Counter-Narratives of Race, Resistance, and Language Learning in College Classrooms

Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.Associate Professor of English, John Jay College/CUNY

Background Image: Black and Latinx students and community members march on City College/CUNY

demanding Open Admissions and Black Studies in 1969

Extra-Curricular Black MIGRATION Literacies for College Students (circa 1925)

The Black Migration Primer1892 Ida B. Wells flees Memphis after receiving death threats for criticizing

lynching and the myth of the black rapist

1910 Chicago has 44,000 black residents; Detroit has 6,000 black residentsWhite mobs attack African-Americans in Boston, New York City, Cincinnati,

Houston, and Norfolk after Jack Johnson defeats James Jeffries

1911 National Urban League is established to help black southern migrants

1914 Harlem's African-American population is 50,000

Extra-Curricular Black MIGRATION Literacies for College Students (circa 1925)

The Black Migration Primer1915 A new KKK is formed; Chicago Defender asks blacks to migrate to the

North and adopt the slogan "If you must die, take at least one with you”

1919 Chicago's African-American population reaches 110,000

1925 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is formed

Extra-Curricular Black CULTURAL Literacies for College Students (circa 1925)

The Black Aesthetic Primer1919 Jessie Fauset is literary editor of CrisisClaude McKay publishes If We Must Die in The Liberator

1920 Mamie Smith records "Crazy Blues"

1921 Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is published in Crisis, Colored Players Guild of NY is founded

African-American art on display at the 135th Street branch of NYPL

1923 Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band records with trumpet player Louis Armstrong

Extra-Curricular Black CULTURAL Literacies for College Students (circa 1925)

The Black Aesthetic Primer1923 Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas arrive in New York Jean Toomer’s Cane is publishedZora Neale Hurston publishes in OpportunityThe Cotton Club in Harlem opens, Josephine Baker appears on BroadwayBessie Smith and Ma Rainey are recording sensations

1924 Paul Robeson has lead role in The Emperor JonesCountee Cullen wins first prize in Witter Bynner Poetry Competition

1925 Countee Cullen’s Color is published, The New Negro is publishedSargent Johnson exhibits at the San Francisco Art AssociationBlind Lemon Jefferson makes first recording using new electrical technology

Extra-Curricular Black INFORMATION Literacies for College Students (circa 1925)

The New Information Primer1892 The Afro-American founded1905 Chicago Defender founded1905 Pittsburgh Courier founded1909 New York Amsterdam News founded1910 NAACP introduces The Crisis with Du Bois as editor with 1,000

subscribers at first printing1917 The Messenger is founded; UNIA is founded1918 Crisis has 100,000 subscribers; Negro World is founded1920 First UNIA Convention; Negro World’s subscription peaks at 200,000

Fisk Universityestablished 1866

Background Photo: Fisk Class of 1888 (pictured in front is W.E.B. DuBois)

“Ev’ry Goodbye Ain’t Gone”

Course Website:

http://www.digirhetorics.org/

The ProjectStudent sampling below is taken from website:

http://wethepeopleunified.weebly.com/

Narrative #3

“Pretty for a Black Girl”: Black Vernacular/Mobile Insurgency

URL:bitly.com/andrene

Header and Top Navigation for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

Left Navigation Sample: “Burning through the Cerebral Cortex”

Close-up of Top Navigation for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

Footer for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

“They weren’t born from the

body, they were born from the

soul”“Mama Gave Birth to the

Soul Children” by Queen Latifah

featuring De La Soul (1989)

Denied the integrity of our words, we lose

possibility. In this sense our freedom depends

directly upon our ability to represent the events of

our lives… In telling the stories of our reality, both

private and public, spiritual and material, we

assert a future. The future, though always apparently beyond our control, is in actuality a continuing alternative,

one we actively construct out of our understanding of past events… language

powers the future.Gordon Pradl in his

introduction to Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays

of James Britton (1982)

The Fisk Continuum1) shifting racial demographics at our public schools and colleges, (first most notably achieved in the 1970s where, for the first time in U.S. educational history, as many black students attended white colleges as HBCUs)

2) a black protest movement innovates and relies on the newest, most available technologies in order to push forth alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, new authoring, and textual productions

3) new temporalities for cross-spatial, non-classroom-contained learning where our students’ connections to justice and aesthetics are centrally and critically informed by cultural, popular, and community movements

For More on Teaching and Classrooms

realwriting.org (my first year writing and advanced writing courses)

digirhetorics.org (my courses and projects related to digital rhetorics)

Blackwomenrhetproject.com (my courses related to gender studies)

carmenkynard.org (“Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions”[main website])

funkdafied.org (courses related to African American rhetorics and literacies)

johnjay.digication.com/carmenkynard (Post-Tenure ePortfolio)