Did you enjoy the beautiful 61° weather yesterday? Unbelievable for February in Michigan, right? How are our strange weather patterns linked to climate change? What do you know about environmental and climate justice? This repost story was written by our Director of Environmental Studies, Dr. Binney Girdler, and is about Dr. Robert Bullard the “father of environmental studies.”
Dear friends, this is the second re-sharing of a 19: This Month in Black History story Lisa Brock and I wrote in January 2021.
This story is about the Devine Nine – a nickname used to speak of the nine historically Black Greek Organizations originally created at a time in US history when higher education for Blacks was inhibited by racism & discrimination – this story, however, has a specific focus on sororities; you will see why. If interested in learning more, this short YouTube video will help you better understand the Devine Nine’s history. Please set aside your views of the current US administration and of Vice-President Kamala Harris herself, and read this story. It highlights the resilience of a people in this country, that despite all odds, have overcome and thrived.
It’s hard for me to believe that it is already February, and I am excited that it is a leap year because we get 29 days to celebrate Black history. To begin the celebration I am posting the 19: This Month in Black History story Lisa Brock and I wrote in 2020. Just an FYI, I will post a different one of these stories every Thursday for the rest of February. Enjoy!
By Dr. Lisa Brock (conceptual and editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)
Many people in the United States, in some way, participate in celebrating Black History Month. How many people, however, know the catalyst of this ritual? This February’s post is in honor of the man who founded what was first Black History Week, which then became Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950).
Carter G. Woodson was born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, to formerly enslaved African Americans, James and Eliza Riddle Woodson. As a child, like many of his time, he worked as a sharecropper, a coal miner and various other jobs to help support his large family. Because of a lack of opportunity, he entered high school late, but according to all of his teachers, he was so bright that he graduated in only two years. He then attended Berea College in Kentucky, and while there, taught at Winona, Fayette County, WV in a school established by Black coal miners for their children. (Yes, there were and still are Black coal miners). Woodson continued his education at the University of Chicago, where in 1908 he earned two bachelor’s degrees as well as a Master’s degree in European History. Woodson also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1912 earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University in history. Woodson was the second African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University; Dr. W. E. B. DuBois was the first to achieve this in 1907.
In the summer of 1915 thousands of African-Americans traveled to Chicago from around the country to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. This major celebration showcasing African-Americans’ progress and achievements after the end of enslavement was held at the Chicago Coliseum. According to records, at one point, an overflow crowd of six to twelve thousand waited outside for their turn to view the exhibits. This event spurred Woodson to begin the work towards honoring Black History. Inspired by the three-week celebration, before he left Chicago he decided to form an organization to promote the academic study of Black life and history. On September 9, 1915, Woodson met with other Black intellectuals at the Wabash YMCA in Chicago and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). One year later the organization established the Journal of Negro History.
Woodson, though, understood that if they were going to promote and popularize the history of African-Americans that they needed greater impact beyond the journal. He urged Black civic organizations to promote the journal and the achievements that researchers were uncovering. As a graduate member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he urged his brothers to take up the work, and in February of 1924, they created the Negro History and Literature Week.
From the beginning, Woodson found a huge response to his call. Negro History and Literature Week appeared across the country in Black schools, churches and popular spaces. The 1920s, after all, was the decade of Marcus Garvey’s Black Pride Parades, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Negro, a name given to the Post-War I generation because of its rising racial pride and consciousness. Urbanization and industrialization had brought over a million African Americans from the rural South into big cities of the nation, which became centers of expanding literacy and confidence. The expanding Black working and middle classes became participants in and consumers of Black literature and culture. Black history clubs sprang up and teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils. Even some progressive whites endorsed the efforts.
It is interesting to note that Woodson’s first inspiration for the study of Black History was actually based on his experience in the Philippines. How you might ask did Woodson get to the Philipines? The US government, in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, decided to use some African-Americans in their colonial territories. Woodson, because of his accomplishments, was sent to the Archipelago in 1903 to work as an education superintendent. He quickly became concerned that the learning materials he had been given focused on European and White American history and he worried that this would have a negative effect on the confidence and sense of self of the Filipino people. After this experience he returned to the US determined to change the experiences for African-Americans. In fact, although he is the author of over a dozen books, his most well-known work is The Mis-education of the Negro . This text is still in publication today and is a grounding text for how the silences and erasures of Black History can have a negative effect on Black people.
Carter G. Woodson died in 1950 but his legacy lives on. Honored as the Father of Black History, the organization and journal that he founded continue to thrive and are known today as The Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (which still conducts an annual conference) and the Journal of African-American History. And oh yes, of course, we now celebrate Black History Month during the month of February!
Let’s celebrate Black history today and every day!
Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry
Lisa Brock, retired, ACSJL Academic Director & Professor of History
Juneteenth – It’s Time to Celebrate
by Drs. Lisa Brock and Regina Stevens-Truss
This month we’re taking it back to the inaugural year of the 19 stories. This 19 story was released to the Kalamazoo College community on June 19th, 2021.
Breaking News – AP: “The Senate passed a bill Tuesday [June 15, 2021] that would make Juneteenth, or June 19th, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.”
Breaking News – NPR: “The Democratic-led House of Representatives on Wednesday [June 16, 2021] easily approved legislation to commemorate Juneteenth, the national remembrance of the end of chattel slavery in the United States, as a federal holiday.”
Breaking News – TWP: on June 17, 2021, President Biden signs into federal law that June 19 will forever be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day! “Great nations don’t ignore the most painful moments. They don’t ignore those moments in the past. They embrace them” stated President Biden in his remarks.
What a GLORIOUS week this has been! Before this year, however, if we had to guess, maybe 20% of the Kalamazoo College community knew what Juneteenth meant, and even less than that knew where the name came from. So, this Month in Black History story is dedicated (1) to K and the nation celebrating Juneteenth, (2) to everyone understanding why it is especially important that the nation will be celebrating it, and (3) to introduce you to what’s next for these monthly posts. Please read Lisa Brock’s keynote address given on Wednesday, June 16th during K’s inaugural Black Joy Week.
Juneteenth is a mashup of June and nineteen as a commemoration of the official day, June 19, 1865, when the last slaves in the USA were emancipated in Texas, and is considered the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Many African-Americans have for years celebrated Juneteenth (or Emancipation Day), something that began in Texas because on June 19, 1865 Union Major-General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 to the people of Galveston which, in all honesty, lacked the joy that Blacks must have felt. It stated:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Juneteenth has been a quiet holiday among African-Americans, but has been gaining in popularity over the years in many communities, not just in the Black community.
It is important to note that the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, freed the enslaved. However, several southern states that voted to secede from the Union were still battling the northern and pacific states in the Civil War (which ran from April 12, 1861 to May 9, 1865) in efforts to maintain slavery and form the “Confederate States of America.” Lincoln’s proclamation also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union (United States) control during the war. Thus, the system of enslavement was a negotiating tool used by President Lincoln to end the Civil War. It is difficult to imagine that the freedom promised in the Emancipation Proclamation depended upon a Union military victory. On January 31, 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, outlawing enslavement, but Section 1 of the Amendment states:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
To understand how this clause of the 13th Amendment has contributed to racist penal policies and the Prison Industrial Complex of today, see Slavery By Another Name and Thirteenth, a Netflix documentary. Because many southern states refused to implement the new law, it was not until the end of the last battle of the Civil War in April of 1865 that the north claimed victory and the enslaved could begin to experience their new dispensation. Such was the situation in Texas.
So, this June marks the first time ever that Kalamazoo College is acknowledging Juneteenth and will, from here on, celebrate it during our annual Black Joy Week. This celebration has actually been in the cards for Kalamazoo College since June 19, 1861 when the College’s first Black student, Rufus Lewis Perry (a former enslaved person), graduated from the College’s Theological Seminary (check out the 1861 graduation program here).
A note from Lisa – “This is my last 19 Essay. Please welcome the new writer of the 19 Series, who will begin writing the monthly column in September, 2021. Dr. Pamela Brooks is an associate professor of African-American and African Studies at Oberlin College (please see Dr. Brooks on Juneteenth).”
A note from Regina – “It’s been an honor to work with Lisa on the first year of the 19 Series, and I look forward to working with Dr. Brooks next year. We did not imagine the impact and reach that these stories would have, and we have been delighted with the interest in them we’ve experienced. In July and August, I will post special short issues – so look for those. Also, starting in September 2021 the BAFSA will begin a video stories project called “We are not a Monolith: Stories from the Diaspora.” Have a great summer, get some rest, and rejuvenate.”
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As we conclude our inaugural year of these stories, we would like to remind our community that these messages have been a collaboration of the ACSJL and the HHMI Inclusive Excellence team aimed at educating the K community on African-American history and culture as we continue to work towards being an anti-racist Institution. The number 19 marks multiple important dates in the lives of Blacks in the USA – 1619 being the year in which the first set of African slaves were brought to what would become the United States, and June 19, 1865, marking the day that Blacks celebrate the end of enslavement in the US.
We need to know our history, we need to teach our history, we need to remember our history.
Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry
Lisa Brock, retired, ACSJL Academic Director & Professor of History
by Dr. Quincy Thomas, Assistant Professor of Theatre (editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry)
The Nation celebrates Black History this month and every February – “Happy Black History Month” to all. Every February, for 28 to 29 days on a good year, the many contributions of Black Americans is highlighted and featured in many settings – so glad that at K we do this every month.
“Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” (2014); “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” (1996); “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (1984); “The Wiz” (1975); these are but a few of the offerings by Black theatre practitioners that, to this day, stand as a testament to artistic excellence within musical theatre’s historical canon. All of these stories speak to the eternal struggles that are all too well known within the Black community. They possess themes and messages that for far too long have resonated throughout the diaspora. But while today, in 2023, many appreciate current day Black art and performance, we would be remiss if we did not take time to track the harrowing paving of a path that has allowed shows such as Hamilton (2015) to even be seen beneath the garish lights of Broadway – this is the story of George Walker and Bert Williams.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Broadway was for many, as it is today, synonymous with quality and commercialism. Black theatre practitioner longed to have their faces caressed by the spotlight of a Broadway stage, as so many practitioners still do, whether they want to admit it or not. For Black theatre practitioners however, entry into this homogenized “Mecca” was nigh impossible, even in the minstrel era.
Minstrel shows were a wildly popular form of American entertainment that were built upon themes of racial stereotype that have endured to this day. In order to tell these stories of ignorant, lazy, and clumsy people of African descent, White actors would blacken their faces with makeup and perform in a show that moved through a three-part structure, beginning with jokes and songs, transitioning to comical skits and monologues, and ending with political critique and parodies of classical literary pieces or current events. This uniquely American form of theatre brought unfavorable representations of Blackness to Broadway’s stages.
The popularity and longevity of the minstrel show was a rallying cry for many Black American nineteenth and twentieth century artists who sought to upturn Broadway’s racist constructions of Blackness. There are, of course, the names that we know—the Harlem Renaissance magic of the poet Langston Hughes (1902-67), and the timeless power of playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65). But few know of George Walker (1873-1911) and Bert Williams (1874-1922), two performers to whom Black actors, such as myself, owe an unpayable debt.
George Walker grew up in Kansas, watching his family perform in minstrel shows, thus exposing him to the popular entertainment at an early age. As he grew older, Walker moved all about the U.S., utilizing his skills in acting, comedic facial contortions, singing, and playing both instruments and dried animal bones. These talents, standards in the minstrel performer’s toolbelt, he put to use on the back of wagons owned by snake-oil salesmen and charlatans, as well as in minstrel shows.
The Nassau, Bahamas born Bert Williams spent his early years migrating with his Danish father and his mother, who was of Spanish and African ancestry. By the time Williams and his family landed in California, his dream was to be an engineering student at Stanford University, but financial woes forced him to seek out more immediate ways to make money. He started a small touring minstrel company, in which he was the only Black man, and as such, he traveled the West Coast. Williams, a fast-footed physical comedian, did not find success with his own troupe and, in 1893, he found himself in San Francisco, where he met George Walker.
Together the duo crafted fast-moving song and dance numbers and crowd-pleasing comedic skits. They performed from Los Angeles to Denver and eventually in New York City. When they weren’t working, they would go to minstrel shows with White casts and observed the banal and uneducated portrayals of Blackness. In the essay, Early Black Americans on Broadway, Monica White Ndounou gives readers a glimpse into Walker’s plan to address the reappropriation of Black representation on vaudevillian stages:
“We thought there seemed to be a great demand for Black faces on the stage, we would do all we could to get what we felt belonged to us to us by the laws of nature. We finally decided that as when men with Black faces were billing themselves as ‘coons,’ Williams and Walker would do well to bill themselves the Two Real Coons.”
White men in blackface could not capture authentic Blackness in the ways that two men of African descent could, but this meant that Williams and Walker were forced to prop up the same damning stereotypes that they themselves were fighting to overturn. As they fought to carve out a place dedicated to Black comedy in Eurocentric spaces, both Williams and Walker were forced to deal with the racial terrorism brought on by white audience members and white performers, terrorism that often turned violent. Despite this, both men continued to do the life-threatening work and, in 1896, they were cast in The Gold Bug, making them the first Black Americans on Broadway. While leading the way for Black performers in the late nineteenth century, Williams and Walker produced seven original works that spoke to issues of African language, political satire, and colonization, and they told these stories through the usage of comic opera, the infusion of African themes into American performance tropes, and musical theatre.
The legacy of these two men, the safety that they sacrificed and the emotional and mental weight that they carried in order to do what they loved to do, lies before Black actors today. The history of Black Theatre is one of a roughly hewn path, strewn with blood, tears, joys, and excellence of many beautiful men and women on whose backs many profited from hatred.
This is something that I think about every time I’m allowed to interact with and on the stage, and it is something for which I am eternally thankful – as should we all be.
