As a policy school dedicated to the public good and producing civically engaged and socially responsible leaders, the School is committed to creating an environment of diversity, inclusion and belonging for its faculty, staff, students and surrounding communities. To that end, here are recommendations to observe Black History Month.
Watch
Pool: A Social History of Segregation | PBS
"Dive into the murky waters of segregated pools & how they impacted generations of African Americans. Visit an exhibit at the Fairmount Waterworks that explores the connection between water, social justice & public health. Learn about the nation’s first private swim club owned by African Americans that still exists today. Meet a coach whose inner-city swim program inspired inspired a movie."
Listen
Black History Year | PushBlack
"Learning your history makes you - and your people - stronger. As Black people, we know we’re left out of the history books. That the media images are skewed. That we need access to experts, information and ideas so we can advance our people.
Black History Year connects you to the history, thinkers and activists that are left out of the mainstream conversations. You may not agree with everything you hear, but we’re always working toward one goal: uniting for the best interest of Black people worldwide."
Read
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation | Linda Villarosa
"In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to ‘live sicker and die quicker’ compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic and necessary reading."
How We Got Over: Growing Up in the Segregated South | Dr. Helen Benjamin and Jean Nash Johnson
“Through 24 narratives, How We Got Over captures Black life in compelling first-person accounts from childhood and teen years in mid-twentieth century Alexandria, Louisiana, a town with nearly twice as many enslaved people as whites in 1860. The stories reflect the impact of slavery and the resulting segregation on the contributors' lives through their unfiltered accounts of racial, social, and economic inequities, injustices, and challenges in the 1950s and 1960s. From the trauma of witnessing a lynched body hanging from a tree at the nearby community center to finding delight in discovering a hidden talent in middle school, the contributors share how they survived and thrived despite the obstacles and challenges they encountered.“
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism | Edward Baptist
“Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution — the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.”