Beyond her own projects—including Callaloo, a children’s book and media brand that got the attention of PBS Kids—she’s been making her mark on Broadway as a co-producer of shows such as The Wiz and the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen, for which she and her fellow producers were nominated for a 2024 Tony Award.

Tell me about how you got into acting and how you found your way to Fordham.
I grew up in D.C. My mom is from Trinidad, and my dad is African American. At home, the arts and storytelling were celebrated. I studied musical theater in high school at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and the dream was to come to New York and be on Broadway.

What intrigued me about Fordham was the fact that you could double major. I was interested in so many different things that I didn’t want to just go to an acting conservatory. I was very invested in the Fordham Theatre program itself and how the University could help me grow.

Did your thinking about your career change during college?
I wasn’t coming out of Fordham saying, “I want to own my own business.” I wanted to be an actor. For about a year after graduating, I auditioned and hustled, and I found that I wanted to do other things. Fordham taught me a lot with my extracurricular involvement. I was part of the Black student club, and a lot of the skills that I was learning—building out events, budgeting, marketing events, bringing an audience together, cross-collaboration with other student clubs—those were all skills that taught me how to produce.

Tell me about your production company, Sepia Works. What has the trajectory been like?
The growth has been incredible. The company started with my one-woman play Girls! Girls? Girls., which took me out to LA and I started doing more film and TV work. My second piece, Callaloo, started off as a play but then turned into a book series and a show with puppetry. Then these bigger companies—Sesame Street, PBS Kids—started calling. And because I was creating my own stories and my own narratives, I had more power in the room.

Why did you decide to start the Canady Foundation for the Arts?
I realized that Callaloo was impacting young people, and we needed more support in the nonprofit space to serve children with literacy and early child development work. The foundation has also grown exponentially since 2015. We now have a staff, we have ongoing programming. We serve young people from 3 all the way to 18. Partnership and collaboration have been such a huge part of the growth.

What does your average day look like?
Every day is different, and I love that. But my days are made up of routine: I get up, I get my daughter to school, I work out in the morning, and then I try to schedule something. I have to have some type of structure. Being a mom also has forced me to prioritize and to know that at a certain time, I have to stop working. I can’t work the way that I worked in my 20s.

How do you balance not only the work but those parts of your identity—thinking like both an artist and an entrepreneur?
Honestly, it’s very hard. And it took me a long time to figure out my workflow and my balance. I would say at this point in my life, I have an amazing team that can manage a lot of the business stuff for me, but in the early stages, I did everything. And I think that makes the best leaders. You have to be able to have a grasp of every role, and be able to roll your sleeves up and do the work. And I think you also just have to carve out time to rest and to focus on your craft.

At times when I get overwhelmed, I like to step back and take time for gratitude and acknowledge that there’s creativity in everything that is going on in the room, whether it’s the business side or the actual creative side. That’s what makes it fun.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

“I was always really interested in migration and movement—why people move and what happens when they move and how they form community,” said Maddox, an associate professor in the African & African-American Studies department.

In her new book, A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press), Maddox explores those ideas, as well as the influence of organizations that supported Caribbean immigrants as they arrived in the U.S. around the early 1900s.

How did you come up with the idea for A Home Away from Home?

I knew that I wanted to work on some aspect of immigration or migration history for my Ph.D. [which she earned in 2016]. I started going to the Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture]in Harlem, and I found these records of Caribbean-American mutual aid societies. There were so many of them. I thought, “They’re really important. We should be talking about this.”

What did you learn from studying these mutual aid societies?

I realized that the societies were important for lots of reasons: helping migrants form community with each other and taking care of them in a time where there weren’t many outlets for Black immigrants.This is when we have a lot of segregationist laws in the U.S. toward Black people … and they’re not OK with that. They become really politically active. They’re fighting against anti-lynching laws. They’re fighting for better living conditions within New York City, better education. This is also the time where we have a lot of xenophobic immigration laws.

What were some of the surprising parts of your research?

