TONIGHT, February 15 | 5pm | Campbell Hall 153

Andrea Roberts, Ph.D, is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at Texas A+M University and the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research and social justice initiative documenting African Americans' place-making history and their contemporary planning practices and challenges. Her talk is entitled "Curating Freedom: Making Hidden Black Publics Visible with Descendant Communities."  For more details: CLICK HERE. Current projects include a book about Black historic preservation practice and an interactive, statewide Black settlement Atlas. Most recently, Roberts was an Emerging Scholar Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's (UT) School of Architecture where she also earned a Ph.D. in community and regional planning. In addition to her Ph.D., Roberts holds an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College.

Roberts will also lead a Digital Technologies/Cultural Landscapes Research Roundtable 11-1 on Saturday, February 16, in Campbell Hall 220B.  Join her for a discussion of her use of digital tools in the creation and dissemination of her ongoing digital humanities project, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Study, which maps the unmapped black settlements of Texas. This is not a workshop on techniques, but a conversation about evaluating and using digital technologies as a pedagogical tool for applied learning, as well as in order to crowdsource information, to create an atlas, and to communicate to the greater public.

We hope to see you there.

The Sara Shallenberger Brown Cultural Landscapes and Sites Initiative Endowment supports innovative interdisciplinary research and teaching at the University of Virginia related to the study, design and preservation of cultural landscapes and sites. It affords UVA students and faculty opportunities to develop new research methods and design approaches for critically and creatively engaging with ordinary and extraordinary landscapes in Virginia and beyond. It strives to catalyze new intellectual and creative communities across UVA Grounds and UVA generations linking students, faculty and expert professionals; to disseminate the work of UVA community to the broader public; and to propel UVA as a global leader in cultural landscape theory, scholarship and practice.

Sunday, February 17 | 3-5pm | The Hive

Zyahna Bryant official release of my book, Reclaim.: A Collection of Poetry and Essays, on Sunday, February 17th from 3-5 PM at The Hive, located at 1747 Allied Street Suite K. I am pleased to host this event where a percentage of the signed book sales will be going to the Black Mamas Bailout Fund for Central Virginia. This is a cause that is very near and dear to my heart, and I am excited about the opportunity to give to such an amazing cause.

Paperback copies and kindle versions of the book can be purchased by clicking here: Reclaim. on Amazon

Thursday, February 21 | 7-10pm | Vinegar Hill Theatre

The Foreigner’s Home is a documentary film that explores the vision and work of Toni Morrison through “The Foreigner’s Home,” the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. Morrison invited renowned artists whose work also deals with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public conversation that she had been pursuing for years through her own research and writing and in her teaching at Princeton University. The film expands that conversation, combining exclusive and unreleased footage of the Nobel Laureate in dialogue with artists—first, in Paris in 2006 and then, in 2015, at her home in New York state—with extensive archival film footage, music, and still images to present a series of candid and incisive exchanges about race, identity, “foreignness,” and art’s redemptive power.

This event is free and open to the public thanks to Light House sponsor, Catherine Dee.

Rev. Sekou & Tracy Howe, March 4th at The Haven

Rev. Sekou is joined by the Nashville blues band, The Freedom Fighters on his national tour celebrating the release of his live album, Live At The Shell, recorded last July in Memphis, TN.  Monday March 4th will bring to life a sacred convening in Charlottesville, VA, a city where Sekou lived and trained people during the infamous summer of hate, 2017. The show will start with a set by local artist Tracy Howe, releasing her album, Things That Grow.  Things That Grow is a project born out of movement work and radically changing life circumstances of the last 5 years. This evening of music will be sure to fill listeners with healing, fire and courage, and call us all to sing and fill the streets.

Tickets are $10 in advance and $20 at the door.  Attendees are also encouraged to give to ongoing work in the area through donating to any or all of the following:

The Haven, Charlottesville's low barrier day shelter for people experiencing homelessness, offering direct connection to rehousing and social services.

Hands Off Maria, support the life and work of Maria Chavalan Sut living in Sanctuary in Charlottesville.

The Charlottesville Resilience Fund, making economic reparations to meet the needs of people who face undue hardships imposed upon them due to structural oppression, including but not limited to, through the criminal legal system.

Interfaith Alliance for Climate Justice, supporting resistance to the degradation and exploitation of creation and helping sustain pipeline resistance and address intersecting issues of racism and indigenous sovereign land rights throughout Virginia.

