Between 2020 and 2025, Lewis University in Romeoville, IL, served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. The university is located near the terminus of a major migration route from the South for the formerly enslaved and their descendants and near several prison sites, which led to a focus on two related themes: Race, Place, and Migration and Mass Incarceration. Under the leadership of Prof. Tennille N. Allen, faculty members and students worked closely with community-based groups in nearby Joliet and Fairmont, IL. Allen and Prof. Huma Zia also worked closely with Rebirth of Sound, Imagine Justice (a social justice group founded by actor/musician Common), and the incarcerated men in Stateville Correctional Center to document communities inside and outside the prison walls.
Presentation slides from the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference, Memphis, TN, September 20, 2024. (Best viewed in full-screen mode.)
This provides an overview of all the work carried out by the project team at Lewis University.
From the project team’s final report:
A major thrust of our work has been around community-based participatory research (CBPR). Since the beginning of the grant, we partnered with local organizations including Joliet’s Warren-Sharpe Center, Second Baptist Church, the Joliet-based arm of Equity and Transformation Chicago, as well as the Fairmont Community Partnership Group, Inc. (FCPGI) and the Fairmont School District.
Through this work, we hoped to establish a rich repository of interviews and other materials that told the story of Black people and Black communities in Joliet and unincorporated Fairmont in their own words. Small communities like Joliet and smaller communities like Fairmont are too often overlooked when it comes to discussing Black communities in general and certainly when it comes to discussing the movement of Black people from the rural South to the North and this work was intended to remedy that as it adds to the richness and diversity of Black experiences in the United States.
In addition, we wanted to explore the ways that Black residents and Black places were subjected to processes of segregation through redlining and other forms of discrimination and marginalization and the consequences of the hyper-segregation these create. … We wanted to explore the connections between not just race, place, and migration but the ways that migration of Black people from the South are also connected to mass incarceration. While we certainly want to—and will—share our findings with academic audiences, it was more important to us that we conducted this work on these communities and in these places in ways wanted by and beneficial for the community members. … [We want] this work to be used by community members, including and especially those who are elementary and high school students, educators, and administrators.
While all of this work has been special, we are perhaps most proud of the work that we have done with the men who had been incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center until its September 2024 closure [a process that dragged out until March 2025!]…. Documenting their experiences, as well as their hopes and plans to prevent others from following in their footsteps, through video and photography can have an impact on perceptions and policy. Perhaps more gratifying is hearing how much listening to and sharing their stories means from a number of incarcerated men and members of their personal communities.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.