Instagram story viewer> @crholmphd> Posts

Charles Holm

@crholmphd

1.2K

followers

2471

following

I teach, work, read, write, educate, organize, love, learn.

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

An Open Letter to the UT Board of Regents, State Legislators, and Citizens of Texas from UT Austin Department of African and African Diaspora Studies Doctoral Student Alumni

CONSOLIDATION IS COLLAPSE, NOT COHERENCE

Since the founding of the African and Afro American Studies Research Center in 1969, Black Studies at UT has grown tremendously. Founded in 2010, AADS is the pioneering Black Studies program in the southern United States to confer doctoral degrees, is internationally recognized, and attracts scholars focused on the study of Black Central America and the Global Black South.

"What starts here changes the world.” The Lone Star does not flicker in the face of controversy; it burns brighter because of it. That is the spirit that made Texas a symbol of independence, a place where strong ideas stand their ground. To silence, consolidate, or erase the African and African Diaspora Studies Department would betray that legacy. To weaken Black Studies is to declare that liberty ends where Black thought begins. But to preserve it is to affirm that freedom, once professed, must be practiced.

Black Studies is a refusal of dominant modes of thought and order, and a process that has historically – and currently- sought to stifle and violate Black life, land, movement, organization and culture. Black Study is a practice that enables us to better reveal what has been historically distorted for Black people and our cultures.

Executive Vice President and Provost Inboden has said, "My ultimate goal, one that I think a lot of university leaders and faculty share, is to depoliticize higher ed.” This statement misunderstands the history and conditions of higher ed and our discipline of Black Studies.

We cannot depoliticize Black Studies, nor would we want to. Whether UT listens to the growing chorus to which we add our voices or not, this is where we stand.

We invite others to speak out, organize, and defend Black Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, spaces for critical thought, and speaking truth to power.

Full statement can be found here: https://bit.ly/SaveAADS

#SAVEBlackStudies #RejecttheCompact
#SaveUT by @crholmphd

141

3

a year ago

Mary E Woodbey, "The World That Suffers," Chicago Daily Socialist, 19 January 1909.

- from the archive

"Mary" is named as the "wife" of Rev.George Washington Woodbey in an endnote in Philip S. Foner's work, and even more than his first wife, Annie R. Woodbey (1855-1901), Mary E. Hart has been overlooked and forgotten in almost all accounts of her famous husband as well as writings on Black women's intellectual history and Black socialists more broadly.

Married to George Woodbey in 1908, Mary E Hart was actually his third wife, but that isn' all: she was a social worker, speaker, organizer, author, and active church woman and member of San Diego California's African American community for over two decades.

She was an active member of the Socialist Party for several years, and was a speaker at events alongside George Woodbey on several occasions during his 1908 tour of the East coast and Midwest as national organizer for the SP.

Mary E. Hart filed for divorce from her husband for reasons of "neglect" not long after his return to San Diego in late 1918 after two years of being away-- first in the Midwest then spending most of this time preaching and organizing in East Tennessee and the Louisville, Kentucky area.

On July 1, 1922, in the Black Los Angeles newspaper, the California Eagle, ran the following:

"Mrs GW Woodby of 12-29th street wishes to announce she has resumed her maiden name of Mrs Mary E Hart."

Her article featured in this post ends with a call to the workers and slaves of the world to deliver for themselves what prophet Karl Marx meant when he "proclaimed deliverance and emancipation" and lines from "A Parable II" by James Russell Lowell.

"'With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven these eighteen hundred years.'"

#forgottenhistory
#californiahistory
#blackhistory
#womenshistory
#socialistparty

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/chicago-daily-socialist/1909/index.htm by @crholmphd

8

0

8 months ago

Most of my CLR James collection, I think (can't find my copy of The Black Jacobins or A History of Negro Revolt, but they're around somewhere).

Just pretending to organize my book shelves this morning...hence the #bookstack

#mariners
#renegades
#jacobins
#marxism
#international
#panafrican
#books
#bolsheviks
#blackstudies
#beyond
#boundaries by @crholmphd

28

2

10 months ago

John Adams* really hated "the people" like this. To protect the "public good" ie property, he argued there must be a way to "compel" the majority, who were in his rendering the group prone to put "private" interests about the good of all.

"Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty," he writes, and then without skipping a beat uses a hypothetical in which 80-90% of people own no property to speak of, who threaten to "right of mankind" that only a few may exercise," and this majority is composed of "the idle, the vicious, the intemperate" who lack reason and only out of "hunger... and other wants equally pressing" are compelled to do anything, just like "savages" without the blessings of "civilization."

