Victoria
[author_affiliation] Overview https://vimeo.com/1127164201 I first met Ms. Victoria Jewelle reflected in the bathroom mirror in front of me, slowly applying layers of makeup, constructing a face. She loaded a suitcase into her car and drove a few miles to a sports bar off the highway. I followed her into a crowded storage room at the […]
A Southern Underground Railroad
[author_affiliation] Overview Prospect Bluff is one of the more remote historic sites you may ever visit. Perched upon the banks of Florida’s Apalachicola River, the old fort is roughly an hour by car from Tallahassee. To get there, drive due west from the Florida capital, down Highway 20. Hang a left at SR65, south […]
Nannie’s Stone: Commemoration and Resistance
[author_affiliation] Overview During the night of June 19, 2023, the first federally recognized Juneteenth holiday, an unknown vandal or vandals desecrated by fire a much-beloved child’s mid-nineteenth-century headstone in Washington, DC’s oldest African American burial ground, the Mount Zion–Female Union Band Society cemetery in Georgetown. For a quarter century, visitors to the grave marker have […]
End of the Pandemic? A Grassroots Perspective
[author_affiliation] Overview In May of 2023, when the World Health Organization downgraded the coronavirus emergency from a global health pandemic to an “ongoing health crisis,” the shift made sense in many ways. Most developed nations have made vaccines available for over two years. Shutdowns and enforced quarantines ended, even in holdout nations. The WHO’s announcement […]
Ablaze: The 1849 White Supremacist Attack on the Pendleton Post Office
[author_affiliation] Overview Ignition In Pendleton, South Carolina, 1849, John B. Sitton had a difficult decision to make. He knew his neighbors were angry at him. He had a position as a postmaster with a small stipend. That job put him at the center of every local event, decision, and dispute. He was situated, too, in the very […]
Navigating Jim Crow: A Review of Adolph L. Reed’s The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
[author_affiliation] Overview In this short book, distinguished political scientist Adolph L. Reed, Jr. offers remembrances from his early life below the Mason-Dixon line as a member of the last African American generation who came of age during Jim Crow. Reed writes with a purpose—not to chronicle his own pivotal events, hardships, or personal demons, […]
Jim Crow Journeys: An Excerpt from Traveling Black
[author_affiliation] Overview Excerpt: “Jim Crow Journeys” The humiliations involved in traveling Jim Crow began before Black travelers even boarded their trains. By the beginning of the 1890s the proliferation of separate car laws had ushered in separate waiting rooms. Although before 1899 only Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi had passed laws requiring the railroads to construct […]
Ecologies of the Sacred: A Review of Valérie Loichot’s Water Graves
[author_affiliation] Overview Water Graves investigates how contemporary writers and artists of the greater Caribbean (such as Jason deCaires Taylor) reinvest sites of racialized violence and environmental degradation—as so many manifestations of “unritual”—with a new sense of the sacred that allows for remembrance and re-humanization. Rituals—be they initiations, funerary rites, or collective acts of remembrance—confer […]
Psychiatry in the Wake: Racism and the Asylumed South
[author_affiliation] Overview Christina Sharpe, scholar of English literature and Black studies, articulates the concept of “the wake” as a way of thinking about the long term impact of slavery upon African American life. In her work on symbolism in African American literature and visual culture, Sharpe argues that the wake symbolizes the “endurance of […]
Three Black Towns: An Excerpt from Black Landscapes Matter
[author_affiliation] Overview After the end of the Civil War, recently freed Black people endeavored to create their own communities. During Reconstruction, and with newfound access to political and economic power, Black towns and institutions emerged wherever Black people lived. Before the end of the Civil War, Union soldiers defeating Confederate soldiers attracted emancipated Black people, […]