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This blog was created to support the larger work of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative—i.e., to help CIC member colleges and universities; their faculty, staff, and students; and the members of their communities reckon with the multiple legacies of American slavery through research and exploration, teaching and learning, and public-facing programs and engagement.
The blog offers a mix of background information about the project, updates and highlights from our institutional partners, and curated content about the afterlives of slavery. It is a place to raise questions, to share examples of exemplary work at scores of CIC member colleges (many of which have direct ties to the institution of slavery), and to build a national network of like-minded researchers, teachers, and community members. We hope that visitors will find some useful things in this small corner of the web while learning more about the public contributions of private (independent) colleges and universities.
We also invite you to contribute to the blog. Please contact us at legaciesproject@cic.edu.
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The Legacies of American Slavery network is much bigger than the seven Regional Collaboration Partners. Many CIC member colleges and universities are reckoning with the legacies of slavery through original research, historic or archival preservation, teaching and learning, and public engagement. We have created a resource database to share some of their ongoing work. It is searchable by institution, legacy theme, resource type, and other variables.
The database was developed in Notion, a multi-function project management platform. The database is displayed as a spreadsheet, which should look familiar to anyone who has used Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Each row begins with the name of a CIC member institutions, listed alphabetically. Next to each institution are columns of other relevant information: the resource name, a brief description, the type of resource (e.g., a course syllabus or a digital exhibit), and the primary legacy theme (e.g., “Contested Citizenship” or “Racial Violence”).
Looking for multiple resources related to a specific legacy of American slavery? Use the filter at the top of the resource database to select any of the legacy themes. (By default the resource database is set to view “ALL.”)
The database is easy to sort and search! The database is not comprehensive. If you know about similar activities at other CIC member institutions, please contact us at LegaciesProject@cic.edu so we can keep adding new resources to the database. Also let us know if you spot any inadvertent errors.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Sewanee: University of the South (Sewanee, TN), served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Located on a campus that was explicitly designed to reflect and commemorate a slaveholding South, the institutional team chose to focus on the theme of Commemoration and Memory—with the ambitious goal of creating a collaborative database of memorials to the Lost Cause on college and university campuses across the nation. The Locating Slavery’s Legacy Database (LSLdb) has grown to include contributors from two dozen private and public institutions (and counting). It now catalogues “memorials erected in opposition to the Lost Cause and white supremacy and in support of racial equality and universal Civil Rights” as well as “monuments and memorials linked to slavery, the American Civil War, and the Confederacy.”
An overview of activities undertaken by Sewanee as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative. The presentation was recorded during the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slidesReflections on the Legacies initiative by Woody Register
From the project team’s final report:
The funds entrusted to us have had a transformative impact on our work here at Sewanee and our ability to build collaborative relationships with fellow investigators at institutions across the United States. The initiatives the grant has empowered us to launch and establish have augmented the reach and impact of our work, enabling us to make good on our mission to be a leading participant “in the global movement to confront and reckon with higher education’s indebtedness to slavery.”
We saw opportunities for inter-institutional and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We also saw opportunities to leverage the impact of one of Sewanee’s greatest challenges, which is its dense tapestry of Lost Cause memorials that decorate everything on our campus. … Not everything we planned or attempted panned out, however. For example, we were never able to marshal the cooperation on or off our campus for building an investigation into the Black roots of regional Blue Grass music. Our colloquium on the use of unfree labor in the region was a brilliant one-off … [but] did not grow into the movement we had hoped.
Our proudest achievement is the Locating Slavery’s Legacies database, which continues to grow in depth and breadth. … [We hear from our partners about] the positive impact of embedding the research in class assignments and involving students in the production of research and contributions to a publicly accessible digital humanities resource. Faculty members and archivists tell us of the impact that participation has on their campuses, how the network reduces their personal experience of isolation and institutional disregard for the work on their campus.
