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.

  • Here is a very short list of academic publications by scholars affiliated with CIC member institutions that were published during the past six months. It is NOT comprehensive!

    photo: Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash
    • Beverly A. Duran, “Maternal Sacrifice and Resilience: The Legacy of Harriet Jacobs and Enslaved Black Motherhood,” GLI MA in American History Student Works (July 2024): https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/glihist/3 (open source). Duran is a graduate student in the online history master’s program offered by Gettysburg College (PA).

      From the abstract: “This paper explores the unique role of enslaved Black women in preserving family and cultural identity during the American slavery era, focusing on the life and writings of Harriet Jacobs. … By examining historical records, literary analysis, and cultural studies, the paper underscores the enduring impact of enslaved Black motherhood on African American cultural preservation, identity, and resilience. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of family dynamics within the institution of slavery and the profound influence of maternal leadership on the survival and legacy of enslaved communities.”
    • Per Ivar Hjeldsbakken Engevold and Kari Lie Dorer, “Norwegians in the Slave Trade: Unveiling Hidden Histories of Colonialism and Enslavement,” Norwegian-American Studies 42 (November 2024):  https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nor.2024.a943155 (subscription). Dorer is chair of the Norwegian department and director of Nordic Studies at St. Olaf College (MN).

      Excerpt: “Norwegian Americans commonly use the year 1825 to mark the beginnings of Norwegian migration to the Americas. The fifty-two Norwegians who set sail on the sloop Restauration from Stavanger were to become a symbol of the mass exodus of Norwegians who journeyed to establish a new life in America. However, Norwegians were in the Americas nearly 200 years prior—as part of the transatlantic slave trade. What brought them there? And how do their stories fit within Norwegian-American histories?”
    • Jajuan S. Johnson, “Black Studies and Public Humanities,” Public Humanities 1:e13 (2025): https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2024.27 (open access). Johnson, who is now affiliated with William & Mary College, served as assistant director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College (MD).

      From the abstract: “The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions. In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American at African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.”
    • Sarah Beth Kaufman, “Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University’s Civil War Era.” Journal of Southern History 90:3 (August 2024): https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932553 (subscription). Kaufman is Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity University (TX).

      Excerpt: “Across the United States, institutions of higher learning are grappling with legacies rooted in slavery. … This essay extends such work, centering the slave economy’s influence on universities founded during southern Reconstruction. … The story of Trinity University’s founding illuminates one aspect of this era: how higher education funneled wealth gained from enslavement before the Civil War to Protestant Anglo children after slavery’s abolition.”
    • Zahi Zalloua, “Reckoning with America’s Anti-Blackness: From Repression to Disavowal—and Beyond,” symploke 32:1 (2024): https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sym.2024.a946643 (subscription). Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College (WA).

      Excerpt: “Historically, repression has characterized America’s general approach to racial slavery, though in more recent years, I argue, that a fetishist disavowal, spearheaded by the liberal Left, is starting to exemplify the nation’s engagement with its traumatic past. I then discuss how the far-Right is moving beyond the existing models of repression and disavowal by imposing its own phantasmatic vision on the racial past. … Finally, I consider what an actual reckoning with anti-Blackness might actually entail.”
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  • Legacies Links for January 27, 2025: L.A. Fires, Civil Rights Struggles Up North, Black History
    A painted mural depicting about two dozen labor and social justice leaders, many with direct connections to New York City — including A. Philip Randolph, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Pedro Albizu Campos, Margaret Sanger, Mabel Dodge, John Lennon, Helen Gurley Flynn, Harry Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Hubert Harrison, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Clara Lemlich, Che Guevara, Bayard Rustin, Marcus Garvey, Carlo Tresca, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, and Bill Haywood.
    In 2008, the Museum of the City of New York commissioned artist Mike Alewitz (via the Puffin Foundation) to create a mural celebrating the history of labor and social justice movements in the city: The City at the Crossroads of History. The mural included portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. (at center, in the red tie) and Marcus Garvey (at right, in the yellow suit), among many others. In 2015, the museum controversially refused to accept the finished work for “not meet[ing] … [our] curatorial standards.” source: National Council for Public History, image by Mike Alewitz

    Fire

    • Emma Janssen, “Incarcerated Firefighters Battle L.A. Blazes While California Upholds Prison Slavery,” The American Prospect (January 21, 2025): LINK. “Last fall, California voters rejected Proposition 6, which would have brought an end to modern-day slavery in the state’s jails and prisons [as allowed under a loophole in the 13th Amendment]. Not even three months later, more than 1,000 incarcerated Californians stood on the front lines of the fires blazing through Los Angeles.”
    • Anissa Durham, “‘Black People Know How to Rise from the Ashes,’” Word in Black (January 20, 2025): LINK. The Eaton Fires destroyed thousands of structures and displaced hundreds of residents, but it also devastated Altadena, a Black middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. Now, residents hope to build back, but they may face a phenomenon called climate gentrification.
    • Emily Witt, “Will L.A.’s Fires Permanently Disperse the Black Families of Altadena?” The New Yorker (January 17, 2025): LINK. Multigenerational families in Altadena reflect on rampant gentrification before the fires and the strong legacy of Black homeownership in the suburb.

