Professor Ismail Rashid and Oona Maloney ’22, History Department

This summer I worked with Professor Rashid on a Ford Scholars Project on Youth Culture and Black Student activism in the United States and South Africa. The project was split into two components over the course of 8 weeks; for the first 5 weeks, Professor Rashid and I expanded on AFRS 289, an existing 6 week seminar, into a 12 week course. For the second part of the project, I traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to begin research on an article that Professor Rashid and I will write on I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, a Sierra Leonean Pan-Africanist, journalist, and unionist.

Reading one of the primary readings for AFRS 289 in the Library

Before Professor Rashid left, we brainstormed weekly topics for the class syllabus and established the student movements that would be studied in class. I helped by reviewing the three primary readings used in the course and sorting out the chapters that students did and did not have to read. I also created weekly folders containing articles that I found and made PowerPoints for each weekly lesson. Professor Rashid spent most of the summer project traveling in Africa, so I kept in contact with him while he was away through weekly WhatsApp calls.

After completing the first part of the project, I started the preliminary for Professor Rashid’s I.T.A. Wallace Johnson article. I traveled to Washington D.C. and stayed for a week to do research at the Library of Congress. At the LOC, I primarily worked in the Madison Building where I looked through 8 boxes of microfilm of three different Sierra Leonean newspapers from the early 1900s to see if there was news about Wallace-Johnson and his political activities. In the future, I will continue to work with Professor Rashid throughout the year on Wallace Johnson research and article writing.

The boxes of microfilm that I sorted through

A microfilm of an article from the Sierra Leonean newspaper the Sierra Leone Daily Mail