GLC Newsletter for May 3, 2022GLC News and Events • Other Events • In the News • AnnouncementsGLC News and EventsDeborah Willis’ The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship
A Civil War History Journal Roundtable
Friday, May 13, 2022 • 4:00 to 5:30 pm
Organized by journal editors Crystal Feimster and Jim Downs
Introductions: David Blight
Moderator: Jim Downs (Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History, Gettysburg College)
Panelists:- Cheryl Finley (Spelman College, Director of Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies)
- Matthew Fox-Amato (History Department, University of Idaho)
- Sarah Lewis (Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies, Harvard University)
- Nell Painter, (Princeton University)
- Anne M. Shumard (Senior Curator of Photographs, Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery)
- Deborah Willis (University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University)
Comparative Racial Regimes: Jim Crow in the United States, Apartheid in South Africa, and the German Nazi Regime
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 • 4:00 to 6:00 pm
register here This panel explores similarities and differences in the development and undoing of racial regimes in distinct settings. Scholars will examine the ideological connections, structural similarities, and direct points of contact between the racialized social hierarchies of Jim Crow United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid-era South Africa. Speakers will examine direct influences between nations, more general parallels, and clear distinctions.
Future programs will shed light on how actors in these different countries learned from each other and from other international movements in developing tools of resistance to these racist regimes. We will also develop programs that focus on contemporary pedagogical approaches for teaching the histories of these regimes (individually and in relation to each other) in classroom settings as well as in public history venues such as museums and historical sites.
Welcome & Introduction: Timothy Snyder (Levin Professor of History at Yale, Faculty Advisor Fortunoff Archive)
"Three Racial Regimes of the 20th Century: The Universal in the Particular"
Moderator: Daniel Magaziner (Professor of History, Yale University)
Panelists:- William Sturkey (Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
- Thuto Thipe (Lecturer, University of Cape Town)
- Patricia Heberer Rice (Senior Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Discussion and Closing Remarks: David Blight (Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center and Sterling Professor of History at Yale)
Sponsored by:
Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center, Yale University
With generous support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University
Thursday, May 5, 2022 • 9:30 am to 6:30 pm EDT
Hybrid Event • register here
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
111 Thayer Street, Providence, RI
Reparations have become a major demand for many Black communities. This conference will examine the calls for reparations and reparative justice in different domains including politics, institutes of higher education, art, and the demands for decolonization in museums.
This hybrid event will also be live-streamed. Livestream registrants Livestream link will be shared with you closer to the date. Limited in-person tickets are available.
Stay tuned for more programs, including performances, lectures, and a retrospective exhibition in honor of the CSSJ 10th anniversary.
further information
Free Renty: Lanier v. Harvard
Presented by The Mary & Eliza Freeman Center For History & Community and
the Bijou Theatre
275 Fairfield Avenue, Bridgeport, CT
Tickets $15
Thursday, May 5, 2022 • 7:00 pm
In person event • register here
Free Renty tells the story of Tamara Lanier, an African American woman determined to force Harvard University to cede possession of daguerreotypes of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. The daguerreotypes were commissioned in 1850 by a Harvard professor to “prove” the superiority of the white race. The images remain emblematic of America’s failure to acknowledge the cruelty of slavery, the racist science that supported it and the white supremacy that continues to infect our society today. The film focuses on Lanier and tracks her lawsuit against Harvard, and features attorney Benjamin Crump, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and scholars Ariella Azoulay and Tina Campt.
Reckoning with Race and Racism in Academic Medicine
Molina Symposium in the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
May 5-6, 2022
Hybrid Event • register here
The legacies of race and racism cast a long shadow on academic medical institutions today: ongoing scientific racism in medicine, unequal access to health care, the segregation of medical facilities, and the exclusion of African Americans and other racialized groups from medical education. Medical research and medical practice have not merely been incidentally affected by racism in broader society, but rather have been key sites for the production and reproduction of biological understandings of race. In order to develop more effective anti-racist responses to endemic health inequalities made so visible in the COVID-19 epidemic, medicine needs to fully confront these painful histories of structural violence. This conference includes historians, sociologists, medical educators, medical trainees, advocates and activists from around the United States to work towards a more inclusive version of historical reckoning. Over two days, we will examine the centrality of history as a tool and as a method to understand the intersections of structural racism and health past and present, aim to build anti-racist curricula and commit to engaging with structural racism as a key aspect of medical training and policy change.
