TaKeia N. Anthony is the Executive Director of the A. Philip Randolph Social Justice, Law, and Economic Policy Center and the Dean of the Honors College at Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Florida. Her most recent publication is a book titled, The Universal Ethiopian Students’ Association, 1927–1948: Mobilizing Diaspora (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). Dr. Anthony is also the recipient of several awards and fellowships. In 2023, she was awarded the Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. Dr. Anthony is a native of Bowling Green, Kentucky, where she is the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in history.
Historical Monuments at Historically Black College/University Campuses
Historical monuments have been the focus of discussion in numerous venues from local and national news outlets, classrooms, professional conferences, and the National Park Service. The discussions have centered Confederate monuments that are located in public spaces, some in front of government buildings. This research aims to extend the conversation to include African American historical monuments which are largely located at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It seeks to demonstrate the ways communities remember influential people and events while spotlighting some prominent African American sculptors.
Marco Robinson is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. He serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the Mellon Foundation-supported initiative, Enhancing the Humanities at PVAMU through an African-American Studies Program, and on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission-supported Texas Domestic Slave Project. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Debates in Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring the Lives of Black and Brown Americans (Kendall Hunt, 2021), and he has authored essays on the pivotal role played by women during the integration of public schools in North Mississippi as well as the efficacy of oral histories and collaborative work to document the histories of Black communities in the American South. Robinson also studies Afro-Latino and Caribbean history, and agricultural history.
“On the Upward Trend”: The Impact of Prairie View A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Agricultural Extension Services on Communities of Color during the Jim Crow Era in Texas
The history of Prairie View A&M University, Texas’ oldest state-supported historically Black university, entails the rich and vibrant experiences of Black and Brown Texans from the Antebellum period to the present day. This digital monograph presents the history of PVAMU’s College of Agriculture—since its founding in 1879 a leader in the true land-grant tradition of academics, extension, and research—with a focus on women’s work within the program and outreach to the Latinx community in Texas during the Jim Crow era. It incorporates records from PVAMU’s Special Collections and Archives Department, particularly agricultural extension workers’ reports from the early to the mid 1900s, including memos, photos, program flyers, diagrams of farming techniques, and maps of service areas. These materials are currently being digitized thanks to a Preservation Assistance Grant from the NEH. The inclusion of interactive elements will further enhance the reading experience.
La Tanya L. Reese Rogers is an Associate Professor of Literature and Drama, and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Honors Program at Fisk University. She holds a doctorate degree in literature and drama from Howard University and two bachelor’s degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, where she held a Mellon Mays Fellowship. Dr. Rogers is a co-founder of the Edward Alexander Bouchét National Graduate Honor Society, which has chapters at Yale, Stanford, and other prominent universities across the nation. She has published on subjects ranging from contemporary playwrights in the United States to economic racism in Brazil. Her most recent article appears in the Black Theatre Review. She is currently participating in the Mellon-funded Afro PWW2 Program.
Mimicry, Minstrelsy, and Masking: Theorizing Black Surrogacy in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks
American playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and educator Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002 for her play Topdog/Underdog, making her the first African American woman in US history to win the prize in drama. Mimicry, Minstrelsy, and Masking examines this and three other plays by Parks—The America Play, In the Blood, and F—ing A—through the lens of what the author calls Black Surrogacy, a dramatic technique that involves replacing white literary and historical figures with Black characters. The digital book, enhanced with video clips of productions of Parks’ plays, argues that while the playwright uses Black Surrogacy to challenge convention and offer social and political commentaries, the technique ultimately reinforces the very stereotypes and misconceptions about Black people that it seeks to counter.