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New Books
- Sara Georgini, “How a Leading Black Historian Uncovered Her Own Family’s Painful Past—and Why Her Ancestors’ Stories Give Her Hope,” Smithsonian Magazine (March 5, 2025): LINK. Martha S. Jones’s new book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025), uses a variety of genealogical records—ledgers, deeds, census records, etc.—to unravel six generations of family history.
- Martin Pengelly, “‘Let’s dig into the archives and tell the truth’: interrogating Yale’s connections to slavery,” The Guardian (March 4, 2025): LINK. Discusses historian David Blight’s recent book on the history of slavery at Yale University. (Blight is director of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative.) Also see Blight in the opening session of a recent conference devoted to the Histories of Race, Science, and Medicine.
- Naomi Elias, “How Do We Combat the Racist History of Public Education?” The Nation (March 4, 2025): LINK. An interview with sociologist Eve L. Ewing, author of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism (One World, 2025). Ewing argues that the history of American education is “embedded in the racialized purpose of the nation, a country that is built on chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. The republic that we take for granted doesn’t exist without those two social and historical forces. Schools are not outside or incidental to those forces.”
- Quartez Harris, “Did You Know That James Baldwin Wrote for Children, Too?” Literary Hub (March 3, 2025): LINK. Baldwin wrote Little Man, Little Man for and about his young nephew, Tejan Karefa-Smart. Originally published in 1976, it echoes the themes of Baldwin’s writing for adults: racial injustice and prejudice.
Persistence and Memory
- Eric Herschthal, “Racism Isn’t the Only Cause of the Racial Wealth Gap,” The New Republic (March 6, 2025): LINK. “[Two new books] offer superbly rendered accounts of how centuries of racist exploitation got us to today’s inequalities. But they both leave open a question about the deeper causes of these inequalities—to what extent is the gap a narrow function of racism, and to what extent has it resulted from the broader system of capitalism in which it’s embedded?”
- Lisa Gail Collins, “Patchworks of Memory: Quilting Remembrance and Healing,” Literary Hub (March 5, 2025): LINK. Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt (University of Washington Press, 2025) describes how a rural community of African American women made sense of suffering, resilience, creativity, and grace through quilting.
- Freeden Blume Ouer and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “Scrapbooking Summer Camp with Yolande Du Bois,” Black Perspectives (March 3, 2025): LINK. W.E.B. Du Bois’s daughter Yolande was a talented observer of the African American experience in her own right. Her newly rediscovered scrapbooks provide a glimpse into the early years of summer camps for Black children and other aspects of her life.
- Maya Pontone, “Charlottesville Nonprofit Seeks Artists to Transform Melted Robert E. Lee Statue,” Hyperallergic (March 3, 2025): LINK. “[A] Black-led public research nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia, is looking for artists to transform the melted remains of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue into a new public work.”
- Matt Yan, “Black Churches Are Awarded $8.5 Million in Grants for Preservation,” New York Times (March 2, 2025): LINK. The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, announced $8.5 million in grants to preserve buildings that played a significant role in Black history.
Other Links
- Joseph Patrick Kelley and David Carson, “The US has pardoned insurrectionists twice before—and both times, years of violent racism followed,” The Conversation (March 7, 2025): LINK. What happened when Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant pardoned former slavers after the Civil War? Not an era of national harmony, but decades of racial violence.
- Scott Spillman, “How the Study of Slavery Has Shaped the Academy,” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 4, 2025): LINK (a free account may be required to read). “The special problems involved in the study of slavery have revealed where the normal practices of scholarship begin to break down, obliging scholars to ask different kinds of questions and compelling them to add new tools to their belts. In short, the study of slavery has helped to shape American academic life.”
- Allison Wiltz, “Why Passing For White Was Popular During Jim Crow,” Level (March 4, 2025): LINK. “People often see the tradition of ‘passing for white’ as the byproduct of self-hate. But, given the legacy of lynching, it’s clear more is at play here. It’s fair to consider the role collective self-esteem played in race-swapping. But we shouldn’t overlook the social complexities of this period.”
- Bernard Mokam, “A Black Studies Curriculum Is (Defiantly) Rolling Out in New York City,” New York Times (March 3, 2025): LINK. “Educators are embracing rather than restricting discussions in schools. Leaders have said they’ll do so whether the Trump administration approves or not.”
- Jalen Coats, “Where were enslaved Africans taken from? The answer could be hidden in their bones,” National Geographic (March 3, 2025): LINK. “Scientists have created a groundbreaking map of strontium isotopes found across sub-Saharan Africa—which could help descendants of enslaved people reconstruct their family histories.”
- Alexis Wray, Eden Turner, and Sabreen Dawud, “60 years after Bloody Sunday, activists remember the Black women behind the curtain,” The 19th (March 3, 2025): LINK. Black women fed, protected, housed, or inspired activists who traveled to Selma, Alabama, in March 1965 to demonstrate for voting rights. Here are some of their stories. (Students from CIC member institution Stillman College participated in the 60th-anniversary commemoration. A new exhibit in Montgomery features stark photos from the 1965 protests.)