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.
Updates from the CIC Network
- Robert E. May, “A Hobart student, Christmas, and the ‘Lost Cause,’” Finger Lakes Times (December 7, 2024): LINK. “[A]ntebellum southern enslavers had something of a fetish for educating their own sons, including some of the future leaders of the Confederacy, at Yankee colleges and universities.” One of those sons was Innes Randolph, who attended Hobart College in Geneva, NY (now CIC member Hobart and William Smith Colleges) in the 1850s and later contributed a racist tale of the Yule Log to the Lost Cause mythology of contented slaves.
- Obbie Tyler Todd, “Review: From Every Stormy Wind That Blows: The Idea of Howard College and the Origins of Samford University,” The Gospel Coalition (December 2024): LINK. Jonathan Bass’s early history of CIC member Samford University (Birmingham, AL) explores revivalism, antebellum slavery, Baptist schisms, and the origins of a racist New South.
Histories of Slavery
- Jennifer Schuessler, “The Smithsonian Looks at How the Slave Trade Shaped the World,” New York Times (December 13, 2024): LINK. “In Slavery’s Wake,” a new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, examines the forced migration of 12 million Africans that reshaped societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
- Annie Correal, “Enslaved People’s Graves Discovered at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage,” New York Times (December 12, 2024): LINK. Add the Hermitage in Nashville, TN, to the list of presidential sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier) where the manifest history of slavery cannot be evaded.
- Maria Cecilia Ulrickson, “Excavating New Archives of the Enslaved,” Public Books (December 12, 2024): LINK. Three new books explore “how Africans shaped the Americas [and] grapple with the politics of archival interpretation in constructing the histories of slavery and empire.”
- David Cunningham, “I’m a scholar of white supremacy who’s visiting all 113 places where Confederate statues were removed in recent years—here’s why Richmond gets it right,” The Conversation (December 10, 2024): LINK. “Monuments removed entirely from public view quickly fade from public memory…. Moving them to alternative sites [as Richmond officials did with a prominent statue of Jefferson Davis that was toppled in 2020], meanwhile, enables public conversation about them to continue.”
Black Farmers
- Aallyah Wright, “Decades of USDA Racism Leave Black Farmers Fighting for Equality,” Capital B News (December 13, 2024): LINK. Hundreds of Black farmers gathered in Charleston this week for the annual meeting of the National Black Growers Council. The main topic of discussion: forging a path forward after Republic legislators blocked federal aid programs for farmers of color. (And always on the agenda: decades of civil rights complaints against the United States Department of Agriculture.)
- Lisa Held, “A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shapes in Maryland,” Civil Eats (December 4, 2024): LINK. Her family stopped farming when her great-grandfather moved north from Mississippi during the Great Migration. Now Gail Taylor (and her partner D’Real Graham) are hoping to create a “resilient Black-led agricultural community as the planet burns, biodiversity plummets, and the larger food system continues to become increasingly industrialized and commodified.”
Cultural Expressions
- Philip Ewell, “Why Quincy Jones should be prominently featured in US music education—his absence reflects how racial segregation still shapes American classrooms,” The Conversation (December 13, 2024): LINK. A Black music professor laments that “music education in the U.S. is still segregated along racial lines.” That’s why Quincy Jones (1933-2024), one of the most influential musicians of his era, is rarely mentioned in the mainstream music curriculum. (Ewell includes a short list of Black classical and jazz musicians, dating back to the 18th century, who should also be part of the curriculum.)
- Tim Brinkhof, “Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative,” JSTOR Daily (December 11, 2024): LINK. Bryan Sinche’s 2024 book, Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, “sheds light on the Black literary ecosystem, of which self-publication was an integral part…. Black authors didn’t self-publish because it was cheap or easy but because…the exclusionary practices of ‘mainstream’ white print culture left them no other choice.”