Legacies Links for January 27, 2025: L.A. Fires, Civil Rights Struggles Up North, Black History

A painted mural depicting about two dozen labor and social justice leaders, many with direct connections to New York City — including A. Philip Randolph, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Pedro Albizu Campos, Margaret Sanger, Mabel Dodge, John Lennon, Helen Gurley Flynn, Harry Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Hubert Harrison, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Clara Lemlich, Che Guevara, Bayard Rustin, Marcus Garvey, Carlo Tresca, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, and Bill Haywood.
In 2008, the Museum of the City of New York commissioned artist Mike Alewitz (via the Puffin Foundation) to create a mural celebrating the history of labor and social justice movements in the city: The City at the Crossroads of History. The mural included portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. (at center, in the red tie) and Marcus Garvey (at right, in the yellow suit), among many others. In 2015, the museum controversially refused to accept the finished work for “not meet[ing] … [our] curatorial standards.” source: National Council for Public History, image by Mike Alewitz

Fire

  • Emma Janssen, “Incarcerated Firefighters Battle L.A. Blazes While California Upholds Prison Slavery,” The American Prospect (January 21, 2025): LINK. “Last fall, California voters rejected Proposition 6, which would have brought an end to modern-day slavery in the state’s jails and prisons [as allowed under a loophole in the 13th Amendment]. Not even three months later, more than 1,000 incarcerated Californians stood on the front lines of the fires blazing through Los Angeles.”
  • Anissa Durham, “‘Black People Know How to Rise from the Ashes,’” Word in Black (January 20, 2025): LINK. The Eaton Fires destroyed thousands of structures and displaced hundreds of residents, but it also devastated Altadena, a Black middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. Now, residents hope to build back, but they may face a phenomenon called climate gentrification.
  • Emily Witt, “Will L.A.’s Fires Permanently Disperse the Black Families of Altadena?” The New Yorker (January 17, 2025): LINK. Multigenerational families in Altadena reflect on rampant gentrification before the fires and the strong legacy of Black homeownership in the suburb.

Civil Rights Struggles Up North

  • Michelle Adams, “Beyond Brown: How the Failure of Desegregation in the North Reveals America’s Lingering Racial Fault Lines,” Literary Hub (January 15, 2025): LINK. A legal scholar reminds us that, as a matter of history and personal experience (as a Black girl in 1960s–70s Detroit), “school desegregation as a social policy was a resounding success for both black and white students. … [It] shifted important educational resources to black students that had long been denied … [and] helped destroy the deeply embedded cultural belief system that underpinned … white supremacy.”
  • Katie Singer, “The Great Migration and Black Women’s Political Work,” Black Perspectives (January 21, 2025): LINK. The author discusses Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North (Rutgers University Press, 2024)—which focuses on New Jersey, “‘a northern state with very southern sensibilities’ due in large part to the Great Migration.”
  • Lacey Hunter, “Centering Northern Black Women in the Civil Rights Narrative,” Black Perspectives (January 22, 2025): LINK. Another essay in a series of posts about The Georgia of the North. Hunter says that the strongest aspect of Williams’s book is her “insistence that Black women’s lived experiences as intellectuals, activists, community organizers, and New Jersey residents informed the direction and progress of the larger civil rights movement.”

Histories

  • Kevin Mahnken, “Poll of High Schoolers Shows Many Are Taught That America Is ‘Inherently Racist,’” The 74 Million (January 22, 2025): LINK. According to one historian quoted in the article, “It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.” 
  • Christina Joseph, “Teaching Black History Now,” School Library Journal (January 23, 2025): LINK. Despite the well-documented challenges to teaching Black history, parents, educators, and their communities have banded together to provide students with more comprehensive and inclusive histories.
  • Charlie R. Braxton, “The Pan-African Worldview of MLK,” Medium (January 21, 2025): LINK (may require free account to read). Poet/playwright/critic Charlie Braxton reflects on the history of American Pan-Africanism, including Martin Luther King’s admiration for the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey.
  • “Biden posthumously pardons civil rights leader Marcus Garvey,” The Guardian (January 19, 2025): LINK. In one of his final acts, former President Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), who was convicted of mail fraud under dubious circumstances in 1922. Garvey was eventually deported to Jamaica.
  • Peniel Joseph, “Trump’s inauguration sought to sully MLK’s legacy,” The Emancipator (January 21, 2025): LINK. The author of The Third Reconstruction (Basic Books, 2022) argues that “[President] Trump’s election victories represent the coming to power of everything that [Martin Luther King, Jr.] found morally reprehensible and politically indefensible regarding American democracy.”
  • Leoneda Inge, Josh Sullivan, Cole del Charco, “How ‘The Greensboro Six’ broke golf’s color barrier,” WUNC (January 20, 2025): LINK. “A week after Rosa Parks began a bus boycott protesting segregation, several Black men played a round of golf at the whites-only Gillespie Golf Course in Greensboro, NC.” In 2024, the PGA recognized their contribution to the eventual integration of the sport.
  • Justin Giboney, “Racial Unity is Out of Style,” Christianity Today (January 17, 2025): LINK (may require free account to read). Writing in a leading evangelical publication, the author argues that “it’s time to consider how race relations in the American church have actually worsened over the past half decade or so. The sentiment seems to have shifted in such a significant way that the once-popular racial-reconciliation project is now passé in many spaces. Even the term racial reconciliation feels corny and cringeworthy to some.”

Updates from the CIC Network:

  • Spalding University (Louisville, KY) will host the 7th annual Elmer Lucille Allen Conference on African American Studies on February 18–19, 2025. This year’s theme is Environmental Injustice in the Black Community. Register here to attend in person or virtually via Zoom.
  • “‘History humanizes experiences’: Students examine enduring legacies of Civil Rights Movement,” Brown University (January 23, 2025): LINK. Brown University (RI) collaborated with CIC member Tougaloo College (Jackson, MS)—an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies of American Slavery network—to develop an intensive study trip for students from the New England school, who visited sites related to slavery and the Civil Rights movement around Jackson, Mississippi.
  • Ian Delahanty, “Teaching the Civil War: A Place-Based Learning Approach to Civil War Memory,” Journal of the Civil War Era (January 21, 2025): LINK. A teaching-focused essay by a professor of history at CIC member institution Springfield College (Springfield, MA): “For most of the students who take my survey of the Civil War era at the regional Western Massachusetts college where I teach, the Civil War is and always has been ‘down South.’  … Thus, when designing a culminating research project for my Civil War era survey, I thought long and hard about how to immerse students in some aspect of the period in a way that would make them grasp what the war meant to contemporaries who, while far removed from its battlefields, were nonetheless invested in its prosecution and outcome.”