    Civil Rights Struggles Up North

    • Michelle Adams, “Beyond Brown: How the Failure of Desegregation in the North Reveals America’s Lingering Racial Fault Lines,” Literary Hub (January 15, 2025): LINK. A legal scholar reminds us that, as a matter of history and personal experience (as a Black girl in 1960s–70s Detroit), “school desegregation as a social policy was a resounding success for both black and white students. … [It] shifted important educational resources to black students that had long been denied … [and] helped destroy the deeply embedded cultural belief system that underpinned … white supremacy.”
    • Katie Singer, “The Great Migration and Black Women’s Political Work,” Black Perspectives (January 21, 2025): LINK. The author discusses Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North (Rutgers University Press, 2024)—which focuses on New Jersey, “‘a northern state with very southern sensibilities’ due in large part to the Great Migration.”
    • Lacey Hunter, “Centering Northern Black Women in the Civil Rights Narrative,” Black Perspectives (January 22, 2025): LINK. Another essay in a series of posts about The Georgia of the North. Hunter says that the strongest aspect of Williams’s book is her “insistence that Black women’s lived experiences as intellectuals, activists, community organizers, and New Jersey residents informed the direction and progress of the larger civil rights movement.”

    Histories

    • Kevin Mahnken, “Poll of High Schoolers Shows Many Are Taught That America Is ‘Inherently Racist,’” The 74 Million (January 22, 2025): LINK. According to one historian quoted in the article, “It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.” 
    • Christina Joseph, “Teaching Black History Now,” School Library Journal (January 23, 2025): LINK. Despite the well-documented challenges to teaching Black history, parents, educators, and their communities have banded together to provide students with more comprehensive and inclusive histories.
    • Charlie R. Braxton, “The Pan-African Worldview of MLK,” Medium (January 21, 2025): LINK (may require free account to read). Poet/playwright/critic Charlie Braxton reflects on the history of American Pan-Africanism, including Martin Luther King’s admiration for the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey.
    • “Biden posthumously pardons civil rights leader Marcus Garvey,” The Guardian (January 19, 2025): LINK. In one of his final acts, former President Biden posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), who was convicted of mail fraud under dubious circumstances in 1922. Garvey was eventually deported to Jamaica.
    • Peniel Joseph, “Trump’s inauguration sought to sully MLK’s legacy,” The Emancipator (January 21, 2025): LINK. The author of The Third Reconstruction (Basic Books, 2022) argues that “[President] Trump’s election victories represent the coming to power of everything that [Martin Luther King, Jr.] found morally reprehensible and politically indefensible regarding American democracy.”
    • Leoneda Inge, Josh Sullivan, Cole del Charco, “How ‘The Greensboro Six’ broke golf’s color barrier,” WUNC (January 20, 2025): LINK. “A week after Rosa Parks began a bus boycott protesting segregation, several Black men played a round of golf at the whites-only Gillespie Golf Course in Greensboro, NC.” In 2024, the PGA recognized their contribution to the eventual integration of the sport.
    • Justin Giboney, “Racial Unity is Out of Style,” Christianity Today (January 17, 2025): LINK (may require free account to read). Writing in a leading evangelical publication, the author argues that “it’s time to consider how race relations in the American church have actually worsened over the past half decade or so. The sentiment seems to have shifted in such a significant way that the once-popular racial-reconciliation project is now passé in many spaces. Even the term racial reconciliation feels corny and cringeworthy to some.”