Additional information about Williams & Walker can be found at:
Questions regarding this story – contact Dr. Quincy Thomas (Quincy.Thomas@kzoo.edu); for questions about the 19 stories, especially if interested in submitting a story – contact Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss (Regina.Stevens-Truss@kzoo.edu)
Written by Dr. James Lewis, Professor of History (editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)
“OK, you would have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of the current political discourse regarding banning American History books from K-12 schools – and burning them! The fight for representation and true American history teaching, however, is not new and has roots in Michigan!”
R. Stevens-Truss
On Tuesday, November 27, 1962, Richard Henry, the president of Detroit’s Group On Advanced Leadership (GOAL) and the father of an eighth grader at Durfee Junior High, announced: “I’ll go to jail before I allow my son to return to a history class in which these objectionable text books are being used.” His strong stance was an emotional climax in an ongoing battle between GOAL and the Detroit School Board over the coverage–and, more frequently, simply the omission–of Black people and Black history from the books required in the city’s primary and secondary school classes. GOAL had raised this issue in the spring, as part of a larger challenge to the school board to address discrimination against Black students in terms of access to vocational training programs and guidance counseling and Black adults in terms of hiring. The school board’s initial response about the textbooks was that better books were not being adopted simply because they did not exist.
In large measure, that assessment was correct. It was not that historians did not know better. Even by the early 1960s, academic historians were already revising and overturning old myths about slavery, Reconstruction, and Black life, often following the lead of Black scholars such as W. E. B. DuBois, Carter Woodson, and John Hope Franklin. But that work had made little impact on primary and secondary school history texts. These texts continued to present slavery as benign and enslaved people as happy with their lot in life (which was often described as easier than that of the northern working class) and Black empowerment in the Reconstruction Era South as misguided and disastrous. The explanation for the disconnect, not only between what happened and what the textbooks said had happened, but even between what scholars were saying had happened and what made it into textbooks arose from the confluence of the profit seeking of textbook publishers and the white supremacism of Southern adoption boards. Textbook publishers wanted to be able to sell their products nationally, pitching the same product to as many potential adopters as possible. The white Southerners who made adoption decisions, whether on the state or the district level, insisted on a version of U.S. history that left little room for Blacks at all and slotted them into acceptable accounts of slavery and Reconstruction when they had to be included. Outside of the South, states and districts had merely chosen from among the available options.
There had been Black activism around school textbooks long before GOAL took up the issue in 1962, by Black educators and organizations and in northern cities with large Black populations (including Detroit). But the battle gained new energy in the context of the dynamism of the early ’60s Civil Rights Movement. In response to the Detroit school board’s insistence that there were no better options, GOAL had called on it to issue an ultimatum to publishers that it would stop adopting their textbooks unless “the races [were] treated with equal respect and distinction.” After two months with little movement on the issue, GOAL had prepared a draft ultimatum for the school board’s use in June 1962.
At a meeting with GOAL in July, the superintendent of schools had promised that textbooks “more suited to the urban community” would be used in the fall. But, when Richard Henry’s son Frederick attended his first day of school that September, the book for his history class, Our United States: A Bulwark of Freedom, was worse than most (it was also in use in Birmingham, Alabama). In the words of an NAACP review, “The image of the Negro projected by the authors is that of a dependent, servile creature, who, with the exception of his ability to sing and make music, has contributed only minimally to the development of his country and is incapable of functioning as a responsible person.” Richard Henry told his son to stay home from school in protest. And, while Frederick returned to Durfee soon, his father kept him out of his history class. On November 23, the superintendent of schools rejected a demand, made jointly by GOAL and the NAACP, that the book be withdrawn from use in the school system—a decision that was reported even in the New York Times. This refusal prompted Richard Henry’s announcement that he would go to jail before letting Frederick return to the class, as well as a threat to sue to prevent the use of the book. After a GOAL meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church a few days later, Henry informed a reporter for the Michigan Chronicle–one of the city’s Black-owned newspapers–that GOAL was “preparing to mobilize 10,000 Negroes to protest the use of [that] text.”
Within a week, the Chronicle would announce “Ultimate Victory Predicted” in the battle over Our United States as the state curriculum committee made clear the need for better options. Within four months, the school board had commissioned a supplement, “The Struggle for Freedom and Rights,” that it quickly sent out to middle schools to use in conjunction with the problematic book. In May 1963, the Chronicle described this step as “an initial victory,” noting that “the problem of more representative textbooks is far from being completely solved in” Detroit. That November, the school board officially dropped Our United States from its approved list and began looking for a replacement. By the beginning of the new school year in September 1964, it had selected a heavily revised version of Our United States that had overhauled its coverage of Blacks with the help of an academic historian and material drawn from “The Struggle for Freedom and Rights.”
