I found myself smiling as I was rewatching this video of my conversation with Dr. Alexandria Russell, Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and a WEB Du Bois Research Institute Non-Residential Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Dr. Russell and I spoke recently about her new book, Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen (University of Illinois Press, 2024) at the New Books Network. We then came here to talk about Dr. Russell’s nonprofit, Black Women Legacies, which seeks to promote racial and gender equity by preserving African American history through a free online platform that provides public audiences access to past and present memorials created to celebrate Black women in the United States and beyond.
In addition to the nonprofit, we discuss:
Richland County, South Carolina
Black Women Legacies Board Members Dr. Wanda A. Hendricks and Dr. Nakia Parker
University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute
The Black Statute of Liberty (1) I am so glad Dr. Russell introduced this; I had no idea! (2) Clicking on the link will take you to a National Park Service-funded report entitled, “The Black Statue of Liberty Rumor,” and I think this title is somewhat misleading.1 While the report debunks some myths about the Statue, it validates and affirms others, reaching several conclusions, including,
The Statue of Liberty would never have been conceived or built if its principal French and American advocates had not been active abolitionists who understood slavery as the cause of the Civil War and its end as the realization of the promise of liberty for all as codified in the Declaration of Independence.
The Life of Madie Hall Xuma: Black Women’s Global Activism During Jim Crow & Apartheid by Wanda A. Hendricks (University of Illinois Press, 2022)
I am frequently confronted with questions about sources whenever I am providing discussion links inside my Substack. I want to provide accurate information, but I lack the bandwidth (and sometimes the expertise) to fully vet every source that I link to. For that reason, I default to individual or institutional websites when linking to a living person; organizational, institutional, or governmental websites when linking to an organization, institution, or government-run entity; or wikipedia in the case of a deceased person. In so doing, I recognize none of these sources is “neutral,” and all may contain inadvertent, or purposeful, errors or omissions. My aim here is simply to set someone seeking to understand more off in a right direction.
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