    Updates from the CIC Network:

    • Spalding University (Louisville, KY) will host the 7th annual Elmer Lucille Allen Conference on African American Studies on February 18–19, 2025. This year’s theme is Environmental Injustice in the Black Community. Register here to attend in person or virtually via Zoom.
    • “‘History humanizes experiences’: Students examine enduring legacies of Civil Rights Movement,” Brown University (January 23, 2025): LINK. Brown University (RI) collaborated with CIC member Tougaloo College (Jackson, MS)—an Institutional Affiliate of the Legacies of American Slavery network—to develop an intensive study trip for students from the New England school, who visited sites related to slavery and the Civil Rights movement around Jackson, Mississippi.
    • Ian Delahanty, “Teaching the Civil War: A Place-Based Learning Approach to Civil War Memory,” Journal of the Civil War Era (January 21, 2025): LINK. A teaching-focused essay by a professor of history at CIC member institution Springfield College (Springfield, MA): “For most of the students who take my survey of the Civil War era at the regional Western Massachusetts college where I teach, the Civil War is and always has been ‘down South.’  … Thus, when designing a culminating research project for my Civil War era survey, I thought long and hard about how to immerse students in some aspect of the period in a way that would make them grasp what the war meant to contemporaries who, while far removed from its battlefields, were nonetheless invested in its prosecution and outcome.”
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  • On September 19–21, 2024, CIC hosted a conference on Independent Colleges and the Legacies of Slavery at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN. The museum is on the site of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, on the national holiday that honors King’s memory, we are pleased to look back and share a video snapshot of the conference.

    The conference was the culmination of CIC’s multiyear initiative, Legacies of American Slavery: Reckoning with the Past—which you can learn more about right here at legaciesofslavery.net. The gathering was an opportunity to celebrate the important work already supported through the initiative while exploring the unfinished work that independent colleges still must do reckon with and repair the legacies of slavery.

    MLK speaks at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1966

    “The realist in race relations trying to answer the question of progress would seek to combine the trues of two opposites…. [T]he realist would agree with the optimist that we have come a long, long way, but he would seek to balance that by agreeing with the pessimist in that we have a long, long way to go. And it is this realistic position that I would like to take as a basis for our thinking together … as we deal with the question of progress in race relations, and as we deal with the whole question of the future of integration. We have come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved.”
    — MLK at Illinois Wesleyan University, February 1966 (source)

  • Legacies Links for January 13, 2025: Not Even Past

    As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Screen shot of Jimmy Carter addressing a large crowd from a podium.
    In his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter (1924–2024) declared that “This is a time for truth and frankness. … I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision, but we cannot underestimate the challenge of hundreds of minor decisions yet to be made. Our inherent human charity and our religious beliefs will be taxed to the limit. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” Image source: Carter Center
    • “Jimmy Carter’s life intersected with slavery’s legacy. His record on Civil Rights is complicated,” WABE (January 8, 2025): LINK. “[Jimmy] Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, spent his life intertwined with America’s and the world’s enduring legacy of slavery.”
    • Allen C. Guelzo, “In Sherman’s Wake,” Washington Monthly (January 5, 2025): LINK. A new book by Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation (Simon & Schuster, 2025), explores the hidden story of enslaved Georgians who briefly seized freedom during Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous March to the Sea.
    • Jeffrey Collins, “South Carolina statue honoring Black hero Robert Smalls will stare down a segregationist,” AP News (January 9, 2025): LINK. “A group studying where to put South Carolina’s first Statehouse monument to an individual African American has decided Robert Smalls’ statue should be staring down a notorious white supremacist [Ben Tillman] who dismantled most of the former slave’s work after the Civil War.”
    • Adrian Carrasquillo and Halimah Abdullah, “The all-American violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection,” The Emancipator (January 6, 2025): LINK. Linking the history of white supremacist insurrections to the violence and political uprisings today, the authors summarize that future transformative social change must be as peaceful as possible amidst so much violence.
    • Allison Wiltz, “Why Black Infants Face Added Danger in American Hospitals,” Medium (January 7, 2024): LINK (may need a free account to access). Research supports that the race of medical practitioners may impact mortality rates and that Black infants fare much better under the care of Black doctors.
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  • Legacies Links for January 6, 2025: Happy New Year!

