Holtzclaw Institute @ Hinds-Utica

Announcing the “Performing Jubilee” Public Lecture

As part of an ongoing National Endowment for the Humanities grant at Hinds Community College-Utica, “The Black Man’s Burden: William H. Holtzclaw and the Mississippi HBCU Connection,” the Humanities Department at Hinds CC-Utica is pleased to announce the third public talk in the Holtzclaw Lecture Series. The Holtzclaw Lecture Series is designed to bring nationally recognized scholars and experts on African American education in the South for public lectures in a variety of venues around the state.

Bobby G. Cooper will be delivering a talk entitled “Performing Jubilee: The History & Legacy of the Utica Jubilee Singers” on Tuesday, April 11^th at 6 pm. The lecture will take place in the Auditorium of the Bobby G. Cooper Fine Arts Center on the Hinds-Utica campus.

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March 23, 2017 0

New Humanities Cohort

We’ve kicked off our next offering of Introduction to the Humanities with an excellent group of students. This term, we have students pursuing projects in a wide variety of areas related to Holtzclaw and his work. We have several teams investigating the history of basketball on the campus. They’re making plans to conduct oral history interviews with members of the Sports Hall of Fame who were at Utica in the 50s,60s, and 70s. We have a student who is working on publishing the historical tour app which was started last semester and another who is working on annotations for Black Man’s Burden.

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February 16, 2017 0

Team Presents Work at NAAAS

The love of the humanities was in the air as several members of the team spent Valentine’s Day at an academic conference with hundreds of scholars from around the globe at the National Association of African American Studies (NAAAS) Conference in Dallas. Our session covered the process of creating an interdisciplinary team-taught humanities course to teach institutional history. We created the presentation to help instructors at other institutions consider methods of exploring local history with their students.

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February 15, 2017 0

Apply Now for the Holtzclaw Summer Institute

This summer, join your colleagues for the Holtzclaw Summer Institute on Southern Black Education. This two week project will allow participants the opportunity to explore the life and legacy of William H. Holtzclaw, the founder of the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute, which later became Utica Junior College and Hinds Community College-Utica, an HBCU community college in rural Mississippi. The workshop will cover the role of the “Little Tuskegees” in the Jim Crow South through seminar discussions on the historical context, African American autobiography, incorporating archival work in your classroom, the role of the Black press, and the Utica Jubilee singers. Participants will create a teaching unit for use in their classrooms and to share with other project participants. This project is funded through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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February 7, 2017 0

Celebrating the Legacy of the Black Press

One of the goals of our Introduction to the Humanities class is to provide students with a wide range of experiences related to our field. We were thrilled that Jackson State hosted a fantastic panel this week and we were able to take some of our students. Twelve students, along with Holtzclaw grant participants Jean Greene, Sharon Melton, and Kristi Melancon from MC attended the session.

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October 19, 2016 0

Jones to Deliver Next Holtzclaw Lecture

A decorated author and historian on race and class issues in U.S. history will address the next installment of the Holtzclaw Lecture Series, sponsored in part by the Humanities Department at Hinds Community College’s Utica Campus.

Jacqueline Jones, chair of the History and Ideas Department at the University of Texas, will speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 27 at the Gore Art Gallery at Mississippi College on a chapter of her 2013 book, “A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America.” The chapter is dedicated to William H. Holtzclaw, who founded the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute in 1903 that is now the Utica Campus. The lecture itself is titled “A Dangerous Thing: Black Schooling in William Holtzclaw’s Mississippi.”

Jones will be signing copies of the book at 6:30 p.m., before the lecture.

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October 17, 2016 0

Student Research Projects Underway

This semester, students in our Introduction to the Humanities course have each selected an undergraduate research project. Our goal with these projects is to familiarize students with critical research skills in the humanities, as well as allow them the opportunity to develop and present their research to a wider audience. Students will be presenting their findings at the end of the semester, along with an opportunity to present at the annual MC-Tougaloo Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Spring. We will also be using their research to support the ongoing research of the Holtzclaw Institute.

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September 21, 2016 0

NEH Team Visits Tuskegee

The Hinds NEH team on the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Apryl, Sharon and Jean marching across the bridge.

The Lowndes Interpretative Center tells the story of the Selma to Montgomery march and is constructed on the site of the Tent City that sprung up after white landowners kicked the marchers off their property.

Our summer workshop got off to a great start this week with our drive down to Tuskegee. We stopped in Selma and had a chance to walk over the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Interpretative Center in Lowndes was a highlight of the drive. The well-designed exhibits chronicle the march and the tent city in a powerful way. Our goals for this week’s seminar are to plan the humanities course in the fall and to research the Washington-Holtzclaw connection in the Tuskegee Archives.

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May 23, 2016 1

Scholars Visit Hinds-Utica

As part of the grant, we are bringing in visiting scholars to work with our team to help develop our course materials and background. Our first two visiting scholars are Dr. William Andrews from UNC-Chapel Hill and Dr. Kristi Melancon from Mississippi College.