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.

“A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.”

“Dolly Parton’s ancestors, just like the majority of the poor non-slaveholding East Tennesseans, declared continued allegiance to “the old flag” and took up arms against those who supported the Confederacy.”

“More than half of the 2,000 people who lived in Williamsburg in the 18th century were Black.”

Artist Laura Wheeler Waring was a renowned portrait painter during the Harlem Renaissance. Her mother, Christiana Freeman, was an Underground Railroad agent & the daughter of Philip Livingston (grandson of a Declaration of Independence signer) & Barbara Williams, an enslaved woman from Jamaica.

Libraries of Barcelona is hosting a program on Catalonia and the Legacy of Slavery this month. So excellent to encounter local scholars & work that I didn’t know about. Also very nice to see a familiar face - so to speak - at the library. @marcusrediker.bsky.social

In 1577 in Panama "The tiny Spanish population - perhaps 800 men, women, & children - was entirely dependent upon the free & enslaved African-descended majority of about 6000, & they also feared them, particularly the thousands of cimarrones [self-freed] living outside of Spanish jurisdiction."

Elated that my next book, Imagining Whiteness in the Pan-American South, is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. This project began over 25 years ago with an article, “What Color is Cuban?” and still feels just as timely.

“At Monticello, descendants of enslavers and descendants of the enslaved are attempting to fashion a family from a fractured past.”

In 1944 Rosa Parks organized against sexual violence and led the NAACP’s investigation of the six men who sexually assaulted a young mother in Alabama. See Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

"She asks us to examine the cumulative cost of systems that extract more from some people while returning less."