research post 2025-08-24
"The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work." - Toni Morrison
Riding back in time and into the future with the research post this week.
Do I need to really say slavery was a crime against humanity, an evil mark on our collective souls? Does that really need to be said? “So be it. See to it.” Douglass and Tubman rolling in their graves, though Tubman, I suspect, always knew freedom would be fragile. She raised funds for a home for the elderly, indigent, and orphan, after all. She never trusted the state to provide for us, to do what it is moral and just, ethical and reparative.
The pedagogies of the enslaved are what we need, now and always.
See the SOURCES section below to use for the work you make in the world: classrooms, workshops, protest signs. Whatever rabble rousing you had better be up to in this moment. As a comrade in the struggle shared with the K4BL team just a few weeks ago: “The time for individuality is done.” We need each other yesterday.
See also “End the Colonial Occupation of Washington D.C.: The People Demand Self-Determination and Self-Governance,” The Black Alliance for Peace, August 12, 2025, https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bapstatements/end-the-colonial-occupation-of-washington-dc.
Reads
Susana M. Morris, “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Fledgling,’” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3/4 (2012): 146–66.
Susana M. Morris, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025).
-Aaron Morrison et al., “Outcry over Racial Data Grows as Virus Slams Black Americans,” Health, PBS News, April 8, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/outcry-over-racial-data-grows-as-virus-slams-black-americans.
Al-Tony Gilmore, “Protests of a Different Color: HBCUs and the Student Protest Movements Against the War in the Middle East,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, June 20, 2024, https://jbhe.com/2024/06/protests-of-a-different-color-hbcus-and-the-student-protest-movements-against-the-israel-gaza-war/.
Marya McQuirter, “CCDI Celebrates Black History Month with Twitter Series | Of the People,” webpage, The Library of Congress, April 7, 2023, https://blogs.loc.gov/ofthepeople/2023/04/ccdi-celebrates-black-history-month-with-twitter-series.
Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, March 7, 2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle.
Evander Price, “So Long, Silent Sam! — An Obituary,” Monument Lab, January 29, 2019, https://monumentlab.com/bulletin/so-long-silent-sam-an-obituary.
“Julian Shakespeare Carr - Carr Building,” Names in Brick and Stone: Histories from UNC’s Built Landscape, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://unchistory.web.unc.edu/building-narratives/julian-shakespeare-carr-carr-building/. (Course Blog)
“Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 1, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy-3/.
Rachel Holt, Finding Black Female Authors in the Gale Women’s Studies Archive, Gale Publishers, October 5, 2021, https://review.gale.com/2021/10/05/black-female-authors-in-womens-studies-archive/.
Anita McGruder, “Alice Dunbar-Nelson” (Ph.D. diss., Lincoln University, 1977).
Miller, “An Unsung Legacy: The Work and Activism of Alice Dunbar-Nelson – Smithsonian Libraries and Archives / Unbound,” Smithsonian Blog, March 12, 2020, https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/03/12/an-unsung-legacy-the-work-and-activism-of-alice-dunbar-nelson/.
Black Officeholders in the South | Facing History & Ourselves (Facing History & Ourselves, 2016), https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/black-officeholders-south. (lots of data and resources here if you sign up, especially created for teachers!)
Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901, with Internet Archive (New York, Dial Press, 1954), http://archive.org/details/negroinamericanl0000loga.
Justin A. Nystrom, “Battle of Liberty Place,” 64 Parishes, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://64parishes.org/entry/battle-of-liberty-place.
Mark Roudané, “United for Justice,” 64 Parishes, September 1, 2020, https://64parishes.org/united-for-justice.
John Schmal, “Dual Identity: The Indigenous Peoples Who Occupy the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” Indigenous Mexico, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/dual-identity-the-indigenous-peoples-who-occupy-the-u-s-mexico-borderlands.
Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Harvard University Press, 2004).
June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights,” The Poetry Foundation, April 25, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48762/poem-about-my-rights.
Mary Niall Mitchell, “In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave,” Harper’s Magazine, February 27, 2014, https://harpers.org/2014/02/in-the-margins-of-twelve-years-a-slave/.
“February: An Exploration Into Black History,” MCLA Gallery 51, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://www.mcla.edu/mcla-in-the-community/bcrc/mcla-gallery-51/365-black-history/january.php.
