“It’s no disgrace to be black [in America], but it’s often very inconvenient.”
—James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Our Mission
The Black American Tree Project is a workshop and historical account detailing the dominant systematic, cultural, and societal forces repressing Black Americans. We want to highlight the power and structure of the indelible forces of systemic racism and how its hold impacts humans, namely Black Americans.
The Project is followed by courageous community conversations offering real-time discovery of new levels of awareness, healing, and affirmation for the participant who can impact those within their circle and their communities.
Participants will feel and comprehend, based on factual evidence, the atrocities of key societal forces, both past and present, whether well-intentioned or not, and the role authority, family, and community, play in conjunction with these forces.
The Tree
The tree is central to this project because it represents a place of wholeness, naturalness, and where families thrive in a lush, collective environment. Black families start off as intact entities while the forces loom and encroach upon them. Throughout the exercise, participants learn about the structural institutional forces that have stripped the Black family into a growing caste, as Michelle Alexander puts it in her book The New Jim Crow, and how Isabelle Wilkerson lays out the parallel between historic Germany, India, and the Jim Crow period within the United States in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Ready To Get Involved?
This program is made possible, by Ohio Humanities, a state-based partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any news, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project does not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