[These immigrants] are also still heavily involved in the politics of home—the political climate of the Caribbean, and what’s happening there. Globally, they’re also really invested in what’s happening in Africa. One of the key points that I look at is 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia; at this time, Ethiopia is the only country on the African continent that’s not colonized by European power. The whole African diaspora and all Black people around the world are looking at Ethiopia. And so these groups are raising money to send to Ethiopian troops. They’re sending supplies there. Some people are actually going to fight for the Ethiopian army. So not only are they invested in what was happening where they are, but they see themselves connected to Black people throughout the world.

How did you see those connections form through your research?

One of the things that I was really interested in is how Black identity is formed—even with my own family, we’re all Black, but there were differences. So how did they become Caribbean, because they start off as someone from Antigua or Jamaica, but then they become Caribbean in the U.S. At the same time, they’re also becoming Black, and they’re becoming African American. They’re living in the same neighborhoods with African American people, they’re in the same job positions.

What do you hope people take away from reading your book?

There aren’t a lot of books that study this early period of Caribbean immigration. We tend to talk about the period after 1960 when there’s this boom of migrants, but I’m really interested to show that there are Caribbean immigrants who were coming prior to that, who are part of the fabric of New York City history, of U.S. history. I’m excited this book is coming out during Black History Month, because we don’t always talk about Black migrants as part of that history. But they are. For instance—no one ever talks about Malcolm X’s Caribbean heritage and what that meant for him as a Black political leader in the U.S. I’m hoping that this helps people feel seen and represented in ways that they hadn’t been before.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“Malcolm X is a well-known figure, but I wanted to know more about his mother and her impact on his life,” said Collins. She recently published the historical fiction novel “Ocean Stirrings” (Peepal Tree Press, 2023), based on the life of Louise Langdon Norton Little, a working mother and activist who raised eight children, including Malcolm X. The book, along with other work by Collins, is currently being taught in Fordham’s African & African American Studies program. 

In a Q&A, Lambert—an interdisciplinary scholar who studies literature, history, and the African diaspora—asks Collins about Little’s life and influence and teases a glimpse of what to expect at Collins’s upcoming lecture at the Rose Hill campus. 

Lambert: What was Louise’s vision of Black nationalism? What kind of activism was she involved in that Malcolm X might have witnessed and learned from? 

Collins: Louise was an activist in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) led by Marcus Garvey. She sent in reports from various places where they lived and organized. As she went from place to place with her husband, establishing UNIA groups, she was at the forefront, writing the minutes, organizing people, getting people to come to meetings, talking about Black identities, etc. She was not only doing activist work out there, but also at home, showing her children the work of Grenadian political thinker T.A. Marryshow, for example—helping them realize that Blackness is not stupidity. 

Lambert: I can’t help but think about what else she might have done with her life, had she been allowed to continue her education. She really took it upon herself to re-educate her children after they came home from school, helping them to openly question what they learned, teaching her children as Black people and as Black Americans.

Collins: Yes, it was interesting to me how she helped to socialize them. How she told them, “You’re being taught that you are worth less as Negro people. And that is not so.” 

Lambert: Most historians agree that Malcolm X is an important figure in Black, American, and Caribbean history. What does the story of Louise Langdon Norton Little add—not only to our understanding of Malcolm, but also to history itself? 

Collins: I think she’s important as a woman, mother, and individual, dealing with all of the complexities of a Black woman’s relationships, and the way society responds to her. In a sense, it’s not only her story, but a collective trauma. 

Every time someone says her full name, Louise Langdon Norton Little, I think that is a story in itself. Little is the name that her husband had because of the white Littles in Georgia. Norton is the name of the father who raped her mother. Langdon is the name of white colonials in Grenada. So every time her full name is mentioned, I think about all those last names that don’t truly don’t belong to her. 

This woman is more than Malcolm X’s mother. We know Malcolm’s story, but there are so many people whose stories we don’t know or acknowledge because they have not come to public attention. Louise Little is one such person.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Laurie Lambert joined Fordham’s African and African American Studies department in 2017. She served as the co-founder of the University’s Freedom and Slavery Working Group from 2019 to 2023. She is the author of several published works, including her book “Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution” (University of Virginia Press 2020). She is the daughter of Grenadians and grew up splitting her time between Toronto and Grenada. 

Learn more about the upcoming lecture on Feb. 1, to be held at 6 p.m. in the Great Hall in the McShane Center.

