Mockingbird Analytics' & the Los Angeles Reparations Advisory Committee’s National Reparations Funding Landscape Report

When the city of LA reached out for my take on the enslavement of African-descended people and what transformative experiences might look like, I thought of my life-changing experience at the Museum of Tolerance and the power that can come out of allowing history to break your heart. I'm grateful for the opportunity to give back to a city that changed my life.

Mockingbird Analytics contacted 36 key stakeholders based on preliminary research, recommendations from the City of Los Angeles’ Reparations Commission, and through a mechanism of chain referrals using snowball sampling. The data come from 18 semi-structured interviews that were completed from August 2023 to April 2024. The final 18 participants worked across industries, regions, and scales of repair work, representing cities, business, and nonprofit sectors that have contributed to a reparations project at the local, state, and/or national level.

Black History at Cambridge’s Longfellow House and George Washington Headquarters

I'm pleased to share that my team was awarded a National Council on Public History and National Park Service project related to the Longfellow House/Washington Headquarters/Vassall Estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts! We'll be delving into the experiences of the people enslaved there and their living descendants.

Check out more about the site and its history here and here. I couldn't be more thrilled to delve into such a complex history.

Research and writing will take place over the course of three years. I'll be drawing on knowledge garnered from my genealogy/family reunion work and time spent with History Cambridge, Boston's Museum of African American History, Harvard University's History Design Studio in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, and the Tufts University Center for the Study of Race & Democracy.

Google

Black History Month 2017: I spoke with the lovely folks of Google Boston on 2/23/17. I presented the last 200 years of my family's story from Mississippi to Chicago in the Great Migration (peppered with hilarious memes, of course). I wrapped things up with a reading of Chiasmus, the piece I workshopped at Yale in 2016.

2019 Global Diversity Call for Papers Day: I presented an abridged version of my imposter syndrome framework, a series of reflections I created to process where my IS comes from, how it manifests, and tools I use to resist the impulse to sell myself short. I chatted with great people over delicious snacks and riveting asides about the histories of coding languages. I always learn so much when I spend time with programmers.

HDS Fellowship

I was so excited to be part of the History Design Studio community at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. I'm part of the 2018-19 cohort of scholars, curators, practitioners, and entrepreneurs using design theory to craft cool projects.

I developed an ancestral migration map, timeline (1788-2018), and curated exhibit related to seven generations of my maternal ancestors.

Shout out to our nifty director Dr. Vincent Brown, and our fearless advisers Robin McDowell and Amy Alemu for helping us interpret our shared past.

The Black Law Students Association (BLSA) at Vermont Law School

Panelists: Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Maria Araujo Kahn; District Superior Court Judge Melanie Cradle; and Rayshauna Gray, coordinator of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School and a historical researcher at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University.

The mission of the Black Law Students Association is to articulate and promote the professional goals and needs of minority law students, to encourage and foster professional competence, to focus on the relationship between minority law students and the law structure, to instill in minority law students a greater awareness of and commitment to the needs of the minority community, and to influence American law schools and legal associations to use their expertise and prestige to bring about change within the legal system in order to make it responsive to the needs of the minority community. BLSA collaborates with other student groups at Vermont Law School to promote diversity and enhance cultural awareness, and to make an impact on the institution, community and region in accordance with the missions of BLSA and the National Black Law Students Association.

Beyond Equity and Inclusion in Conflict Resolution: Recentering the Profession

The ACR Practitioner’s Guide Series

Useful for any field that recruits adherents and standardizes practices, this volume addresses how individuals, organizations, and institutions are shaped by and give shape to racially based exclusion. With contributions by 46 contributors, most of whom are people of color, this book offers a unique opportunity for readers to reach beyond assumptions, biases, and other limitations to change-bringing awareness.

Massachusetts Historical Society

In 2019, I shared some of my family's Reconstruction story. As I took everyone on a journey from Virginia and Kentucky into Mississippi, up to Chicago and over to Boston and Cambridge, I remembered a bright-eyed 22 year old Rayshauna furiously taking notes and soaking up all she could during MHS brown bags and lectures.

Who knew that getting to share this wild ride of a family history (which includes a Welsh social reformer, a Confederate first family, three renowned Black historians, and enough chance encounters to make your head spin) would be one of them? It felt so good to share about the lessons I've learned during my decade as one of my family's keepers, my research and projects, Harvard History Design Studio fellowship, and my process while writing Roseland, my book about the last 200 years of U.S. history.

