Call for Submissions: The Significance of the Black Family in the US

“For generations the [Black] family has remained an important cauldron of resistance, forging and preserving a vital legacy of collective struggle for freedom.” These words by imminent scholars and modern civil rights activists, Fania E. Davis and Angela Y. Davis, were true throughout U.S. history and remain so today. With that in mind, Black Perspectives‘ editors are issuing a call for submissions that center, from varying viewpoints and across time, on the importance of Black families as historical figures who, in many ways, fought for a more inclusive and diverse society. American society has an extensive history (that continues today) that promotes and protects “idealized” notions of “civilization” that promoted anti-Black laws, social norms, and policies. And yet, as the scholarship of historians Dylan Penningroth, Brenda Stevenson, Tera W. Hunter, and others reveal, Black families remain resolute in challenging various anti-Black institutions, ideologies, and structures that shape American life and culture.

Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), invites blog posts that cover Black familial experiences ranging from 1619 to the present. Black Perspectives especially welcomes submissions that highlight Black familial experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to contextualize their generations-long fight for equality. We encourage potential contributors to submit guest blog posts that explore topics that include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Enslaved families
• Working-class Black families
• Middle-class and/or elite Black families
• Education and the Black family 
• Political activism in the Black family 
• Entrepreneurship in the Black family 
• Labor activism and the Black family 
• Black families in the Jim Crow South
• Black families in the urban North
• Politics of memory and the Black family 
• Black marriage
• Black queer families
• Interracial families
• Black motherhood/fatherhood/sisterhood/brotherhood

The submissions should be between 1,000 to 1,500 words. They must be submitted to the senior editors (editors@blackperspectives.org) no later than Saturday, October 1, 2022 by 11:59 p.m Eastern. With your submission, please include your bio (250-300 words) and headshot (for use in promotion if your essay is accepted).

All submissions will undergo a peer review process before they are accepted. Please click here for more details on the blog’s submission guidelines as well as information regarding format and citations.