Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin

Professor, City College of San Francisco

"Aliyah is a model of what the school-to-liberation pipeline can look like. As a young person coming up in the Bay Area, she journeyed through her time as a student at CCSF and SFSU, her eventual professorship in the Social Studies Program and now, as African American Studies Department Chair at CCSF, Aliyah has pushed back and through barriers to become an educator to her own community and supported MANY others, including her own family and our Peer Leader alumni, to do the same. Throughout her time at CCSF as a student and after graduating, she worked directly with students as a peer educator, tutor and changemaker, always consciously illustrating how historical knowledge of self and community knowledge increases power."

Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin is a civil rights advocate and current Department Chair of African American Studies at City College of San Francisco. Aliyah is currently professor of American and African-American History. Her research and teaching are centered around race and ethnic relations, and the African-American experience in the United States. Her current research is centered around the 1966 San Francisco Uprising in Bay View Hunters Point as well as dance as a form of arts activism. Aliyah graduated from San Francisco State University in 2008, with a Masters of Arts in American History and a minor in Dance. She has worked extensively within the San Francisco community in schools, community organizations, supportive living communities, and colleges/universities. Aliyah is a contributing author in the upcoming anthology, The Strange Career of the Jim Crow North, scheduled for release in March of 2019. In the Fall of 2019 Aliyah will be entering Stanford University to pursue a Doctorate in History, so she can document the African-American freedom struggle in the Bay Area as well as civil rights history.

"I grew up in San Francisco and was raised by a single mom and a self-affirming village of strong grassroots community organizers. At age 13, in a program called Youth In Action, I learned to plan and implement community service projects. As a girl, I went to Aunt B Park in Hunters Point and took dance classes, learned to sew, and could always get a warm hug from Aunt B. My life was saved by people who took the time to invest in me. As James Baldwin has stated, there comes a time when you have found some sense of success that one must "pay their dues." I wanted to be that turn around person for someone, who like me decades ago, was trying to find peace, stability, support, community, and love in the chaos of the urban reality that I was born into. I want to show the youth and people I work with that no matter where you start, we already have the tools we need to change our lives and the answers we seek within us. Through the writing of history, I hope to preserve and validate the experiences of those, who are displaced and made invisible. No matter the hat I'm wearing, whether that be a college teacher, community organizer, after-school tutor, mentor, or dance instructor, I hope to help people find the power and knowledge that already exist inside themselves; knowledge and wisdom carved into their inner being like constellations in the night sky. A north star embedded in our DNA."