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Updates from the CIC Network:
- Emily Belz, “How Baylor Is Facing Its Slavery History,” Christianity Today (February 18, 2025): LINK. CIC member Baylor University (Waco, Texas) is putting the finishing touches on a Memorial to Enslaved People this year. This article addresses the distinctive challenges for faith-based colleges and universities to examine institutional histories of slavery and racial discrimination.
- Allison Luthern, “Documenting Slavery at St. John’s College Campus,” Maryland Historical Trust (February 19, 2025): LINK. In 2023, CIC member St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) received a grant from the Maryland Historical Trust to help explore the institution’s historical relations with indigenous and enslaved people and make recommendations about how the past should be acknowledged. As part of the larger initiative, the St. John’s College History Task Force released an Architectural Survey Report in 2024.
The Catholic Church and Slavery:
- Nate Tinner-Williams, “Here are the Catholic bishops who enslaved Black people in America,” Black Catholic Messenger (February 15, 2025): LINK. A scholar explores the history of episcopal human trafficking in the United States, finding that many of the Catholic church’s leading clergy were complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans.
- “Georgetown Collaborates with Catholic Educational Institutions in Louisiana,” Georgetown University (February 20, 2025): LINK. “Georgetown has formed partnerships with a Catholic high school and university [i.e., CIC member Xavier University of Louisiana] in New Orleans, Louisiana, as part of its ongoing … [effort] to address historical ties to slavery and engage with Descendant communities whose ancestors were once enslaved on Maryland Jesuit plantations.”
- Richard Szczepanowski, “In blessing graves of enslaved persons, Cardinal Gregory honors ‘people once in shackles,’” Catholic Standard (February 21, 2025): LINK. “During his tenure as archbishop of Washington [D.C.], Cardinal Wilton Gregory [the first African American in that position] acknowledged a terrible wrong—and attempted to soothe the pain it has caused—by blessing, honoring and showing respect for the gravesites of enslaved people who lie in parish cemeteries, mostly without name markers.”
Links:
- Chanté Griffin, “Black Labor Matters,” Christianity Today (February 20, 2025): LINK. A spiritual reflection on the Black History Month 2025 theme set by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH): African Americans and Labor. “[Black History Month] isn’t merely an opportunity to remember the accomplishments of … [specific] Black leaders. It’s also an opportunity to remember how, generation after generation, God has used Black believers to usher in justice and righteousness.”
- Seph Rodney, “Dawoud Bey Asks, Can Landscapes Hold Traumas?” Hyperallergic (February 18, 2025): LINK. Photographer Dawoud Bey explores how people use the land “as a convenient place to let generational traumas rest because they are brutally heavy.” A recent exhibition used photographs of specific places in Virginia associated with slavery to explore the connection between African American history and the American landscape.
- Joe Killian, “Rev. Nelson Johnson: A Legacy Beyond Tragedy,” The Assembly (February 14, 2025): LINK. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, died this month at 81. Decades after the deadly confrontation between white supremacists and labor activists, Johnson was still pushing the city government to acknowledge and apologize for its role in the killings; an accurate historical marker was not installed on the site until 2017.
- Omari Weekes, “A Revelatory Way of Understanding the Black Experience,” The Atlantic (February 13, 2025): LINK. In a review of scholar Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025), the reviewer discusses Perry’s focus on the color blue and how the color evokes a complicated history of slavery and racism.
- Melanie D. Newport, “Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes,” Public Books (February 12, 2025): LINK. In this interview, historian John Bardes argues that “mass incarceration as we know it is not a new phenomenon, and [the] complicated relationship among race and violence and slavery is as old as the American prison itself.” Bardes is the author of The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930 (UNC Press, 2024).