Victory in Detroit, when combined with the release of some highly critical assessments of the available textbooks, sparked increased activism around the presentation of Blacks in primary and secondary school history textbooks in other northern cities (including New York City), in California, and, within a couple of years, in the U.S. House of Representatives. The furor in Detroit led most of the textbook publishers to launch internal reviews of their products and policies that included meetings with civil rights groups and educators. Other cities followed Detroit in setting guidelines for textbook approval that called for racial diversity and honesty. The new textbooks, perhaps not surprisingly, produced a backlash, not only from adoption committees in Southern states, but also in places with a large population of conservative whites, such as California.
What the efforts of textbook authors and publishers to offer a more inclusive and more honest representation of the American past revealed was the complexity of incorporating Blacks into that past on anything beyond the superficial level of “great contributors,” whether the mathematician Benjamin Banneker or the agricultural pioneer George Washington Carver. Revisions designed to give Blacks their full place in the American past could only challenge the simplistic, nationalistic myths that served to hold that past—and the idea of Americans as a single people—together. These basic myths were encapsulated in such phrases as: “a bulwark of freedom” (the subtitle of Our United States) or “land of opportunity” or “a nation of immigrants” (which implies a voluntarism that was entirely absent from the experience of enslaved Africans). None of them could easily accommodate the Black experience—many required denying its most important features.
Richard Henry (later Imari Obadele), GOAL, and other Black Detroiters helped to launch real changes in what most American children now see in their textbooks. But the difficulty of fully incorporating Black history into the feel-good national story that many Americans expect (and demand) remains and has shaped battles over everything from multiculturalism in the 1990s to the 1619 Project in recent years.
For further reading on this issue, see: Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (2003), esp. chapter 7; and Hillel Black, The American Schoolbook (1967).
Questions about this story, please contact Dr. James Lewis (James.Lewis@kzoo.edu). Questions about this series or if interested in authoring one, please contact Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss (Regina.Stevens-Truss@kzoo.edu)
Written by Dr. Binney Girdler, Professor of Biology & Director of Environmental Studies
Photos: See photos of Dr. Robert Bullard
This month, we celebrate Dr. Robert Bullard, often called the “father of environmental justice,” who in October of 1990 published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, a path-breaking book with a national focus on environmental injustice in the United States. Dr. Bullard was also a key organizer of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in October 1991, which resulted in the adoption of 17 Principles of Environmental Justice as a comprehensive platform for a national and international movement of all peoples.
Robert Bullard was born in 1946 in the small town of Elba, Alabama, where he attended segregated schools. He received his B.S. in Government from Alabama A&M University. After serving in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam war, he pursued his M.A. in Sociology from Atlanta University and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Iowa State University. He has held faculty and director positions at Clark Atlanta University, where he founded the Environmental Justice Resource Center, University of Tennessee, the University of California – both Riverside and Berkeley, and Texas Southern University, where he is now Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy and Director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice.
Robert Bullard began his efforts to catalog environmental injustice as an expert witness in a Houston, Texas class action lawsuit that attempted to block construction of a landfill proposed to be built within two miles of six schools, one within 1500 feet of the proposed dump. Recruited by his wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, the young sociology professor Bullard recruited students in his sociology methods class, and together they conducted a painstaking study of landfills in Houston. At that time, in 1979, “[t]here was no Google, there was no GIS mapping,” Bullard says in a recent interview with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The team eventually reported that all five city-owned landfills were sited in Black neighborhoods, as were 80 percent of city-owned garbage incinerators, and 75 percent of privately-owned landfills, even though only 25 percent of Houston’s entire population was Black. That lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., did not succeed in stopping the landfill, because it was difficult to prove intent. But Bullard was “hooked,” as he said in a 2006 interview: “I started connecting the dots in terms of housing, residential patterns, patterns of land use, where highways go, where transportation routes go, and how economic-development decisions are made. It was very clear that people who were making decisions — county commissioners or industrial boards or city councils — were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities” (Grist, Meet Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice)
Bullard expanded his study of environmental injustice to a nationwide scope in his landmark book Dumping in Dixie, published this month in 1990. He cataloged the stories of five Black communities across the American South where ordinary people spoke up, organized, resisted, protested, and fought for their right to live free from contamination and other environmental harms. Dr. Bullard has gone on to publish dozens of peer-reviewed articles and 17 more books on topics ranging from the racist roots of the unequal toll of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to city planning, health equity, food security, transportation apartheid, and climate justice.
Although Bullard has had a successful career in academia, it is his work within marginalized communities that has been most impactful. Bullard related in a 1999 interview: “What we’ve tried to do over the last twenty years is educate and assist groups in organizing and mobilizing, empowering themselves to take charge of their lives, their community and their surroundings. … For the most part, a lot of the small grassroots groups operate from a bottom-up model. They don’t have boards of directors and large budgets and large staffs but they do operate with the idea that everyone has a role and we are all equal in this together” (Earth First! Journal, Environmental Justice: An Interview with Robert Bullard).