The April 29 event was the deans’ second forum for alumni on their commitment to furthering the University’s action plan for addressing racism and educating for justice. Fordham announced the plan in June 2020 after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice prompted members of the Fordham community to describe their own experiences of discrimination on campus.

“We’re asking hard questions, addressing proposals that have come forward, and moving forward indeed with hope and confidence into a future … that is marked by greater inclusivity, greater diversity, and greater commitment shared to building a much more just world as we educate for justice and seek to eradicate racism,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in opening remarks.

Father McShane and the four deans were joined by moderator Valerie Irick Rainford, FCRH ’86, a Fordham trustee who is spearheading anti-racism training efforts within the University, and Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer.

The panelists spoke of changes underway in the curriculum, recruitment of faculty and students, new programs, and other efforts to embed anti-racism in the University and effect permanent change.

“For students to come here from different backgrounds, it is vitally important that they feel that this institution represents them, that they do not feel like … they are here on sort of sufferance, that they feel that their communities are a part and parcel of what makes Fordham tick, what makes Fordham an excellent place,” said Tyler Stovall, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Faculty Diversity, Community Connections

Stovall emphasized the importance of forging links between the University and the diverse, vibrant communities surrounding the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses. Zapata noted current efforts like a collaboration with the Bronx Book Festival and a speaker series focused on Bronx writers facilitated by faculty. “We are an institution of this wonderful borough, and I think that’s something we need to talk about a little bit more,” he said.

In efforts to diversify the faculty, Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and associate vice president for arts and sciences, said 50% of the arts and sciences faculty members recruited to begin this academic year are people of color. In addition, Fordham announced the creation of the Margaret Peil Distinguished Chair in African and African American Studies and is currently recruiting for a newly created postdoctoral fellowship in critical race studies in the sociology and anthropology department, as well as a new position in the English department—a rhetoric specialist—to support the faculty’s work on revising the composition program toward anti-racist learning objectives and pedagogy.

Arts and Sciences also announced the creation of a new affiliate program in African and African American studies to elevate that department’s visibility and foster an interdisciplinary approach to anti-racism, Badowska said. Fifteen faculty members across departments have committed to joining the initiative.

On the point of hiring diverse faculty, Rainford noted that “once you hire those individuals, I think it’s also about inclusion and access.”

Stovall said a newly formed group of Fordham faculty members of color would be meeting soon to discuss diversity among faculty and at the University generally. “I think these leaders are going to have an awful lot to say, and it’s going to be up to us to listen,” he said.

He pointed out the importance of integration, “one of the terms we tend not to talk about.”

“Ultimately, what we are all about in this endeavor is producing an integrated educational experience and ultimately an integrated society,” he said. “Study after study has shown, in despite of people’s fears of integration, that actually integrated education benefits not just students of color but all students, and makes them stronger students.”

“This is a major pathway towards the ultimate goal of Fordham University,” he said.

Zapata said his office is offering a grant program titled Teaching Race Across the Curriculum to help academic departments integrate questions of race within their courses, particularly those that all students take.

“Students want to see themselves in the people that teach them, that they encounter throughout [the University], but they also want to see themselves in the curriculum. They’ve talked a lot about that,” he said.

Expanding Scholarship and Internship Opportunities

Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, pointed to the Office of Undergraduate Admission’s “above-and-beyond” efforts to increase diversity among incoming students. Changes this year include an effort “to appreciate and value a wider range of student experiences in the admissions process,” she said, as well as new events for prospective students of color who would be part of the fall 2021 entering class.

Also important, Auricchio said, is the recently created Trustee Diversity Scholarship Fund, which grew out of a scholarship fund that Rainford founded. “Before we could even announce it, we were starting to get donations,” Rainford said.

A new Cultural Engagement Internships program, funded by Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Fordham College at Rose Hill, has created paid internships that place students with New York nonprofits and cultural organizations that mostly serve communities of color or advance the work of anti-racism. “This opens up the internship opportunities to students who might not otherwise be able to afford” to take unpaid internships, Auricchio said.

And diversity in the yearlong Matteo Ricci Seminar for high-achieving students on both campuses has grown by opening it up to all students who want to apply, rather than relying on a select pool of students recommended by faculty, she said; she also cited the importance of bringing on Assistant Dean Mica McKnight, a woman of color, as co-leader for the Fordham College at Lincoln Center program.

