Legacies Links for March 24, 2025: Remembering Slavery, Segregation, and the Great Migration

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Painted portrait of an elderly Black man in 19th-century clothing.
Richard Allen (1760–1831) was born into slavery in Delaware. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States.
  • Ben Mace, “Many don’t know the abolitionist and AME Church founder honored in this new Delaware mural,” Delaware News Journal (March 18, 2025): LINK. A mural of Richard Allen—born into slavery, became an abolitionist, founded the most significant Black Protestant denomination in 1816—is unveiled near his hometown of Smyrna, Delaware.
  • Melodie Woerman, “Georgia church creates ‘Weeping Time’ monument to remember 429 people sold into slavery,” Episcopal News Service (March 18, 2025): LINK. An Episcopal church in Georgia marks one of the largest auctions of enslaved people in American history (1829), the property of an Episcopalian enslaver who cultivated rice and racked up debts in Georgia’s Low Country.
  • Kendra D. Boyd, “The story of the Great Migration often overlooks Black businesses that built Detroit,” The Conversation (March 19, 2025): LINK. A business historian explains that “Black businesses were essential to facilitating the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South between the 1910s and 1960s. Yet, the traditional narrative of the migration as a movement of laborers seeking high-wage jobs obscures the history of African Americans who moved north or west seeking entrepreneurial opportunities.”
  • Petula Dvorak, “The way we remember slavery is changing. A Virginia city is taking the lead.” The Washington Post (March 14, 2025): LINK. The Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington (VA) Project is trying to change the way people encounter the history of slavery through “stumbling stones”: simple but unavoidable bronze plaques that bear the names of enslaved people, embedded in walkways around the city.
  • Jeanne Theoharris, “Learning from the Courage of the Civil Rights Movement,” Jacobin (March 17, 2025): LINK. In the midst of political uncertainty and assaults on free speech, the actions of civil rights activists like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Claudette Colvin, et al., should encourage us “to tak[e] great risks even after demoralizing setbacks.”
  • Noliwe Rooks, “How Delayed Desegregation Deprived Black Children of Their Right to Education,” Literary Hub (March 19, 2025): LINK. In an excerpt from her new book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon Books, 2025), Rooks discusses the slow process post-Brown to integrate schools in both Southern states and Northern cities, where de facto segregation often persists today.
  • Gerren Keith Gaynor, “Trump administration rescinds 1965 clause barring ‘segregated facilities’ like water fountains and restrooms in government contracts,” The Grio (March 19, 2025): LINK. “A February memo issued by the General Services Administration that has become more widely known to the public calls for the ‘segregated facilities’ clause to be stricken from new solicitations or contracts, along with provisions and clauses related to affirmative action in construction, among others. The clause barring segregation in facilities was first established in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson.”