The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund launched its 10-week Freedom Schools lecture series Saturday at Genesis Church, beginning with a lesson that looked far beyond the Black Belt Prairie and the Mississippi Delta, all the way back to Africa’s earliest civilizations.
Abdulrahman Ajibola, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, led the opening session. His lecture focused on Africa’s contributions to civilization and on Western education’s narrow lens of African American history.
“The reason that we have to discuss this aspect of history is that in western worlds, the history of African American always started with history of slave trade and sometimes extending into colonialism,” Ajibola told attendees. “This lecture is trying to expand the scope of African American history by locating the beginning to earlier periods.”
The Freedom Schools series, part of a nationwide effort, is organized in Columbus by Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving African American history through cemetery restoration and historical preservation.
Mt. Zion was one of eight organizations nationwide to receive a $14,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation through the Association for the Study of African American Life and History to support the program.
Shannon Evans, the organization’s vice president, said the series aims to “fill the gaps” left by formal schooling, continuing the legacy of the original Freedom Schools, which were established across Mississippi in 1964 to educate Black citizens about voting rights, literacy and Black history.
“We started working more … to inform the next generation because we can’t be the end of it,” Evans said. “… The histories and the cultural underpinnings of underrepresented society members (and) cultures, is going to be lost because … less and less of it’s being taught and incorporated.”
Lectures will continue at 2 p.m. each Saturday through Jan. 10 at Genesis Church, 1820 23rd St. N. Sessions are free and open to the public. Participants can attend in person or virtually through Zoom.
Experts from southern universities will lead weekly discussions on topics such as the transatlantic slave trade, its expansion into Mississippi, Reconstruction, the Blues, the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter.
Ajibola, who also serves as Mt. Zion’s director of archival research, said understanding Africa’s diversity is key to understanding its role in global civilization.
“To insist that African cities look like rural areas is to distort the contemporary history of Africa, which more or less completes the history of any other continent in the world today,” Ajibola said. “… Africa has more or less been theoretically reduced to Blackness, but from the beginning Africa represented everyone, and that is the birth of humanity. Wherever you are today, one can, at least with solid evidence, trace one’s ancestry to Africa.”
He added that recognizing Africa as the birthplace of humanity can help reduce cultural division.
“In a world of polarization (where) people see each other as different, and they use that to judge, knowing that Africa is the birthplace of humanity can help to restore some balance,” Ajibola said. “That way people can see we are connected in one way or the other. We are closer than we are far apart.”
Though attendance was modest for the first session, Evans said she hopes more people will take part as the series continues.
“Understanding the connections to the people who were here and where they came from, is to understand why all of this matters,” Evans said. “… It’s a part of the reason why we work so hard with our organization to preserve a lot of the blues history, because blues history is roots history. … Those are all critical to the complete story of our state and the south at large.”
Ajibola will return Oct. 25 to discuss the kingdoms of Africa. A full schedule and registration details are available at mtzionmemorialfund.com.
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