Black Madison Voices (BMV) is curating a public history archive of Black people’s experiences in K-12 and higher educational institutions in and around Madison, Wisconsin. We envision an intergenerational, community-engaged project rooted in authenticity and collaboration where scholars will support community members in sharing their stories about their educational experiences. Through cultivating these relationships and amplifying these stories, we hope to
1) Illuminate Black Madisonians’ education and schooling experiences through honoring our diverse local legacies
2) Create spaces, e.g. a public history archive, that facilitate these stories being recognized as necessary resources in the public discourse around education
3) Overall, this project recognizes the vulnerability of Black Madisonians in the educational landscape and seeks to identify the structural inequities and barriers that make it risky to “learn while Black in Madison.”
The Black Madison Voices (BMV) group is a collective effort of Black women scholars committed to connecting Black Madisonians to each other’s intergenerational and educational stories in ways that will last far beyond this project. Our project is grounded in a commitment to Black humanity and agency through life-giving/affirming research that serves the Black Madison communities’ expressed interests and concerns. Our project has five primary goals:
To amplify and gather the stories of Black students, families, scholars, staff, and/or alumni experiences in Madison’s k-12 and higher educational institutions through oral history interviews that are humanizing and dignity-affirming.
To learn from and archive the stories and local legacies of Black Madisonians and bring them into the public record for recognition and to facilitate more just educational and social policies, practices, and futures.
To develop and refine anti-racist curriculum (especially in the STEMM fields) that honors Black Madisonians, and Black communities’ more broadly, experiences of harm and possibility within STEM fields and within k-12 and post-secondary educational spaces
To facilitate reciprocal relations between Black scholars on-campus and Black Madisonians.
To honor institutional harms done to Black communities within K-12 and higher education settings and to model for educational institutions how to engage in reparative, regenerative, and right relations with vulnerable communities rather than to continue histories of exploitation and extraction
