Comparative Black Liberation Mosaic

The Comparative Black Liberation Mosaic will examine two of the most internationally significant liberation movements of the twentieth century: the Anti-apartheid movement in South Africa from the 1950s through the 1990s, and the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1980s.

Dickinson College proposes to conduct a cross-cultural and transnational program that will involve student and faculty participants in study of and research in King William’s Town, South Africa and Coahoma County, Mississippi during the summer and fall of 2008.

Travel both to South Africa and Coahoma County, Mississippi will allow participants to study how African and African American people in small communities responded to and eventually defeated white supremacy in two of its most infamous manifestations: Apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow Mississippi. The program will consider the economic and political legacies of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, how they interacted with one another, and how they are remembered and memorialized today.

In July, students will come to Dickinson College for an extensive orientation. Program participants will depart for approximately a month in South Africa, where they will engage in collaborative oral history and archival research with faculty and students from Fort Hare University, the Steve Biko Foundation, and residents of King William’s Town.

CLICK HERE for proposed South African Itinerary.

Upon return to Dickinson College during the fall 2008 semester, they will be engaged in a semester-long academic program involving the following four courses:

South African History~ Ball
History of the African American Civil Rights Movement~Rogers
Oral History~ Ball & Rogers
Ethnomusicology:World Music from Liberation Movements~ Wlodarski

During this time, they will analyze data, create a website, and produce films, audio portraits, and other materials from the research they conducted in South Africa.

In November, the participants will travel to Mississippi, where they will conduct a new series of interviews focusing on Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta. Here, the team will work collaboratively with students from Coahoma Community College (CCC) to understand the relationship between this historically black but now multi-racial public institution and the surrounding communities in the Mississippi Delta. Students and faculty members also will work with area high school students, their families, and civil rights leaders, doing home stays with families in one of three communities: Coahoma, Friars Point, and Clarksdale.

Participants will have ample opportunity to share with these communities and schools what they learned in South Africa, even as they begin interviewing Mississippi activists who became local leaders in the Head Start projects of the 1960s and 1970s, and activists who became leaders of local governments. Participants also will interview the families of leaders and examine the ways in which movement leadership has affected the lives of activists’ children and grandchildren.

CLICK HERE for proposed Mississippi Itinerary.

Through a cross-cultural classroom and fieldwork experience, this program will enhance knowledge of Africana Studies involving South Africa, the African Diaspora, and the African-American experience. This innovative program will examine the intersections between the global and the local, the international and domestic, in relation to race and ethnic relations, social movements and counter movements, and the parallels and discontinuities within transformative liberation movements in the U.S. and South Africa.

Read the story in theDickinsonian:
http://www.dickinson.edu/dickinsonian/detail.cfm?3040

Application filed through Office of Global Education

Click here to download an application (Application due February 15, 2008)