Legacies of American Slavery

  • Why Do We Have a Blog?

    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.

  • The Resource Database
    Decorative image of file cabinets.

    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.

  • Legacies Links for April 7, 2025: Erase or Repair the Afterlives of Slavery?
    Black cafeteria workers on strike, Washington, DC (1941). Source: Washington Area Spark/Flickr

    Please share this post. As always, a link here does not necessarily mean agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    • Jon Swaine and Jeremy B. Merrill, “Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad,” Washington Post (April 6, 2025): LINK. A “review of websites operated by the National Park Service…found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division.”
    • Wendy L. Wilson, “‘America in Black’: The Plan To Erase Black History Forever,” BET (April 3, 2025): LINK. “One of the most controversial topics being argued across the political aisle today involves state law makers and politicians who have combined efforts to ensure that African American history courses stay out of the classroom. Across the nation, historians, educators, parents, and others are protesting that Black history deserves to be taught and not just relegated to one month of the year.”
    • Chandra Childers, “The ongoing influence of slavery and Jim Crow means high poverty rates and low economic mobility in the South,” Economic Policy Institute (April 3, 2025): LINK. Part 4 of a detailed report on economic inequality. This installment focuses on “efforts to continue exploiting Black workers [which] led to racist anti-worker policies that continue to maintain…high levels of inequality for workers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds in most Southern states.”
    • Sujata Srinivasan, “‘Complicity in injustice’: New Haven church wrestles with its connection to slavery 200 years later,” Connecticut Public Radio (April 3, 2025): LINK. An Episcopal “church connected to Lucy and Lois, documented as the final two enslaved people sold in New Haven [CT] in 1825, recently held a ‘Service of Lamentation and Healing’ to honor their stories of heartbreak and resilience.” Part of an ongoing effort by many denominations to reckon with the legacies of slavery.
    • Leslie M. Harris, “Black soldiers on both sides of the Revolutionary War,” Boston Globe (April 3, 2025): LINK. “Slavery was so central to the European occupation of the Americas that when the colonists went to war against Great Britain in 1775, their most potent metaphor for their subservient political position was that of enslavement….  When the Revolutionary War began, [actual] enslaved people throughout the Colonies took advantage of the chaos of war to make common cause with those [on both sides] who would offer freedom.”
    • Pamela Wood, “Maryland lawmakers approve commission to study slavery reparations,” Baltimore Banner (April 2, 2025): LINK. “Maryland lawmakers approved creating a commission to study reparations for slavery [on Wednesday, which]…represented the culmination of years of work from [Del. Aletheia] McCaskill and other lawmakers…. Maryland become[s] the third state in the nation to study reparations.”
    • Sara Safransky, et al., “Land reparations are possible—and over 225 U.S. communities are already working to make amends for slavery and colonization,” The Conversation (April 1, 2025): LINK. Since 2021, a research team of geographers has “been documenting and analyzing over 225 examples of reparative programs underway in U.S. cities, states and regions. Notably, over half of them center land return.”
    • Rachel Reed, “The afterlife of slavery in the law,” Harvard Law Today (April 1, 2025): LINK. NYU law professor Devon Carbado argues that “[s]lavery is not just a historical event that happened in America’s past…[but] a ‘structural phenomenon’ with an afterlife—one that continues to facilitate racial inequality in the U.S., even in the absence of intentional discrimination or bad actors.”
    • “Empowering a Thriving Black Middle Class,” Urban Institute (March 24, 2025): LINK. Findings from the Urban Institute’s Black Family Thriving Initiative. “‘[M]iddle class’ is a surprisingly subjective term in the United States. And for Black families, defining who is middle class is even more difficult…. [Researchers say that] given the extensive legacy of enslavement, sharecropping, residential and school segregation, mass incarceration, and continued everyday racial discrimination in policies and practices…‘talking about [middle-class status] and not including that historical context is very dangerous.’”
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  • Legacies Links for March 31, 2025: Local Histories Matter