    We’re back with a few links that appeared during our winter break. As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Photograph of a Black woman.
    Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)—civil rights leader, community activist, political organizer, and proponent of women’s rights— was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 4, 2025.
    • Melissa L. Cooper, “Inside the Struggle to Preserve Georgia’s Butler Island, Home to a Notorious Plantation,” Smithsonian Magazine (January/February 2025): LINK. “Descendants of people enslaved at the site are grappling with its complicated history while honoring the region’s rich culture.”
    • Allison Wiltz, “Black History is American History. So, Why Is it Hidden From View,” Medium (January 4, 2025): LINK (might need a free account to access). Writing about the gap between public school education and Black history, a scholar writes: “Without all the puzzle pieces, students will leave their schools ill-equipped to confront the nation’s legacy of systemic racism. They won’t understand the connection between disparities in the modern era and those throughout history.”
    • Adam Mahoney, “‘Our City Is Always Hurting’: Black New Orleans Residents Grapple With Inequity,” Capital B News (January 3, 2025): LINK. “As federal, state, and local authorities have mobilized extensive resources, including bringing in hundreds of government officials and increasing the police presence, Black residents worry about the consequences in a city with a long history of police brutality backdropped against the nation’s highest murder rate for two consecutive years.”
    • Daniel Chang, “Trash incinerators disproportionately harm Black and Hispanic people,” The Grio (January 3, 2025): LINK. With a new trash incinerator scheduled to break ground in Miramar, Florida, protestors argue that the effects of burning trash fall disproportionately on Black and Latino neighborhoods, another legacy of historic racism.
    • Willy Blackmore, “The End of the EPA’s Environmental Justice Era,” Word in Black (January 2, 2025): LINK. The Environmental Protection Agency tried to protect at-risk communities by using Title XI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but opened itself up to a myriad of legal challenges led by Republicans who have sued the agency.
    • Brandon Gates, “The White House will soon be ‘anti-woke’ again. Republicans got a head start.” The Emancipator (January 2, 2025): LINK. “Initiatives once heralded as critical to addressing systemic inequities in workplace’s schools, and government are now at the center of a conservative push to roll back policies seen as redistributing power to historically marginalized groups.”
    • Allison Wiltz, “Why America’s New Year’s Resolution Should Be to Confront Racism,” Level (January 2, 2025): LINK. The author asserts, before reviewing America’s racial gap in wages, education, housing, investment, and terrorism that “If America were to make a New Year’s resolution, it should be to confront the legacy of racism within its borders. This would be a natural conclusion after a good, hard look in the mirror.””
    • Delaney Nolan, “Infrastructure neglect and poverty lead to parasites in the Mississippi Delta,” The Guardian (January 1, 2025): LINK. Recent research has proven that the US has not eradicated parasites from unclean water. In the case of a majority-Black county in Mississippi, it seems that only federal investment might help a community with historical sanitation problems.
    • “Short Stuff: Watch Night,” Stuff You Should Know (January 1, 2025): LINK. “The episode [of this podcast] delves into the historical and cultural significance of Watch Night within the African American community. This tradition dates back to December 31, 1862, marking the anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is particularly prominent among African American Methodists who conduct a service on New Year’s Eve that concludes shortly after midnight, coupled with a special meal on New Year’s Day.”
    • Marc Ramirez, “She hoped to learn more about her enslaved ancestors. A trip South revealed hard truths.” USA Today via Yahoo News (December 30, 2024): LINK. Michelle Johnson, an African American retired professor, dived deeply into her family’s history, piecing together her ancestry for the first time, going beyond online databases by visiting various Southern towns.
    • Rolonda Teal and Jaclyn Tripp, “This Northwest Louisiana village has connection to Liberia,” KTSM News (December 30, 2024): LINK. An anthropologist discovers the little-known connection between Converse, a rural town in Louisiana, and freedpeople that resettled in Liberia.
    • Michelle Duster, “New Coin Celebrates the Living Legacy of Ida B. Wells,” Smithsonian Magazine (December 30, 2024): LINK. The great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells reflects on her legacy of teaching, writing, and organizing, as Wells posthumously becomes one of 20 women selected by the U.S Mint for the American Women Quarters program.
    • Cynthia Greenlee, “How Collard Greens Became a Symbol of Resilience and Tradition,” Capital B News (December 23, 2024): LINK. Collard greens have provided inspiration to African Americans for decades, but have also been the subject of petty crimes committed against others in the years of rampant Jim Crowism.
    • Kamri Hudgins, et al., “Detroit’s reparations task force now has until 2025 to make its report, but going slow with this challenging work may not be a bad thing,” The Conversation (December 20, 2024): LINK. A team of scholars provides context for understanding the challenges that Detroit faces in enacting reparations, especially since the initial deadline for a task force report came and passed in October 2024.
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  • Winter Break for the Legacies Blog

    The Legacies of American Slavery blog is taking a winter break—but we’ll be back on January 6, 2025. We hope that your holidays are …

    more like this …

    Stock photograph of a winter festival with fireworks and dancers.
    Historic black-and-white photograph of African American laborers clearing snow from a street in Washington, DC, circa 1909.

    and less like this!

