Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership

This course explores the profound silences and absences that structure the archive of Black life in the United States. We will explore what it means to search for Black history when the official record is silent or incomplete. Together, we will examine how the stories of Black people, especially those who were enslaved, have often been left out of archives, distorted, or deliberately erased. Using the work of scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman, we will learn how to read between the lines of history and listen for what was never written down. We’ll focus on the WPA Slave Narratives, a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people recorded in the 1930s, asking: What can these stories tell us, and what do they leave out? We’ll also trace the Black history of salt: as labor, as spiritual practice, and as a symbol of survival, pain, and endurance. Salt will be our guide for thinking about how memory lives in the body, in ritual, and in the land, even when written records are missing. This course is rooted in a belief that Black history lives not only in books and documents but also in our ancestors, our bodies, our communities, and our imaginations. Through conversation, collective reading, and creative reflection, we’ll practice ways of engaging with the past that honor both what has been remembered and what has been forgotten. This class is especially for those who are interested in healing, justice, storytelling, and reclaiming history from the ground up.