Reckoning with Enslavement
[author_affiliation] Overview Excerpt Georgetown, April 2017 It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn light. I was headed to a religious service at Georgetown University that would acknowledge the trauma of a massive slave sale in 1838, […]
When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
[author_affiliation] Overview While I was an undergraduate at Temple University in the mid-1990s, gospel’s ubiquity in both secular and sacred spaces was a source of great fascination for me. On a Saturday night stroll down the halls of my dormitory, Temple Towers, one might hear Kirk Franklin’s “Silver and Gold,” Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” […]
Joshua McCarter Simpson’s “To the White People of America” (1854)
[author_affiliation] Overview O’er this wide extended country, Hear the solemn echoes roll, For a long and weary century, Those cries have gone from pole to pole; See the white man sway his sceptre, In one hand he holds the rod— In the other hand the Scripture, And says that he’s a man of God. —Joshua […]
Social Justice Environmentalism
[author_affiliation] Overview Essay In a 2017 essay, National Museum of African American History and Culture director Lonnie Bunch noted that, like much of black history, environmental activism by people of color is often “forgotten” or “hidden in plain sight.” Bunch, now director of the Smithsonian Institution, labeled this movement work unacknowledged environmentalism. Environmental reform campaigns […]
Black. Queer. Southern. Women.
[author_affiliation] Overview Presentation Part One Black women who influenced Johnson’s thinking about literature, folklore, the arts, and “quare theory” while growing up in western North Carolina and when attending UNC–Chapel Hill (5:27). Part Two Johnson’s approach to interviewing and transcribing, selecting and editing narratives for print publication, and recording stories of everyday sexual violence (14:49). […]
Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern “School Choice” Movement
[author_affiliation] Overview A New Era for “School Choice” and Vouchers The United States has never been closer to adopting a nationwide program in which the state and federal governments spend billions of tax dollars to finance largely unaccountable private schools to educate children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. By the beginning of 2019, more […]
Quilting Conversation
[author_affiliation] Overview Introduction by Katherine Jentleson During the summer of 2018, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art hosted Outliers and American Vanguard Art, an exhibition that demonstrated how self-taught artists have been major contributors to the development of modern and contemporary art over the last century. One of the most popular galleries in Outliers contained a […]
The South as Foil: A Review of This Is Not Dixie
[author_affiliation] Overview Review “By branding the South as the racist section of the country,” writes Brent Campney, “those narrating the identity of other sections have found a foil against which they can compare their own racial goodness. They can then deny, sanitize, or simply not see the profound anti-black racism in their own sections. Furthermore, […]
A Woman’s Work: Jim Crow Modernity and the Remaking of the Carceral State
[author_affiliation] Overview Review There’s a gripping scene in Arthur Jafa‘s award-winning film, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, in which he pairs the image of a small group of African American boys acrobatically diving into a swimming pool with a haunting narration from literary scholar Hortense Spillers. Without equivocation, Spillers warns, “I know that we are […]
Loving-Moonlight(ing): Cinema in the Breach
[author_affiliation] Overview Beneath Beneath the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia US Supreme Court case is a very simple story: two people, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, loved each other and wanted to marry and raise their family in rural Caroline County, Virginia. In the 2016 cinematic dramatization, Loving, writer-director Jeff Nichols best exemplifies this simplicity […]