From the Editor

This special edition of 1619: Journal of African American Studies is published during an unprecedented time in which the twin forces of a novel viral pandemic, COVID 19, and the perpetual and historical pandemic of violent over-policing of African American individuals and communities unexpectedly and suddenly intersected during the spring and summer of 2020. 

While he COVID 19 pandemic removed the scales from the eyes of the majority of White Americans that blinded them from the realities of systemic racism, structural violence and the perpetual structural inequalities suffered by African Americans/Blacks, the murder of George Floyd ignited ongoing protests in which millions of Americans across racial, ethnic, socio-economic, educational, regional, gender, generational, and state boundaries are together demonstrating and demanding changes to the policing and criminal justice systems that continue to decimate African American communities and individual lives.

This edition shares the reactions to the concomitant events of the 2020 COVID 19 pandemic and brutal public lynching of George Floyd, the murders of Brionna Taylor, Ahmaud Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks from members of the business and financial services community. The articles featured include, first and foremost, a reprint of Dr. Vanessa Nottingham Gamble’s seminal and groundbreaking article on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and its impact on the African American community, originally published in 2010. The parallels between the structural inequalities in employment, economics, and healthcare marginalizing African Americans in 1918 cannot be overlooked by readers.

The articles following are written by two of the highest-ranking African Americans in the economic public sector, the Federal Reserve of Atlanta, and the Connecticut State Treasury, written by Mr. Raphael Bostic, President and CEO and Mr. Shawn Wooden, CT State Treasurer. These two pieces are precedential in that the voices from the banking and financial sectors of the nation are rarely heard as it relates to matters of race, racial inequality and inequities in the criminal justice system and police brutality. These are accompanied by a powerful piece written by an MBA student at the Harvard Business School, class of ’21. The final selections in the volume are two poems written by a newly featured poet who is a graduate of the CSCU system, Mr. Jamil D. Effend.

Walton Brown Foster, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief
June 2020