Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

There is something infectious about courage; when we see others embody it, we want it too and recent events, beginning at the University of Missouri, have helped many campuses step out in courage. I don’t have to be at Mizzou to understand their frustration and desire for a safe space because I know what it means to be a black woman on a predominantly white college campus...

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of two books of poetry, Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation and Karma’s Footsteps, and is also the Poetry Editor of African Voices, a literary magazine. Her work focuses on women, race, ancestry, violence and the healing power of art, has been published in North American Review, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Black Renaissance Noire, VIDA, Crab Orchard Review, BOMB, Paris/Atlantic,and Listen Up!, and has been the subject of a short film, I Leave My Colors Everywhere...

KU graduate student Dion Simmons provided HBW with his take on the recent town hall meeting. Stay tuned for Charlesia McKinney’s take on race relations in the university next week!

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Editor’s note: Last week, Maryemma Graham wrote a piece, “The Huck Finn Syndrome,” addressing the racial injustices across college campuses. The week prior, KU held a town hall meeting to talk through the racial problems that have persisted at the University of Kansas. KU’s very own Dion Simmons was not only in attendance, but spoke out against and questioned these racial problems in front of the thousands of students, faculty, administrators, and concerned citizens in attendance. Dion Simmons and Charlesia McKinney have both agreed to provide us with their takes on the town hall meeting. McKinney also spoke out at the meeting and expressed concern not only as a student but a teacher. This two-part series will start with Dion Simmons’s take on the town hall meeting; next week, Charlesia McKinney will speak about racial dynamics at KU.
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On Saturday, November 7, I left the United States for a brief
teaching stint in China. I left the U.S. in the midst of a raging controversy
at nearby MIZZOU, one of the most recent universities to remind us of how
little progress we have made in the war against racism in this country...

Please join Project HBW this week for our fourth and fifth webinars of the semester! Tune in as we talk with Jericho Brown and jessica Care moore...

Almost 60 years after the Mongomery bus boycott of 1955, public buses in Montgomery, Alabama continue to be a discriminatory space.
Allen Toussaint, legendary pianist from New Orleans, passed away this week at the age of 77.

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Please join Project HBW as we talk with poet Nikky Finney on Wednesday, November 11th in our third webinar of the semester!
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Meredith Wiggins wrote a review of HBW staff member Crystal Bradshaw’s new book, Eliza: A Generational Journey.

Journalist Nina Martyris wrote about the rise in big candy and its racist past. Martyris argued that because of rations during WWI, many soldiers returned with a sweet tooth. Similarly, prohibition led to a substitution of once vice (alcohol) for another (candy). Like most other facets of society, racial lines were created in the advertisement and distribution of candy, creating what historian April Merleaux calls the “Jim Crow candy hierarchy.”

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In African American writing, the South often exists as a place of both danger and beauty, the North as a place of both alienation and promise. One body of African American literature that explores the dynamics of place is that concerning African Americans’ movement west to Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado as part of the Exoduster Movement of the 1870s..