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A Celebration of Women's Voices
Beinecke Library
Sunday, May 8, 2022 • 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm EDT
Stetson Library, in the new Dixwell Q House
197 Dixwell Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Virtual Program • register here
Organized by the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society and the Beinecke Library, we will come together to engage African American women's history. The event will include a discussion of the New Haven Women's 20th Century Club by scholar Lisa Monroe and a one-woman performance by Karima Robinson as Ida B. Wells – who came to New Haven in 1900 to help organize the 20th Century Club. Afterwards, all are welcome to enjoy delicious treats from Lucky's Star Bus Cafe. This event is inspired by archives, including the minutes of the earliest years –1900 to 1902 – of the New Haven Women's 20th Century Club, which are in the Beinecke Library and have been fully digitized, available to all online at https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/31909767
Traumas and Triumphs: A Roundtable on the History of Black Childhood
Crystal Lynn Webster and Kabria Baumgartner in conversation with Nazera Wright
American Antiquarian Society
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 • 7:00 pm ET
Virtual Program • register here
Join us for a roundtable discussion on the history of Black childhood. Moderated by Nazera Wright (University of Kentucky), this program brings together Kabria Baumgartner (Northeastern University) and Crystal Webster (University of British Columbia), who share their own research on the subject. Participants will discuss the threats and challenges facing African American children in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which they wrote, organized, and forged their own individual and collective identities. They will unpack the concept of and assumptions surrounding Black childhood, how it is represented in the archive, and what is needed next for this emerging field of study.
Slavery and Emancipation in the Age of Revolutions / La esclavitud y la emancipación en la Era de las Revoluciones
Celso Thomas Castilho, Marcela Echeverri Muñoz, and Chernoh Sesay, Jr.
Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610
Thursday, May 12, 2022 • 6:00 to 7:00 pm Central Time (US & Canada)
In person event • register here
Slavery was abolished in Brazil on May 13, 1888, marking the official end of legal slavery in the Western hemisphere.
Join scholars Celso Thomas Castilho, Marcela Echeverri Muñoz, and Chernoh Sesay Jr. as they discuss controversies over the role of Indigenous and African enslaved peoples in the formation of new nations and governments throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Our panel will examine choices of the period regarding rights, liberties, and citizenship of formerly enslaved peoples, and how the repercussions of these decisions extend to the present day.
Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad
Center Street Gallery
18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, MA 02740
May 20, 2022 to November 20, 2022
In person event • register here
Sailing to Freedom highlights little-known stories and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African Americans' paid and unpaid waterfront labor.
This exhibition is an extension of the 2021 publication of the same title, edited by Timothy Walker and released by UMass Press. It corresponds with an NEH Summer teacher’s institute “Sailing to Freedom: New Bedford and the Underground Railroad,” running in July 2022.
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Burn Baby Burn: The Politics of Urban Riots, a lecture by historian Britney Murphy
Bridgeport History Center, Burroughs-Saden Library
925 Broad Street, Bridgeport, CT
Saturday, May 21, 2022 • 11:00 am to 12:00 pm
In person event • register here
UCONN historian Britney Murphy tells the history of urban America, and Bridgeport, through the perspective of the “riot.” She argues that uncontrolled and unlawful acts of collective violence are an unavoidable byproduct of urban living. Cities, as centers of commerce, politics, and population diversity, are powder kegs in which contests over power periodically erupt into violence.
The Legacy of the Canterbury Female Boarding School
Connecticut Democracy Center
Prudence Crandall Museum
1 South Canterbury Rd, Canterbury, CT 06331
Tuesday, May 24, 2022 • 12:00 pm EDT
In person event • register here
In 1832, Prudence Crandall, the white principal of the Canterbury Female Boarding School, was approached by a young Black woman named Sarah Harris asking to attend the academy. When residents protested the school’s integration and parents threatened to withdraw their daughters, Crandall closed her school and reopened in 1833 for non-white students. Her students came from several states. Connecticut responded by passing the “Black Law,” which prevented out-of-state Black students from attending school in Connecticut towns without local town approval. Crandall was arrested, spent a night in jail, and faced three court trials before the case was dismissed. In September 1834, a nighttime mob attack closed the school. Years later, many former students became nationally-renown educators and reformers. Crandall v. State of Connecticut impacted two U.S. Supreme Court cases and a Constitutional Amendment.
Join Joanie DiMartino, Curator & Site Superintendent at the Prudence Crandall Museum, site of the Canterbury Female Boarding School and a National Historic Landmark, for a presentation on the successes and legacy of the Canterbury School. This talk will focus on the lives of several of students after they left Canterbury, and the legal significance of Crandall v. State.
In the News
Landmark University Report Details How Slavery ‘Powerfully Shaped Harvard’
Cara J. Chang and Isabella B. Cho, April 26, 2022, Harvard Crimson
Harvard University faculty, staff, and leaders enslaved more than 70 Black and Indigenous people over about 150 years, including some who lived on campus, according to a long-awaited University report released Tuesday that detailed and acknowledged the “integral” role slavery played in shaping the school.