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Historic photo (circa 1861) of "Price, Birch & Co. Dealers in Slaves," a three-story brick building with several U.S. soldiers on guard duty.
    1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, VA, was the site of a notorious slave pen from the 1830s until the city’s occupation by U.S. troops in 1861. Source: City of Alexandria, VA
    • Ishaan Barrett, “Urban Slavery in Alexandria, Virginia: A Corpus of Critical Urban Historical Sites in Alexandria Today,” Urban Equity Institute (March 24, 2025): LINK. An exemplary urban survey of “sites of slavery, imprisonment, and Atlantic slave trade in Alexandria, Virginia. It touches sites in the city along the waterfront, within the urban fabric of the city, as well as on the periphery of Alexandria.”
    • Dominique Ellis Falcon, “$257,000 Awarded to Preserve and Further African American History on the Chester River,” Washington College (March 24, 2025): LINK. Two grants from the National Trust for Historic Preservation will help CIC member Washington College preserve the 1746 Custom House in Chestertown, MD—the former home of a mid-18th century slave trader.
    • Victoria Moorwood and Randy Tucker, “Newport’s founder left slaves at least $1.7M in today’s dollars. Can descendants collect?” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 24, 2025): LINK. In 1848, Gen. James Taylor V, the founder of Newport, Kentucky, bequeathed more than 1,500 acres to about 50 enslaved people on his estate—but neither those enslaved people nor their descendants ever received the land or money in compensation.
    • Carol Brooks, “Never-enslaved people from Jamestown [North Carolina] helped in emancipation,” Yes Weekly (March 26, 2025): LINK. Free Black families supported the abolitionist movement by establishing Black townships in antebellum Indiana and Ohio. (Based on a presentation by retired sociologist Kerstein Priest, who previously conducted research on pioneer Black settlers in the region with her students at CIC member Taylor University [IN].)
    • Dominic Davies, “Three graphic novels that address the history of slavery—and commemorate resistance,” The Conversation (March 24, 2025): LINK. Three recent graphic novels help tell the story of resistance to slavery: Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Verso Books, 2023); Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel (Verso Books, 2023); Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel (Verso Books, 2023).
  • Legacies Links for March 24, 2025: Remembering Slavery, Segregation, and the Great Migration

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    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.”
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  • Legacies Links for March 17, 2025: Postal History is Black History is American History (and Other Topics)

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Formal black and white photograph of a seated Black woman from the early 20th century.
    Minnie M. Cox (1869-1933) was appointed the first Black postmistress in Mississippi, making national headlines after President Theodore Roosevelt refused to remove her from the position despite threats of racial violence in Indianola. Source: Wikimedia Commons
    • Sarah Prager, “How Mail Delivery Has Shaped America,” JSTOR Daily (March 12, 2025): LINK. African Americans have been part of the postal system, unofficially or officially, since the nation’s founding. As enslaved messengers, Black people delivered items between plantations and towns; Black postmasters faced racial violence when they emerged as federal appointees in the 19th century; and activists have used the U.S. mails for campaigns and political organizing for more than two centuries.
    • Claire C. Carter, “As NC History Center in Fayetteville nears milestone, historian raises question about mission,” The Fayetteville (NC) Observer (March 14, 2025): LINK. A dispute over interpretation at a new North Carolina historic site devoted to the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Some critics say the museum is downplaying slavery and misrepresenting the gains achieved during Reconstruction; others still focus on “heritage.”
    • Chandelis Duster, “Congress reignites a bipartisan effort to ban hair discrimination,” National Public Radio (March 12, 2025): LINK. The CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act of 2025 was introduced in the House of Representatives last month. If enacted, it will ban discrimination based on hairstyles or hair texture associated with a specific race. This includes “[hair that is] tightly coiled or tightly curled, locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, and Afros.”
    • Ana Lucia Araujo, “A New History of Atlantic Slavery from the Global South,” Politics and Rights Review (March 11, 2025): LINK. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo discusses her latest book, Humans in Shackles (University of Chicago Press, 2024). She argues, among other points, that “the lived experiences of enslaved women are crucial to understanding slavery and its aftermath in the Americas.”
    • Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices,” New York Times (March 11, 2025): LINK. A proposed cut by the Trump administration “effectively ends three decades of work at the [Environmental Protection Agency] to try to ease the pollution that [disproportionately] burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.”
    • “The Murdaugh Family: A History of Slave Ownership,” My Heritage Blog (March 10, 2025): LINK. A micro-history of one prominent slave-holding family in South Carolina and the “complex and painful legacy that still lingers in the shadows of their modern-day influence.”
    • Scott Spillman, “How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery,” Literary Hub (March 10, 2025): LINK. “[U.B. Phillips was] the first professional historian of American slavery, writing books and articles in the early decades of the twentieth century that redefined the way the subject was studied. Despite, or perhaps because of, their frank statements about Black inferiority and the beneficence of slavery, they stood as the standard histories until the 1950s. Even today, their influence lingers.”
    • Andrew Zonneveld, “Anti-Confederate movement heats up in Stone Mountain,” Atlanta Community Press Collective (March 8, 2025): LINK. “Controversy over a city cemetery in Stone Mountain [Georgia, home of the world’s largest Confederate monument] is once again exposing a long and unresolved community struggle against neo-Confederate and far-right forces.”

