March 22, 2024

‘Inspiration and information’: Elms College holds annual Black Experience Summit

REGIONAL
Story and photos by Rebecca Drake

 

CHICOPEE – Scenes from an innovative documentary, talks by national and local Black educators, and a spoken word performance were featured at the Seventh Annual Black Experience Summit held Feb. 23 at the College of Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee.

The topic for this year’s summit was, “Forging Democracy: Black Womanhood and the Long March for Civil Rights.”

Harry Dumay, Elms College president, spoke to iObserve about the value of the annual summit for the college and the wider community. “What it’s brought to Elms College and to the region is a forum for scholarly dialogue on the experience of African Americans and Africans from the diaspora as a rich contribution to the American history and American culture,” he said.

“The poignant and painful aspect of that history as well as the contribution to excellence,” he continued. He said educating students on national and global history is part of the college’s mission and noted, “I learn something every year.”

Featured speaker Kellie Carter Jackson, associate professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, said educating oneself is the first step in engaging in dialogue about Black American history.

“Reading is the first step,” she said. “Get as much information as you possibly can and then let that information guide you in where you want to go and guide your passion. And so for me, it’s about inspiration and information.”

Asked how to engage people who might feel threatened by the study of African American history, Carter Jackson said, “Black history is American history – full stop – it just is.”

“And I think oftentimes people are afraid of what they don’t understand. And so the more information you can get, the more reading that you can do, the more history you know, the more empowered you can be not to live a life of fear.”

Responding to the question of the role of faith in addressing racism, she said, “The church and faith communities are instrumental in bringing about the dismantling of white supremacy, patriarchy and sexism.

“The church has such a powerful role, I think in how people understand the world, and that if the church is courageous enough and bold enough to stand up against these things that are wrong, that are sins – for me – I see racism as a sin, sexism as a sin, I see homophobia as a sin, that God loves all of his creation and wants us to be unified,” Carter Jackson said.

“I think that the church as a powerful message, a good and old message, really, and that is we stick to those principles of love for one another, love for God and for one another, we can’t go wrong,” she said.

Sister of St. Joseph Betsy Sullivan agrees with Carter Jackson’s emphasis on the church’s role in addressing injustice. Sister Sullivan is the president of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield, co-sponsor of the Black Experience Summit.

“It’s our honor to be a co-sponsor to this annual event because it resonates very well with our goal to live simply and for a more just society, and certainly (with) our mission, which has been stated so often: caring for our neighbor and uniting neighbor to neighbor so that all may be one.”

Sister Sullivan said her community strives to show the dignity of all people “and that everyone is a child of God, deserving of a good life and… dignity and respect.”

Sister Sullivan said that the summit provides a way for attendees to learn more about what’s happening in the broader world “and we realize that there is a seriousness right her in our own country in terms of our relationship with people of varying races and it’s time that racial injustice is eliminated.”

Other featured speakers at the event included Brittney Cooper, professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies, and is the founding director of the Race and Gender equity Lab at Rutgers University; Stephanie Logan, associate professor of elementary and multicultural education at Springfield College; Latonia Monroe Naylor, a chief business educator; Tyra Good, inaugural executive director of the Cynthia A. Lyons Center for Equity in Urban Education and associate professor of education at Elms College; and Jennfer Shoaff, chief diversity officer and assistant professor of anthropology at elms College.

Also featured were excerpts from the documentary, “Stamped from the Beginning,” which uses an animation process that blends live action with the art of the era to highlight figures and moments in the history of anti-Black racist ideas in America. The program also included a performance by Lyrical Faith, a Black American educator, activist and spoken word poet from The Bronx, N.Y.

A video version of this story will be featured on an upcoming edition of “Real to Reel,” which airs Saturday evenings at 7 on WWLP-22NEWS.