    In the meantime, here are some holiday-related links that we shared in the past:

    • “The Slave Experience of the Holidays,” Documenting the American South: LINK.
    • Robert E. May, “The Grim History of Christmas for Enslaved People in the Deep South,” TIME (December 21, 2021): LINK. Historian Robert E. May discusses the reality of the holiday season for enslaved people in the South. Also see his important book on the topic, with thoughtful reviews here and here.
    • “How Women Used Christmas to Fight Slavery,” History Channel: LINK. In 1834, Black and white women from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society organized Christmas bazaars to sell donated gifts to support the abolitionist cause.
    • Robin Washington, “The creator of Kwanzaa modified a Hanukkah menorah—and gave advice to Black Jews,” Forward (December 23, 2021): LINK. Washington, who co-founded the Alliance of Black Jews, recalls the advice his group received at a critical moment from the creator of Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga.
    • Kayla Stewart, “Tracing the Origins of a Black American New Year’s Ritual,” New York Times (December 24, 2021): LINK. Eating collard greens, Hoppin’ John, or black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve are closely associated with Black Americans—but these foodways can be traced back to West African traditions.
  • Legacies Links for December 16, 2024: Histories of Slavery, Black Farmers, and More

    As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

    Historic photograph of four elderly African American women
    This quartet of centenarians traveled to Washington, D.C., in November–December 1916 for an annual convention of the formerly enslaved. Source: Flickr/Washington Area Spark

    Updates from the CIC Network

    • Robert E. May, “A Hobart student, Christmas, and the ‘Lost Cause,’” Finger Lakes Times (December 7, 2024): LINK. “[A]ntebellum southern enslavers had something of a fetish for educating their own sons, including some of the future leaders of the Confederacy, at Yankee colleges and universities.” One of those sons was Innes Randolph, who attended Hobart College in Geneva, NY (now CIC member Hobart and William Smith Colleges) in the 1850s and later contributed a racist tale of the Yule Log to the Lost Cause mythology of contented slaves.
    • Obbie Tyler Todd, “Review: From Every Stormy Wind That Blows: The Idea of Howard College and the Origins of Samford University,” The Gospel Coalition (December 2024): LINK. Jonathan Bass’s early history of CIC member Samford University (Birmingham, AL) explores revivalism, antebellum slavery, Baptist schisms, and the origins of a racist New South. 

    Histories of Slavery

    • Jennifer Schuessler, “The Smithsonian Looks at How the Slave Trade Shaped the World,” New York Times (December 13, 2024): LINK. “In Slavery’s Wake,” a new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, examines the forced migration of 12 million Africans that reshaped societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
    • Annie Correal, “Enslaved People’s Graves Discovered at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage,” New York Times (December 12, 2024): LINK. Add the Hermitage in Nashville, TN, to the list of presidential sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier) where the manifest history of slavery cannot be evaded.
    • Maria Cecilia Ulrickson, “Excavating New Archives of the Enslaved,” Public Books (December 12, 2024): LINK. Three new books explore “how Africans shaped the Americas [and] grapple with the politics of archival interpretation in constructing the histories of slavery and empire.”
    • David Cunningham, “I’m a scholar of white supremacy who’s visiting all 113 places where Confederate statues were removed in recent years—here’s why Richmond gets it right,” The Conversation (December 10, 2024): LINK. “Monuments removed entirely from public view quickly fade from public memory…. Moving them to alternative sites [as Richmond officials did with a prominent statue of Jefferson Davis that was toppled in 2020], meanwhile, enables public conversation about them to continue.”

    Black Farmers

    • Aallyah Wright, “Decades of USDA Racism Leave Black Farmers Fighting for Equality,” Capital B News (December 13, 2024): LINK. Hundreds of Black farmers gathered in Charleston this week for the annual meeting of the National Black Growers Council. The main topic of discussion: forging a path forward after Republic legislators blocked federal aid programs for farmers of color. (And always on the agenda: decades of civil rights complaints against the United States Department of Agriculture.)
    • Lisa Held, “A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shapes in Maryland,” Civil Eats (December 4, 2024): LINK. Her family stopped farming when her great-grandfather moved north from Mississippi during the Great Migration. Now Gail Taylor (and her partner D’Real Graham) are hoping to create a “resilient Black-led agricultural community as the planet burns, biodiversity plummets, and the larger food system continues to become increasingly industrialized and commodified.”

