Students will engage with:

Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave is a memoir of black born free in New York, but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. How does one retain one’s human dignity in such harrowing, degrading, and evil circumstances?

Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed: “Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people...the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And...the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history,[this book] illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view.” How do we reconcile and remember one of the worst evils in the history of the world?

Kendi and Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019 (excerpts): “This book is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.” Randall Jelks writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “This superbly edited book comes right on time in this unenlightened moment in US history and serves as a reminder of a different set of democrats who have creatively turned 400 years of painful, uplifting ugliness into beautiful Blackness, inspiring histories of lifelong democratic struggle to be an unshackled people. If I were a teenager today, I would carry it in my backpack.”