Social and Racial Equity

Celebrating diversity. Practicing inclusion. Striving for Equity.

The Lane Center for Social and Racial Equity is an extension of Wesleyan’s work on campus that began in earnest more than eighteen years ago, and its commitment to foster diversity and inclusion and uphold equity and justice in all areas of the College. This includes making transparent Wesleyan’s commitment to creating an anti-racist community on campus, and supporting social and racial justice work in the Macon community.

The Equity Center has also provided DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice) training, workshops, and facilitations for Wesleyan and Macon community constituents. Since 2020, through the support of the Crafting Democratic Futures Project, we’ve created opportunities for Macon community members to come together physically and virtually through the College and our community partner, the Tubman Museum. Our community outreach work was also supported by our partnerships with the Interactivity Foundation and the E Pluribus Unum Fund. 

Crafting Democrating Futures

Wesleyan was one of nine institutions invited to participate in this three-year national project supported by the vision of Dr. Earl Lewis and the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan. Through a series of community-based discussions, artists’ lectures, and community events, we worked collaboratively on areas of need in Macon, such as more diverse representation in public art and more visible and accurate representation of Macon’s rich African-American history. 

Through this grant, Wesleyan’s Equity Center hosted meetings for the the Macon Bicentennial Subcommittee on Historic Markers and funded a group research trip to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2023. The work of the Bicentennial Subcommittee and the passionate vision of Mrs. Muriel McDowel-Jackson and Mr. George Fadil Muhammad created a series of markers dedicated to preserving African-American history in Macon. These include commemoration of Macon’s first thriving African-American business district on Historic Cotton Avenue, as well as the first markers in the city to acknowledge the horrors of Macon’s participation in the slave strade by commemorating those who suffered at the Poplar Street slave trade markets and at the site of the Old Bibb County Courthouse.

Through this grant, Wesleyan also partnered with Storytellers Macon to participate in empathy-building storytelling workshops and community-led events, such as the Still Bending the Arc series. 

The Crafting Democratic Futures Project also supported scholarly research into Wesleyan’s own history as an institution founded during the antebellum, slave-holding era of the U.S. South. This work will continue beyond the grant period, as Wesleyan has partnered with Sewanne University’s “Locating Slavery’s Legacies” research network of colleges and universities across the U.S. South working to address the long history of white supremacy and Lost Cause narratives interconnected with U.S. higher education.

For more information about the work of the Equity Center, please contact Dr. Brandi Simpson Miller, Co-Director of the Lane Center for Social and Racial Equity.