    Cultural Expressions

    • Philip Ewell, “Why Quincy Jones should be prominently featured in US music education—his absence reflects how racial segregation still shapes American classrooms,” The Conversation (December 13, 2024): LINK. A Black music professor laments that “music education in the U.S. is still segregated along racial lines.” That’s why Quincy Jones (1933-2024), one of the most influential musicians of his era, is rarely mentioned in the mainstream music curriculum. (Ewell includes a short list of Black classical and jazz musicians, dating back to the 18th century, who should also be part of the curriculum.)
    • Tim Brinkhof, “Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative,” JSTOR Daily (December 11, 2024): LINK. Bryan Sinche’s 2024 book, Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, “sheds light on the Black literary ecosystem, of which self-publication was an integral part…. Black authors didn’t self-publish because it was cheap or easy but because…the exclusionary practices of ‘mainstream’ white print culture left them no other choice.”
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    • As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

      Color transparency of five African American farm workers in a field, including one man in blue overalls and four women or girls in colorful dresses.
      America has always had Black farmers: enslaved, free, or somewhere in-between. In some places, this history on the land is under new threats. Photo: Jack Delano, Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. (1941). Source: Library of Congress

      African Echoes

      • Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Peter Baker, “In Angola, Biden Warns That Slavery’s History Should Not be Erased,” New York Times (December 3, 2024): LINK. “The president’s decision to emphasize [the slave trade that defined relations between the United States and Angola] served not only as a nod to the wounds inflicted on generations of Africans, but also as a statement of principle in the contemporary debate underway in his own country about how to teach and remember history.”
      • Melissa Chemam, “Benin to give nationality to descendants of those deported as slaves,” RFI (November 30, 2024): LINK. According to the law, applicants must “provide proof of [their] Afro descent by authenticated testimonies, civil status document or DNA test carried out in a laboratory approved by Benin.”

      Reparation and Repair

      • Gerren Keith Gaynor, “Advocates urge Biden to apologize for slavery and take other racial justice actions before leaving office,” The Grio (December 4, 2024): LINK. Advocates would “like President Biden to issue a U.S. apology for slavery, much in the same way he did to Native Americans in October for the U.S.’s role in running boarding schools that abused Native American youth and sought to eradicate or whitewash their tribal identities.” 
      • Sophie Austin et al., Associated Press (December 2, 2024): LINK. “A California lawmaker introduced a bill [last] Monday to allow admission priority to the descendants of slaves at the University of California and California State University, two of the largest public university systems in the nation.”
      • Debbie Eliot, “Gospel-focused racial reconciliation in the Deep South,” NPR (November 26, 2024): LINK. A biracial group of clergy and lay leaders are tackling the racial divide in the Deep South. According to one leader of this effort, “We started with the notorious slave cities, Charleston, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Mobile and New Orleans. Because it’s obvious to us that if God can do that here, he can do it anywhere.”

      Written on the Land

      • Ciara Cummings, “Georgia family farm fights land seizure, claims eminent domain abuse,” Atlanta News First (December 4, 2024): LINK. Across the South, descendants of enslaved people are fighting property developers to stay on their family land. “A 2007 Institute for Justice study revealed [that] when eminent domain was used for private development, it most often impacted areas where more than half of the community was made up of people of color. As well as in areas where nearly half of the community’s population sat below the poverty line.”
      • Adam Mahoney, “Can land repair the nation’s racist past?,” High Country News (December 1, 2024): LINK. “Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, California lawmakers have debated how to make material amends for the deep-rooted impacts of slavery and anti-Black racism, and many now argue that reparations should be made not in cash but with land.” However, different groups of advocates, including Black Californians trying to reclaim land that once belonged to their families, have different approaches to communal and private landholding.
      • Christina Cooke, “Black Earth,” The Bitter Southerner (November 25, 2024): LINK. “In North Carolina, a Black farmer purchased the plantation where his ancestors were enslaved—and is reclaiming his family’s story, his community’s health, and the soil beneath his feet.”
      • Gail Sims, “Sparking Freedom: Enslaved Resistance in Fredericksburg and Stafford, Virginia,” Public Humanities (December 2, 2024): https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2024.44. From the abstract: “Inspired in large part by the author’s residence on the grounds of a former plantation in Stafford County, Virginia, Sparking Freedom highlights local stories of enslaved resistance. The program incorporates stops at multiple National Park Service sites … [but it is also] a highly personal example of innovative and engaging public history work honoring enslaved communities.”

