Publisher description

The Nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are more culturally revered today than ever. As public health and socioeconomic inequity gaps continue to widen between the African American community and other racial groups, the HBCUs embody a shared support system. Since the 1800s, this body of prestigious higher education institutions have represented trusted pathways for the advancement of our community. With these historical accomplishments in mind, it is crucial for HBCUs and their leadership to create a vision for generations to come. Visionary leadership is a must for our storied institutions to advance beyond just surviving into fully thriving. As such, our book project, Imagining the Future: Historically Black Colleges and Universities - A Matter of Survival, offers cutting edge ideas, suggestions and advice from HBCU alumni, proponents, faculty leaders, and researchers for HBCU leadership to cultivate success today and into the foreseeable future. Imagining the Future: Historically Black Colleges and Universities - A Matter of Survival promises timely, relevant and emergent scholarship as well as perspectives for HBCU leadership, HBCU scholars and HBCU supporters.

Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective—if fraught—culture of freedom. In Cara Caddoo’s perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers. But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the “colored theater.” Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world’s first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced “race films” by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

The Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are more culturally revered today than ever. As public health and socioeconomic inequity gaps continue to widen between the African American community and other racial groups, the HBCUs embody a shared support system. Since the 1800s, this body of prestigious higher education institutions have represented trusted pathways for the advancement of our community. With these historical accomplishments in mind, it is crucial for HBCUs and their leadership to create a vision for generations to come. Visionary leadership is a must for our storied institutions to advance beyond just surviving into fully thriving. As such, our book project, Imagining the Future: Historically Black Colleges and Universities - A Matter of Survival, offers cutting edge ideas, suggestions and advice from HBCU alumni, proponents, faculty leaders, and researchers for HBCU leadership to cultivate success today and into the foreseeable future. Imagining the Future: Historically Black Colleges and Universities - A Matter of Survival promises timely, relevant and emergent scholarship as well as perspectives for HBCU leadership, HBCU scholars and HBCU supporters.

Historically Black colleges and universities play a vital role in the education of African Americans in the United States. For nearly 150 years, these institutions have trained the leadership of the Black community, graduating the nation s African American teachers, doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Despite the wealth of new research on Black colleges, there are topics that remain untouched and accomplishments that go unnoticed by the scholarly community. The chapters in this edited volume focus on topics that deserve further attention and that will push students, scholars, policymakers, and Black college administrators to reexamine their perspectives on and perceptions of Black colleges.

This inspiring collection of accounts from educators and students is “an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system” (Ibram X. Kendi). Since 2016, the Black Lives Matter at School movement has carved a new path for racial justice in education. A growing coalition of educators, students, parents and others have established an annual week of action during the first week of February. This anthology shares vital lessons that have been learned through this important work. In this volume, Bettina Love makes a powerful case for abolitionist teaching, Brian Jones looks at the historical context of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in education, and prominent teacher union leaders discuss the importance of anti-racism in their unions. Black Lives Matter at School includes essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from participants across the country who have been building the movement on the ground.