Academics
McCain-Ravenel Center
McCain-Ravenel Center

All-Day Program Celebrates Black History

As part of Black History Month activities in February, the McCain-Ravenel Center hosted an exciting daylong exploration of Black and African American history featuring authors, artists, and scholars.
 
Freshman listened to a talk by Penny Blue, author of “A Time to Protest: Leadership Lessons From My Father Who Survived the Segregated South for 99 Years.” Blue took the students through her father’s journey as a farmer, janitor, coal miner, factory worker, land owner, and landlord. 
 
According to Blue, Black and African American people “protest anytime, anywhere. I grew up understanding that protest is a right, not a privilege. It is not a choice, but my God-given duty and responsibility.” Her father believed that one person standing could make a difference, a lesson Blue has carried through her entire life.
 
Blue left our students with a challenge and a question: “We are living in historical times. How do we hit the target this time? The target is humanity, citizenship, and equality.” She brought the conversation back to Episcopal’s mission statement and encouraged students to embody “courageous action” to make change for the better.
 
Ernest J. Quarles, author, attorney, and professor at Johns Hopkins University, joined the 10th grade class to talk about the hidden history of Black women in the 1800s, whom he calls the Talented Tenth. “When you have history that is not truthfully told and many narratives that are not correct, it compromises the capacity of various disciplines to effectively respond to the contemporary political, economic, and social crises that we have in our public life today,” he told the sophomores.
 
Quarles pointed out that even amidst the information at our fingertips, today’s narratives can be unreliable. Quarles encouraged students to do their own due diligence to find out who is financing and driving the narrative, who profits from it, and who owns the platforms where the narratives appear.
 
Dr. George Derek Musgrove — an expert on African American politics and a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus — spoke with juniors about how the nation’s capital became known as “Chocolate City” and emerged as a center for the Black Power movement from the 1960s through the 1990s. In 1957, Washington, D.C., was the first large American city in which Black and African American residents made up more than half of the population. These residents, who also enjoyed relatively more wealth and political clout than their counterparts in other cities, organized under Black Power leadership on issues such as improving treatment of Black women on welfare, curtailing police killings of unarmed Black residents, and ending white-dominated colonial rule in Africa and other parts of the world.
 
Today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Dr. Musgrove said, looks to Black Power’s ideology and iconography but is careful not to replicate its top-down, male-dominated structure. The movement is using Black Power “as an inspiration and a cautionary tale,” he said. “They’re in conversation with that history but not swallowing it wholesale.”
 
Seniors, meanwhile, gathered together in Flippin Field House for a sculpture workshop with Chris Malone, a visual artist who creates imaginative dolls, to study Black history through the lens of art. Evening activities began with a pre-recorded performance by the Survey of Dance class, followed by a musical performance by Alison Crockett, an international soul and jazz singer. The day’s programming closed with a quiet moment of contemplation.
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