Supporting Students

In other efforts on the undergraduate level, Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said administrators on both campuses are developing a program to support first-generation students—61% of whom are students of color—and their families as the students navigate college life. At Rose Hill, the college is expanding access to undergraduate research opportunities by developing a one-credit course on the ins and outs of conducting research, such as developing a proposal and finding a mentor, Mast said.

“It’s … so important that we intentionally support students as they are and who they are, when they get to Fordham and when they’re at Fordham—that we are transparent and effective in this work,” she said.

In a culmination of longstanding efforts to increase diversity in the college’s Honors Program, 60% of students offered admission this year are either BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or people of color) or first-generation students, Mast said.

The University has also secured a planning grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to join a national learning community aimed at building capacity for developing inclusive, equitable, anti-racist approaches to STEM education—in first-year “gateway” courses, in particular—to support students who are underrepresented in these fields, she said.

The panelists took questions, including one about why the University doesn’t have an Asian American studies program with a major and minor offered. Badowska said she had met with members of the faculty—which would have to propose any new program, according to University statutes—about surveying the existing classes and resources to see what might be offered immediately while they work on developing a program.

“It is the curriculum that reveals who we are, and it is our academic programs that say we’re an anti-racist university or we are not an anti-racist university,” she said. “So that’s one of the reasons why an Asian American studies program is so critical for us to develop at this moment.”

Eradicating Racism

In response to another question—“Do you really believe that racism can be eradicated at Fordham?”—Rainford spoke of a long-term effort.

“There are some that still believe that racism doesn’t exist,” said Rainford, who is Black. “But the fact of the matter is, it’s in the fabric of everything in the country.”

“It will take time and effort, and we will not eradicate racism in our lifetime, but we certainly can help advance racial equity,” such as through the efforts the deans described, she said.

Zapata responded, “It’s going to take courage, the courage to … listen to the experiences of people who don’t always feel they have a chance to voice their experiences.”

Stovall said, “We currently live in a world where scientists are literally talking about creating human immortality in less than a century. So in that kind of world, I think all sorts of things are possible, including eradicating racism.”

Hurdles to Surmount

Asked about obstacles the University faces, Mast mentioned funding—for staffing, on-campus housing, and financial aid, for instance.

Badowska spoke of the challenges that would be inherent in changing the University’s culture to a point where everyone in the arts and sciences community would possess the five competencies that the deans have proposed:

• Knowledge about racism, white privilege, and related topics;
• Self-knowledge and a commitment to self-work and continuous learning in these areas;
• Commitment to disrupting microaggressions and racist dynamics in the classroom, the workplace, and beyond;
• Commitment to systemic change through examining policies and practices to make sure they support racial equity; and
• Reimagined community and allyship, or a capacity to form equitable partnerships and alliances across racial lines.

“We know that we have a long road before we can say that everyone has these five capacities, but we’ve identified them,” she said.

The event drew 64 attendees, nearly all of whom stayed nearly a half-hour beyond the event’s one-hour allotted time.

“That, I think, shows the great hunger and thirst that the people of Fordham have for this great work that we’re about together,” Father McShane said. “One of the things we have to remind ourselves is that this is a beginning, and that’s an important observation and an important thing for us to own. We have a long journey ahead of us, but we are up for it and will keep at it.”

The event featured presentations from Catherine Powell, J.D., professor of law, on the color and gender of COVID; Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science on being Black in Biden’s America; and Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies on the politics of the Black image of rebirth. The webinar was hosted by Laurie Lambert, associate professor of African and African American Studies.

“Let me start with what I call the ‘color of COVID,’” Powell said. “I start with our current inflection point, our moment of interlocking pandemics of COVID-19, economic insecurity, and inequality.”

Powell said that we must examine the race and gender issues built into the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how this crisis relates to economic and social injustice. With Black and Latinx populations being overrepresented among essential workers, they’ve been exposed to COVID-19 more, she said. And they are more likely to have pre-existing conditions and live in congregate settings, which is part of why they’ve been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, she said, both in terms of health and finances.

