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.
African Echoes
- Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Peter Baker, “In Angola, Biden Warns That Slavery’s History Should Not be Erased,” New York Times (December 3, 2024): LINK. “The president’s decision to emphasize [the slave trade that defined relations between the United States and Angola] served not only as a nod to the wounds inflicted on generations of Africans, but also as a statement of principle in the contemporary debate underway in his own country about how to teach and remember history.”
- Melissa Chemam, “Benin to give nationality to descendants of those deported as slaves,” RFI (November 30, 2024): LINK. According to the law, applicants must “provide proof of [their] Afro descent by authenticated testimonies, civil status document or DNA test carried out in a laboratory approved by Benin.”
Reparation and Repair
- Gerren Keith Gaynor, “Advocates urge Biden to apologize for slavery and take other racial justice actions before leaving office,” The Grio (December 4, 2024): LINK. Advocates would “like President Biden to issue a U.S. apology for slavery, much in the same way he did to Native Americans in October for the U.S.’s role in running boarding schools that abused Native American youth and sought to eradicate or whitewash their tribal identities.”
- Sophie Austin et al., Associated Press (December 2, 2024): LINK. “A California lawmaker introduced a bill [last] Monday to allow admission priority to the descendants of slaves at the University of California and California State University, two of the largest public university systems in the nation.”
- Debbie Eliot, “Gospel-focused racial reconciliation in the Deep South,” NPR (November 26, 2024): LINK. A biracial group of clergy and lay leaders are tackling the racial divide in the Deep South. According to one leader of this effort, “We started with the notorious slave cities, Charleston, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Mobile and New Orleans. Because it’s obvious to us that if God can do that here, he can do it anywhere.”
Written on the Land
- Ciara Cummings, “Georgia family farm fights land seizure, claims eminent domain abuse,” Atlanta News First (December 4, 2024): LINK. Across the South, descendants of enslaved people are fighting property developers to stay on their family land. “A 2007 Institute for Justice study revealed [that] when eminent domain was used for private development, it most often impacted areas where more than half of the community was made up of people of color. As well as in areas where nearly half of the community’s population sat below the poverty line.”
- Adam Mahoney, “Can land repair the nation’s racist past?,” High Country News (December 1, 2024): LINK. “Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, California lawmakers have debated how to make material amends for the deep-rooted impacts of slavery and anti-Black racism, and many now argue that reparations should be made not in cash but with land.” However, different groups of advocates, including Black Californians trying to reclaim land that once belonged to their families, have different approaches to communal and private landholding.
- Christina Cooke, “Black Earth,” The Bitter Southerner (November 25, 2024): LINK. “In North Carolina, a Black farmer purchased the plantation where his ancestors were enslaved—and is reclaiming his family’s story, his community’s health, and the soil beneath his feet.”
- Gail Sims, “Sparking Freedom: Enslaved Resistance in Fredericksburg and Stafford, Virginia,” Public Humanities (December 2, 2024): https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2024.44. From the abstract: “Inspired in large part by the author’s residence on the grounds of a former plantation in Stafford County, Virginia, Sparking Freedom highlights local stories of enslaved resistance. The program incorporates stops at multiple National Park Service sites … [but it is also] a highly personal example of innovative and engaging public history work honoring enslaved communities.”
Other Links
- “Jane Deveaux: The Black Woman Who Risked Everything to Teach Enslaved Children to Read in the 1800s,” Talk Africana (December 2, 2024): LINK. Deveaux (1810–1885) defied antebellum law and established a secret school in Savannah, Georgia, to teach enslaved and free African Americans how to read.
- Ron Grossman, “The Nation of Islam flourished in Chicago after Elijah Muhammad took over from the movement’s founder,” Chicago Tribune (December 1, 2024): LINK. “Blacks who joined the Great Migration only to find that discrimination and violence in the North wasn’t much better than in the South were ripe for recruiting by the Black Muslims’ message.”
- “Federal Judge rules Byron Allen’s $10 billion lawsuit against McDonald’s for racial discrimination will go to trial,” The Grio (December 3, 2024): LINK. A district judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence for the lawsuit under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which states that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States have the same right to uphold contracts as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
- Kaitlyn K. Stanhope et al., “Slavery, homeownership, and contemporary perinatal outcomes in the southeast: a test of mediation and moderation,” American Journal of Epidemiology 193:12 (December 2024): https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae138 (full access requires subscription). A new epidemiological study “conclude[s] that historic slavery remains relevant for perinatal health”: wherever slaveholding was most intensive in 1860, Black mothers and babies in 2013–2021 were more likely to experience a variety of health risks just before and after birth.