Maintaining Baltimore's Black History

A $4 million grant will focus on preserving the history of Black Baltimoreans

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on Wednesday awarded a $4.4 million grant to a team of scholars at Johns Hopkins University that is investigating the history of academic racism in higher education and building a citywide network to preserve Baltimore’s Black history, culture, and arts.

The project is a collaboration between the Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship; the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts, which is affiliated with the Center for Africana Studies; and the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums. Inheritance Baltimore will focus on three goals:

• Researching and chronicling the history of the Black community in Baltimore and of the impact of racism on academic disciplines in higher education and at Johns Hopkins in order to fill in missing or excluded elements in traditional historical records
• Expanding the Baltimore Africana Archives Initiative that launched two years ago to offer Johns Hopkins scholars opportunities to take their research to the city’s Black churches and communities and to preserve archives in jeopardy of being lost
• Developing a doctoral curriculum that incorporates city residents who are experts in local history to advance Black freedom education already underway in the city, and to develop a professional pipeline of Johns Hopkins PhD students and future faculty who are trained to combat racism in American institutions, including at universities.

“We want to cultivate the historical legacy of Black people in the city and in this region where so many African American archives are either incomplete or are being actively discarded,” said Lawrence Jackson, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and history. “The university actually has a responsibility to direct resources toward the historical preservation of the complex features of Black life in the city of Baltimore.”

Read more about Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation at The Hub.