HYDERABAD, India – With a microphone in hand and a computer linked up to a screen projector, an American history professor from Virginia recently took about two dozen students here at Osmania University on a whirlwind tour of the Black experience in America.
It was a trip that Dr. Ann Denkler, a professor of American history at Shenandoah University, began by recounting the tortuous journey that enslaved Africans made across the Atlantic as “cargo” in the hulls of slave ships. This led up to the time when enslaved Africans were officially reduced to three-fifths of a human being by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
She continued with the harsh realities of plantation life in the antebellum South and the harassment and lynchings that characterized the era known as Jim Crow. Then she ended with a look at segregation in public facilities in the South that lasted well into the 20th century.
Denkler’s brief overview of Black history was meant to prepare students for a more in-depth discussion about the Civil Rights Movement—a cause that is itself, in many ways, inextricably linked—through an HBCU—to India’s own struggle for liberation.
After all, it was Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson—the first Black president of Howard University—who paid a visit to India in 1950 and then gave a talk in Philadelphia about Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance movement, which led to India’s independence.
In the audience of Dr. Johnson’s talk was a young man named Martin Luther King Jr., who was subsequently moved to study Gandhi’s life. And the rest, as they say, is history.
It was that history—the Civil Rights Movement—that Denkler came here to teach at Osmania University. She did it during a two-day workshop as part of a month-long return to India. This was prompted in part by relationships she built with Osmania University during her time as a Fulbright scholar last year at the University of Hyderabad. She taught a course that was meant to promote cultural understanding through teaching a “more nuanced understanding of American history.”