In addition to his deep engagement in communities facing environmental harms, Dr. Bullard has continued to serve as expert witness in court cases across the nation, and has served on several national advisory panels. This month in 1991, the Principles of Environmental Justice were adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, co-organized by Dr. Bullard and held in Washington, DC. The EJ Summit, attended by well over 1,000 participants, was foundational in the Environmental Justice Movement. Delegates came from all fifty states including Alaska and Hawaii, and from Puerto Rico, Chile, Mexico, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands. The seventeen principles were developed as a guide for organizing, networking, and relating to each other as people of color, non-governmental organizations, and governments. Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Bullard to the inaugural National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a federal advisory committee to the EPA, which was pivotal to Clinton signing the landmark Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.” Dr. Bullard continues this important work at the intersection of civil rights and environmental justice today as a member of President Joe Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which now advises the entire administration, from the U.S. Department of Energy to Health and Human Services.
Bullard’s list of honors and awards is long and wide-ranging, so we’ll highlight just the last few years. In 2020, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) honored Dr. Bullard with its Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award, the UN’s highest environmental honor. Most recently, Dr. Robert Bullard was among the 2022 cohort of scholars inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In an interview at Texas Southern University, Bullard reacted: “It is truly an honor to be elected to such a prestigious body and to have the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recognize and lift up our justice and equity work,” he said. “I accept the honor on behalf of the struggles in frontline and fence-line communities where there is still much work to be done to secure environmental and climate justice for all” (Texas Southern University, TSU’s “Father of Environmental Justice” selected to join American Academy of Arts & Sciences)
Questions about this story, please contact Dr. Binney Girdler (Binney.Girdler@kzoo.edu). Questions about this series or if interested in authoring one, please contact Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss (Regina.Stevens-Truss@kzoo.edu)
The State of Education
of Black Folks
in the USA
by Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Director of the HHMI IE Grant
As we begin our school year and because of the landscape of higher education in the USA, I thought that a ‘feel good’ story was in line, albeit, I will add some caution to this.
The U.S. is doing better (said out of one side of my mouth) when it comes to educating the Black population. According to the 2020 US Census report “88% of Blacks have a high school diploma.” In that report they also state that ~90% of the U.S. population have graduated high school, putting the Black community in almost parity with the rest of the Nation. As a point of comparison, in 1940, only 7% of Blacks completed high school when the National average was 24%. Many credit this increase to the Compulsory Education Laws enacted by states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to enact a compulsory education law in 1852. In a 2012 report that examined whether schooling laws matter, it was found that the “introduction of compulsory attendance laws had positive and statistically significant effects on schooling in states that passed laws after 1880.” This means that overtime then, the educational gap between Black students and the National average had closed to about 2%, as measured in 2019; at least at the high school level.
The college degree gap has also closed, but nowhere as tightly; in 2019, the gap between Blacks and the National average was 26% for college degree attainment. It is important to note that the vast majority of college degrees attained by Blacks before 1967 in the U.S. were from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). HBCUs were the only game in town in educating Blacks prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To be clear, Blacks were “allowed” to attend White universities in northern states before the abolition of slavery. However, because of institutionalized racism and discrimination at these institutions, as well as the poor college preparation that Black students were afforded, their education was hampered. HBCUs were the predominant means of African American post-secondary education for about 100 years (from right after the Civil War to the Civil Rights era of the 1960’s). Before the establishment of the first HBCU in a southern state (Atlanta University – now Clark Atlanta University on September 19, 1865), there were four HBCUs established in northern states: Cheyney University of Pennsylvania in 1837, University of the District of Columbia in 1851 (then known as Miner School for Colored Girls), Lincoln University in 1854, and Wilberforce University in 1856. Atlanta University (Clark Atlanta University) was one of the first graduate institutions in the Nation to award degrees to African Americans, and the first to award bachelor’s degrees to African Americans in the south. According to Wikipedia, “HBCUs have a rich legacy of matriculating many leaders in the fields of business (Spike Lee, film director and producer – Morehouse), law (Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Court Justice – Lincoln and Howard; featured in our 19 story in July 2020), science (Katherine Johnson, NASA mathematician – attended West Virginia State College, now West Virginia State), education (Booker T. Washington, educator, orator, and advisor – Hampton), military service (The Tuskegee Airmen were educated at Tuskegee University), entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, talk show host and media mogul – Tenn State), art (Erykah Badu singer, entrepreneur, and actress – Grambling State), and sports (Jerry Rice, considered the greatest NFL wide receiver of all-time – Mississippi Valley State).”
Despite their excellent track record of educating Blacks, HBCUs have struggled to stay open. Once predominantly white institutions committed to educating Black students and opened their doors during the Civil Rights Era, and because of the government’s affirmative action goals, enrollment at HBCUs began to drop. While the number of Black students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities increased by ~377% from 1966 to 1976, only 18% were enrolled in HBCUs; which dropped to only 9% in 2010. The reduced number of students attending HBCUs has also led to a decrease in the number of these institutions (from 121 in 1930 to 101 in 2019).
