Week 1
The right’s vehement opposition to Black Studies is predictable. Black Studies has been under attack since its formal inception on college campuses in the late 1960s. We can go back even further. Most state laws prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write were introduced after 1829, in response to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an unrelenting attack on slavery and US hypocrisy for maintaining it. Back then the
Appeal was contraband: anyone caught with it faced imprisonment or execution. Today, it is a foundational text in Black Studies. Historian Jarvis R. Givens found that during the Jim Crow era, Black school teachers often “deployed fugitive tactics” and risked losing their jobs in order to teach Black history. In Mississippi, organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) taught contraband history in “Freedom Schools,” while the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) established “Freedom Libraries” throughout the state stocked with donated books—many on Black history by Black authors. Between 1964 and 1965, white terrorists burned down the Freedom Libraries in Vicksburg, Laurel, and Indianola.
Kelley