Madison’s Black Greenbook
Co-founder & Visual EthnographerSoulFolk Collective, Department of African American Studies, University of Wisconsin Madison
The state of Wisconsin ranks among the worst in the U.S. for racial disparities impacting its Black residents, such as rates of unemployment, educational inequities, segregation, and mass incarceration. Amidst historical challenges in funding efforts to counteract these inequities, local Madison community leader Reverend Dr. Alexander Gee has raised over $30 million to build a state-of-the-art The Center for Black Excellence and Culture in Madison (“The Center”). Opening late fall 2025, The Center hopes to be a national model of an institutional resource for Black residents in medium-sized, predominantly white cities.
The SoulFolk’s collaboration with The Center will be an invaluable foundation for what has the potential to help us understand the structural barriers that Black residents face and how an extensive, community-based center might be a model for helping Black people address and overcome the antiblackness they encounter. In this ethnographically inspired research, we will investigate the following questions: What are the current experiences of Black Madison residents? Where do they report that Black culture and excellence currently exist in Madison? What are their hopes and concerns about The Center? As this study sets up for a “before and after” look, this initial exploratory study will be an essential avenue for capturing how The Center is a catalyst in transforming the experiences and life outcomes of Black people who live in Madison, as well as what we can learn from the current freedom dreams (Kelley, 2022) of Black people who live here.
In addition to collaborating with The Center, we are creating a dynamic of archive oral histories of Black people who live in Madison, where the public can click on a map of Madison and hear the stories of the spaces and places that have been Black-affirming, creating a map of human geographies of resistance and liberation.
// LAND B[L]ACK
What do Indigenous Nations and Black Americans have in common? Land.
To be Indigenous is to live in deep, ancestral relationship with the land. Black Americans, in contrast, have historically had a fraught and coerced relationship to the land we now call the United States. Yet the histories of these communities are not separate—they are deeply entangled, shaped by displacement, forced labor, resistance, and resilience.Indigenous Nations and Black communities are never monolithic. They are diverse, dynamic, and hold vast and sometimes contradictory histories. Scholars like Kyle Whyte argue that Black Americans—also called Africans in America or African Americans—carry their own Indigenous origins, rooted in the nations of West Africa. We are Igbo, Yoruba, Fulani, Asante, and many others.
Land/B(l)ack is a long-term multimedia photo documentary project inspired by Indigenous movements for land reclamation, sovereignty, and decolonization. At its heart is the assertion that one cannot speak about land—particularly the land of Turtle Island—without also speaking about Indigeneity and Blackness.
The U.S. was built on the backs of enslaved Black people, whose labor made possible the nation’s economic and political foundations. From the 15th through the 19th centuries, Black hands cleared forests, tilled soil, and harvested cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Even as settler colonialism and white supremacy worked to erase and dispossess, Black and Indigenous peoples resisted through culture, kinship, and refusal.
Land/B(l)ack positions these legacies in conversation with one another. Through visual ethnography, documentary photography, portraiture, and radical dialog, the project offers an ongoing and evolving archive of how Black and Indigenous communities continue to survive, resist, and build new forms of kinship with each other, the land, and their ancestors.
This long-term body of work aims to document cultural and land stewardship as everyday acts of freedom, memory, and relationality—revealing not only what has been endured, but what is being made anew.
Black Badger Archive
The Black Badger Archive is a multimedia photo-documentary project dedicated to authentically rendering the Black experience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Initiated in Fall 2021, the project responds to a glaring absence of Black representation in the university’s archival and communications infrastructure. Despite Black students having been present on campus since 1875, the institution’s visual record remains incomplete and, in some cases, deeply problematic—such as in the year 2000, when the university photoshopped a Black student, Diallo Shabazz, into its admissions brochure to feign diversity.
This archive grows from the lived experience and creative practice of the author, a First Wave Scholar and artist-researcher, who has been photographing the spaces where Black life is made and held—protests, portraits, parties, classrooms, and community gatherings. It is an ongoing documentation effort that seeks to preserve and elevate the mundane and extraordinary ways Black students, staff, and faculty resist, relate, and reimagine their place on campus.
The archive is also a political intervention. In the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court decision to strike down race-based affirmative action, The Black Badger Archive offers an urgent, people-centered counter-narrative to sterile institutional metrics of diversity. It asserts that presence does not equal visibility, and visibility does not equal care.
Ultimately, The Black Badger Archive is both a creative and scholarly intervention. It not only addresses the erasure and underdocumentation of figures such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and bell hooks within the university’s historical record—it also ensures that current and future generations can see themselves reflected, remembered, and rendered with care. The project will culminate at the conclusion of the author’s undergraduate tenure, but its impact is designed to outlast my time at UW–Madison.