      Other Links

      • “Jane Deveaux: The Black Woman Who Risked Everything to Teach Enslaved Children to Read in the 1800s,” Talk Africana (December 2, 2024): LINK. Deveaux (1810–1885) defied antebellum law and established a secret school in Savannah, Georgia, to teach enslaved and free African Americans how to read.
      • Ron Grossman, “The Nation of Islam flourished in Chicago after Elijah Muhammad took over from the movement’s founder,” Chicago Tribune (December 1, 2024): LINK. “Blacks who joined the Great Migration only to find that discrimination and violence in the North wasn’t much better than in the South were ripe for recruiting by the Black Muslims’ message.”
      • “Federal Judge rules Byron Allen’s $10 billion lawsuit against McDonald’s for racial discrimination will go to trial,” The Grio (December 3, 2024): LINK. A district judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence for the lawsuit under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which states that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States have the same right to uphold contracts as is enjoyed by white citizens.”
      • Kaitlyn K. Stanhope et al., “Slavery, homeownership, and contemporary perinatal outcomes in the southeast: a test of mediation and moderation,” American Journal of Epidemiology 193:12 (December 2024): https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae138 (full access requires subscription). A new epidemiological study “conclude[s] that historic slavery remains relevant for perinatal health”: wherever slaveholding was most intensive in 1860, Black mothers and babies in 2013–2021 were more likely to experience a variety of health risks just before and after birth.
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    • Legacies Links for December 2, 2024: Normalized Racism, Unique Histories

      As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

      A white, male police officer finger-printing a black woman.
      Yesterday (December 1) was the anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to vacate her seat in a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Here she is on December 1, 1955, being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey. Source: Wikimedia Commons
      • Maya Jokhadze, “Remnants of Normalized Racism: Historical Racism Violently Bleeds Into Today,” Medium (November 21, 2024): LINK. “In a world where racism is still as (if not even more) prevalent than it was in 1965, we could all learn from [James] Baldwin that repairing racist beliefs is an intensely emotional process. Racism was a foundation of society — in slavery and later in segregation — and Baldwin argues that shifting from these previously normalized ideals cannot be done overnight.”
      • Julie Denesha, “Restoration of a historic Black church in Parkville gives congregants renewed hope,” NPR (November 22, 2024): LINK. A church built by formerly enslaved people in Parkville, Missouri, is one of several being restored through grants from the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. (The Fund is also supporting the restoration of historic Black cemeteries.)
      • Jennifer Porter Gore, “Study: Life Expectancy of Black People Shortens,” Word in Black (November 22, 2024): LINK. “A study of life expectancy trends in the U.S. released [before Thanksgiving] has found that the gap between Black and white lifespans has nearly doubled over the last two decades, exacerbated by geographic and racial health disparities—and reversing decades of a slow but gradual narrowing of the gap.”
      • Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon, “Segregation Academies in Mississippi are Benefiting from Public Dollars, as They Did in the 1960s,” ProPublica (November 22, 2024): LINK. “ProPublica identified 20 schools in the state that likely opened as segregation academies and have received almost $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.”
      • Keshler Thibert, “The lives that unfolded on a former plantation in Prince George’s County,” Greater Greater Washington (November 26, 2024): LINK. Lord Baltimore’s plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. The nonprofit foundation that is working to re-open the plantation to the public is struggling to balance two separate stories: the wealthy, white landowners and the enslaved people who worked the land whose descendants still inhabit its surroundings.
      • Colin Gordon, “Trump’s next HUD secretary would have a lot to do to address the history of racist housing policy—and Trump’s own comments and history suggest that’s unlikely,” The Conversation (November 26, 2024): LINK. A public policy scholar reviews the long history of “patchwork apartheid”: restrictions that allowed private contractors to prevent African Americans and other people of color from occupying homes in “protected” neighborhoods.
      • Garrick McFadden, “Celebrating Soul Food’s Essential Place on Black Culture’s Mount Rushmore,” Level (November 26, 2024): LINK. “Those who had been enslaved needed to supplement the meager scraps that the slavers provided to them. Men, women, and children forced to do back-breaking labor from before the sun rose until after it went down needed more than the paltry allowance these greedy slavers afforded them. They needed soul food.”
      • John Eligon, “Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola,” New York Times (December 1, 2024): LINK. “When President Biden travels to Angola this week, he is scheduled to visit the National Slavery Museum near the capital, Luanda, to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born out of slavery.” (Note: most historians contend that the majority of enslaved Africans in North American came from West Africa; the slave-trading route from Angola more often ended in Brazil.)
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    • Legacies Links for November 25, 2024: Thanksgiving, Religion, and Slavery

      We hope that you will be enjoying a holiday respite this Thanksgiving week. Have a slice of pumpkin pie in honor of the Yankee abolitionists! As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.

