IN THE NEWS! #BigIsms #BLM #FRancisScottKey #HistoryWars
Black Lives Matter, She Wrote. Then ‘Everything Just Imploded.’
Erica L. Green, October 10, 2021, The New York Times
CENTREVILLE, Md. — When Andrea Kane sat down to write a letter to
parents in her school district days after George Floyd’s death in 2020,
images of the Black man pleading for his life under the knee of a white
Minnesota police officer were haunting her.
Dr. Kane, the superintendent, saw him in the faces of Black students in
her district and heard him crying out for his mother when she spoke to
her own sons. So she started her letter with a warning that it would
bear not just “good news,” but “a bit of a reality check.”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the high-performing district on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland had closed out the year with much to be proud
of. But like the rest of the country, Dr. Kane said, the community had
another crisis to confront.
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Francis Scott Key: One of the anti-slavery movement’s great villains
Bennett Parten, September 29, 2021, The Conversation
The history wars – the battle over how we teach our country’s past – are raging.
The United States is confronting the legacies of slavery as never
before. This national reconsideration has been prompted by police
killings of unarmed Black men and The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reexamines the history of slavery in the U.S.
Outcries from conservatives over legal scholarship known as critical
race theory, the premise that racism is systemic in U.S institutions,
have also added fuel to the national debate.
And that is revealing some of the deepest contradictions in our history.
As a U.S. historian, I think few people embody those contradictions like
the author of the country’s national anthem, Francis Scott Key.
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Yale Center for British Art tries to identify enslaved Black child in 18th-century portrait of an early university benefactor
Nancy Kenney, 6 October 2021, The Art Newspaper
A year ago this month, when it was still closed to the public because of
the pandemic, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) took a major step
toward interrogating a controversial 18th-century group portrait in its
collection centering on an early benefactor to the university, Elihu
Yale. Responding to pointed criticism of the painting’s subject from
students and others, it removed the work from a gallery wall, replacing
it with a pointed critique by the African American painter and sculptor
Titus Kaphar.
Around the same time, the museum embarked on exhaustive research on the
portrait, which is now dated to around 1719 and was presumably painted
at Elihu Yale’s house in London. Foremost on the research team’s minds
was the identity of an enslaved boy of African descent depicted in the
work, who has poured madeira into glasses for the American-born
philanthropist and three other privileged white men gathered around
a table.
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‘It feels like the start of something’: Reginald Dwayne Betts on his groundbreaking prison library project
Adrian Horton, 8 October 2021, The Guardian
When Reginald Dwayne Betts fell in love with poetry as a young man, his
reading options were limited. He could not spend aimless hours in the
library, nor have access to boundless titles, nor browse shelves at
will. Convicted at 16, in 1997, of carjacking with a pistol in
Fairfax county, Virginia, Betts was serving eight years in prison when
an unknown person slipped a copy of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets
under his cell door.
The book opened his mind, showed him things he didn’t know were
possible. It provided the entryway to a writing practice, a portal to a
world outside his cell, a model to envision a future beyond prison.
Betts, now 40, a Yale-trained lawyer and a recipient last month of the
prestigious MacArthur “genius grant”, now endeavors to
offer incarcerated people a similar experience with 1,000
micro-libraries in prisons across the country through his
non-profit, Freedom Reads.
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Monument to ‘Mothers of Gynecology’ unveiled in Montgomery
Dennis Pillion, September 27, 2021, Alabama.com
19th century Montgomery physician J. Marion Sims is often credited as
the father of modern gynecology for developing new tools and techniques
for women’s health that are still used today.
Often overlooked are the enslaved Black women he experimented on -- without consent or anesthesia -- to make those advancements.
A new monument unveiled Friday in Montgomery aims to tell the other side
of the Sims story by honoring the “Mothers of Gynecology,” -- Anarcha,
Lucy and Betsey, three of eleven enslaved women who were the unwilling
subjects of Sims’ experiments in the 1840s.
The statues stand almost 15 feet high and were welded together by
Montgomery artist and activist Michelle Browder. They were unveiled
Friday afternoon at a ceremony at the More Up Campus on Mildred Street.
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Birmingham's shameful links to slavery uncovered by academic (Podcast)
Society Matters podcast series, 6 October 2021, Alton University, Birmingham, UK
A research project that examines digital archives around slavery and its
subsequent abolition has revealed Birmingham's past involvement in the
shameful trade.
The studies led by Dr Joseph Yannielli, a lecturer in history at Aston
University, show how the 'workshop of the world', as Birmingham was
known, contributed to the global slave trade during the 18th and 19th
centuries.
Dr Yannielli spoke about his research in the latest episode of the
'Society matters' podcast series, presented by journalist Steve Dyson.
The Enduring Influence of Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Advocate
Jill Watts, October 5, 2021, The New York Times
Jill Watts reviews UNTIL I AM FREE:
Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, by Keisha N. Blain, and
WALK WITH ME: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, by Kate Clifford Larson.
On Aug. 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper
from Mississippi, took her place before the credentials committee at
the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. She was there
to challenge her home state’s attempt to seat an all-white delegation.
On that sweltering day, in front of television cameras, Hamer proceeded
to recount her efforts to register to vote in a state that historically
had denied Black citizens the right to do so.
Almost two years before, she said, she had journeyed 26 miles by bus to a
distant courthouse to take the state’s required literacy
test. Afterward, she and the group of Black citizens she was
traveling with were detained by the police — an apparent attempt
to intimidate them — and when she arrived home, she found that her white
landlord, incensed over her determination to register, was evicting her
from the farm where she worked. The following June, she went on, as she
returned from a voter registration workshop, authorities in Winona,
Miss., arrested her and her traveling companions. Hamer told the
credentials committee of being restrained, beaten with a blackjack and
sexually assaulted by the police. “Is this America,” she asked boldly,
“the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep
with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily,
because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
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Ellen and William Craft: Blue plaque for abolitionists who fled slavery
Joseph Lee, October 5, 2021, BBC News
A black married couple who escaped slavery in the US and fled to England to campaign for abolition have been honoured with a blue plaque.
Ellen and William Craft travelled 1,000 miles from Georgia to freedom in the north, with Ellen disguised as a white man and William as her servant.
When new laws meant they could be recaptured by their enslavers, they escaped to the UK.
After their arrival they lectured on abolition, reform and social justice.
One of the most brutal aspects of the US system of slavery was used by the Crafts to aid their daring escape in 1848.
Like many enslaved people, Ellen was conceived when her mother was raped by the white man who owned her.
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