One way to think about addressing these pandemics is through a “viral convergence,” she said, a twist on civil rights scholar Derrick’s Bell’s theory of “interest convergence,” which argued that Black people have been able to achieve civil rights victories only when white and Black interests align.

“My idea of viral convergence is a recuperative project—one that seeks to span our shared and differential interests,” she said. “It calls for the adoption of transformative laws to reinforce our shared and unifying elements of our current crisis, while also addressing our differential vulnerabilities, whether in the context of the cross racial nature of the movement for Black Lives, or the rise of urban-suburban alliances that are paving the way for large scale inclusive politics.”

Greer said the alliances Powell discussed were instrumental in electing President Joe Biden. But she also noted that the current political landscape includes a “swinging pendulum” that moved dramatically from the first African American president to Donald Trump. That swing has brought large, overarching questions about how Black people are thinking about their roles in the country, she said.

“Can Black people ever be full citizens in this country? Can anyone who’s not white ever be a full citizen in this country, especially after what we just experienced for the past four years, and especially what we saw over January 6?” Greer said.

Biden, to start, has made efforts to swing the pendulum back, including putting together one of the most “inclusive cabinets,” Greer said. But he also has to deal with the historical context of these “multiple pandemics.” and “systemic inequalities.”

One way to continue to swing the pendulum, Greer said, is through the combination of “protest politics” and “electoral politics.”

“Black people in this country have never gotten anything without the duality of both,” Greer said. And I think a lot more Americans are understanding the power of protest politics, to change policy and to change electoral politics.”

Protests are some of the most common images depicted in the media of Black people and others fighting for justice, Prettyman said. She showed the image of TIME magazine’s cover from the Baltimore uprisings in 2015, featuring a photo of a Black man running from police. She asked everyone to consider what a “revolutionary image” might be in this time.

“As we consider this notion of a revolutionary image, I wonder, is it an image of protest, a visual articulation of defiance or resistance?” she said. Or, she said, “perhaps a revolutionary image is one that challenges that paradigm and offers us one of intimacy or care.”

Prettyman showed images from protests and from movies such as Judas and the Black Messiah, where Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader from Illinois as played by Daniel Kaluuya, is depicted giving a rousing speech. She contrasted those to more everyday images of Black people working, living, experiencing joy.

“Is it possible that that is also a revolutionary image? Perhaps still, a revolutionary image is one that simply shows the everyday life of Black people doing nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic, titillating, or comedic?”

Lambert said these presentations worked together in a way “that’s blown my mind.”

“As we move through these dual pandemics, I thought that was great to ask us to reconsider images of joy and care and intimacy, and everyday life—seeking those out, finding those, but also thinking of them as the spaces of possibility where some of this work is going to be done,” she said.

Naison, a principal investigator on Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project, has worked for years to create a database for scholars and people in the community to access the Bronx’s African-American history. The walk was part of his ongoing efforts to rebut perceptions of the borough as an urban wasteland and to share, particularly with students, the rich vein of history that resides just blocks from Fordham’s campus.
The tour also attracted New York State Assemblyman Jose Rivera and Bronx-born trumpeter Jimmy Owens.

“The Bronx is a place where people of many different racial, religious, and national backgrounds live in harmony and which has produced more varieties of popular music than any place in the world. Everyone from Fordham can gain inspiration from this experience, whether from studying the borough’s history, or immersing themselves in Bronx communities and sharing the Bronx’s cultural traditions,” said Naison.

Video by Jeff Coltin

The book, co-edited by Mark Naison, PhD, professor of African and African American studies, and Bronx resident Bob Gumbs, features 17 edited and condensed interviews that were chosen from among 300 conducted as part of the Bronx African American History Project.

Naison said he and Gumbs managed to cull from the 300 interviews the ones that feature the best storytellers.

“If you’re going to have an oral history, you want something told in a way that’s going to capture people’s attention,” he said.

Taken as a whole, said Naision, the stories counter perceptions of the Bronx’s past as a hellish, fire-ridden borough overcome with drugs, crime, violence, and family decay. He said the interviews also form a blueprint for a successful community that’s marked in particular by decent housing, good schools, and an unusual openness (for the times) to racial integration, as black families moved to the area from Harlem.

