The Big Isms

  The House might pass a long-ignored bill to study reparations for slavery. Why now? Katherine Tate, March 23, 2022, The Washington Post The U.S. House of Representatives appears poised to pass a bill to establish a reparations commission, which John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) first introduced in 1989. Conyers regularly sponsored the bill — known as H.R. 40, for the “40 acres and a mule” promise made to formerly enslaved Black people by a Union general in 1865 — and usually got about 30 co-sponsors, mostly Black lawmakers. The bill never made it out of committee. After Conyers retired in 2017, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) took over the bill. In the last congressional session, she won more than 173 co-sponsors, including a sizable number of White Democrats. This round, the bill has 196 backers; the bill was voted out of committee in April 2021. What changed? Why is H.R. 40 suddenly passable? Several developments worked in the bill’s favor. Black lawmakers are now k

  Beyond Maryland’s efforts, there are increasing calls in the United States for national versions of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ways for the country to reckon with its history. The Booker-Lee proposal of a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission would look at 400 years of racial injustice . As Rep. Lee told Vox, the truth-telling commission is “critical for our democracy.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Reps. Sharice Davids (D-KS) and Tom Cole (R-OK) have reintroduced the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act to look at the country’s policies toward Indigenous families. Maryland’s commission may be a test case for how such an initiative could operate on the national level. As those involved in the committee said, it is a learning process, but one that has a fixed core: Nothing can happen without the truth. READ The impossible task of truth and reconciliation

  Who We Are  The Harlem Writers Guild was set up as a forum where African-American writers could develop their craft. After funding for an organization active in the late 1940's called The Committee for the Negro in the Arts ended, these writers felt excluded from the mainstream literary culture of New York. The Harlem Writers Guild (HWG) was also part of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's, and its rationale continues to be to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African diaspora. Other writers who have been associated with the HWG include Lonne Elder III, Douglas Turner Ward, Ossie Davis, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou and Sarah E. Wright. VISIT

 Virtual Symposium on the Legacies of Slavery (click) Please join the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale and our colleagues at the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) on the afternoons of April 5–7 for a virtual symposium devoted to the  Legacies of Slavery: Past, Present & Future .   The opening panel features four of the country’s most important thinkers about the problems of slavery and race in the public culture of the United States:  Lonnie G. Bunch III , secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture;  Edward Ayers , historian and president emeritus of the University of Richmond;  Elizabeth Hinton , associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a leading scholar on racial inequality, criminalization, and policing; and  David Blight , Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Fred

  Her Experience at Yale Unsettled Her. So She Wrote a Horror Film About Being Black in Academe. Oyin Adedoyin, March 17, 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education Mariama Diallo was walking the streets of New York City when she ran into a former professor of hers — a college “master” — from when she was an undergraduate at Yale University. Back then, the term “master” was a title used for the heads of residential colleges. Although Yale did away with the term in 2016, replacing it with “head of college,” Diallo was struck by how, almost instinctively, she referred to the familiar figure as “master,” as she had so many years before. “While I was a student it was, for the most part, normalized and just really accepted,” Diallo says. “In that moment it slapped me in the face how bizarre and sick and twisted the whole thing was.” continue   Biden’s push for an infrastructure presidency risks sacrificing Black communities N. D. B. Connolly, March 15, 2022, The Washington

  Commemorating Bloody Sunday at a crucial moment for civil rights Makaelah Walters, March 11, 2022, Facing South Thousands of people gathered in Alabama from March 3-6 to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the historic 1965 march from Selma to the capital of Montgomery for voting rights. The event was organized by the nonprofit Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, which was founded by spouses Hank and Rose Sanders, prominent attorneys and lifelong civil rights activists in Alabama. Hank Sanders served nine terms in the Alabama Senate and is running again this year. "I never thought that ‘not long' would have us marching from Selma to Montgomery in 2022, some 57 years later, fighting for the right to vote," Sanders said at a Zoom press conference ahead of the march, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King's speech  delivered on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol after the march was finally completed on March 25, 1965. continue   Redlining means 45 million A

  Jason R. Mancini, Ph.D ., Executive Director of CT Humanities, presents the program “Preserved on the Mighty Waters: Indians, Maritime Labor, and Communities of Color in Southern New England.”  This program was hosted by Otis Library in partnership with the Norwich Historical Society. This program was presented on February 23, 2022.   Over 9,000,000 acres of Indian Country in southern New England and Long Island were reduced to fewer than 30,000 acres by the American Revolution. Indians across the region adjusted in different ways to this rapidly changing world. One important and largely unseen shift involved the participation of Indian men in various forms of maritime labor – from shipbuilding to whaling.  This talk focuses on the hundreds of Indians – and other men of color – who found work in the customs district of New London and explores their “roots” and “routes,” the global social networks they formed, and their traveling histories from the objects they collected and stories t

  ‘Listen to what he said’: remembering and honoring the speeches of Frederick Douglass David Smith, 26 February 2022, The Guardian “I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me – do not recognise me as a man. I am not thought of or spoken of except as a piece of property. Now, in such a country as this I cannot have patriotism.” The words are spoken by The Harder They Fall actor Jonathan Majors, wearing a hoodie before a bare brick wall, at the opening of Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches, an HBO documentary that makes a case that the fugitive slave turned celebrity abolitionist was also one of America’s great prose poets. Sadly for the film-makers, no recordings of Douglass exist. But here a starry cast – Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Majors, Denzel Whitaker and Jeffrey Wright – conjure his spirit by performing excerpts from five speeches, each representing a 

By David Goodman | Mar 6 2022 Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, is chair of the committee that created a bill that apologizes for Vermont’s eugenics movement. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman  is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Listen below, and subscribe on  Apple Podcasts ,  Google Podcasts  or  Spotify  to hear more. In 2021 , the Vermont Legislature issued a long overdue  apology for   Vermont’s early 20th century state-sanctioned eugenics movement , which targeted Indigenous people and other groups. According to VTDigger, “The eugenics movement used forced sterilizations and other practices in an attempt to wipe out targeted populations who were deemed unfit to procreate, including Indigenous people, French Canadians, mixed-race people, people with disabilities and low-income f

‘Listen to what he said’: remembering and honoring the speeches of Frederick Douglass David Smith, 26 February 2022, The Guardian “I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me – do not recognise me as a man. I am not thought of or spoken of except as a piece of property. Now, in such a country as this I cannot have patriotism.” The words are spoken by The Harder They Fall actor Jonathan Majors, wearing a hoodie before a bare brick wall, at the opening of Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches, an HBO documentary that makes a case that the fugitive slave turned celebrity abolitionist was also one of America’s great prose poets. Sadly for the film-makers, no recordings of Douglass exist. But here a starry cast – Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Majors, Denzel Whitaker and Jeffrey Wright – conjure his spirit by performing excerpts from five speeches, each representing a d