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  • Legacies Links for March 10, 2025: Bloody Sunday at 60, New Books, and Memory Work

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Photograph of the "Bloody Sunday" protest march in 1965, as described in the caption.
    March 7, 2025, marked the 60th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the first Selma-to-Montgomery protest march. Pictured here are James Reeb (in clerical collar), Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, and the Abernathy children. A few days after this picture was taken, Reeb was murdered by white supremacists. Source: Wikimedia Commons

    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.)
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  • Legacies links for March 3, 2025: Preserving Black History and Communities

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Kenyon College’s (Gambier, OH) Ransom Hall. The building currently hosts the president’s office, but its namesake, John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), was a Southern Agrarian and advocated for the return of chattel slavery in the 20th century.

    Preserving Black History:

    • Maureen Corrigan, “‘Last Seen’: After slavery, family members placed ads looking for loved ones,” National Public Radio (February 26, 2025): LINK. Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery (Simon & Schuster, 2025) contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hoped to find family members separated by slavery.
    • Aaron Foley, “Bringing Black Studies to Black People,” Word in Black (February 26, 2025): LINK. “On weekends, Stanford University professor Adam Banks flies from the California campus to Cleveland, on a mission to teach a college-level African American studies class to the Black community – for free.”
    • Jimmy Royals, “Fayetteville Museum Aims to Right the Record on Civil War History,” The Assembly (February 24, 2025): LINK. A new museum, “two decades in the making, will help North Carolina’s educators teach a nuanced, factual story as unresolved racial and political divisions continue to cleave the country.”

    Preserving Black Communities:

    • Ben Finley, “Black graves are being moved to make way for an industrial park, drawing a mix of emotions,” AP News (March 1, 2025): LINK. The remains of hundreds of African American tenant farmers interred at a former tobacco plantation in Virginia belonging to “the largest enslaver in the South” will be relocated, but descendants have mixed emotions.
    • Adam Mahoney, “America’s Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution,” Capital B News (February 25, 2025): LINK. Previous federal and state administrations brought energy to rural South Carolina by destroying Black livelihoods and final resting places, but now, nearly a century later, Big Tech threatens these communities again as they fight to ramp up energy production for AI.
    • P.R. Lockhart, “The Long Journey To Preserve Black History in Greensboro,” The Assembly (February 24, 2025): LINK. “An effort to commemorate a Greensboro neighborhood steeped in Black history finally paid off when it received federal recognition last December. Residents say it couldn’t have happened without a broad coalition of support.”

    Other Links:

    • Abbie Hopson, “A 1964 boycott fought school segregation, but inequality continues,” New York Amsterdam News (February 27, 2025): LINK. Segregation is still rampant in New York City’s school system, but activists in the 1950s and 1960s tried to prevent this form of systemic inequality: “A lawsuit challenging segregation in NNYC public schools moved forward in court. Still, Black and Brown schools are more likely to be under-resourced and under-performing, and the children are less likely to admitted to prestigious schools.”
    • Wagdy Sawahel, “What are the challenges as experts study slavery, reparations?” University World News (February 27, 2025): LINK. The African Union has named 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.” They are enlisting the help of experts from higher education to accomplish its goals by establishing a new alliance of university chairs for studying the transatlantic slave trade, developing expertise, and pushing scholars to continue to rely on primary sources, among other initiatives.

