Category Archives: book club

Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth 

Septima Clark Auditorium (Room 118)
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
25 St. Philip St, Charleston, SC 29401
Tuesday, March 28, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

The recently unveiled mural of Septima P. Clark in the Education Center at the College of Charleston will serve as a backdrop for a March 28 conversation on the civil rights icon’s life and legacy. A 7:30 p.m. panel discussion at the center will include five contributors to the book “Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth” and an archivist from the college’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. Ukweli is a collection of essays and poems on the Black experience in America. Georgetown artist Natalie Daise created the 7-foot-high by 30-foot-long mural, “Saint Septima with Carolina Jasmine” in the center’s Septima P. Clark Memorial Auditorium. Unveiled on Feb. 23 in the auditorium’s foyer, the mural features Clark’s portrait in profile and a quote from a 1970 speech: “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than to believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.

Ukweli, is the Swahili word for truth. The book follows a 2020 poetry-lecture series at McLeod Plantation organized by poet Horace Mungin. He passed away before Ukweli was released in February 2022. The book is a collection of essays and poems from 49 contributors, including Mungin and co-editor Herb Frazier. Ukweli contributors Millicent Brown, LaTisha Vaugh and Karen Meadows will discuss their Ukweli essays and Clark’s legacy.

Brown is co-founder and project director of an oral history initiative to identify the “first children,” like herself, to desegregate previously all-white schools. LaTishais co-founder of E3: Educate, Empower, Elevate LLC, an organization that focuses on equitable outcomes for Black and brown children and families. Meadows, a high school counselor in Guilford County Schools, is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Avery’s archivist Georgette Mayo will join them. Avery holds Clark’s personal papers.

Savannah Frierson, a Ukweli contributor and Avery’s office manager, will moderate the session. She and Marjory Wentworth, also a Ukweli contributor, will open and close the panel with Mungin’s poems from Ukweli. Wentworth teaches at the College of Charleston.

 

The event also provides an opportunity to premier a video that honors Mungin’s contributions to poetry and social activism. Charlotte filmmaker Steve Rutherford produced the seven-minute video as a tribute to Mungin, who started writing poetry in the mid-sixties during the genesis of the Black Arts Movement.

 

In addition to the Septima P. Clark mural, information panels in the Education Center present the periods of Clark’s life. Essays, interviews and a range of primary sources represent the online material the college has posted to tell Clark’s story as an educator and civil rights champion who Martin Luther King Jr. called the mother of the movement.

Black Studies and the Ethics of Historical Privacy: When Archival Silences Are Acts of Refusal

Join Dr. Mari N. Crabtree with a presentation of her sabbatical research.

Flyer - Dr. Mari N. Crabtree's Sabbatical Presentation: Black Studies and the Ethics of Historical Privacy: When Archival Silences are Acts of Refusal. Thursday, March 23rd, 2023 at 5:00 pm in Room 227, Addlestone Library, 224 Calhoun Street, Charleston, SC. Addlestone Library: Room 227
205 Calhoun Street, Charleston, SC
Thursday, March 23, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM(ET)

Black Studies scholars often have sought to recover Black voices that have been excluded, marginalized, or erased from mainstream scholarship as a form of reclamation, and as a corrective to research that excludes Black people, and therefore distorts, our understanding of the world in which we live. But what if some of these Black voices don’t want to be found? What claims to privacy do the dead have? This talk offers answers to these questions and will be part of a collection of essays Professor Crabtree is writing on ethical praxis and the craft of writing in Black Studies.

African American Studies Faculty Book Celebration

Join us as we celebrate recent publications from our African American Studies faculty:

Thursday, February 16th at 5 pm
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center * Septima Clark Auditorium
25 St. Philip Street, Room 118

origin story: poems by Gary Jackson

origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?

My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching by Mari N. Crabtree

Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.

My Soul Is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

Reading Pleasures: An Evening with Tara A. Bynum

The Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture presents Tara A. Bynum and Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America

Tuesday, February 7th at 7 pm
Avery Research Center * Senator McKinley Washington Auditorium

 

In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. In her book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker’s pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter.

FALL 2020 Book Club

JOIN US FOR VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB
MEETINGS AND A VISIT FROM THE AUTHOR ON DECEMBER 2!
BOOK READINGS ARE IN LATE OCTOBER – DECEMBER
MEETINGS: TWICE IN NOVEMBER
OPEN TO ALL COFC STUDENTS, ALUMS, FACULTY, STAFF, & SUPPORTERS
RSVP TO RECEIVE INFORMATION ABOUT MEETINGS AND HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF VANGUARD: HTTP://BIT.LY/VANGUARDCOFC

 

Spring 2020 Book Club Selection

The Spring 2020 book selection for the joint Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program and African American Studies is Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies & Black Food in Twentieth-Century America by Jennifer Jensen Wallach.  The book club meeting (there will only be one since it’s a relatively short book) will be lead by Jacob Steere-Williams.  If you are interested in participating, please let Sandy Slater know and she’ll send you a copy of the book via campus mail. Once we have a group of interested parties we will create a doodle-poll to find the best time for our meeting.