CreativeMornings Boston

I had the honor of sharing about Creative Morning's global theme (#CMPreserve) with the good people of the Boston chapter.

It was such a blessing to meet so many people with stories on their lips - stories about ancestors making their ways to the States, stories about how some hope to parent, stories about what they hope to leave behind. As I chattered into the mic up front, I kept thinking about all the circumstances that had to unfold exactly the ways they did *how* they did...to not just leave room for our existence, but to gather us in the Boston Moo offices over coffee and reflection in 2019. It was an honor and a privilege to share about my worldview and my work with the Cambridge Historical Society, Harvard's History Design Studio, Tufts University, and my book Roseland.

Modus Operandi Reflection Deck

Etsy Shop // Deckible (IOS & Google Play)

Whether you're reflecting on your own, chatting with friends, or deliberating during a staff meeting, my 72-card #ModusOperandiDeck is a great resource for solo or community reflection about what really matters. This pandemic has forced us to reconsider so many of the ideas, motivations, and historical circumstances (personal, familial, and cultural) that got us here. Let's (re)consider what keeps us going and why.

Available as a Braille booklet as well.

Harvard Business School

More than 100 scholars and practitioners braved a Boston blizzard to attend our 2018 Gender & Work Symposium (co-sponsored by my team, HarvardHBS' Gender Initiative (now the Race, Gender, and Equity Initiative), and the HBS Leadership Initiative in honor of the HBS African American Student Union's 50th anniversary). We centered our discussions on Black experiences and had two days of insightful cultural critique and fictive kinship. I live tweeted under #HBSGW2018. Did I call it "where Hogwarts meets Wakanda"? Oh, I sure did. 🙂

Planning Team Photo , l-r: Colleen Ammerman (GI Director), Karina Grazina, Serenity Lee, Bethany van der Walde, me, Jamie Thomas, NaDaizja Bolling, Linda Hill (LI Faculty Chair), Laura Morgan Roberts, Robin Ely (GI Faculty Chair), Letty Garcia, and David Thomas // 📸: Evgenia Eliseeva

#TheHeartWorkIs (Instagram // Twitter)

I have something to celebrate. In 2017, I created something that would help more people than I could've ever imagined. I was working at Harvard Business School and my imposter syndrome was raging. I won't rehash everything (get caught up here and here) but all the old standards showed up.

My struggles were an issue. And it was clear that I couldn't move forward until I faced them. I was aware of the connection between our personal lives and our politics when I designed The Heart Work but it was beautiful to see a room of people use it to interrogate personal wounds, reflect on their communities, and cultivate lasting positive change. Because what's more powerful than the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves? ;)

Public Newsroom

I'm one of City Bureau's public newsroom guest curators! On 11/8, I had the pleasure of interviewing my college friend Tanikia Carpenter, founder of Black Owned Chicago. BOC was created in 2016 to be a resource for people who desired to support Black owned businesses. My guest curator in crime (and fellow Belt Publishing author) Daniel Kay Hertz and I are interviewing snazzy Chicagoans and facilitating conversations about the Chicago We Inherit (11/1 audio here), Inhabit (11/8 audio here), and Impart (11/29). We'll explore the ways we build narratives and monuments—physical or otherwise—out of people, events, and memories. We began with neighborhood histories that are sometimes buried under decades of change and displacement, move on to how we reconcile history with our present, and then look forward to how future generations of Chicagoans will learn their history. Many thanks to Andrea Hart for wrangling us all (and taking this photo) and Build Coffee for being our gracious host.

Check out the livestream audio here.

Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War

I dug into the histories of about sixty African American and Indigenous communities in Oklahoma for Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale Press, 2018).

Order here

(£35.00 / $45.00 USD)

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.

Black Archives without Archivists, Black Curation without Curators: An Intra-Historical Conversation at the University of Maryland (2018)

This roundtable brings Black curators, archivists, and researchers together for a conversation about what digital and social media tools offer historians of African American life and history. The digital opens up space for "anyone" to be archivists or curators, but flattens experience and professional credentials. Does this help or harm practitioners of Black and Black diasporic history? What does social justice look like in this context, particularly those working directly with community organizations, community members, family members, as well as students? Are curators, archivists, and university-affiliated scholars speaking to each other and what do we need to learn from each other? Where do we need to check ourselves? The participants on this roundtable, in collaboration with audience members, hope to generate a set of best practices for intra-historical engagement between community accountable scholars rooted in Black and Black Diasporic historical practice.