    Updates from the CIC Network:

    • Mina Ruffle, “Kenyon should confront ties to racism, rename buildings,” The Kenyon Collegian (February 27, 2025): LINK. A student at CIC member Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) calls on her institution to do more to repair the “embedded racism” in buildings named for President Rutherford B. Hayes and noted faculty member John Crowe Ransom.
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  • Legacies Links for February 24, 2025: The Catholic Church and Other Institutions Reckon with Slavery

    As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was an African American labor organizer and civil rights activist, notable for his work in promoting workers’ rights. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) set “African Americans and Labor” as the theme for this year’s Black History Month. Source: Wikimedia Commons

    Updates from the CIC Network:

    • Emily Belz, “How Baylor Is Facing Its Slavery History,” Christianity Today (February 18, 2025): LINK. CIC member Baylor University (Waco, Texas) is putting the finishing touches on a Memorial to Enslaved People this year. This article addresses the distinctive challenges for faith-based colleges and universities to examine institutional histories of slavery and racial discrimination.
    • Allison Luthern, “Documenting Slavery at St. John’s College Campus,” Maryland Historical Trust (February 19, 2025): LINK. In 2023, CIC member St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) received a grant from the Maryland Historical Trust to help explore the institution’s historical relations with indigenous and enslaved people and make recommendations about how the past should be acknowledged. As part of the larger initiative, the St. John’s College History Task Force released an Architectural Survey Report in 2024.

    The Catholic Church and Slavery:

    • Nate Tinner-Williams, “Here are the Catholic bishops who enslaved Black people in America,” Black Catholic Messenger (February 15, 2025): LINK. A scholar explores the history of episcopal human trafficking in the United States, finding that many of the Catholic church’s leading clergy were complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans.
    • “Georgetown Collaborates with Catholic Educational Institutions in Louisiana,” Georgetown University (February 20, 2025): LINK. “Georgetown has formed partnerships with a Catholic high school and university [i.e., CIC member Xavier University of Louisiana] in New Orleans, Louisiana, as part of its ongoing … [effort] to address historical ties to slavery and engage with Descendant communities whose ancestors were once enslaved on Maryland Jesuit plantations.”
    • Richard Szczepanowski, “In blessing graves of enslaved persons, Cardinal Gregory honors ‘people once in shackles,’” Catholic Standard (February 21, 2025): LINK. “During his tenure as archbishop of Washington [D.C.], Cardinal Wilton Gregory [the first African American in that position] acknowledged a terrible wrong—and attempted to soothe the pain it has caused—by blessing, honoring and showing respect for the gravesites of enslaved people who lie in parish cemeteries, mostly without name markers.”

    Links:

    • Chanté Griffin, “Black Labor Matters,” Christianity Today (February 20, 2025): LINK. A spiritual reflection on the Black History Month 2025 theme set by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH): African Americans and Labor. “[Black History Month] isn’t merely an opportunity to remember the accomplishments of … [specific] Black leaders. It’s also an opportunity to remember how, generation after generation, God has used Black believers to usher in justice and righteousness.”
    • Seph Rodney, “Dawoud Bey Asks, Can Landscapes Hold Traumas?” Hyperallergic (February 18, 2025): LINK. Photographer Dawoud Bey explores how people use the land “as a convenient place to let generational traumas rest because they are brutally heavy.” A recent exhibition used photographs of specific places in Virginia associated with slavery to explore the connection between African American history and the American landscape.
    • Joe Killian, “Rev. Nelson Johnson: A Legacy Beyond Tragedy,” The Assembly (February 14, 2025): LINK. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, died this month at 81. Decades after the deadly confrontation between white supremacists and labor activists, Johnson was still pushing the city government to acknowledge and apologize for its role in the killings; an accurate historical marker was not installed on the site until 2017.
    • Omari Weekes, “A Revelatory Way of Understanding the Black Experience,” The Atlantic (February 13, 2025): LINK. In a review of scholar Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025), the reviewer discusses Perry’s focus on the color blue and how the color evokes a complicated history of slavery and racism.
    • Melanie D. Newport, “Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes,” Public Books (February 12, 2025): LINK. In this interview, historian John Bardes argues that “mass incarceration as we know it is not a new phenomenon, and [the] complicated relationship among race and violence and slavery is as old as the American prison itself.” Bardes is the author of The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930 (UNC Press, 2024).
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  • Legacies Links for February 17, 2025: Memory and Preservation
    A photograph of Frederick Douglass in old age.
    Frederick Douglass (1818-1895): abolitionist, author, and orator, pictured here in 1879. Douglass died 130 years ago this week. Source: Wikimedia Commons