A possible shiny light for HBCUs – while in 2020 (the year when Black Lives Matter issues was heightened) the enrollment of Black and White students attending secondary institutions declined, however, some HBCUs experienced a surge in enrollment – Howard University, for example, increased 15 percent from 2019 to 2021. This could be a sign that Blacks are finding needed support at these institutions. Historically, HBCUs have been a pillar in the lives of many successful Blacks, offering an education that is unmatched by many of the Nation’s other institutions. For non-HBCU institutions to truly ensure access to students of color, these institutions (like K) have a duty to make sure that these students are supported in all the ways!
by Drs. Fari Nzinga and Regina Stevens-Truss
Happy Juneteenth everyone! Today, everyone in the United States can enjoy a federally-recognized holiday in honor of Juneteenth, and many may have heard the story of its roots at least once – on June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved Africans in Texas were finally informed that they could claim their freedom. Imagine the joy and celebration, and the birth of Juneteenth (celebrated since 1865 by many Black people – you can re-read this Juneteenth story). By now then, you may know about the why behind the holiday, so this final story of the 2021-22 school year will focus on some of the how to celebrate Juneteenth – the culinary traditions.
As in most cultures around the world, Black people typically celebrate with and gather around food. Red-colored foods and drinks are of primary significance to the culture. Culinary historian and chef, Michael Twitty, discusses in Oprah Daily (The Traditional Foods of Juneteenth Carry a Rich History, Dating Back Centuries), “Texas was at the end of the world to the Antebellum South. There were a lot of enslaved Africans who were coming to Texas from the continent and through the Caribbean. The color red is highly associated with the cultures that would’ve come through the later years of the trade, which would have been Yoruba and Kongo.” Twitty also writes in his blog, Afroculinaria, “enslavement narratives from Texas recall an African ancestor being lured using red flannel cloth, and many of the charms and power objects used to manipulate invisible forces required a red handkerchief” (Juneteenth, A Culinary History Part 1).
The places where many newly-imported African laborers passed through, cultural and culinary traditions were carried along and continue to manifest. For example, Dr. Fred Opie, makes the connection that West African peoples like the Asante, Yoruba and Kongo among others, marked special occasions with the offering of sacrifices, especially the red blood of white birds and goats.
Soul Food Scholar Adrian E. Miller has further traced red drinks served at Juneteenth celebrations to the fruits of two native West African plants: the kola nut and the hibiscus flower. The kola nut, typically white or red, was and still is served to guests throughout West and Central Africa as a snack to chew, used as a water purifier, or steeped for tea. The flowers of the hibiscus, too, are often stewed to make a reddish-purple, tartly-sweet tea called sorrel or bissap.
A traditional Juneteenth spread consists of barbeque and red foods: tables lined with bbq chicken, hot links, watermelon, hibiscus tea, and, more recently, strawberry soda and red velvet cake. In addition to the cultural and spiritual meanings behind the red-colored foods, the color red symbolizes not only the bloodshed of enslaved people who never tasted freedom, but the resilience of all Black people in the face of continued oppression. Sides like cabbage, collard, turnip or mustard greens, and black-eyed peas are typically served as well. Often called prosperity dishes and eaten during the new year, black-eyed peas are said to bring luck and greens and cabbage, of course, money and abundance.
However you choose to celebrate Juneteenth, the point is to place one’s experience within a larger, historical context; to connect with family and cultural traditions, and to realize one’s own definition of freedom. This June, and in the many to come, take a moment to reflect and honor those who have demonstrated resistance to oppression (check out the Freedom Lifted “6 Ways to Resist” exercise by Mia Henry).
As Adrian Miller so eloquently puts it: “I think about all of those Emancipation celebrations, church suppers, family reunions and other occasions when people got together to celebrate, renew family ties and friendships, and affirm their humanity.” Chew on that.
Again this year, these monthly Black History stories have been brought to you by the ACSJL and the HHMI Inclusive Excellence team, and are aimed at educating the K community on African-American history and culture as we continue to work towards being an anti-racist Institution. The number 19 marks multiple important dates in the lives of Blacks in the USA – 1619 being the year in which the first set of African slaves were brought to what would become the United States, and June 19, 1865, marking the day that Blacks celebrate the end of enslavement in the US.
We need to know our history, we need to teach our history, we need to remember our history.
Anyone can contribute a 19 story. Contact Regina Stevens-Truss at Regina.Stevens-Rruss@kzoo.edu for information on how to get started!
by Dr. Fari Nzinga (editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)
In honor of Asian American heritage month (May 1-31st), we are going to look at some of the moments where Asian American and African American histories connect and overlap.
