Category Archives: Uncategorized

Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas

Join the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program in welcoming Kim Hass

Rita Hollings Science Center, Rm 101
College of Charleston
58 Coming Street, Charleston, SC 29401
Wednesday, April 19th
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM(ET)

Kim Haas

Kim Haas is Executive Producer, Host and Creator of Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas, a travel show celebrating the African influence in Latin America. She has traveled extensively throughout Latin America. Kim has been active in Afro-Latino issues for more than a decade and is founder of losafrolatinos.com, a blog celebrating Afro Latino culture. Kim speaks fluent Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Spanish. Kim is the owner of Haas Media LLC, a multilingual community outreach, translation services, and communications firm located in the greater New York City area.

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.

Should Harvard Still Own My Enslaved Ancestors?

Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
Septima P. Clark Auditorium (Rm 118)
25 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
5:30PM – 7:00 PM(ET)

The Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston has invited Tamara Lanier to deliver a lecture about her enslaved ancestors, whose naked or partially clothed bodies were forcibly photographed in 1850 outside of Columbia, SC, for a Harvard scientist, Louis Agassiz. Agassiz supported racist theories of polygenesis, and Harvard currently owns these photographs. You may be familiar with the court case Lanier has brought against Harvard to obtain the rights to these images. Her case foregrounds the need for legislation that protects the cultural property of descendants of chattel slavery in the United States. I hope you can attend and hear her speak about the importance of her family’s history and the ethical and legal matters regarding who gets to own, display, and view historical artifacts of slavery.

 

CofC Podcast: Dean Kameelah Martin Reflects on Her Spiritual Exploration of the Yoruba Religion

  • kameelah martin dressed in white holding an ornate feather fan

Above: Kameelah Martin dressed in traditional white attire worn by initiates of the Yoruba religion. Initiates wear all white for a year as well as for a week after undergoing the Yoruba initiation. White symbolizes a rebirth. (Photo by Catie Cleveland)

Kameelah Martin, dean of the Graduate School and professor of African American studies and English at the College of Charleston, has spent the last 10 years researching the ancient Yoruba religion of West Africa, a religious practice that came to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. The practice has flourished in places with large Catholic communities like Cuba, a country that is known for having the most pristine practice outside of Nigeria.

To listen to this episode of Speaking Of … College of Charleston.

Trial Access to The HistoryMakers 

The HistoryMakers Logo

The College of Charleston has campus-wide trial access to The HistoryMakers available on the Libraries’ A-Z Databases List.

Trial ends February 28, 2023.

The HistoryMakers is a unique collection of oral history videos that provides an unprecedented and irreplaceable record of African American lives, history, and culture. The collection includes over 12,000 hours of video oral history interviews covering a variety of topics and fields including the arts, business, civic engagement, education, entertainment, law, medicine, and much more. Learn more about The HistoryMakers here.

The Libraries’ Collection Development Committee values the input of the campus community when evaluating potential new resources to add to the collections. Please complete the Trial Evaluation Form and let us know what you think of The HistoryMakers.

 

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.

Port of Entry – Episode 5 – “The Issue of Females”

Click the link below to listen to the 3rd episode of Port of Entry!
Episode 5 “The Issue of Females”

November 12, 2019

A lively conversation between Religious Studies scholars Matthew Cressler and our 2019-2020 Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecturer Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, following her standing-room only talk on “’The Issue of Females’: Abortion, Infanticide, and Ethics in Southern Slavery.” Her research presented at CofC is drawn from her forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Souls of Womenfolk.