    Happy Presidents’ Day! A good time to remember that 12 U.S. presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives and that one president fought a war to free slaves. As always, we encourage you to share this post. A link does not necessarily imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Memory and Preservation:

    • Adam Mahoney, “A Black Family Now Owns the Site of America’s Largest Slave Revolt,” Capital B News (February 12, 2025): LINK. Jo and Joy Banner, who run the Descendants Project, have purchased the Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana—where nearly 500 enslaved men and women fought for freedom in January 1811.
    • Brendan Kirby, “Highlighting overlooked history with Rhode Island Slave History Medallions,” WPRI (February 12, 2025): LINK. An interview with Charles Roberts, founder and executive director of the Rhode Island Slave History Medallion project. Roberts participated in a summer workshop and the final conference sponsored by the CIC Legacies initiative.
    • Michael Hemphill, “With Bedford County farm, slave owner’s descendant finds a chance to restore forest and help heal wounds from history,” Cardinal News (February 12, 2025): LINK. A white landowner in Virginia, descended from slaveholders, sees the “ecological degradation of his Bedford County farm [as] part and parcel with the human enslavement that once happened there as well.” He is working to repair both legacies.
    • Alexandria Russell, “Memory Crafters Preserve Black Women’s History,” Yes Magazine (February 10, 2025): LINK. Discusses the “evolution of African American women’s memorialization, or the process of commemoration. Its origins in the United States date back to the early 19th century, when free Black communities in the North organized festivals and parades to celebrate emancipation, promote abolitionism, and disseminate Black history.”
    • Kristin Braswell, “These Black neighborhoods shaped America. Here are their lasting legacies.” National Geographic (February 7, 2025): LINK. “Uncover the nearly erased, but not forgotten, histories of these Black communities and their testament to resilience, from New Orleans’ Treme to Wisconsin’s Bronzeville neighborhood.”

    Other Links:

    • Rachel Hunter Himes, “Past and Future: The Art and Automatons of Kara Walker,” The Nation (March 2025): LINK. New artwork by Kara Walker, installed in the heart of Silicon Valley, features “eight Black automatons [that] invite us to reflect on the human and nonhuman histories of radicalized labor, offering a cryptic message about our own liberation.”
    • Matthew Wills, “Hoe History: Complex and Knotted,” JSTOR Daily (February 15, 2025): LINK. Wills argues that the plantation hoe has been ignored historically, but the unassuming farm implement was essential to the cultivation of tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton; it was the signature tool of enslaved Africans who worked on plantations.
    • Hannah Kliger, “The story of two Brooklyn sisters who forged a family of firsts,” CBS News (February 13, 2025): LINK. Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward (1847-1918) was the first Black woman to practice medicine in New York state, while her older sister Sarah Garnet (1831-1911) became the first Black female principal of a New York City public school. Dr. McKinney Steward’s great-granddaughter (Ellen Holly) also went on to become the nation’s first Black soap opera star.
    • Mia Lawson, “MLK Day Sees Move the Monument March,” The Megaphone (Southwestern University) (February 13, 2025): LINK. At CIC member institution Southwestern University (Georgetown, TX), faculty and students joined a “Move the Monument” protest on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to protest a Confederate statue at the local courthouse.
    • Quintessa Williams, “Ringing the Alarm for Civil Rights Data in Schools,” Word in Black (February 13, 2025): LINK. In 1968, the U.S. Department of Education launched the Civil Rights Data Collection, which was designed to track disparities in educational access. The data is now under threat of removal, which would hinder the enforcement of civil rights laws and limit the ability of local schools to address segregation.
    • Frank E. Crump, “Can Compassionate Lending Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide?” Nonprofit Quarterly (February 12, 2025): LINK. The head of a community-based nonprofit lender discusses how “redlining, subprime mortgages, and predatory lending…have helped perpetuate the racial wealth divide. One alternative is “community development financial institutions (CDFIs) [which] lend to underserved populations…. [But] I’m an advocate for something a little more ambitiouswhat I call compassionate lending—a strategy that combines a CDFI with an on-the-ground community or faith-based partner to achieve transformative community results.”
    • Ben Railton, “Considering History: Langston Hughes and the Patriotism of Black History Month,” The Saturday Evening Post (February 10, 2025): LINK. Using the works of the great Harlem Renaissance poet, Railton argues that Black history is a source of the most patriotic material in American history.