Our project is not just about gathering data. It also is about student learning, research, and engagement, and it still takes a human imagination to discover and make known the ways the Lost Cause was embedded in higher education. Our ability to muster those resources in the emerging political climate and era of diminishing grant resources will determine the future of the LSLdb. … [But] we predict that the Legacies grant will do as much as any support program to insure the continued existence and operation of the Roberson Project at Sewanee.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Meredith College (Raleigh, NC), served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Meredith is a single-sex college with a tradition of creating opportunities for women (for many decades, just white women) and a history that reflected the political, economic, and religious roots of white supremacy in the region. With these legacies in mind, the project team chose to focus on the legacy theme of Contested Citizenship. Individual projects included the annual Voices of Change political institute (designed to encourage political engagement and office-seeking by women of color); an ambitious oral history project to “document the lives, activities, and voices of women of color who have engaged in activism or public service,” which now includes contributions from a network of colleges and universities across the region; and a reckoning with the college’s own complicated history that led to the renaming of two campus buildings.
This is an excerpt from a presentation at the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024. For more details about the activities undertaken by Meredith College, download the presentation slides.
Reflections on the Legacies initiative by Sarah N. Roth and Daniel Fountain
From the project team’s final reports:
When Meredith was chosen as one of the regional hubs for the Legacies of American Slavery project, we planned to highlight the systems that over time had methodically and effectively diminished the citizenship rights of black North Carolinians. The main initiative we pursued to this end involved researching and publicizing Meredith’s own connections to the state’s white supremacist leaders in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The grant funded four open forums during the 2022-23 academic year aimed at increasing campus-wide awareness of the ways North Carolina’s own particular brand of white supremacy was intertwined with the college’s early history.
To produce these forums, … [a] team of faculty historians and archivists joined with the Black Student Union, the Student Government Association, undergraduate researchers, and the Arts & Humanities Common Experience Committee. The events hosted by these groups helped inform the student body, as well as faculty, staff, and alumnae, about the involvement of Meredith’s early leaders with anti-Black movements that included eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, and the proslavery ideology of the Lost Cause.
The political legacies of slavery in North Carolina, however, have included more positive developments than state-imposed contested citizenship for African Americans. Since emancipation, Black North Carolinians have engaged in activism to counter voter suppression efforts and other means of exclusion from the political system. It seemed appropriate for Meredith, as a women’s college, to focus another grant project on ways Black women have persistently fought for the rights guaranteed to those with full citizenship.
Perhaps the greatest value our projects have had stems from the personal nature of the initiatives we began as a result of our participation in the Legacies grant. White supremacist structures can sometimes seem abstract and intangible, even from the perspective of those most directly affected by those structures. Exploring the specific history of a college with which students, faculty, and alumnae are directly associated in the present day has brought home in a very real way the fact that the legacies of slavery are local, that they have real impacts on actual people’s lives, and that they last long past the dismantling of the laws that originally put the system in place. … Our hope is that the many people we have had the good fortune to partner with in this work will use the experiences they have had to help dismantle the legacies of slavery.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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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.This is a teaser for a documentary about the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison for men in Joliet, IL, that permanently closed in March 2025. The documentary was created by creative director Mateo Zapata in collaboration with Anthony Ablan and the Rebirth of Sound project, a research team from Lewis University, and the incarcerated men of Stateville. All rights reserved. Reflections on the Legacies of American Slavery initiative by Tennille N. Allen and Huma Zia 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.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Huston-Tillotson University (Austin, TX), served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Huston-Tillotson is an HBCU located in a city (and neighborhood) with a complicated history of segregation, which is still reflected in health disparities and other inequities. With these legacies in mind, the project team decided to focus on the themes of Race, Health, and Medicine and Environmental Justice. Activities included community-engaged research by students and faculty (usually with a focus on health equity or affordable housing), an annual Building Green Justice Forum, co-curricular programs for students, community-based art projects, and a multifaceted collaboration with the nearby George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center.
An overview of activities undertaken by Huston-Tillotson University as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative. The presentation was prerecorded for the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slidesReflections on the Legacies initiative by Amanda Masino
From the project team’s annual reports:
Our Legacies project developed educational resources, research products, and community engagement programs around the race and place connections within Austin and the Central Texas region. Faculty and students conducted research on the history and status of gentrification, environmental health, and health disparities in east Austin, and used these findings to generate educational resources and community engagement events. We also embedded race and health content into our existing coursework, generating sharable curricular resources. Our unifying theme: How have the legacies of American slavery impacted and continue to impact the health of Austin’s Black community?
