The Big Isms

Legacies of Slavery: A Resource Book for Managers of Sites and Itineraries of Memory UNESCO This resource book is designed for managers of sites and itineraries of memory related to the slave trade and slavery. It provides a comparative analysis of experiences in the preservation and promotion of such sites across the world and proposes practical guidance for their management and development. It is the first resource book on this specific issue to be published by a UN agency, and provides guidelines on how best to preserve, promote and manage sites of memory, taking into account the sensitivity of this painful memory. Designed in two parts, the resource book contains conceptual and practical information for managers. It also showcases more than 50 concrete examples of sites, itineraries and museums implementing particular strategies for the preservation, promotion and interpretation of heritage related to the slave trade and slavery. Moreover, it offers advice a

Katrina After 10 (video)   Poetry Performance by Sunni Patterson, New Orleans poet and activist October 1, 2015, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), Brown University This symposium marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in Orleans, and brought together artists and activists to discuss critical issues such as structural and environmental racism, gender discrimination, mass incarceration, education and privatization, as well as the history and future of social movements in the city. October 1, 2015 Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA)

After the Flood Recedes David W. Blight, April 26, 2020, The Atlantic Those with power who are planning our resurgence from the coronavirus need imagination and, above all, the humility of a long view of the human drama. To buoy myself one recent morning, after reading so much bad news, I did what the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass had done at an earlier moment of crisis: I sat and reread the Book of Genesis. One of the most profound rebirths, at least in spiritual and literary terms, occurs in the first eight chapters of that oldest story of all. All over our culture and in journalism right now, we are encountering metaphors of renewal, revival, restoration, and rebirth. For a host of historical reasons, Americans borrowed the grand idea of rebirth after destruction and then made it their own. Some narratives of renewal are constructed with an authentic sense of tragedy, an understanding that in our nature is the capacity for great good and great evil. The

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (video) Aired April 9, 2019, PBS The aftermath of the Civil War was bewildering, exhilarating . . . and terrifying. African Americans had played a crucial role in saving the Union and now, as the country grappled with the terms and implications of Reconstruction, they struggled to breathe life into their hard-won freedom. The result was a second American Revolution. continue

The pathology of American racism is making the pathology of the coronavirus worse Stacey Patton, April 11, 2020, The Washington Post Black America is ground zero for covid-19. Alarming health department statistics from cities and counties in the Carolinas, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Wisconsin show that black people are getting sicker and dying at higher rates from the novel coronavirus than white people. Although the federal government hasn’t yet released data on the pandemic and race, the disparity looks likely to be a national trend, exacerbated by a combination of biased white doctors, black people’s well-documented distrust of the medical community and the failure to aggregate and properly report out data on the sick and dying. Even President Trump has noticed. “Why is it that the African American community is so much, you know, numerous times more than everybody else?” he asked on Tuesday, adding: “It doesn’t make sense, and I

Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression David W. Blight, April 11, 2020, The New York Times On March 30, the Republican id burst forth when President Trump said that the latest congressional stimulus bill “had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Two days later, the Republican House speaker in Georgia, David Ralston, admitted that an expansion of absentee voting would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.” And on April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court refused, in a 5-to-4 ruling, to allow additional days for absentee voting in the Wisconsin primary. For years, Wisconsin Republicans have demonstrated that they will do anything to gerrymander and restrict access to voting to stay in power, including now asking citizens to risk their health to vote. Someone should ask Mr. Ralston and the conservative legislators and judges in Wisconsin what they are con

Black people are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates because racism is a preexisting condition. https://t.co/EMsU1NWHXd — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 10, 2020 #BloodOnTheirHands https://t.co/HyhWfkKCmI — Trace kalala Hentz (@StonePony33) April 10, 2020

Wilmington on Fire "Wilmington on Fire" is a feature-length documentary that chronicles The Wilmington Massacre of 1898. The Wilmington Massacre of 1898 was a bloody attack on the African-American community by a heavily armed white mob with the support of the North Carolina Democratic Party on November 10, 1898 in the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina. It is considered one of the only successful examples of a violent overthrow of an existing government and left countless numbers of African-Americans dead and exiled from the city. This event was the spring board for the White Supremacy movement and Jim Crow segregation throughout the state of North Carolina and the American South. This incident has been barely mentioned and has been omitted from most history books . It was not until 2006, after the North Carolina General Assembly published a report on it, that the tragedy became known to the general public.

Beloved community, The night before he was brutally shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point...either we go up together or we go down together.” Fifty two years later, in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic and the poverty that preceded it, and is now deepening and spreading because of it, the truth of this statement still reverberates. Epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only the biology of the infectious agent, but patterns of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination. We are seeing that our society is only as healthy as our sickest person, our country is only as secure as the least secure homeless family, low-wage worker, indebted student, or uninsured person. Times such as these require that we come together in bold, new ways and build a moral fusion movement that has everybody in, nobody out.