Research Group Fall 2026

On Monday, October 5, from 3:00–4:30 p.m., we will hold the second session of our Research Group. Laura Fretwell (History) will present “Relocating and Remembering as Resistance: African American Community Organizing & Memory in Richmond, Virginia.”

The site of Chimborazo Hill in Richmond, Virginia witnessed crucial moments in American history that reflected racial tensions of their respective eras: it hosted a Confederate Army hospital during the Civil War, a post-war neighborhood for African Americans, a municipal park during the Jim Crow-era, and a museum about the Confederacy established in the 1950s. This presentation traces the forced relocation of Chimborazo’s African American neighborhood to the adjacent neighborhood called Church Hill, and residents' refusals to forget their history. Drawing on local and government archival records, oral history interviews, and community-based sources, Fretwell reveals how residents developed a deep sense of place and belonging over time, which helped them effectively resist systemic segregation, displacement, and attempts of public erasure.

Danyelle M. Greene (SCMS) will present “Through a Political Lens: Christianity and Racial Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation (2016).”

This presentation discusses the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation through a political lens in which black identity, Christian religious language, and political action are entangled. The film, which is a dramatization of Nat Turner’s 1831 Slave Rebellion, uses religious rhetoric and iconography to ground its narrative of righteous anger and political action in a black theological framework. The discussion stems from a chapter in my in-progress book, Spirit in Cinema.