      Posed photograph of a group of African American students and three adult teachers, looking at a model of a log cabin on a table. A chalkboard in the background reads, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers."
      African American students learning about Thanksgiving at the Whittier Primary School (Hampton, VA), c. 1899–1900. Source: Library of Congress

      Thanksgiving Throwbacks

      • Matthew Korfhage, “The abolitionist history of Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie—and why the South resisted both,” USA Today via northjersey.com (November 24, 2021): LINK. In the 19th century, pumpkins were a “hotly contested battleground in America’s original culture war. In the 1800s, the humble pumpkin became a totem of the fight to abolish slavery in America.”
      • Lauren Goforth, “Thanksgiving in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: Preaching the Case For and Against Abolition,” Hermann-Grima and Gallier Historic Houses (November 23, 2023): LINK. Thanksgiving is historically a Northern and Protestant tradition. In Catholic Louisiana, it took an 1863 proclamation from Pres. Lincoln and encouragement from the Archdiocese of New Orleans to make the holiday official.

      Updates from the CIC Network

      • Ellie Wolfe, “Maryland’s oldest college honored enslavers. Its next steps: ‘Honest conversations.’” The Baltimore Banner (November 20, 2024): LINK.  At CIC member St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), the community reckons with its next steps following a report on the campus legacies of slavery. The college’s president says: “I think any school of a certain age was supported by monies that really were due to the work of enslaved people…. [However,] we’re the type of institution that [can have] these honest conversations.”
      • Kristen Cole, “Primus Project Furthers Reach with New Podcast,” Trinity College (November 20, 2024): LINK. “As part an overarching effort to tell a truer and fuller story of [CIC member] Trinity College’s history, the Primus Project recently released the first in a series of podcasts … that [address] the difficult early history of the institution.” (Trinity is located in Hartford, CT.)
      • Mackenzie Grizzard, “Baylor University author series talks slavery, Southern Baptists,” Baylor Lariat (November 19, 2024): LINK. Kimberly Ellison is the author of a new book about slavery, pro-slavery ideology, and early Baptists in the American South: Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race and Slavery, 1696-1860 (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2023). Prof. Ellison’s public lecture was part of CIC member Baylor University’s effort to memorialize enslaved workers on the Waco, TX, campus.

      Teaching about Race

      • Adam Seagrave and Stephanie Shonekan, “Racism is such a touchy topic that many US educators avoid it—we are college professors who tackled that challenge head on,” The Conversation (November 12, 2024): LINK. A Black ethnomusicologist and a white political theorist joined forces to teach a model course about “Race and the American Story.”
      • Jaden Edison, “How some Texas parents and historians say a new state curriculum glosses over slavery and racism,” The Texas Tribune (November 18, 2024): LINK. If the Texas Board of Education approves a proposed new curriculum, public school children won’t learn the full story of places like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (an architectural marvel that was also a labor camp for hundreds of enslaved people) or people like Robert E. Lee (a soldier who also embraced slavery) or MLK Jr. (whose radicalism on poverty and race will be downplayed while focusing on his nonviolence).
      • Karin Wulf, “Even George Washington Was a Tyrant,” Time (November 18, 2024): LINK. Washington’s glowing record as a general and president is often sanitized when it comes to his role as an enslaver of 600 people: “Washington did nothing, ever, outside the context of slavery, and his position as an enslaver shaped all aspects of his career, even those exalted as examples of principled leadership.”

      Religion

      • “Scripture as a Weapon: How The Confederacy’s Biblical Justification of Oppression Still Echoes Today,” Milwaukee Independent (November 21, 2024): LINK. “The legacy of slavery in America still looms large today, as the fight for racial justice and true equality before the law remains ongoing. Unfortunately, the distortion of Christianity that once served to justify slavery is still echoed in some corners of today’s political landscape.”
      • Shireen Korkzan, “Historically Black South Carolina parishes lament, repent church’s complicity in slavery,” Episcopal News Service (November 14, 2024): LINK. Three Episcopal churches in South Carolina met together for the first time in a service dedicated to the memory of the Church’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade; ironically, local Black parishes are taking the lead in this work of reckoning and repair.

      Reparations

      • Shelby Hawkins, “Report Examines What Some South Side Residents Think About Reparations,” WTTW (November 13, 2024): LINK. Researchers from the Chicago Urban League and the South Side Community Reparations Coalition summarize the view of community members: “[Reparations] should be for individuals rather than an entire community and that it would need to go beyond the acknowledgement of the war on drugs.”
      • Amber Ogden, “Vandalia’s Arnwine Drive Bears the Legacy of Slavery and a Family’s Fight for Justice,” Michigan Chronicle (November 15, 2024): LINK. Candice Hammons, a Michigan woman descended from a Texas enslaver and an enslaved woman, wanted to trace her lineage. Instead, she discovered a long-standing injustice: land that was willed by the enslaver but never transferred to her family.

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