Racism and the legacies of slavery impact the health of African Americans in myriad ways, directly and indirectly. A full exploration of these impacts, and one that seeks to translate findings into interventions, must examine the significant connections between place and health that contribute to endemic health disparities affecting African Americans. These connections between geography and health can be understood through two nested and complementary frameworks: social determinants of health and environmental justice.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Dillard University in New Orleans, LA, served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Located in a city and region that resonates with the history of slavery and the creative excellence of African Americans, the project team focused on the theme of Cultural Creativity—with a particular emphasis on food, music, and tourism. The project was headed by food historian Zella Palmer, director of the Ray Charles Program in African-American Material Culture. Many of the public-facing programs are archived on a vibrant YouTube channel; there’s also a DJ-curated playlist of music that reflects the legacies of American slavery. Regional collaborators mentioned in the videos below include the Amistad Research Center, the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses, the New Orleans Jazz Museum, and the Whitney Plantation.
An overview of activities undertaken by Dillard University as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative. The presentation was recorded during the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slidesReflections on the Legacies initiative by Zella Palmer From the project team’s final report:
Our participation in the Legacies network helped us to understand other institutions’ projects and goals—and the barriers that we all face. Our students were actively engaged and many participated in every facet of our programming. They truly benefited from experiences both on and off campus. We were able to increase community engagement and we have had positive outcomes. Our faculty truly benefited from the entire project by enhancing curriculum, participating in programming, and engaging with students.
This project has helped us to understand how the legacies of slavery impact our society today and how culture is the defining thread to conceptualize an unjust legal system that continues to impact generations. … We [will] continue to build upon our research, storytelling, documentation and programming so that we can have these discussions about American history.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Centenary College in Shreveport, LA, served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. The institutional team focused on the theme of Race, Health, and Medicine—but also led students on a journey into the history of slavery and race relations at the college (as described in the videos below). Projects included a walking tour and exhibit about the racialized history of healthcare in Shreveport; new undergraduate courses about medical ethics, race and biology, and archives-based historical research; a virtual teaching circle for college instructors across the region; and a collaboration with the local medical school to improve teaching about health inequities for future healthcare professionals at all levels.
An overview of activities undertaken by Centenary College as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative. The presentation was recorded during the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slidesReflections on the Legacies initiative by Christopher Ciocchetti, Chris Brown, and Jama Grove
From the project team’s final report:
When this project began, we hoped to thoroughly integrate teaching about the legacies of American slavery into Centenary’s premedical curriculum. Our initial team included people from all three academic divisions on campus (Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences). We knew that we couldn’t convey a lot of information to our students; we couldn’t just teach them the facts they would need to know. Instead, we sought to build a habit of asking questions about the legacies of slavery. …
By the end of the project, only one of the original three faculty members remained. But we made sure our work was disseminated on campus and off, so when someone did leave, people had heard about our project and maybe even participated in one of our events. We could find new people to participate because we knew about each other. It did not take long to integrate new people.
From Prof. Ciocchetti: Throughout the project, I was most struck by the little details. I had driven past some empty lots for years and seen the police station near downtown without realizing they were originally the sites of some of the first Black medical institutions in Shreveport. We learned to connect names and faces with broad historical trends. I found these stories much more compelling when I could tell the story of a particular doctor. Hearing about how they came together to provide medical care during some of the most difficult times in Shreveport helped me think about what we should be doing today. It gave me hope and made me feel less isolated and more a part of a larger community.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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Between 2020 and 2025, Austin College in Sherman, TX, served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. The college is located in the shadow of a notorious 1930 lynching and race riot, which began just a few blocks from campus; with this legacy in mind, the project team focused on the theme of Racial Violence and Resistance. The project was led by historians Felix Harcourt and Claire Wolnisty and dean of humanities Greg Kinzer. Major activities included faculty and student research into the history of the local Black community, pedagogy workshops for local K–12 instructors and college professors from across the region, and supporting the installation of a state historic maker to commemorate the violent events of 1930.
