Writing about how their time in Washington D.C. and at Howard University drew to a close in the early 1940s, Pauli Murray reflected on all the work they did, notably the 1943 sit-ins in the nation’s capital and how those sit-ins laid the foundations for the 1960s. Murray thinks about the tensions between their “urge toward kamikaze defiance of Jim Crow and the more … Read More Our Role in the Relay of “Cosmic Composition”
“And I wonder,” Angela Davis asked in a 2013 lecture at Birkbeck University in London, “will we ever truly recognize the collective subject of history that was itself produced by radical organizing?” The narratives we tell ourselves, the myths we construct, obscure the foundations and erase the stories of countless individuals and moments in history. We seek a clear path for our narratives, a … Read More The Voices That Carry Us Forward
Over the past few years, I have thought about various iterations of a Civil Rights memoir course. One example of this is the “Civil Rights Memoir” syllabus I posted about a year ago. Each of these syllabi seek to move students beyond thinking about the movement merely in relation to the “nine-word problem.” As I thought about this course more, I decided to focus it on … Read More Women In the Civil Rights Movement Memoir Syllabus
Interminable Rambling 