Following a Just Futures team meeting with the Class of ’72 on September 30, 2022, we engaged in dialogue around experiential learning. One result from that generative discussion was that the senior seminar students in American Studies, hearing of the discussion, decided to engage with alumni and their experiences in civil rights and human rights. The seminar focused on Indigenous and African and Afro-American enslavement during and after the formal colonization period that devastated cultures and peoples in the Americas an Africa. The US, Africa, and Cuba (in both its historical and contemporary constructs) were the central areas of study. Students in Prof. Joy James’s Fall 2022 course “Cuba, US, Africa, and Resistance to Black Enslavement, 1791-1991,” an American Studies Senior Seminar, interviewed Williams College alumni about their work.
