by Monica Mercado

Today at 4:30 p.m., historian Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus, joins the Swarthmore College community to close the 2015 Black History Month Celebration. Swarthmore’s “Stand UP! Speak OUT! Black Student Activism in the 1960s” 2015 celebration theme draws attention to their new digital project, the Black Liberation 1969 Archive — a site that suggests possibilities for future work on our own campus histories.

“The Black Revolution on Campus: Black Students and the Transformation
of Higher Education,” featuring Martha Biondi Professor of African American Studies & History at Northwestern University

Thursday, February 26 – 4:30 p.m. – LPAC Cinema [link to campus map]

Activism rocked American campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Black students were at the forefront of this nationwide youth uprising, and they helped push the Black freedom struggle to embrace the radical transformation of higher education. The students faced strong resistance but they won many demands, leaving a legacy that profoundly reshaped campus life in the 1970s and beyond. A reception will immediately follow the talk.

((crossposted from Educating Women, the Greenfield Digital Center blog))

by Grace Pusey

This semester Emma Kioko and I are collaborating on a Praxis III independent study course titled Black at Bryn Mawr, a project that will illuminate the history and experiences of Black students, faculty, and staff at the College. Using Bryn Mawr Special Collections as well as primary sources archived outside of the College, we are analyzing the ways in which Bryn Mawr has chosen to record, remember, and represent racism in its history. Using the archives, we are identifying spaces of both racial conflict and conversation on campus in order to develop a final project in the form of a campus walking tour and a digital historical record.

Follow the Black at Bryn Mawr blog, tumblr, and Twitter hashtag #BlackatBrynMawr

Bryn Mawr College Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, and Responsibilities in Thomas Great Hall (November 2014), via Educating Women blog.

The project was born out of several community-wide conversations that occurred after two students hung a Confederate flag in their dormitory in September 2014. Emma came up with the idea of doing a campus walking tour modeled after the Black and Blue tour at the University of North Carolina, where she spent time last summer. Because I work at the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in Philadelphia, I offered to help create a digital historical record to complement the tour. In this way, Emma and I are working to create multiple avenues to engage with Black history at Bryn Mawr. We hope the walking tour will prompt community members to look at the campus and experience the place we inhabit in new ways, and that the digital historical record will function as a complementary space of deepened historical consciousness.

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