It was right before Thanksgiving in 2014 that the St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown. Students at universities across the country were either at home with their families or preparing to leave for the Thanksgiving break.
At Dartmouth, the winter break starts with Thanksgiving. By the time students returned to campus in January 2015 from their winter break, the controversy would have blown over, Dartmouth professor Aimee S. Bahng realized.
The tragic events of Ferguson, Missouri, were already far removed from life at Dartmouth College, situated as it is in the quiet reaches of Upper Valley on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. Given the physical distance, and the timing, the conversation on campus about the justice of the grand jury’s decision would never have the chance to begin.
“My singular goal was to keep the conversation going,” Bahng tells Diverse.
Bahng and nine other Dartmouth professors decided to offer a course in the spring of 2015 called 10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter#BlackLivesMatter. In its first year, 100 students attempted to sign up for the 30 available spots in the class. Dartmouth offered the same class in a slightly different format this spring, taught by Bahng and Reena N. Goldthree, an assistant professor of African and African-American studies.
“It’s not the only course that is focusing on calling attention to systems of inequality and racism — there are lots of courses on campus that do that work — but what is successful about the Black Lives Matter course is that it manages to thread the intellectual genealogies through the contemporary moment,” Bahng says.
Now in its second year of existence, the course received a nearly $50,000 grant that funds student travel to work alongside activists across the country. The grant also brought activists, such as Pete White, executive director of LA CAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network), to Dartmouth.
