The Amistad Editorial Club
As The Amistad Editorial Club met in fall 2024 in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center for our very first meeting of the semester, we asked ourselves how we could cultivate a revolutionary sensibility and voice the rage of Black students everywhere fighting against subjugation. The theme of this issue is revolution, and it is a meditation on cultural memories that urge us to open new ways of communing. The books in Moorland set us in conversation with our ancestors, their expressions of love, revolt, celebration, and struggle from a Black lens to a Black audience. Revolution seemed to us a pathway to empower our generation with learning, thinking, being, feeling, knowing, and beauty.
Toni Cade Bambara's words in The Black Woman Anthology present our direction: “Our art, protest, and dialogue no longer spring from the impulse to entertain, or to indulge or enlighten the conscience of the enemy... Our energies now seem to be invested in and are in turn derived from a determination to touch and to unify. What typifies the current spirit is an embrace, an embrace of the community and a hardheaded attempt to get basic with each other.”
Getting basic with each other, means not to simplify our ideals and strivings, but instead to communicate and organize around the things that matter most: self-protection, self-love, community protection, community love, and autonomy. This idea of revolution is expressed, complicated, lamented, and pored over in the poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art presented here.
Revolution, for us, is not at all dissimilar from that of the Mende people who overthrew oppression on La Amistad in 1839; it is a call to live free, love free, be free, and remain undaunted by unprecedented challenges. We're tryna get basic with each other.
Anjali Robinson-Leary '27
Editor-in-Chief
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Literature and Publishing The Amistad
The Literature and Publishing course produces The Amistad, Howard University's longest running journal. As such, the student editors joined a beautiful tradition that contributes to the rich history of Black revolutionary writers. The meanings and experiences of revolution are at the heart of this edition of the journal. The class discussed the definition of revolution at length. We shared different perspectives, collaborating with editors in The Amistad Club on an idea of revolution we thought the journal should embody. This is a culmination of what revolution means to the literary scholars at Howard University.
An incredibly special aspect of this class was the interviews we were able to conduct with various people dedicating their lives to working for the Black community. These people, beginning with Renee Latchman and ending with Lauren Francis- Sharma, along with five others, took the time to share their journey with editors of The Amistad. One component of revolution the Literature and Publishing editors discussed is the idea of Black people engaging in resistance of the system, throughout our daily lives. I see this historical struggle for liberation in the work of the people we spoke to. We spoke to poets A. Van Jordan and Shauna Morgan, both contributing to the legacy of Black writers speaking to the experience of being Black in a racially oppressive system. Or Dr. Kelli Morgan, founder of the Black Artists Archive, who is working to ensure the preservation and dissemination of Black art.
As the editors from the Literature and Publishing class, we are grateful to share the various facets of the Black revolution and the young writers contributing to this tradition.
Mariah Hamilton
Chief Editor