An overview of activities undertaken by Austin College as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative.
The presentation was recorded during the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slidesReflections on the Legacies initiative by Felix Harcourt and Greg Kinzer From the project team’s final report:
A theme that quickly emerged in our work as part of the Legacies grant was the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, loosely translated to mean “looking back in order to move forward.” The faculty, staff, and students at Austin College, along with an array of local partners, worked to help our campus and our community wrestle with our area’s histories of racial violence and resistance. In so doing, we saw both new local efforts to reckon honestly with these past injustices and an insistence on continuing a decades-long tradition of entrenched resistance to facing that historical truth. To this day, there are those in the area who refuse to call the murder of [local farm worker George] Hughes a lynching, clinging to the tendentious argument that he was killed by fire rather than by hanging. Too many are made too uncomfortable by the idea that the violent legacies of American slavery hang over their own personal or familial histories. We need look no further than the efforts to restrict what students in Texas public schools can learn and understand to know what power such feelings still hold.
These are impacts of the work at Austin College that we believe will have lasting positive effects:
- Research and academic work, much of which was student-led. Student researchers focused on the impact of the violence of 1930 on the Black population of Sherman. Using city directories, census data, tax records, and newspaper archives, they were able to create full databases of the Black population of Sherman in 1928 and in 1935.
- Silence-breaking efforts. Working with community groups like Grayson United, the county chapter of the NAACP, Grace United Church, and others, we developed and implemented public programming designed to overcome [local] resistance and active denial of history. This ranged from the creation of walking tours to public talks and symposia to the creation of a memorial scholarship for high school seniors to discussion panels with descendants.
- A pedagogical workshop series for faculty in higher education that grounded the teaching of our legacy theme in broader pedagogical processes, including place-based learning, trauma-informed teaching, and best practices in community engagement. Beginning with a pilot program for Austin College faculty in summer of 2021, we were able to offer the higher education workshop again in 2022, 2023, and 2024. We were also able to hold a version of the workshop targeted towards K-12 educators in March 2024. [Download the resource guide created for K–12 educators.]
- The creation of a regional network of institutions studying slavery and its legacies (in collaboration with Prairie View A&M, Texas Christian University, and others): Texas Consortium of Universities and Colleges Studying Slavery & Race.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.
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On March 29, representatives from Austin College (Sherman, TX) participated in the unveiling of a new historical marker on the grounds of the Grayson County Courthouse, site of a lynching that sparked an especially horrible race riot in 1930. The college strongly supported community efforts to have a marker approved and installed by the Texas State Historical Commission. Please forward these links to anyone who might be interested, A link here does not necessarily mean agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges. Note: We have been sharing curated links about the legacies of slavery every week (more or less) since July 2022. This is the final weekly roundup, though we may post occasional links in the future. Check this space in May for a series of final reflections on the Legacies of American Slavery initiative from our Regional Collaboration Partners. In the meantime, please visit the project timeline for more details about our work.
- Brian Lyman, “A poisoned cause, a pointless sacrifice,” Alabama Reflector (April 28, 2025): LINK. Today is Confederate Memorial Day, “one of three state holidays [in Alabama] honoring men who killed American soldiers in defense of white supremacy.” A White newspaper editor reflects on the meaning of the day: “Given the choice, I would fire every single Confederate holiday into the sun. But if the state insists on having them, we may look at those men [in a local graveyard] decaying beneath the Stars and Bars and reflect on where embracing authoritarianism leads.”
- Megan Pauly, “New Burying Ground [Memorial] honors enslaved labor at University of Richmond,” Virginia Public Media (April 25, 2025): LINK. On April 23, the University of Richmond (a CIC member institution) “held a dedication ceremony…for a new memorial honoring enslaved people who labored on the university’s land. The memorial is located on what is believed to have been a burial ground for enslaved people.” This was the culmination of a six-year effort to engage community members and honor the site.
- Haniyah Philogene, “A plantation museum spotlighting the truths of slavery has lost federal grants in ‘furtherance of the president’s agenda,’” The Grio (April 24, 2025): LINK. “Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation—open since 2014 as a museum dedicated to education about the legacy of slavery in the U.S.—lost its federal grants as a result of Trump’s attack on DEI.”
