Three students connected to Africana Studies within the College of Arts & Sciences highlight prominent and lesser-known individuals including journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and John Edmonstone, a taxidermist who trained Charles Darwin. Read the article by Alex Schein and Callum Bhatti from Omnia below:
When undergraduates Kara Butler, C’26, Jaimee Martin, C’27, and Clarke Dickens, C’26, spoke with Omnia about inspiring figures in Black history, the three students each had different perspectives on who to highlight.
Martin brought up well-known journalist, activist, and Civil Rights leader Ida B. Wells and the way she learned to protect herself. “It really helped me think about Black women’s specific intellectual insights and how their forward thinking advances not only us as a group for Black women, but also the entire Black community,” Martin says.
Dickens and Butler chose Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Edmonstone, respectively. Dunbar has been described as one of the first influential Black poets in American history; Edmonstone famously taught Charles Darwin taxidermy. See below for more on what the students had to say about these inspiring individuals.
Jaimee Martin, C’27
Major: Africana Studies
Last semester in my Intro to Africana class taught by Kelly Harris [lecturer and senior staff director] and Tukufu Zuberi [Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations], we had a lesson where we focused on Ida B. Wells. I’d come into the class already knowing a little bit about her: She’s a prolific writer, a really important Black woman figure who led an anti-lynching campaign, and this was really significant for the time because Black men couldn’t really speak out about these things without experiencing direct violence, thus continuing the lynchings against the community.
But Wells had a really strong role in this by being able to not only speak out, but also through her self armament—this was a really famous aspect of her as a historical figure. She always carried a pistol with her everywhere. And she wrote about this in the late 1800s into the 1900s, how important it was for the Black community, especially Black women, to be able to protect themselves. This really helped me think about Black women’s specific intellectual insights and how their forward thinking advances not only us as a group for Black women, but also the entire Black community, the way that she thought about self-governance through being able to arm yourself. We see that pick up much later in the ’60s with the Black Panthers, so she was definitely ahead of her time.
Clarke Dickens, C’26
Major: Criminology
Minor: Africana Studies
I’m a D.C. native, so a person I would like to highlight is Paul Laurence Dunbar. Originally born in Kentucky to enslaved parents in the 1800s, he was a young writer who would grow up to be a famous poet and have major contributions to literature at the time.
He would go on to go and attend Howard University, where he found himself interacting with the M Street High School, which is the first African-American high school in the United States. And in the late 1800s he did a lot of work in this area, wrote a lot of poetry, interacting with other figures like the son of Frederick Douglass. In the end, M Street High School would go on to be renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, where his legacy lives on as a Black poet.
Kara Butler, C’26
Major: Communication and Anthropology
Last semester I was in a course called Human Origins and Evolution with Caroline Jones, and we started talking about evolution. Obviously, it’s in the title, and obviously, we had to start with Charles Darwin, but we started it a little bit before that, and we started talking about a man named John Edmonstone. He was a formerly enslaved man from Guyana who learned how to do taxidermy over there, and then took his taxidermy talents—because he was really, really good at it—to Scotland and started up a business.
It was there that he started not only doing taxidermy for all of the wealthy people in Scotland, but also doing taxidermy lessons. One of his students, one of the people who learned from him was Charles Darwin. It’s thought that Darwin then took all of the knowledge that he learned from Edmonstone about taxidermy, specifically in tropical climates like Guyana, to the Galapagos, where he was learning about finches; he was able to preserve those finches better in order to then come up with his theory on evolution.