Photo collage for the Praying Grounds Oral History Project.
By Regennia N Williams, PhD
As the the founder and director of the RASHAD Center, Inc., I am pleased to announce the official April 2020 launch of the “Praying Grounds” Book Publishing Project (PGB2P).
This project is made possible, in part, by in-kind support from the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University (CSU), where the Praying Grounds oral history and manuscript collections are housed.
CSU is one of many educational institutions to use Pressbooks, a creation platform that supports open educational resource (OER) initiatives and helps make free or very affordable books available to students and other library patrons. As a four-time CSU alumna, I am especially proud to be able to work on this project with former colleagues at my alma mater.
The first volume in the proposed Pressbooks series will focus on the history of Black sacred music in Greater Cleveland, c. 1935-1995. Ms. Eva Blount is the first community partner to join the editorial team. Blount is an amazing gospel vocalist and she, too, is a CSU alumna.
Needless to say, I am grateful for the incredible support that Praying Grounds has received since its founding in 2003, and I look forward to sharing the Pressbooks publications with interested readers.
For more information on PGB2P, feel free to contact me at regennia@gmail.com.
Take care, be well, read on, and God bless!
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 
Wonderful scholarly outlet