At the University of North Carolina, Chancellor Carol Folt resigns her position, two weeks after approving the removal of what remained of the “Silent Sam” statue.
What do the worlds of fashion and speculative fiction have to do with nonprofits? Well, our sector has its own version of black tchotchkes—black people as clients and victims, not partners for a more human future for all. The exploitation of powerless identity narratives drives us still.
In Florence, Alabama, a local social justice nonprofit seeks to lift up the memory of Dred Scott, proposing a statue that honors him and his wife be placed in front of the county courthouse building.
Good leadership is situational. Sometimes consensus is called for, but what if the institution’s consensus is governed by a non-representative group of overseers? Sometimes, you may just have to step out in front and risk something.
On the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill, a statue that was gifted to the university by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913 came down.
Opened last month, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama spotlights the nation’s history of violent racism. Telling the stories of men, women, and children killed because they were black, the Memorial asks us to reflect on how we have allowed this brutality to go on and have looked the other way.
This week, Tennessee lawmakers withdrew funding for the Memphis’ bicentennial celebration as punishment for the city’s removal of two Confederate statues from a public park without the legislature’s approval. But residents of the city, who supported the removal in the first place, have largely replaced the money through crowdfunding, exerting ownership over their own history.
Teaching history by preserving infamous physical spaces from Germany to California.
The San Francisco arts commission, after getting approval from the city’s historic preservation committee, voted unanimously to remove a statue that had depicted the degradation and genocide of American Indians. The statue has been prominently displayed on city land since 1894.
It is understandable that US educators often prefer to teach a sanitized version of slavery. The truth, after all, is painful. But ignorance is not bliss. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass would surely remind us, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