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  • Legacies Links for February 10, 2025: Museums, New Books, and the Future of Education

    As always, we encourage you to share this post with students, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested. A link here does not necessarily indicate agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges or the Mellon Foundation.

    Historical engraving of a college quadrangle.
    CIC member Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT)—pictured here in 1861—was the first American college to matriculate and graduate a student of African descent. (However, Alexander Twilight, class of 1823, did not publicly identify as a Black man.) Source: Middlebury College via the Internet Archive

    Museums:

    • Kate McMahon, “Rare portraits reveal the humanity of the slaves who revolted on the Amistad,” The Conversation (February 3, 2025): LINK. The lead historian and researcher for In Slavery’s Wake (a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture) discusses the enslaved participants in the Amistad mutiny (1839)—an event that inspired decades of litigation and helped put an end to the international slave trade.
    • Isa Farfan, “The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Is Turning 100,” Hyperallergic (February 4, 2025): LINK. To celebrate its centennial, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center will display rare and notable items from a staggering collection of 11 million books, manuscripts, photographs, artifacts, etc.
    • Natasha Brown, “Philadelphia museum celebrates Black history while giving unfiltered glimpse into slavery,” CBS News (February 5, 2025): LINK. The Lest We Forget Museum of Slavery, a small museum outside of Philadelphia, is the only institution in the area with “actual artifacts from the transatlantic slave trade.”

    New Books:

    • Robert Colby, “After Confederate Forces Captured Their Children, These Back Mothers Fought to Reunite Their Families,” Smithsonian Magazine (February 6, 2025): LINK. From the author of An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press, 2024): “During the Civil War, Confederates targeted free Black people in the North, kidnapping them to sell into slavery. After the conflict ended, two women sought help from high places to track down their lost loved ones.”
    • Iris Crawford, “Brea Baker on the Legacy of Stolen Farmland in America,” Civil Eats (February 3, 2025): LINK. The author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership (Random House, 2024) “talks about her family’s farming history, the lasting impact of land loss for Black people, and the case for reparations.”
    • Erin L. Thompson, “The Reckless Creation of Whiteness,” The Nation (January 29, 2025): LINK. A discussion of Sarah Lewis, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024), which “examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the ‘Caucasian race’ led to centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.”

    Education:

    • Noah Nelson, “Black Educators as Movement Leaders,” Black Perspectives (February 3, 2025): LINK. “Throughout the history of Black struggle and the social movements it has fueled, education and the transmission of knowledge have been central to advancing sociopolitical change.” Discusses educators from Anna Julia Cooper through the Black Panther Party and today.
    • Aziah Siid, “Schools Can Still Teach Black History—Very Carefully,” Word in Black (February 3, 2025): LINK. “Education experts say there are ways around President Trump’s threat to defund K-12 schools who ‘indoctrinate’ students with honest Black history.”
    • LaGarrett J. King, “What We Lose When We Only Teach ‘Respectable’ Black History,” Education Week (January 30, 2025): LINK. A leading education professor proposes a “Black Historical Consciousness framework” with eight principles: “Studying history can teach us how to make a difference in our communities today. Our students need to learn from the contentious past and realize that their own imperfections do not hinder them from becoming historically relevant and making a difference.”