50 Black Women Have Been Killed by the Police since 2015. Most of the Officers Who Shot Them Didn’t Face Consequences., n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://www.insider.com/black-women-killed-by-police-database-2021-6.
#SayHerName “IN MEMORIAM,” AAPF, accessed August 23, 2025, https://www.aapf.org/in-memoriam.
“About Us,” BLACK FEMINIST FUTURE, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://blackfeministfuture.org/about-us/.
“END THE WAR ON BLACK WOMEN,” M4BL, n.d., accessed August 23, 2025, https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-black-women/.
“Fatal Violence Against the Transgender Community in 2016,” HRC, accessed August 23, 2025, https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2016.
B. Chew et al., “Tales from the Chew Family Papers: The Charity Castle Story,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 132, no. 1 (2008): 65–86.
Emily A. Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
Elizabeth N. Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
“Universities as Political Battlegrounds, A Call for Courage,” Scholars For Social Justice, accessed June 13, 2025, https://www.scholarsforsocialjustice.com/universities-as-political-battlegrounds.
Barbara Smith, Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition: A Black Feminist Anthology (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
Ismael García-Colón and Edwin Meléndez, “Enduring Migration: Puerto Rican Workers on US Farms.,” Centro Journal 25, no. 2 (2013)
Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins, New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana‘s First City Government, 1769-1803 (LSU Press, 1996).
Edgardo Meléndez, “Puerto Rican Migration, the Colonial State and Transnationalism,” Centro Journal 23, no. 11 (2015).
Michael P Gueno, “Puerto Rico Revolt (1527),” in Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Greenwood Press, 2007).
Odile Ferly, “Chronotopal Slave Ships, Corporeal Archives: Devoir de Mémoire in Fabienne Kanor’s Humus and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s Las Negras,” in Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime, ed. Odile Ferly and Tegan Zimmerman (Springer International Publishing, 2023)
Kimberly Bain, “HOLD: SPACE,” Differences 35, no. 2 (2024): 109–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11259640.
Quinn Dombrowski et al., DIY Web Archiving Zine (Zine Bakery Shop, 2025).
Andrea Livesey, Voices of the Formerly Enslaved in Louisiana: The WPA Narratives (LSU Press, 2025).
David Akbar Gilliam, “Mother Africa and la Abuela Puertorriqueña: Francisco Arriví, Rosario Ferré, and the Ambiguity of Race in the Puerto Rican Family Tradition,” Afro-Hispanic Review 24, no. 2 (2005): 57–70.
Nnedi Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy,” African Identities 7, no. 2 (2009): 275–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808967.
Diana Roy and Amelia Cheatham, Puerto Rico: A U.S. Territory in Crisis | Council on Foreign Relations (2025), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/puerto-rico-us-territory-crisis.
Agustín Lào-Montes, “La Filosofía de La Liberación y Sus Avatares Descoloniales En Clave de Africanía,” Analysis. Claves de Pensamiento Contemporáneo 20 (2017): 5-pp.
Tony Castanha, “Adventures in Indigenous Caribbean Resistance, Survival, and Continuity in Borikén (Puerto Rico),” Wicazo Sa Review 25, no. 2 (2010): 29–64.
Sources
Since we live an age of even more pressure to misinform and misread; separating out primary sources and raw material of history from the interpretation of it from now on. Also useful for any of those teaching and looking for things to use in class, or organizing workshops and looking for things to create conversations with.
Bethany Veney, The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman, with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Library (Worcester, Mass. [s.n.], 1889), http://archive.org/details/narrativeofbetha00vene.
“Julian Carr’s Speech at the Dedication of Silent Sam,” Hillary N. Green, Ph.D., June 26, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20200626002355/http://hgreen.people.ua.edu/transcription-carr-speech.html.
John Williamson Palmer, Old Maryland Homes And Ways by Palmer, John Williamson |... (The Century Company, 1894) (source of the Juba dance image in this post)
Projects
Archivo Negro x Revista étnica - La Prietura series
Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, https://www.descendants.org/who-we-are.
“Sylvanie Francoz Williams · Voices of Progress · The Historic New Orleans Collection - Digital Exhibits,” accessed August 23, 2025, https://vop.omeka.net/exhibits/show/voices-of-progress/advocating-for-all--nineteenth/sylvanie-francoz-williams.
