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- Veronica Chambers, “How Negro History Week Became Black History Month,” New York Times (January 31, 2025): LINK. “In the years after Reconstruction, campaigning for the importance of Black history and doing the scholarly work of creating the canon was a cornerstone of civil rights work for leaders like Carter G. Woodson.” This work culminated in Black History Month, which now is under attack as part of the war on DEI.
- William Spivey, “The George Floyd Movement is Officially Dead,” Level (January 31, 2025): LINK. Independent journalist Spivey offers a sobering valedictory to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the past five years: “Very little was accomplished after all was said and done due to the George Floyd Movement. No act was passed by Congress or signed by the president. The war being waged by police against minorities never ended. Police forces weren’t defunded. Donald Trump has returned to the White House and taken up a more familiar tone…”
- Kaila Philo, “The Vast Geographic Scope of Slavery Is Hard to Fathom. One Groundbreaking Exhibition Shows Its True Scale Around the Globe,” Smithsonian Magazine (January 27, 2025): LINK. In Slavery’s Wake, a major new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, is “the brainchild of the Global Curatorial Project, an international network of scholars, curators and educators seeking new ways to engage people with critical points in world history.”
- Lydialyle Gibson, “A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” Harvard Magazine (January 29, 2025): LINK. In a controversial move, last week Harvard University laid off the entire staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) and outsourced its work to an external research organization. “[T]he HSRP team had been researching the identities of people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff, and working to trace their direct descendants.” Many see this as a retreat from the university’s commitment to address the institutional legacy of slavery.
- Araceli Mingura, “California bill allowing admissions priority for slave descendants draws scrutiny,” The College Fix (January 29, 2025): LINK. If the bill passes, California’s public higher education systems and its private colleges and universities would be allowed to consider an admission preference for direct descendants of people enslaved in the United States. (The writer of this article is a student journalist from CIC member institution Franciscan University of Steubenville [OH].)
- Amanda Vinicky, “Companies That Participated in the Slave Trade Could Face New Rules in Illinois Under Proposal,” WTTW (January 29, 2025): LINK. An Illinois state representative has introduced a measure that would require companies that want to conduct business in the state and that participated in the slave trade or slaveholding to acknowledge that historical legacy.
- Bernadette Athuahene, “How Local and Federal Laws Disenfranchised a Generation of Black Homeowners,” Literary Hub (January 31, 2025): LINK. The author traces the history of urban segregation in mid-20th century America through the stories of two Detroit-area families, one white, the other Black. “[T]he federal government has never taken responsibility for the fact that, by cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods through redlining, it manufactured the blight that its urban renewal programs sought to erase.”
- Zoe Betekova, “Study Looks at Association Between School Segregation and Late-life Dementia,” Yale University School of Public Health (January 3, 2025): LINK. An epidemiological study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health concludes that “Black individuals who were exposed to segregation during their school years had lower cognitive ability and a higher prevalence of dementia in later life, after accounting for other variables. One of the ways that segregated education impacts cognitive ability is by influencing future physical health conditions.”