With gratitude to Professor Scot French, Professor Julian Chambliss, the Academic Conference team, and the entire network of Zora Neale Hurston Festival champions, led by N.Y. Nathiri, THANK YOU for the opportunity to share these words in the final year of the Afrofuturism Conference series. I have to take a moment to dedicate this presentation to the memory of my brother in this work, Angel David Nieves, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last month. None of us would be where we are today without his constant contributions to this mission over the last twenty years.
We have come a very long way in a very short period of time. In 2018, Marvel Studios’ film Black Panther brought the aesthetics of Afrofuturism to the world. In 2008, no one had heard the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’. In 1998, Octavia Butler had just published her book, Parable of the Talents, where she predicted a white Christian nationalist government in the remnants of North America.
I’m here to share with you a very specific comparative timeline of African-American place-making – a series of arguments based in a collection of primary source documents and award-winning historical scholarship that made this leap in the understanding of Black Speculative Design possible over the last five years.
But, first, a brief aside.
In 1999, everyone looked at the emergence of computer generated images in the film, The Matrix, and celebrated a new era in filmmaking. For my purposes today, another film released in that year will help me to explain the African-American Place-Making Tradition. Its title is “Magnolia” and it opens with three stories that explore the theme — “A Matter of Chance.”
A Matter of Chance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIa77tZaHJA
In the first story, a man returns from work in late nineteenth century London. He is mugged and robbed, and ultimately killed in front of his home on Greenberry Hill. Perhaps coincidentially, when his assailants are arrested, the police discover that their last names are “Green”, “Berry”, and “Hill.” Perhaps this was just “a matter of chance.”
In the second story, two men meet over a blackjack table in Las Vegas, Nevada – a player and a dealer. The player loses his bet, blames the dealer, and jumps over the table to fight the dealer in his frustration. A few days later, the dealer takes a day off to scuba dive at a local lake. In the midst of his swim, a fire-fighting plane scoops thousands of gallons out of the lake to help control a wild fire in the nearby mountains. The dealer is collected in the scoop, has a heart attack from the shock, and is dropped into the burning forest where his body is lodged in the trees. Impossibly, the pilot was the player who attacked the dealer a few days earlier. Consumed by guilt over this incident, the player kills himself with a handgun. Again, we are left to wonder – is this “a matter of chance?”
In the final story, a young man jumps off the roof of his apartment building. He is killed by a shotgun blast as he falls and is caught in a safety net placed by window washers above the first floor. Here, the irony is that the young man is the child of the elderly couple that lived in the apartment where the shotgun blast originated. The parents would often fight with the mother often threatening to shoot the father with the weapon, despite knowing that the father always kept the gun unloaded. A neighbor’s child explained to police that he had seen the young man load the gun because ‘he was tired of his parents’ arguing and, if they wanted to kill each other, he would help them to do it.’ After waiting for days for their next argument, the son’s frustration and guilt moved him to jump off of the roof. He was unaware that his parents’ had started another argument while he was on the roof, and his mother threatened his father with the weapon – without either of them knowing it had been loaded. Was this a case of attempted murder, involuntary manslaughter, or successful suicide?
This opening scene sets the tone for an extraordinary sequence of improbable events, leaving the audience to wonder how much of our lives are “a matter of chance.”
[P.T. Anderson, “Magnolia” New Line Cinema, 1999]
Bear with me as I tell you two basic histories of African American place-making, as you consider the unlikely, improbable, and impossible events that led us all to be here today.
To start, hold in your mind the evolution of social media over the last decade. MySpace shaped social interactions at the start of the twenty-first century. Facebook emerged and solidified its platform by 2007. Twitter became the leading platform for media and journalism by 2010. In rapid succession, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok became leading platforms in 2015, 2017, and 2019. [Andre Brock, Distributed Blackness, 2020]
These communications technologies dramatically transformed the activist and scholarly products that energize projects like the Preserve Eatonville Committee.
However, there is an antecedent to understand what has happened recently.
Booker T. Washington took the blueprint of Hampton Institute in Virginia and created the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This organization relied on networks of Black churches to share the vision of racial uplift, extending generations of abolitionist work that inspired new leaders to challenge the emerging restrictions of Jim Crow across the United States before 1896. Thousands of schools created systems of knowledge and a curriculum for empowerment that had never existed in the world. Within a generation, thousands of Black businesses emerged and hundreds of Black communities grew across the country. [“Documenting the American South”, University of North Carolina, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/washington/bio.html]
The ongoing efforts to organized Colored Conventions in the late nineteenth century documented the work to create a just and inclusive society, despite the efforts to create hegemonic systems of Jim Crow segregation. One of the most powerful symbols of this work was Timothy Thomas Fortune’s career as an investigative journalist and civil rights activist. Between 1881 and 1928, his newspapers shaped a wide-ranging agenda to empower African Americans, politically, economically, and socially. At the peak of his career, his success in transforming a rural resort town into a base for civil rights action between 1901 and 1910 laid the foundation for the emergence of jazz as an art form and made the Black Renaissance possible for hundreds of thousands of African American households. [Walter D. Greason, Suburban Erasure, 2013]
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper created a network of women’s clubs that emphasized literacy, social leadership, and economic empowerment. Her leadership was central to the growth of the National Association for Colored Women. These leaders used thousands of churches as centers for programs that fed the hungry, clothed the impoverished, and maintained countless initiatives as social safety nets – long before the New Deal. These foundations made the work of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women possible.
[Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice, 2010; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal, 1990]
One of the most neglected stories of this era is Frederick Douglass’ work in the last decades of his life to create Black academies like Tuskegee Institute across the northern and midwestern states. In visiting the resorts of elite white philanthropists, he campaigned for Black academies that would enable African Americans in participate in the global industrial revolution of the era. His blueprint did not take hold in many places. However, in Bordentown, New Jersey, a group of ministers raised funds for twenty years to create a Manual and Industrial Training Institute. Nicknamed ‘Old Ironsides’, this school became the Tuskegee of the North – training a group of young scientists, technicians, and engineers to develop new electrical and radio technologies between 1911 and 1953.
[Zoe Burkholder, An African American Dilemma, 2021]
Tuskegee, the New York Age, the National Association for Colored Women, and Old Ironsides are only a few examples of the tradition of African American place-making. The careful study of these examples show what those of us here at the conference have called the Tuskegee Universe – a dedicated network of leaders and activists who worked every day to transform the institutions of racial segregation for a century between 1863 and 1964.
These combined efforts were not ‘a matter of chance’ – they teach us something very different.
The more recent wave of this tradition moved into a different phase between 1987 and 1991 when Teresa Nance and Maghan Keita opened the doors to higher education curriculum design at Villanova University. As a result of their work, a student movement emerged on campus between 1992 and 2006 which prioritized a strategic plan for cultural diversity that provided millions of dollars of new resources to support an agenda of student empowerment, led by a coalition of Asian, Latine, and African American students. Their work transformed a university dedicated to conservative segregationism into a leader in higher education for justice, equity, and inclusion. [“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Villanova Univeristy” https://www1.villanova.edu/university/diversity-inclusion/about.html]
As similar movements in American education crested, cable news took notice. By 2012, in response to the success of Barack Obama as President of the United States, MSNBC created a Saturday morning program led by political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry. Organizing her productions as an academic syllabus, Harris-Perry provided a pathway for journalists to partner with scholars in raising the level of public discourse. Using social media to amplify the voices of Black scholars around the world, new leaders like Eddie Glaude, Jelani Cobb, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Peniel Joseph became regular contributors to the debates over issues of the day by 2015. [“She gave me the space to be unapologetically Black,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/03/why-melissa-harris-perry-msnbc-show-mattered]
In that moment, social media became a way for younger scholars to open a new understanding of the African-American tradition of place-making, specifically through the aesthetic lens of Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts Movement. Julian Chambliss was strategically positioned to combine the knowledge of urban planning with the literary and graphic insights from comics studies. The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially the Black Panther film in 2018, made Chambliss the world’s leading voice on comics in media studies, alongside a chorus of rising stars like Ibram Kendi, Reynaldo Anderson, Khalil Muhammad, Kinitra Brooks, Keisha Blain, Nnedi Okorafor, John Jennings, Stacy Robinson, Tim Fielder, Isiah Lavender, Yohuru Williams, Sheena Howard, Frances Gateward, and Qiana Whitted. [Walter D. Greason, “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2022]
When Ruha Benjamin convened these voices (and many more) at Princeton University for the “Ferguson is the Future” conference in 2015, it was clear that the tradition of African-American place-making was transforming the world. Beyond literature and the fine arts, ahead of the technocratic advances of STEM fields, Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Andre Carrington, Alondra Nelson, Andrea Roberts, Pier Gabrielle Foreman, and Andre Brock created dozens of new tools to restore Black organizations and communities in the twenty-first century. These projects have transformed the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes for Health, the Smithsonian Institution, and countless museums, libraries, and archives around the world. [“Race and Data Science Resources,” https://datascience.columbia.edu/diversity/race-data-science-resources/]
Thus, we turn to our work this year with the Hungerford School, these two timelines converge here and now as we celebrate the work to preserve, restore, and expand the legacy of Black liberation here in Eatonville, Florida. Today, I have highlighted the antecedents to the Black Renaissance of the early twentieth century and the continuities that flowed from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the late twentieth century. In the last twenty years, social media created systems of information convergence that allowed the Zora Festival to reach new audiences everywhere, bringing the support of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and CBS Sunday Morning. However, the global effort to dismantle new community projects includes Brexit, MAGA, Putin’s war on Ukraine, and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. These attacks on freedom everywhere are a form of ‘counterconvergence’ that seeks to limit justice and equality for all people. It is the attack on critical race theory from 2021-2023. It is the current attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is the abolition of affirmative action. It is the abolition of Roe v. Wade. The preservation of the Hungerford School and all of Eatonville is a turning point to a brighter day for Dr. King’s Beloved Community. [Danian Jerry and Walter D. Greason, eds., Illmatic Consequences, 2023]
A Black Community’s History Up for Sale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OTYeHKrXn0
In the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century, the African-American tradition of place-making has NEVER been ‘a matter of chance.’ It is the constant effort to sacrifice, connect, and build together as leaders, activists, and scholars that makes the restoration of our homes, businesses, institutions, and whole communities possible.
Thank you for joining me and the entire team in this mission over the last decade.
Walter D. Greason
Macalester College (MN)
To DaVinci, From Imhotep 