- “Black churches back embattled Smithsonian African American history museum after Trump’s order,” Associated Press via NBC News (April 23, 2025): LINK. A Baltimore pastor walked to Washington, DC, to lay a wreath at the entrance of National Museum of African American History and Culture “in support of its mission, which [has] incurred President Donald Trump’s criticism alongside other Smithsonian Institution sites.” Part of a grassroots effort by predominantly Black congregations.
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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.”
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Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on this day in 1865. James Brown, age 104, was the oldest Civil War veteran in Illinois when he was photographed with this portrait of Lincoln in 1936. source: National Museum of African American History & Culture As always, we encourage you to share and discuss these links. A link here does not necessarily indicate agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
- Richard Kreitner, “Let These People Go,” Slate (April 10, 2025): LINK. In an excerpt from a new book, Kreitner discusses the Jewish debates over slavery before and during the Civil War. “The Passover seder calls on Jews to remember our ancestors’ enslavement in Egypt, but the question of what to do with that memory has never been easy to answer. In 1861, Jews found themselves torn between competing conceptions of self-preservation and justice.” He sees parallels today.
- Rich Tenorio, “Slave-owning Jewish Confederate woman documents wartime Passover in newly published diary,” The Times of Israel (April 11, 2025): LINK. “Like this year, Passover in 1864 took place in April. In the penultimate year of the American Civil War, a Jewish Confederate citizen named Emma Mordecai spent the holiday with her cousins in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It’s one of the opening memories in the diary she started in the spring of 1864 and continued into the following year.”
- Tamar Manasseh, “A legacy of defiance: Why I’m holding my Seder in one of the oldest Black churches in the country,” Forward (April 7, 2025): LINK. The author, an African American Jew, writes: “I come from a long line of strong and resilient people…. As we confront a new era of threats to our freedom, I want to honor them. So I am going to meld one of my precious traditions—Judaism—with another—the legacy of strength and perseverance of my ancestors, who moved to freedom through Underground Railroad stops [like Chicago’s Jerusalem Temple Church].”
- “How Do Descendants of Slavery Honor Their Ancestors’ Legacy?,” NPR via WKNO (April 9, 2025): LINK. In this episode of the “Code Switch” radio program, co-host B.A. Parker attends “a symposium at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for ‘descendants of slavery who are stakeholders of culturally significant historic places.’ She meets people who, like her, are grappling with how to honor their enslaved ancestors. She asks herself: what kind of descendant does she want to be?”
- Eric W. Dolan, “Lack of racial knowledge predicts opposition to critical race theory, new research finds,” PsyPost (April 9, 2025): LINK. The research “suggests that many people who oppose critical race theory may do so out of ignorance rather than ideology. Across four studies involving college students in the United States, researchers found that individuals who possessed accurate knowledge about the history and realities of race in the country were more likely to support the central ideas of critical race theory.”
- Glenn Loury, “Slavery, Emancipation, and the Meaning of American Enlightenment: A Classroom Discussion,” The Glenn Show (April 13, 2025): LINK. Conservative-leaning Black economist Glenn Loury wants to complicate the conversation about reparations: “It is easy to enumerate what was lost due to slavery, but not so easy to talk about what, in the fullness of time, has been gained. And yet, a full accounting would have to consider both, wouldn’t it?”
- “Gavin Wright on the Civil Rights Revolution through the eyes of an economic historian,” The Work Goes On (April 7, 2025): LINK. In this podcast, an eminent scholar “discusses his work on the economics of slavery, Black mobility patterns after the Civil War, and his thoughts on the current state of Black economies in the American South.”
- Sophia Snyder, “Hercules, Harris, and the Mulberry Tree: History and Memory in the Founding of Harrisburg,” Harrisburg Historical (April 2025): LINK. Snyder, a student at CIC member Messiah University (Mechanicsburg, PA), unravels the truth behind a local legend involving an enslaved man, his enslaver, and a dramatic rescue from the hands of Native Americans. “[T]he story positions Black individuals at the forefront of the capital area’s history and raises critical questions about the complex relationship between history, memory, and race.”