Legacies Links for April 21, 2025: Quiet and Unquiet Violence

A large bronze sculpture in the rough shape of a cube, constructed of piles of "books" bearing the names of enslaved people on each spine.
Earlier this month, CIC member Roanoke College hosted a dedication ceremony for “Authors and Architects,” a memorial sculpture that recognizes and honors the role of enslaved people in the college’s history. The sculpture was designed by Richmond artist Sandy Williams IV. The college has also released an extensive report on the history of enslavement at Roanoke, a significant milestone in a decade-long inquiry into the history and legacies of slavery at Roanoke and in the surrounding area. The names of the enslaved on the monument were identified through many hours of research conducted by undergraduate students and Prof. Jesse Bucher as part of the Genealogy of Slavery (GOS) project.

As always, we encourage you share these links. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

  • Ann Price, “Taxes, Race, and Justice: Confronting ‘Quiet Violence’ Against Black Americans,” Nonprofit Quarterly (April 15, 2025): LINK. The author, who leads an advocacy group for economic justice, argues that “the tax system, like so many systems in the United States, has a long and insidious history of disproportionately targeting, scapegoating, and punishing Black people for simply existing.” Her examples stretch from the antebellum era to today.
  • Livia Gershon, “How White Women Organized Against Lynching,” JSTOR Daily (April 16, 2205): LINK. “In the 1930s, a coalition [of Southern] white women fought against lynching, disproving the idea that extrajudicial killings were intended to protect them.”
  • Katherine Knott, “Reclaiming the Narrative About Critical Race Theory,” Inside Higher Ed (April 17, 2025): LINK. An interview with the authors of a new book, The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement (NYU Press, 2025). They argue that the much-maligned theory “is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, … an organic extension of the civil rights movement. It is not something that is foreign or strange to the American experience.”
  • Evan Charney, et al., “How epigenetic inheritance fails to explain the Black-White health gap,” Social Science & Medicine 366 (2025): LINK (subscription required, but an open-access prepublication version is also available). From the abstract: “We find no prior evidence that supports (or is relevant to) the notion that the black-white health gap stems from the inherited trauma of slavery. We conclude that, given the ongoing traumas black Americans are exposed to in modern America, it is much more likely that present-day racial health disparities are due to more direct and current mechanisms than transgenerational transmission of slavery-era trauma.”

Expanded geographies of slavery and racial violence

  • David Rigby, et al., “A national data set of historical U.S. sundown towns for quantitative analysis,” Scientific Data 12:31 (2025): LINK. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has compiled “a new national data set of historical sundown towns in the United States linked to contemporary spatial information [drawn from the U.S. Census and other records]. … Sundown towns are places that once enacted legal or conventional practices meant to restrict the movement or residency of Black people and other people of color within their borders. … [They] represent an important instance of historical racism whose potential impacts on contemporary inequality are understudied.”
  • Howard Husock, “How Rye Slaveholders Scored an Extra Windfall,” The Rye Record (April 15, 2025): LINK. A local writer explores the legacy of slavery in Westchester County, NY, where “Slave labor made it possible for families like the famous Jays to accumulate large land holdings [in the 18th century]. And the slaveholders of Rye—in contrast to Southerners who saw their plantations burned and ruined—never ceased to profit from what slavery allowed them to build, even after its abolition.”
  • Reuben Downey, “The Conservation Chronicle: A Historical Journey Begins,” SELT (April 2025): LINK. The start of a series of blog posts about legacies of slavery in New England. “While the history of enslavement here [in New Hamphire] is not as widely known as that in the South, primarily due to differences in scale, understanding the impact of free and enslaved Black voices on the culture of New Hampshire and the entirety of New England is essential to tell the full history of these places SELT [the Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire] now manages.”