All but one of the interview subjects came from parents with no college education, and yet they went on to become principals, teachers, social workers, architects, world class musicians, and ministers, he said.

“We’re definitely trying to get across that a community is families, schools, churches, community groups, and everybody working together, with the interest of young people foremost,” he said.

“The schools had much better arts and sports programs, the after school programs stayed open until nine at night, and there were community programs in the churches and the housing projects. I think we’ve gotten away from those things we used to provide to youth.”

Naision said the words of the late African-American historian Vincent Harding resonates deeply and thematically in the book. Harding talks about how, growing up in a single parent family, what nurtured him and helped him succeed were the members of a small, all-black congregation at a church he attended, and the teachers who took him under their wings at his large, multiracial school.

“Where does success come from? There are definite things that we can learn from these stories about what it takes to help young people who grew up in difficult circumstances to succeed,” Naison said.

Naison said it’s most gratifying to him that area high school teachers are going to use Before the Fires in their lessons about Bronx and urban African-American history.

“We hope people discuss it and debate it . . .  and that the material itself is exciting enough to engage them,” he said.

“I’m excited that it’s going to be used in schools,” he said. “A high school class might draw something entirely different from what a college class might.”

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship 

In Shapeshifters, Aimee Meredith Cox writes about the young black women she met and came to know during the eight years she spent doing fieldwork at a homeless shelter in Detroit, “arguably one of the most beleaguered U.S. cities.” Cox, a former professional dancer, gives voice to the girls as they and their families struggle to make a living in a service-oriented economy. She focuses on how the girls fight the stereotypes (of race, poverty, and gender) that constrain them, using dance and poetry and other means to “shift the terms” of what it means to be seen as “acceptable or disrespectable citizens, through their own definitions of family, care, love, success, and labor.”

The archive, made available through the Department of African and African-American Studies and Fordham Libraries, consists of downloadable audio files and verbatim transcripts of interviews conducted by researchers from 2002 to 2013.

“This took years of incredibly hard work,” said Mark Naison, PhD, professor of history and African and African-American studies and principal investigator of the project. He said that the transcriptions were completed over the past two years by Fordham undergraduates, with the exception of a handful of people from outside of Fordham, who helped when interviews were conducted in French.

The archive also includes interviews with white families who stayed on as neighborhoods went through demographic transformations. Naison said that in the 1940s and 1950s, the Bronx was “incredibly diverse” as the borough transformed. White flight didn’t happen in a flash.

“For about 20 years the Bronx had a very unusual mix,” said Naison. “The transformation was a much slower process than people realize. We captured that experience.”

The racial mixing inspired a musical history, too, which has become an overarching theme that evolved through the interviews, said Naison. Similarly, as one oral account led to the next, it became obvious to the researchers that they should include the wave of African immigration, which by the 21^st century had grown to be one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere.

In 2006, Sudanese native Jane Edward, PhD, a clinical assistant professor in the African and African-American studies department, joined the oral history project to engage the growing African community. She and Naison went to events, schools, and organizations, eventually gaining the trust of the communities. Edward, an ethnographer by training, had to veer from the established protocols of the project, creating separate questionnaires and release forms tailored to the community concerns, as issues of undocumentation left some afraid to speak.

“It ties to my own experience as an immigrant from South Sudan,” said Edward. “It is also a contemporary history, so it changes all the time.”

The project moved from gathering oral history to organizing and uploading the transcripts and recordings, with an eye toward preserving the borough’s history for the long haul, said Damien Strecker. A doctoral candidate in history, Strecker worked with Fordham Libraries to archive the project.

“You don’t want them collecting dust,” he said. “You want them available for scholars, but also you also want a kid in a Bronx middle school or high school to be able to Google them and find them.”

Even with the technical issues he faced in creating the archive with such large files, Strecker said he still was pulled in by the personal histories.

“The stories can latch on to you,” he said. “The real gold is the average working person sharing his or her life experience.”

One end result of putting the archive online for the public may be to raise Fordham’s profile in the Bronx. Project participant Andrea Ramsey, FCRH ‘86, said that when she was growing up she often went to the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Gardens near the campus, but she didn’t know much about Fordham “other than that it was a Catholic organization or school.”