Adams held democracy in contempt, and advocated a Senate to represent Property, of "gentlemen" (essentially the rich and well educated, and the uncommon commoner who could rise to join this class), as a check on a House of representing the interests of the majority (but open to the rich and well educated), and a "kingly" executive (ie the President; he would like advocate monarchical forms of address for George Washington).

All this in a strawman red herring laden polemic in a sprawling terribly written three volume Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1786-1787) against a quote from English pamphlet writer and Republican, Marchamont Nedham (1620-1678) who once wrote,

"The people are the best keepers of their own liberties."

These mental gymnastics some of these "founding fathers" were capable of in defense of some bullshit was really something, y'all. The contempt Adams had for democracy and the "common" and propertyless people of the majority, and his related arguments for a Senate exclusively composed of wealthy and highly educated elites to protect the interests of property, is exactly why socialists have called for its abolition for over 100 years.

* I'm working on something. Don't ask. by @crholmphd

2

0

17 hours ago

Doing laundry and reading Shawn Gude's new biography of Eugene Debs, which just dropped.

AMERICAN SOCIALIST: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF EUGENE V. DEBS (Simon and Schuster: 2026)

#books
#booksbooksbooks
#eugenedebs
#socialism
#history by @crholmphd

10

3

2 days ago

Lyrics to the song "Dig It," by The Coup.

Dig it. by @crholmphd

7

2

4 days ago

Stopped in Whitesburg, TN and picked up a few things today at @113.books @black_in_appalachia

Thanks y'all.

#appalachia
#blackhistory
#books
#booksbooksbooks by @crholmphd

16

1

10 days ago

New column in the @kansascitydefender by my dear friend and fellow panelist at the Socialism Conference, minister Andrew Hairston, for a new series on Black Liberation Theology. by @crholmphd

30

2

25 days ago

"Land of liberty, indeed!...Go tell these 'bruised' ones in mine, field and factory that Christ came to set them free in this life, and then they can get more time to think about the future. These words about prisons are to be taken as literal as that about opening the eyes of the blind. Under Socialism the prison doors will all, in a short time, be closed forever, just as completely as the slave pen, which now only lingers, here and there, as monuments to our shame."

- George Washington Woodbey, THE BIBLE AND SOCIALISM: A Conversation Between Two Preachers (San Diego: 1904).

For posterity. For the people. For the people.

Photos and misc. "Socialism, Liberation Theology, and the Black Church," Sept 5, 2026, Chicago, Illinois. by @crholmphd

46

0

a month ago

As far as I know, this was the first book published by @haymarketbooks. It was completed after September 11, 2001 and released in early 2002.

The book argues for a revolutionary socialist position on Palestine that is unequivocally anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, and provides a regional analysis centering the self-emancipatory power of workers and peasants against Western backed regimes and imperialism.

It is now dated. There is much that was found worthy of critique even at the time. But since then, Haymarket (and other publishers) have played an immense educational and political role in defending, advocating, and platforming the Palestinian struggle, Palestinian writers, activists , and organizers, and Palestine solidarity activists. And they have done so now for 25 years.

There is an "academic left" that exploits Palestine to launch careers. There is a "non-profit industrial complex" we know (or should) will not save any of us.
For 25 years Haymarket has been an example, however imperfect, of other possibilities.

From students and professors who helped organize SJP and labor activists who helped build BDS movements, went on strike, and occupied campuses, lesser known would-be academics who risked their careers standing on principal and speaking truth, and many more who gave up or lost jobs and careers because of their organizing yet who remain committed to the struggle wherever they have landed, the left could use more of such people and more institutions like Haymarket and what it has tried and still works and aspires to be.

To paraphrase Marx, we need a ruthless critique of *nearly everything.* There is plenty of necessary critique going on. We also have to build, engage, and organize in good faith. A lot of us in these (mostly online ) spaces are too quick to engage in unprincipled attacks rather than the productive, even if necessarily ruthless, critique the left needs.

Sometimes, often, we forget the value of kindness. That *not everything* demands ruthlessness. Marx himself demonstrated this in his theoretical and practical organizational work, for whatever that's worth.

Solidarity comrades.
Free Palestine. by @crholmphd

20

0

a month ago

Sneak peak. @socialismconference by @crholmphd

40

3

a month ago

ViiiBEs tonight. by @crholmphd

22

0

2 months ago