The report found that the institution of slavery was essential to Harvard’s growth as an academic institution, serving as a key source of the University’s wealth across three centuries. Harvard had “extensive financial ties” to slavery through key donors who built their wealth off of slavery, the report said — including some who are memorialized across the University today. The report is Harvard’s most significant public acknowledgement of how it was supported and shaped by the institution of slavery. Its release comes more than two years after University President Lawrence S. Bacow formed the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. On Tuesday, the University pledged to allocate $100 million to implement the report’s recommendations. “Slavery—of Indigenous and of African people—was an integral part of life in Massachusetts and at Harvard during the colonial era,” the report said. The report, which was conducted by a team of Harvard faculty, offered seven recommendations, including a public memorial, partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and a Legacy of Slavery Fund. continue
Education Professors React to Divisive-Concept Laws
Adrienne Lu, April 25, 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education
 New state laws and other actions limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about topics including race, racism, and sexuality typically apply to elementary and secondary schools. So professors, while often opposed to the laws, have largely remained unaffected. But at least one group of faculty members has felt a direct impact: those training teachers.Since 2021, more than a dozen states have passed laws — sometimes referred to as divisive-concept laws — or used other statewide actions such as executive orders to restrict how teachers discuss certain issues. Many draw language from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in 2020, which has since been revoked by President Biden. Faculty members at teacher colleges have had a unique perspective as the nation’s culture wars have shifted into classrooms, where many of their students work or soon will. Worried that the laws will have a chilling effect on teaching, some recommend their students consider the environment when they decide where to teach. They urge them to think creatively about how they can serve the needs of their pupils even under the constraints of the laws. And some have actively fought against the laws, testifying in statehouses against them or working to get higher education exempted from bills, and organizing faculty senates to pass resolutions opposing the laws.
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They Called Her “Black Jet"
Keisha N. Blain, April 28, 2022, The Atlantic
It is late evening on Tuesday, May 25, 1971, in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the small Delta town of Drew. A young Black woman stands on Union Street in a yellow dress. She is a teenager, thin, pretty, and dark-skinned, with straight black hair and thick bangs. At this moment, she is chatting with friends near Eddie’s and Susie’s Cafe, a popular hangout, at the end of a day of celebration.
A car is cruising down Union Street, toward the café. Inside are three white men who have been drinking beer by the quart. The driver’s window opens. A hand emerges, holding a .22-caliber pistol. There is only one shot, but it finds the young woman’s neck. The car drives off.
Joetha Collier was 18 when she died. She and her friends had gathered to celebrate her class’s graduation that day from Drew High School—a formerly all-white school that she had helped integrate. Joetha was heading to Mississippi Valley State, a historically Black college nearby, on a scholarship. She wanted to be a teacher. She wanted to help lift her family out of poverty, haul them out of Drew to someplace better. Graduation night was meant to be the beginning of her climb. As she fell to the pavement, newspapers reported, she was still clutching her high-school diploma.
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Harriet Tubman led military raids during the Civil War as well as her better-known slave rescues
Kate Clifford Larson, April 28, 2022, The Conversation
Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.
What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America. “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.” Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known. As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.
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Never the Same Step Twice
Brian Seibert, May 12, 2022, The New York Review
Brian Seibert reviews Brian Harker’s Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic
In a scene from the otherwise unremarkable 1937 Warner Brothers musical Varsity Show, the star, Dick Powell, finds some fraternity boys shirking their studies by watching the school’s Black janitor dance in the boiler room. Powell shoos them off, then tells the janitor, whom he calls “Bubbles,” to show him “that step you were teaching the kids.” Bubbles obliges—not with one step, but a slew of them. His swiveling, crossing feet scrape coal dust on the floor with the rhythmic phrasing of a great jazz drummer playing brushes. Here, and in the minute of dance brilliance before Powell’s entrance, Bubbles’s taps have the sound of surprise—hesitating, then pouncing in dense, crunchy clusters—without losing an easy swing. Through all this intricacy, he ambles, winds, and unwinds with a tossed-off nonchalance that’s echoed in his chuckling and snatches of song. This man in the cap labeled “janitor” is clearly one of the great dancers of his time or any other.
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Changes at Montpelier work against repairing the wounds of slavery
Stephen P. Hanna, Derek H. Alderman and Amy E. Potter, April 29, 2022, The Washington Post
 As scholars who have conducted research at Montpelier, we are saddened and angered by the Montpelier Foundation’s withdrawal from its power-sharing agreement with the Montpelier Descendants Committee as well as by the firing of dedicated and talented staff who worked diligently to tell a more inclusive account of American history. Plantation museums, including those dedicated to the nation’s first presidents, have been justly criticized for marginalizing, trivializing or even erasing enslavement from their presentations of history. Before these actions, Montpelier was at the forefront of efforts to have descendants of enslaved people reclaim their family histories and have a say in how their histories are interpreted for the public. Montpelier’s current leadership seemed to be withdrawing from this effort.continue
Announcements
Black Lives Matter: Lessons from a Global Movement
May 21, 2022 to May 22, 2022
Deadline for Submission: 10 May 2022
GIRES, the Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship and the Greenwood African American Studies Center (GAASC) wish to explore the phenomenon of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
The social media campaigns that transformed into one of the most important movements in the United States and sparkled racial justice protests across the globe. Black Lives Matter slogan became famous internationally and created a vast network of grass-roots organizations and a moral collective for activists and supporters social justice and equality.
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