2023- Present, Principal Investigator (PI), Outsider Preservation Initiative, Presidential Initiative of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. A four-year program investing in commemorative practices and storytelling projects. I manage research and program staff to create a web portal, community of practice, host symposia, develop new pedagogy, and make grants to descendant-led place preservation projects. Commemorating Black place preservation and persistence…
Chronicling the stories and resilience of Texas freedom colonies facing erasure, and of the efforts of descendant community members to safeguard them. Since Emancipation, Deep East Texas has been a place where Black Texans have experienced oppression yet also have created free Black communities. Well into the Jim Crow era, the area was home to…
WPPB Image Addons Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban + Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and has been appointed Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes. She is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her…
Looking for examples of anti-banking system, anti-respectability, pro-cooperative Black planning &community building? Try 19th Century Texas History. I recently published an article on race gender, planning, and mutual aid called “The Farmers’ Improvement Society and the Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary of Texas: African American Community Building in the Progressive Era,” in the Journal of Planning History.…
Pursing a graduate degree requires discipline and confidence. It is a process that also requires commitment and sustained interest. Doctoral degrees in particular, demand something more than an interest in attaining another credential. You need to be personally invested in the new knowledge you create. Creating new knowledge is a process that simultaneously exposes us…
I have a lot to say about the movie Selma, but I frankly feel like I’ll need to see it again before I play armchair filmmaker. What I do feel confident talking about is Selma as a storytelling enterprise. Storytelling is on my mind a lot lately. Mostly because it is a large part of…
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity” ― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time For Benicio I awoke this morning feeling a little weary. Groggy, and frankly disappointed. But I felt compelled to…
Reflect, Reclaim, Rejoice: Preserving the Gift of Black Sacred Music from GodFilms | A ministry of GBOD on Vimeo.
I saw this video this morning and started to get a little excited. I thought, someone is finally going to make the connections. They are going to expose the plethora of reasons that the media’s responses, the NFL’s, and many Americans’ responses to the Ray-Janay Rice video have been inadequate at best. But, well, watch…
