As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
Preserving Black History:
- Maureen Corrigan, “‘Last Seen’: After slavery, family members placed ads looking for loved ones,” National Public Radio (February 26, 2025): LINK. Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery (Simon & Schuster, 2025) contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hoped to find family members separated by slavery.
- Aaron Foley, “Bringing Black Studies to Black People,” Word in Black (February 26, 2025): LINK. “On weekends, Stanford University professor Adam Banks flies from the California campus to Cleveland, on a mission to teach a college-level African American studies class to the Black community – for free.”
- Jimmy Royals, “Fayetteville Museum Aims to Right the Record on Civil War History,” The Assembly (February 24, 2025): LINK. A new museum, “two decades in the making, will help North Carolina’s educators teach a nuanced, factual story as unresolved racial and political divisions continue to cleave the country.”
Preserving Black Communities:
- Ben Finley, “Black graves are being moved to make way for an industrial park, drawing a mix of emotions,” AP News (March 1, 2025): LINK. The remains of hundreds of African American tenant farmers interred at a former tobacco plantation in Virginia belonging to “the largest enslaver in the South” will be relocated, but descendants have mixed emotions.
- Adam Mahoney, “America’s Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution,” Capital B News (February 25, 2025): LINK. Previous federal and state administrations brought energy to rural South Carolina by destroying Black livelihoods and final resting places, but now, nearly a century later, Big Tech threatens these communities again as they fight to ramp up energy production for AI.
- P.R. Lockhart, “The Long Journey To Preserve Black History in Greensboro,” The Assembly (February 24, 2025): LINK. “An effort to commemorate a Greensboro neighborhood steeped in Black history finally paid off when it received federal recognition last December. Residents say it couldn’t have happened without a broad coalition of support.”
Other Links:
- Abbie Hopson, “A 1964 boycott fought school segregation, but inequality continues,” New York Amsterdam News (February 27, 2025): LINK. Segregation is still rampant in New York City’s school system, but activists in the 1950s and 1960s tried to prevent this form of systemic inequality: “A lawsuit challenging segregation in NNYC public schools moved forward in court. Still, Black and Brown schools are more likely to be under-resourced and under-performing, and the children are less likely to admitted to prestigious schools.”
- Wagdy Sawahel, “What are the challenges as experts study slavery, reparations?” University World News (February 27, 2025): LINK. The African Union has named 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.” They are enlisting the help of experts from higher education to accomplish its goals by establishing a new alliance of university chairs for studying the transatlantic slave trade, developing expertise, and pushing scholars to continue to rely on primary sources, among other initiatives.
Updates from the CIC Network:
- Mina Ruffle, “Kenyon should confront ties to racism, rename buildings,” The Kenyon Collegian (February 27, 2025): LINK. A student at CIC member Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) calls on her institution to do more to repair the “embedded racism” in buildings named for President Rutherford B. Hayes and noted faculty member John Crowe Ransom.