My White Perceptions, Silence, and Fragility
A SURJ Cville Discussion Group        
 

Who is the group for?

This discussion group is targeted at people who identify as white or as having race and/or class privilege. Participants should be interested in asking questions like:

• How does my racial identity impact the way in which I view and move through the world?

• How will a deeper understanding of my racial identity impact my behavior?

• How can I get better at talking about privilege, oppression, and what to do about it?

What are the goals of the discussion group?

• Participants will be able to define white supremacy and racism (multiple levels) and explain the ways they see these forces operate in themselves and the world around them.

• Participants will reflect on their level of understanding of the myriad ways white supremacy impacts them, and those around them, and design a plan for how to continue to develop this lens. This plan will include potential blindspots and how they will be combated.

• Participants will reflect on their evolving engagement with antiracist work and design a plan for deeper involvement. This plan will include identified obstacles that might cause participants to avoid antiracist work and how they will overcome them.

How is the group structured?

Each week, participants  prepare by reading 1-2 short articles (approx. 20 - 30 minutes worth of reading). Then, they meet and discuss during in a 90 minute facilitated session, leaving with an action that they commit to for the following week, aiming to disrupt patterns of behavior that preserve white supremacy. These disruptions can be as simple as breaking a pattern of silence between two friends who know they share liberal ideology, but who avoid talking about whiteness, privilege, oppression, etc.

What is the content of the group?

The eight sessions are organized into three sections. The first focuses on the ways in which white racial identity impacts perception of privilege, racism, and anti-racism work. The next focuses on how these perceptions influence what we say (or don’t say) and do (or don’t do) in the face of racial injustice. The final sessions are informed by the very helpful concept of white fragility, which is the notion that because white people are so insulated from race-based stress, when we are exposed to any racial tension we are unprepared and overly defensive. Common to all weeks is the goal of better understanding ourselves, so we can more fully and effectively participate in anti-racism efforts.

More details are available about the working group membership and its charge here: https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva/members-of-ryan-s-town-gown-working-group-named/article_1ac011c0-d32c-11e8-b9fe-73b0cbac5632.html 

The Working Group seeks feedback from community members, organizations, and coalitions to identify the highest-priority issues where the university and the community can work together over the next five years to promote a healthy community for all.

With this survey, as well as through face-to- face conversations across our community, the Working Group is asking community members, organizations, and coalitions to help prioritize these focus areas worthy of our collective effort in the next five years.

This is the monthly chapter meeting of SURJ Cville, the Charlottesville chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (http://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/about).

SURJ is a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice. New faces and voices are more than welcome, they are vital to building a strong local base for this movement.

We'll try to start right around 7:00, but PLEASE: roll in late if you need to, make noise on the way in, bring kids, leave early, ask what you missed, do what you need to do. Whatever makes it possible for you to bring yourself to this work. Your needs are our community's needs.

Telling All the Stories: The People and Places Working to Restore Charlottesville’s African American History

By Carol Diggs   | Original Publication: CVILLE Weekly | Photo: Eze Amos

"A viral photo of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) overshadowed the first day of Black History Month. As an expert in the history of amateur blackface minstrelsy, I was not surprised to see that a young Northam had a blackface Klansman photograph included in his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook.

I spent a decade poring over blackface composites from yearbooks and fraternal orders, watching cracked film footage and cataloguing more than 10,000 blackface plays at Harvard University. Those plays and Northam’s racist photo show us the centrality of amateur blackface minstrelsy to American cultural life and universities. They show how upwardly mobile white men concentrated white-supremacist political power in the century after the Civil War, using the profits of amateur blackface to build white-only institutions and using blackface performances to articulate to voters their legislative commitment to white supremacy.

They also show how persistent those power structures remain..."

James was killed after a mob removed him from a train that was taking him from a jail in Staunton, where he had been awaiting trial on charges that he assaulted a white woman near Charlottesville.

The exhibition features soil from the site of the lynching, images from a community civil rights pilgrimage, information from recent community remembrance activities, historical documents and a recommended reading list..."

Each weekday in February we are releasing a new episode of "Race and Place in Charlottesville," which follows UVA Professor Louis Nelson as he gives a tour of the history of race and racism in Charlottesville, starting with Jefferson's era on Grounds and leading toward the Downtown Mall, site of the August 11-12 rallies. The research-based tour is motivated by Jesus' command to love our neighbors.

Please feel free to share the tour with your community! You can use this link: https://www.studycenter.net/race-place-cville