Beyond the Campus: Black Resistance in Fairfax County
In a new Reston suburb, new Fairfax university, and new protest movement, anti-racist activism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Resistance to white supremacy in the United States has often been tied to the idea of geography, of being in a spatial "grid that is economically" and racially influenced by European practices of domination.[1] These practices of domination are important influences, but they are not all-determining factors in "the locations of black history, selfhood, [and] imagination."[2] Three imaginative Black organizations that made their own history--Reston Black Focus, a George Mason undergraduate group called Ujamaa, and the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS)--are featured in this exhibit.
By Sira Anissa I Thiam
[1] Katherin McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1-36.
[2] McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 6.