Rethinking Black Freedom Studies in the Jim Crow North

FAIN: FS-50396-14

Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, NY 10708-5999)
Komozi Woodard (Project Director: March 2014 to May 2017)

A two-week college and university faculty summer seminar for sixteen participants on African-American freedom movements beyond the U.S. South.

The Civil Rights movement is now one of the most cherished aspects of American history. Just this past year, we have seen President Obama take his second oath of office using Martin Luther King’s Bible and the dedication of the Rosa Parks statue in the Capitol, for instance. Yet much of our popular view of the movement is narrow and distorted. Over the past 15 years, scholars have overturned a set of assumptions about the Civil Rights movement. Examining the Northern and Western dimensions of a struggle popularly seen as Southern, they have widened the timeline of the movement, expanded our view of Black Power, reinterpreted women’s leadership, and insisted on interweaving culture into the narrative. This seminar will invite faculty to examine the new scholarship and facilitate discussion and feedback for new work in the field. Specifically we aim to produce new scholarship and curricula on the Black Freedom Struggle and change how we teach and see this key period of American history.