We hope that you will be enjoying a holiday respite this Thanksgiving week. Have a slice of pumpkin pie in honor of the Yankee abolitionists! 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.
Thanksgiving Throwbacks
- Matthew Korfhage, “The abolitionist history of Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie—and why the South resisted both,” USA Today via northjersey.com (November 24, 2021): LINK. In the 19th century, pumpkins were a “hotly contested battleground in America’s original culture war. In the 1800s, the humble pumpkin became a totem of the fight to abolish slavery in America.”
- Lauren Goforth, “Thanksgiving in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: Preaching the Case For and Against Abolition,” Hermann-Grima and Gallier Historic Houses (November 23, 2023): LINK. Thanksgiving is historically a Northern and Protestant tradition. In Catholic Louisiana, it took an 1863 proclamation from Pres. Lincoln and encouragement from the Archdiocese of New Orleans to make the holiday official.
Updates from the CIC Network
- Ellie Wolfe, “Maryland’s oldest college honored enslavers. Its next steps: ‘Honest conversations.’” The Baltimore Banner (November 20, 2024): LINK. At CIC member St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), the community reckons with its next steps following a report on the campus legacies of slavery. The college’s president says: “I think any school of a certain age was supported by monies that really were due to the work of enslaved people…. [However,] we’re the type of institution that [can have] these honest conversations.”
- Kristen Cole, “Primus Project Furthers Reach with New Podcast,” Trinity College (November 20, 2024): LINK. “As part an overarching effort to tell a truer and fuller story of [CIC member] Trinity College’s history, the Primus Project recently released the first in a series of podcasts … that [address] the difficult early history of the institution.” (Trinity is located in Hartford, CT.)
- Mackenzie Grizzard, “Baylor University author series talks slavery, Southern Baptists,” Baylor Lariat (November 19, 2024): LINK. Kimberly Ellison is the author of a new book about slavery, pro-slavery ideology, and early Baptists in the American South: Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race and Slavery, 1696-1860 (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2023). Prof. Ellison’s public lecture was part of CIC member Baylor University’s effort to memorialize enslaved workers on the Waco, TX, campus.
Teaching about Race
- Adam Seagrave and Stephanie Shonekan, “Racism is such a touchy topic that many US educators avoid it—we are college professors who tackled that challenge head on,” The Conversation (November 12, 2024): LINK. A Black ethnomusicologist and a white political theorist joined forces to teach a model course about “Race and the American Story.”
- Jaden Edison, “How some Texas parents and historians say a new state curriculum glosses over slavery and racism,” The Texas Tribune (November 18, 2024): LINK. If the Texas Board of Education approves a proposed new curriculum, public school children won’t learn the full story of places like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (an architectural marvel that was also a labor camp for hundreds of enslaved people) or people like Robert E. Lee (a soldier who also embraced slavery) or MLK Jr. (whose radicalism on poverty and race will be downplayed while focusing on his nonviolence).
- Karin Wulf, “Even George Washington Was a Tyrant,” Time (November 18, 2024): LINK. Washington’s glowing record as a general and president is often sanitized when it comes to his role as an enslaver of 600 people: “Washington did nothing, ever, outside the context of slavery, and his position as an enslaver shaped all aspects of his career, even those exalted as examples of principled leadership.”
Religion
- “Scripture as a Weapon: How The Confederacy’s Biblical Justification of Oppression Still Echoes Today,” Milwaukee Independent (November 21, 2024): LINK. “The legacy of slavery in America still looms large today, as the fight for racial justice and true equality before the law remains ongoing. Unfortunately, the distortion of Christianity that once served to justify slavery is still echoed in some corners of today’s political landscape.”
- Shireen Korkzan, “Historically Black South Carolina parishes lament, repent church’s complicity in slavery,” Episcopal News Service (November 14, 2024): LINK. Three Episcopal churches in South Carolina met together for the first time in a service dedicated to the memory of the Church’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade; ironically, local Black parishes are taking the lead in this work of reckoning and repair.
Reparations
- Shelby Hawkins, “Report Examines What Some South Side Residents Think About Reparations,” WTTW (November 13, 2024): LINK. Researchers from the Chicago Urban League and the South Side Community Reparations Coalition summarize the view of community members: “[Reparations] should be for individuals rather than an entire community and that it would need to go beyond the acknowledgement of the war on drugs.”
- Amber Ogden, “Vandalia’s Arnwine Drive Bears the Legacy of Slavery and a Family’s Fight for Justice,” Michigan Chronicle (November 15, 2024): LINK. Candice Hammons, a Michigan woman descended from a Texas enslaver and an enslaved woman, wanted to trace her lineage. Instead, she discovered a long-standing injustice: land that was willed by the enslaver but never transferred to her family.