The “Praying Grounds” Collage for the Cleveland Memory Website.
By Regennia N. Williams, PhD
Earlier this month, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Praying Grounds: African American Faith Communities, A Documentary and Oral History Project would benefit from a recent American Rescue Plan Humanities Grant to Cleveland State University’s Michael Schwartz Library. The library plans to “use the American Rescue Plan funds to process, digitize, and promote . . . Praying Grounds, which contains oral histories, audio visual materials, ephemera, and research materials.”
Launched in 2003, Praying Grounds was a CSU-based project through the spring semester of 2015, when I left CSU and moved to Maryland in 2016. All materials collected through 2015 were donated to Library Special Collections.
The 2021 online description for the funding initiative suggested the following, “With funds from he National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) will distribute $2 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding to help anchor libraries as strong humanities institutions as they emerge and rebuild from the coronavirus pandemic. The purpose of this emergency relief program is to assist libraries that have been adversely affected by the pandemic and require support to restore and sustain their core activities.” In February 2022, the ALA announced that 200 libraries would receive grants of $10,000 each.
According to Marsha Miles, Assistant Director for Collections and Resource Management, a portion of the CSU grant will cover costs associated with hiring a graduate assistant to work on the Praying Grounds Project during the summer of 2023. Congratulations to Marsha and Amanda Goodsett, Performing Arts and Humanities Librarian, on the receipt of this grant award.
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. 