“I love Fordham, and I went here as an adult,” she said. “But when I was growing up I wasn’t aware of [it].”

Bob Gumbs, a local historian and project organizer, said he knew of very little in terms of contact between Fordham and the residents of the south Bronx before the project got underway in 2002.

“Fordham was a world away,” he said. “So I think this project has given the University a new identity in a positive way.”

On Oct. 5, in collaboration with the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme, Fordham hosted a moderated discussion of scholars, writers, and historians to honor and commemorate the lives of these enslaved black women.

The event, titled “Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery,” also examined the ways in which contemporary women artists address historical absences and give a voice to the unheard.

Opening the discussion before a capacity audience at the Fordham School of Law, Kimberly Mann, Chief of Education Outreach at the UN Department of Public Information, noted that women throughout the African diaspora used art “to express, endure, survive and liberate both themselves and their people.”

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history at Fordham, explained that women’s resistance to slavery is often overlooked, however, as historical narratives focus on larger, more violent uprisings led by men.

“I would also like to recognize that women’s resistance often happens in much more subtle, everyday forms,” she said.

These forms were visible in a series of archival photographs presented by Deborah Willis, a photographer and the chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.

Through images of enslaved women, runaway slaves, teachers, washerwomen and other workers, as well as famous figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Willis showed that women were not merely the objects of photography, but played a role in constructing their own identities for the camera.

Nicole Fleetwood, associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University, explored a similar agency expressed in photographs of incarcerated black women today, who use the medium “as a mode of self-representation” and a way “to claim interior lives,” she said.

Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro discussed the inspiration for her own book, Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women” (2012).

“I decided that the visibility of slave women needs to be reclaimed by means of fiction. I took in hand the memory of all black women to make them visible and to bring out their contributions to humankind,” she said.

Other panelists included Gabriela Salgado, an African and Latin-American contemporary art curator based in London, who focused on the work of Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, and Iyunolu Osagie, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Osagie summed up the evening’s sentiments concisely when she claimed, “Women have always been there. If you look for them you will find them.”

“Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery” was sponsored by the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, Department of African & African-American Studies, the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, the Department of History, and Fordham’s theatre program.

–Nina Heidig

For Aimee Meredith Cox, PhD, assistant professor of African and African-American Studies, the production, which runs through Sept. 27, combines her former life as a dancer with her current one as an ethnographer.

Cox was involved with the creation of the dance from its inception as a resident cultural anthropologist, and her book, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015)  is one of four cited as inspiration, along with The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2006) by Kyra Gaunt, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Wonderland: The Zen of Alice (Parallax Press, 2009 by Daniel Silberberg.

The piece, which Cox first saw last summer during a workshop on Martha’s Vineyard, is meant to reflect the nuance and complexity of being a black female. It’s a tricky task for the performers because it requires recognizing what unifies all black women and what differentiates them, and then expressing it physically.

“Her choreography is like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my life,” said Cox. “It takes technique in the traditional way that we think of being able to perform certain things in ballet or traditional concert dance terms, but it is so deeply rhythmic, and it requires a full body and spirit of the dancer

Apart from being a dancer herself, Cox said she related to Brown because in her recently published book about black teenage girls in Detroit, she tries to address how one’s body influences one’s sense of identity. She also relates to Brown’s insistence on audience talk-back sessions.

“Because she does not shy away from talking about race in a very real way, those talk-back sessions can get really intense. I think that speaks to the way I think about my work in the academy, and how research works,” she said.

As for the production, Cox said it’s a thrill to see her work reflected in performance—particularly in one of the three duets. There’s a sisterhood of sorts, she said, based around the notion of being ignored by the rest of society. She addresses the issue in a chapter in her book about sexuality and love.

“The dancers are watching each other, and you feel like they really do see each other on a deep level. I talk about the importance of visibility and being seen in the book, and you see that so beautifully captured in those duets,” she said.

Cox said that sitting through a performance made her feel—for the first time ever—the entire range of human emotions.

“What Camille has done is capture the emotional nuance of what it means to live in a black girl’s body. To see that onstage made me hope that’s what my book does too, even if its only one story, one paragraph, or one chapter,” she said.