This course offers a critical history of the Black labor, creativity, craftsmanship, engineering, and activism that built the United States of America. It is undeniable that Black Americans and African Americans have been brutally marginalized by the instruments of systemic racism including segregation, redlining, eviction, and more recently gentrification. In this class, however, that very real and continuing history of oppression is studied as the fuel for the creative agency of Black individuals and communities. Appropriating, intervening, and shaping the built environment became one of the many forms of Black resistance to racism and systemic injustices. In doing so, Black hands and Black minds shaped the very fabric of America’s landscape. Our class begins and ends in Washington DC, posing important questions about the hidden and overt symbols of Black heritage in the nation’s capital.
