America’s Black Holocaust Museum
abhmuseum.org
ABHM is a museum dedicated to both history and ongoing commemoration. ABHM builds public awareness of the harmful legacies of slavery and Jim Crow in America and promotes racial repair, reconciliation, and healing. ABHM is open to the public (please visit abhmuseum.org for current hours) at 401 W. North Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53212.
Public History Project, University of Wisconsin–Madison
publichistoryproject.wisc.edu
The Public History Project is a multiyear effort commissioned by former Chancellor Rebecca Blank to uncover and give voice to those who experienced and challenged bigotry and exclusion on campus and who, through their courage, resilience, and actions, have made the university a better place.
SlaveVoyages
slavevoyages.org
SlaveVoyages is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records
to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.
Equal Justice Initiative
eji.org
The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
nmaahc.si.edu
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.
Learning for Justice, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery learningforjustice.org/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/american-slavery
Teaching Hard History: American Slavery is a comprehensive guide to teaching this critical topic and to helping students understand how slavery influences us in the present day.
Monument Lab, National Monument Audit
monumentlab.com/audit
Monument Lab’s research team spent a year scouring almost a half million records, but for its deepest investigations, focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. The National Monument Audit allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our American monument landscape, to question common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions in public memory.
Books
Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (New York: Back Bay Books, 2021) • This book was the selection for UW–Madison’s 2022–2023 Go Big Read. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith narrates an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—offering an intergenerational story of how slavery has shaped our nation’s collective history, and us.
Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, new edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) • This is a history of US Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy.
Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021) • In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: The New Press, 2020) • Challenging the notion that the election of Barack Obama signaled a new era of colorblindness in the United States, Alexander reveals how racial discrimination was not ended but merely redesigned. By targeting Black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the American criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, relegating millions to a permanent second-class status even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.
James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story, Third Edition (Wauwatosa: LifeWrites Press, 2016) • This is a memoir written by a lynching survivor about coming of age as a Black child during the Jim Crow era.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1987) • An unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. This spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.
Virginia Hamilton, Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom (Alfred A Knopf, 1993) • Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning companion to The People Could Fly traces the history of slavery in America in the voices and stories of those who lived it. Leo and Diane Dillon’s brilliant black-and-white illustrations echo the stories’ subtlety and power, making this book as stunning to look at as it is to read.