Institute for
Dismantling Racism (IDR)
SOC 321 | Wake Forest Research Seminar
Wake Forest Sociology Seminar and working group: How Societies Remember the Past and Why that matters
This webpage and the following are a racial justice work-in-progress. After the United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, around the statue of a traitor and enslaver that resulted in the murder of anti-racist activist, Heather Heyer, in 2017, I initiated at Wake Forest University a seminar on how societies remember the past and why that matters. From the beginning, seminar participants read scholarly works in preparation for doing their own research into how the US remembers its racist past: enslavement, segregation, White supremacy. In 2019, students discovered Wake’s auction of 16 enslaved human beings in order to fund its first endowment. This class organized, with the help of Wake’s Divinity School and the Department of Sociology, the first and second commemorations of Wake's auctions of enslaved humans. Here is the description and link to videos of each kept in Wake.
The following webpages are a living archive of my seminar’s work on: Wake Forest University’s record on racism; on Wake traditions and their relationship to racial justice; on Wake Baptist Hospital and eugenic forced sterilizations; on how other universities deal with enslavement, segregation, and racism; on identifying the descendants of Wake’s enslaved humans; on the case for reparations in North Carolina. We are grateful to Reverend Willard Bass and the Freedom Tree project for sponsoring this work on the web. We pledge to pursue this research and racial justice reparations as our commitment to truth and social justice.
Joseph A. Soares at Wake Forest University's commemorations of the enslaved 16 humans (2021)
Reparations for Descendants of Those Enslaved Humans
Reparations for descendants of those enslaved humans oppressed and exploited by administrators, faculty, and students of Wake Forest College before emancipation.
Slaves of the rebel Gen. Thomas F. Drayton, South Carolina, 1862. Arguments at the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston centered on the practice of slavery and its proliferation.