Includes discussion of 1920s Fisk students

1. 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

2. Extra-Curricular Black MIGRATION Literacies
for College Students (circa 1925)
The Black Migration Primer
1892 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 residents
White 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

3. Extra-Curricular Black MIGRATION Literacies
for College Students (circa 1925)
The Black Migration Primer
1915 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

4. Extra-Curricular Black CULTURAL Literacies
for College Students (circa 1925)
The Black Aesthetic Primer
1919 Jessie Fauset is literary editor of Crisis
Claude 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

5. Extra-Curricular Black CULTURAL Literacies
for College Students (circa 1925)
The Black Aesthetic Primer
1923 Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas arrive in New York
Jean Toomer’s Cane is published
Zora Neale Hurston publishes in Opportunity
The Cotton Club in Harlem opens, Josephine Baker appears on Broadway
Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey are recording sensations
1924 Paul Robeson has lead role in The Emperor Jones
Countee Cullen wins first prize in Witter Bynner Poetry Competition
1925 Countee Cullen’s Color is published, The New Negro is published
Sargent Johnson exhibits at the San Francisco Art Association
Blind Lemon Jefferson makes first recording using new electrical
technology

6. Extra-Curricular Black INFORMATION Literacies
for College Students (circa 1925)
The New Information Primer
1892 The Afro-American founded
1905 Chicago Defender founded
1905 Pittsburgh Courier founded
1909 New York Amsterdam News founded
1910 NAACP introduces The Crisis with Du Bois as editor with 1,000
subscribers at first printing
1917 The Messenger is founded; UNIA is founded
1918 Crisis has 100,000 subscribers; Negro World is founded
1920 First UNIA Convention; Negro World’s subscription peaks at
200,000

7. Fisk University
established 1866
Background Photo: Fisk Class of 1888 (pictured in front is W.E.B. DuBois)

8. “Ev’ry Goodbye Ain’t Gone”

9. Course Website:
http://www.digirhetorics.org/

10. The Project
Student sampling below is taken from website:
http://wethepeopleunified.weebly.com/

11. Narrative #3
“Pretty for a Black Girl”:
Black Vernacular/Mobile Insurgency

12. URL:
bitly.com/andrene

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

14. Left Navigation Sample: “Burning through the Cerebral Cortex”

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

16. Footer for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

17. “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)

18. The Fisk Continuum
1) 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

19. 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)