Christina Proenza-Coles

"Slavery, Freedom, Public History & National Identity: Charlottesville, Curaçao, Cartagena" explores these locations as Black spaces whose histories help us better appreciate the communities we are today. uva-center-for-cultural-landscapes-newsletter-features.mailchimpsites.com/african-dias...

Elijah McCoy, mechanical engineer, born in Canada after his parents fled slavery via the Underground Railroad. As an inventor in Michigan he acquired 57 patents for innovations that improved trains in an era when railways were the dominant mode of transport for people & goods.

Ralph Bunche, political scientist, won the Nobel in 1950. He & Barack Obama both descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who had a son in 1630s VA with an indentured European servant. Their progeny bifurcated into the “white” Punches of VA (Obama’s line) & the “colored” Bunches of NC.

Dr. Chester Pierce (b. 1927) earned his MD from Harvard where he was a professor for 40 years. A US Navy Commander, he advised the Children's Television Network, the Surgeon General of the US Air Force, the US Arctic Research Commission, Peace Corps & the National Aeronautics & Space Administration.

During the American Revolution, James Armistead La Fayette gathered intelligence from British troops that enabled the Patriot victory at Yorktown. Having risked his life - among thousands of Black Patriots - for the establishment of the United States, he petitioned for his freedom which was granted.

Matilda Sissieretta Jones (b. 1868 in Virginia) was a renowned opera singer who performed at the White House (multiple times), at Madison Square Garden (with Antonin Dvorak), headlined at Carnegie Hall in 1893, & toured the Caribbean, South America, & England.

Mary Silvinia Burghardt Du Bois, with her sister and infant son William - aka W. E. B. Du Bois. The Burghardts descended from a formerly enslaved ancestor who fought in the American Revolution.

The book “lays a historical understanding for the Black freedom struggles of the 1950s-60s. That moral revolution of the US becomes comprehensible in a new way bc we understand just how deep the roots extend into the history of the nation, the continent, & the world” www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSG7...

Reverend George Washington Henderson, theologian, professor, principal (b. 1850 in Virginia, enslaved) graduated University of Vermont as valedictorian in 1877, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, & attended Yale. In 1894 he wrote "1st Memorial Against Lynching" addressed to the Louisiana legislature.

Nannie Helen Burroughs, educator, entrepreneur, advocate of women’s rights, daughter of formerly enslaved parents, founded a school in Washington DC in 1901. She observed, “Education & justice are democracy’s only life insurance.”

Lemuel Haynes was a Revolutionary War veteran & the 1st Black (mixed-race) man to be ordained as a minister in the US. He argued for universal rights in his 1776 antislavery tract, Liberty Further Extended, challenging the pretense of a nation fighting for its own freedom while denying it to others.

Wifredo Lam (pictured right) was a widely celebrated 20th century artist. An Afro-Cuban painter of Chinese & Congolese ancestry, a descendant of slavery, a colleague of Pablo Picasso (pictured left), Henri Matisse, & Frida Kahlo, Lam viewed his world-renowned work as “an act of decolonization.”

In 1855 Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole went to the Crimean Peninsula to care for soldiers in wartime. She & Florence Nightingale were honored in London for their service. Seacole wrote "I am proud of [my] relationship to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved & whose bodies America still owns."