Projects

UWT Nonviolence Initiative

Faculty and community members are developing teaching, research, and community engagement projects aimed at reducing all forms of violence and developing the capacity of individuals and communities to bring about social justice through nonviolent movements for change. The Center's film, Love and Solidarity, provides an overview of how it can be done. Lectures on nonviolence by James Lawson at UWT in 2008 can be found here:

Love and Solidarity Film: James Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers' Rights. Click here to go to the film's website.

African American Financial Capability Initiative

The Tacoma Urban League and the University of Washington Tacoma Center for the Study of Community and Society have announced a collaborative effort to conduct local community research as part of the Northwest Area Foundation's African American Financial Capability (AAFC) Initiative. This project is centered within the Center's 2016 Research Theme of "Black Lives Matter" providing important research and analysis that addresses the crisis of the black working class, and poor and minority communities. Learn more here.

Tacoma Community History Project

The Center helped to develop this project through Prof. Michael Honey’s undergraduate and master’s courses in oral history and Justin Wadland’s work in the UWT library. The Puyallup Tribe provided a grant of $11,000 to digitize more than 60 oral histories that the UWT library now hosts online. We are working on a book project to publish oral histories of “Tacoma Native Voices.” We also develop History Links written projects based on our oral histories. Learn more here. “Twenty-Six Years of Greater Tacoma Oral Histories."

Learning from Martin Luther King and Social Movement History Project

Michael Honey is researching the life and thought of Rev. James Lawson, a close adviser to King and one of America’s most significant theorists and practitioners of nonviolent direct action, for a film contracted with the Fetzer Institute. Honey and Elizabeth Stevens are also researching the civil rights and civil liberties movements and efforts to free political prisoners, for a future book, tentatively titled, They Never Can Jail Us All: A Memoir of Southern Struggle, 1970-76. These are part of a series of research projects on labor and civil rights history in the South. Learn more here. Dr. Honey's most recent book, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, will be available April 2018.

The Center for the History of the New America

This project based at the University of Maryland aims to develop an understanding of the long immigration history of the U.S. from 1500 to the present, and is collecting oral histories of immigrants from all over the world. The Tacoma Community History Project has made several immigrant oral histories available and we plan to continue working in partnership to build a better understanding of of our multi-ethnic and multi-national past and present.

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