Scholars Aja Y. Martinez and Robert Owen Smith visited Atlanta to do a talk about their coauthored book, Harmony and Harassment: A New Critical Race Theory Story and celebrate the audiobook release of their coauthored book The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created A Movement at For Keeps Books. Here, Martinez and Smith describe their projects:
This work is the result of a journey through CRT founder Derrick Bell’s archive—an archive that includes the writing process for the texts he published, the documents he collected, and the relationships he cultivated during his storied life. Through this archive, we have been able to (as composition scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster says) “trace the stream” of Bell’s commitment to both civil rights legal theory and critical race storytelling, commitments shaped through decades of relationships with many people, many of whom are Black women. Through this journey, we have been able to gain insight into the experiential, contextual, and material foundations of CRT.
In this presentation we, in partnership with Lori Evans Jackson, will tell the story, the stream we have traced back to the headwaters of Harmony, Mississippi, in the 1960s. We assert, following Bell’s own directive, that Harmony, epitomized in the leadership of Behonor McDonald (Jackson Evans’s grandmother) alongside Winson and Dovie Hudson, provides the material condition for Bell’s intellectual and activist trajectories.
Through it all, we trace the development of Bell’s coming to consciousness of the stream of Black women’s leadership flowing through him. This stream reaches back to his home neighborhood in Pittsburgh, “The Hill,” and flows through Harmony, on to Harvard Law School, and westward to Portland, OR. Bell resonated with and put into practice the pedagogical insights of fellow exiles Paulo and Elza Freire, whose radical commitment to literacy resonated with another stream traced back to Harmony, the women- and community-led educational movement now known as Head Start. The headwaters of CRT flow into many mighty rivers.
Aja Y. Martinez, PhD (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarship, published nationally and internationally, makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT). Dr. Martinez is author of the multi-award-winning book Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory and is co-author, with Dr. Robert O. Smith (UNT History), of several forthcoming titles on the storied histories of CRT. Dr. Martinez is co-editor and co-founder, with Dr. Michele Eodice and Dr. Sandra Tarabochia (University of Oklahoma), of the transdisciplinary, digital open-access, and multimodal journal Writers: Craft and Context. Dr. Martinez is co-editor, with Dr. Stacey Waite (University of Nebraska) of the University of Pittsburgh Press’s series Composition, Literacy, and Culture.
Rev. Robert O. Smith, PhD (he/him/his) serves as Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, IL. His research focuses on the interactions of race, religion, and Indigeneity. Smith is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).