The first Asian immigrants arrived in the 19th century. They were Filipino sailors who came to the shores of the so-called “New World” aboard Spanish ships in the 16th century. Some of these Filipino sailors survived pirates and shipwrecks to settle in parts of colonial Mexico and Louisiana, and, while there, some joined maroon societies comprised of Indigenous people, Africans and European deserters.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, large numbers of Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese men travelled across the globe to toil on large industrial plantations in the British West Indies, Hawaii, and the U.S. Deep South as indentured laborers. Pejoratively called “coolies,” countless men and many women were taken advantage of and lured with promises of economic prosperity by contractors and agents, only to work over ten hours a day, six days a week, for five or more years before gaining their freedom. During this time Asian Americans were being forced into the bottom of the white supremacist racial hierarchy, working closely with Africans both enslaved and free; and upon emancipation, Asian mobility and labor power were weaponized against newly emancipated Africans in order to keep wages low and profits high. While racial animus was sewn to ensure competition, there were also new opportunities to cultivate Afro-Asian relationships and build political alliances.
It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that Asian immigrants would begin to migrate in their greatest numbers to the U.S. When gold was “discovered” by white settlers in California in 1848, word quickly got out, spawning the California Gold Rush (and providing the reference for the present-day NFL team the San Francisco ‘49ers). The Gold Rush sped up the process of colonization, kept up the momentum of U.S. expansionism and, later, so-called Manifest Destiny, attracting entrepreneurs and cut-throat capitalists alike.
At the same time, many Chinese laborers migrated by the thousands to California. While many had come in hopes of striking rich, the majority found work laying track for the Pacific/Transcontinental Railroad between 1863 – 1869. Comprising the vast majority of railroad workers on the Western routes, Chinese immigrants were paid to physically clear Indigenous homelands in order to connect the distant colony of California to industrial centers in the East Coast and Midwest, thereby consolidating the U.S. continental empire. As railroad towns began to proliferate, Chinese merchants followed the construction boom. Before, during and after the transcontinental railroad’s construction thousands of enslaved and then freedmen also worked on the railroads grading lines, building bridges, and blasting tunnels. Often paid the least to do the most undesirable jobs, both Black and Asian workers survived brutal conditions of economic exploitation and racial violence.
In the wake of the devastation of the Civil War, as the nation scrambled to rebuild, the United States and China negotiated the Treaty of Trade, Consuls, and Emigration, known as the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, which established a reciprocal relationship for the movement of people and goods between the two countries. But that didn’t stop white settlers from discriminating against Asian immigrants, seizing their property, and perpetrating cowardly acts of violence and intimidation. In his speech “Our Composite Nation,” delivered in Boston in 1869, powerful orator and statesman, Frederick Douglass, condemned anti-Asian racism:
Men differ widely as to the magnitude of this potential Chinese immigration. The fact that by the late treaty with China, we bind ourselves to receive immigrants from that country only as the subjects of the Emperor, and by the construction, at least, are bound not to [naturalize] them, and the further fact that Chinamen themselves have a superstitious devotion to their country and an aversion to permanent location in any other, contracting even to have their bones carried back, should they die abroad, and from the fact that many have returned to China, and the still more stubborn [fact] that resistance to their coming has increased rather than diminished, it is inferred that we shall never have a large Chinese population in America. This however is not my opinion.
[…] Already has the matter taken this shape in California and on the Pacific Coast generally. Already has California assumed a bitterly unfriendly attitude toward the Chinamen. Already has she driven them from her altars of justice. Already has she stamped them as outcasts and handed them over to popular contempt and vulgar jest. Already are they the constant victims of cruel harshness and brutal violence. Already have our Celtic brothers, never slow to execute the behests of popular prejudice against the weak and defenseless, recognized in the heads of these people, fit targets for their shilalahs. Already, too, are their associations formed in avowed hostility to the Chinese.
[…] I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why we may expect them in very large numbers in no very distant future. Do you ask, if I favor such immigration, I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would.
Frederick Douglass
A short-lived treaty, it didn’t last long before white settlers began to discriminate against and harass Asian immigrants, chasing them out of the West Coast through the twin prongs of violence and legislation. By 1882, not even twenty years later, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, placing the first restrictions on immigration in U.S. history. The law specifically sought to eliminate Chinese immigration.
At a time when white supremacist policies, laws and ideologies are precipitating near-constant racial violence against Black and Asian communities, it is important to learn from those moments in history when these groups labored together and (sometimes) stood in solidarity.
To learn more about how you might get involved in supporting contemporary solidarity and coalition-building work, check out The Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project’s resource on Black/Asian solidarity.
And just for fun and maybe to occupy the summer months, here are some titles to peruse:
