On Thursday morning, when Chad Williams woke up to the news that a white gunman had killed nine black people inside a historic church in Charleston, S.C., he thought he was having a bad dream.
“Once I came to my senses, I had incredible pain,” said Mr. Williams, an associate professor of African and African-American studies at Brandeis University. “It was visceral. I went from shock to sadness to anger.”
Watching the news only compounded his sorrow and frustration. Public conversations about the shooting were generally devoid of the kind of historical knowledge that frames contemporary racial violence and its deep roots.
Two days later Mr. Williams decided that he wouldn’t just sit and stew. He thought about how another historian, Marcia Chatelain, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, had responded to the events in Ferguson, Mo., last August by creating the #FergusonSyllabus hashtag on Twitter. That hashtag spawned conversations about race, violence, and history.
Mr. Williams wondered if he could do the same. He got on his computer to see if someone else had beaten him to the punch. To his surprise, no one had.
“I naïvely expect that someone had created a syllabus, given the way hashtags move like rapid fire on social media,” Mr. Williams said.
So he decided he’d do the work. His project started with a series of tweets.
“I want to use this as an educational moment and mobilize people,” Mr. Williams said.
The professor reached out to the historians Kidada E. Williams (no relation), a professor at Wayne State University; Keisha N. Blaine, an incoming professor at the University of Iowa; and Christopher Cameron, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who is the founder of the African American Intellectual History Society. The four scholars solicited suggestions on Twitter under the hashtag #CharlestonSyllabus, and the project quickly took off.
In a conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Williams shared more details about his motivation in creating the project and the response to it. An edited transcript of that conversation follows.
Q. Where is the #CharlestonSyllabus hosted, and what kind of measurable response have you seen so far?
A. It’s on the African American Intellectual History Society’s website. Since Saturday, when it went up, it’s had over 55,000 views, averaging 900 an hour. It’s gotten almost 20,000 likes on Facebook, 13,000 mentions and 28,000 engagements on Twitter. We’ve had a few trolls who’ve tried to hijack the thread with rants about how the Confederate flag is not a racist symbol but a source of Southern heritage and pride. But over all, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. By Sunday we had about 10,000 suggestions of books, articles, and other documents.
Q. Why do you think that #CharlestonSyllabus resonates in this current moment?
A. I’m a scholar of African-American history, and so I was thinking about this tragedy as a historical event as I was working through my own profound grief and sadness. This is the worst racial massacre since the Reconstruction era. What happened in Charleston is connected to other race riots of the 20th century, but this one is unique because of its explicitly religious and political intentions. We can’t disconnect it from the current moment, the killings of unarmed black people, the surge in white supremacy, and massive resistance to Obama.
Q. Can you say more about why were you so frustrated by news-media discussions surrounding the Charleston shooting?
A. So much of our conversations about race are rooted in emotions and feelings and not knowledge and facts. What I was hearing on the news lacked historical substance. The Charleston shooting is connected to so many important issues — the history of slave resistance, the history of racial violence during Reconstruction, the history of the AME church, the desires of black people for freedom and self-determination, the role of the black church in Charleston and how it served as a place of spiritual sustenance and radical activism, and the history of the Confederate flag. People are often not willing to search for the necessary knowledge to have informed conversations.
People need to at least understand where the racism is coming from. These types of ideas and behaviors and institutions didn’t just materialize overnight. They are not new. There’s a long history of racial terror, demonizing blackness, policing and criminalizing black bodies, economic exploitation, and abuse of black women. There’s a lineage that we are seeing manifested today. Having that knowledge is critical to trying to do something about it in the present.
Q. Were you inspired by the popularity of the #FergusonSyllabus?
A. Yes. A lot of people were familiar with the Ferguson syllabus, and like that one, ours has books, movies, songs, articles, opinion pieces, and editorials. There are diverse sources, and there’s overlap between the two syllabi. You’ll find some of the same titles on each, but there are some geographical differences. We reached out to African-American intellectual-history circles and combed through thousands of suggestions.
Q. How is the syllabus organized?
A. There are specific themes and subjects related to what happened in Charleston. There’s a section of texts that provide a broad overview of black history and the black experience. There’s a section on the history of South Carolina, the history of the black church, black women in the church. There are readings on the history of Charleston, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Confederate flag, Jim Crow, racial violence, white racial identity, Black Power, and the civil-rights era. We’ve added sections for novels and poetry, editorials, and primary sources and multimedia. The list is interdisciplinary and pretty substantial. The syllabus itself can be used for a range of courses.
Q. Do you see historians playing an important role in educating the general public through hashtag activism?
A. As historians we have an important responsibility at this moment. Scholars of the race and the black experience need to bring their expertise to bear and put it to use to promote informed dialogue about what happened in Charleston. We must place our current work into the context of the black intellectual tradition. This is the kind of work black historians have always engaged in. We must take advantage of new technologies and new mediums and modes of communication like Twitter to disseminate knowledge and organize people.
The syllabus is a good tool for well-intentioned white people who want to be allies. One of my motivations for this project was to get white allies to start doing the hard work of reading and educating themselves. There’s no excuse given the generations of amazing scholarship on race that’s been produced. Any type of ignorance is willful.
Q. What kind of impact to you think the Charleston killings will have on college classes in the fall?
A. This tragedy took place in the summer, so the immediate effect is not going to be as acute as it would have if it happened during the academic year. For those of us who teach about the history of racial terrorism, this is going to be a signal moment. Students who are taking classes in black history will be coming to campus with this on their minds. We are going to be talking about Charleston for a long time.
Q. How are you preparing yourself to teach next semester?
A. As a black man professor, it’s all so exhausting. Last semester I taught a course where we began with Mike Brown and ended with Eric Garner. Those events unexpectedly framed my teaching. It was challenging pedagogically and on an emotional level. Many of my students were traumatized. It’s important for black scholars to practice self-care and to make sure we are emotionally and mentally ready to do the work. The response to the Charleston syllabus shows there’s a community of concerned scholars and everyday citizens grappling with these issues.
It’s been therapeutic and cathartic seeing the responses to the hashtag. So often you feel helpless and like a lone voice in the wilderness. To know there are other scholars and decent humans out there, grappling with the grief and trauma and at least doing something to educate themselves and other people, is reassuring.
Stacey Patton writes about the academic job market, the experiences of being a graduate student or faculty member, adjunct-labor issues, and race and diversity in academe. Contact her at stacey.patton@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @DrStaceyPatton.