Panel: Jarrett Drake, Lanae Spruce, Stacie Williams, Rayshauna Gray

20x2 Chicago: How Does It Work? 

What happens when you take 20 handpicked creatives and luminaries, give them each two minutes before a live audience and the same (fuzzy) question to unravel? That's the premise behind 20x2, the popular event staged since 2001 at SXSW Interactive —20x2 has grown to an ever-expanding pantheon of participants. Founded in Austin by Kevin Newsum, Chicago's own Andrew Huff produced the first permanent satellite 20x2 Chicago show in 2013, with shows now happening twice annually.

On 10/20/17, a great group of folks gathered at The Hideout to be enraptured. Andrew Huff hosted 20x2 Chicago, a show in which 20 people from all different walks of creative life get two minutes each to answer the question of the day in whatever way they like. The results were as varied as the emotions and reactions they evoked.

Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology edited by Martha Bayne

Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology is the ninth book in a series of city anthologies that shines a light on the common ground Chicago shares with the Rust Belt through essays, memoir, journalism, fiction, and poetry.

On 8/13/17, great folks gathered at The Hideout to celebrate the release of Rust Belt Chicago, a collection of essays, journalism, poetry, and fiction edited by Martha Bayne. This collection tells the vibrant and culturally rich history of this great city, all together singing a forlorn love song to a place similarly marked, if less evident, by deindustrialization and economic decline as Rust Belt sister cities.

Editor's Introduction // Order

Tufts University African American Trail Project

In addition to researching in Tufts University's history department, I'm also part of the team behind the Boston African American Freedom Trail. Inspired by the scholarship of the late Tufts Professor Gerald R. Gill (1948-2007), the project aims to develop African American historical memory and inter-generational community across greater Boston.

The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) is devoted to conceptualizing the intersection between race and democracy at the local, national, and international levels. It focuses on the pivotal contributions of ordinary activists, iconic anti-racist political activists, intellectuals, elected officials, and cultural workers. Based on the belief that history informs contemporary struggles for democracy and public policy, the Center seeks to participate in a public conversation about the very meaning of racial, social, and political justice. // Flickr Album

THREAD at Yale

I was jazzed to attend THREAD, a summer program for storytellers and journalists from around the world and across mediums. I was workshopping an essay called Chiasmus, a word with Greek roots meaning "a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form" (e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’).

I used etymology to process my feelings about the last 200 years of United States history through seven generations of women in my family. Ushering my cohort from antebellum Mississippi through Great Migration Chicago into present day New England was just the experience I needed to own my story.

It was fun to channel my inner Rory Gilmore.

History Cambridge (fka the Cambridge Historical Society)

I’ve had a blast supporting History Cambridge’s events over the years. What started as an inaugural fellowship blossomed into really cool volunteer opportunities. I’ve become a better steward of our community and shared past because of their meaningful work.

The historic Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street—the second oldest house in Cambridge and one of the oldest houses in New England—became the Society’s headquarters in 1957 after Frances Emerson donated the building to the Society. Today it houses staff offices and special collection archives. The Hooper-Lee-Nichols house was built in 1685 and has been changed by its residents over the years, modified repeatedly to meet the style of the day. While it primarily reflects the Georgian Style of the 18th century, parts of the original 17th-century construction remain and one can see Victorian and Colonial Revival alterations from later generations (credit to HC for this last paragraph).

2016 New England Museum Association Annual Conference

Our Offensive Objects panel talked about everything from language around enslavement to the humane representations of atrocities. We talked about the reasons why we curate, research, and interpret. We broke up into mini groups to discuss three contentious pieces (a letter peppered with anti-Black slurs written by a Union soldier from Connecticut, a pair of shoes worn by a Chinese woman with bound feet, and a Cigar Store Indian - a wooden likeness of an Indigenous/Native person often used to advertise tobacco products).

The venue: Mystic Seaport Museum or Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea in Mystic, Connecticut is the largest maritime museum in the United States. It is notable for its collection of sailing ships and boats and for the re-creation of the crafts and fabric of an entire 19th-century seaport village (credit to MSM/MS for this last paragraph).