuing slavery and Lost Cause mythology.
- Jon Key, “A Radical Black Magazine from the Harlem Renaissance was Ahead of its Time,” Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024): LINK. “Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists was a short-lived ‘little magazine’ hoping to jolt the editorial landscape of Harlem life by featuring and targeting a younger generation of Black artists.”