    Other Links:

    • Brent Hallenbeck, “Vermont African American Heritage Trail tells stories of Black history in the state,” Burlington Free Press (February 6, 2025): LINK. Middlebury College—home to abolitionists before the Civil War, a pioneer in racial integration—is one of several Black history sites mentioned in this article. (Today, Vermont is the second whitest state in the country.)
    • Aallyah Wright, “The Battle for Land, Identity, and Survival of Gullah Geechee Communities,” Capital B News (February 4, 2025): LINK. In the shadow of a local tragedy and amidst various economic and environmental assaults, residents of Sapelo Island, Georgia, fight to ensure that the distinctive history of their African American community is not lost.
    • Angela Davis, “Reporter’s notebook: Minneapolis police, Black men find common ground in Alabama’s past,” Minnesota Public Radio (February 5, 2025): LINK. A fascinating account of a visit to Alabama by members of the Minneapolis Police Department and members of the local Black community, as part of a healing process in the wake of the Jamar Clark and Philando Castile murders.
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  • Legacies Links for February 3, 2025: Black History Month 2025
    A new bill in California considers providing preferences for descendants of slavery, a new study links victims of school segregation with late-life dementia, and Black History Month i
    Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) is credited as the “Father of Black History Month,” which began as “Negro History Week” 99 years ago this month.

    As always, we encourage you to share this post with students, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested. A link here does not necessarily indicate agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges or the Mellon Foundation.

    • Veronica Chambers, “How Negro History Week Became Black History Month,” New York Times (January 31, 2025): LINK. “In the years after Reconstruction, campaigning for the importance of Black history and doing the scholarly work of creating the canon was a cornerstone of civil rights work for leaders like Carter G. Woodson.” This work culminated in Black History Month, which now is under attack as part of the war on DEI.
    • William Spivey, “The George Floyd Movement is Officially Dead,” Level (January 31, 2025): LINK. Independent journalist Spivey offers a sobering valedictory to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the past five years: “Very little was accomplished after all was said and done due to the George Floyd Movement. No act was passed by Congress or signed by the president. The war being waged by police against minorities never ended. Police forces weren’t defunded. Donald Trump has returned to the White House and taken up a more familiar tone…”
    • Kaila Philo, “The Vast Geographic Scope of Slavery Is Hard to Fathom. One Groundbreaking Exhibition Shows Its True Scale Around the Globe,” Smithsonian Magazine (January 27, 2025): LINK. In Slavery’s Wake, a major new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, is “the brainchild of the Global Curatorial Project, an international network of scholars, curators and educators seeking new ways to engage people with critical points in world history.”
    • Lydialyle Gibson, “A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” Harvard Magazine (January 29, 2025): LINK. In a controversial move, last week Harvard University laid off the entire staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) and outsourced its work to an external research organization. “[T]he HSRP team had been researching the identities of people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff, and working to trace their direct descendants.” Many see this as a retreat from the university’s commitment to address the institutional legacy of slavery.
    • Araceli Mingura, “California bill allowing admissions priority for slave descendants draws scrutiny,” The College Fix (January 29, 2025): LINK. If the bill passes, California’s public higher education systems and its private colleges and universities would be allowed to consider an admission preference for direct descendants of people enslaved in the United States. (The writer of this article is a student journalist from CIC member institution Franciscan University of Steubenville [OH].)
    • Amanda Vinicky, “Companies That Participated in the Slave Trade Could Face New Rules in Illinois Under Proposal,” WTTW (January 29, 2025): LINK. An Illinois state representative has introduced a measure that would require companies that want to conduct business in the state and that participated in the slave trade or slaveholding to acknowledge that historical legacy.
    • Bernadette Athuahene, “How Local and Federal Laws Disenfranchised a Generation of Black Homeowners,” Literary Hub (January 31, 2025): LINK. The author traces the history of urban segregation in mid-20th century America through the stories of two Detroit-area families, one white, the other Black. “[T]he federal government has never taken responsibility for the fact that, by cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods through redlining, it manufactured the blight that its urban renewal programs sought to erase.”
    • Zoe Betekova, “Study Looks at Association Between School Segregation and Late-life Dementia,” Yale University School of Public Health (January 3, 2025): LINK. An epidemiological study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health concludes that “Black individuals who were exposed to segregation during their school years had lower cognitive ability and a higher prevalence of dementia in later life, after accounting for other variables. One of the ways that segregated education impacts cognitive ability is by influencing future physical health conditions.”
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