
Communities are made.
They don't just exist.
Akeem Anderson is a dual degree student pursuing a JD at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (Minneapolis) Law School and a PhD in American Studies with the College of Liberal Arts.
His scholarship focuses on understanding the relationship between jazz, eugenics, and racial violence in the late 19th and early 20th century.
As a Black Latine of Panamanian and Guyanese descent who grew up in New York, he says moving to Minnesota was an adjustment, but he has created his community while here, and welcomed countless others along the way. Here, in his own words, Anderson recounts his journey.
Growing up, a lot of my family were still immigrating, so while I wasn't going there, they were bringing Guyana here. There were moments when people were immigrating in, they would be staying at our place until they figured out their living situation. And so those were days of a packed house. Two bedrooms, and like 10 people in the house … cousins, relatives.
I don't know anyone in my family who's ever been to graduate school. Nobody's done the PhD thing. No one's done the JD thing. So a lot of this is foreign to me.
Anderson says that he had few relationships and connections in Minnesota prior to enrolling at the University of Minnesota, but that quickly changed as academic opportunities inspired him to build community spaces, especially for underrepresented students.
I think that oftentimes you talk about community in a way in which it's just like we expect to be part of a community because of how we identify, or because of where we are. I fundamentally believe that's not how things work. I think that communities are made. They don't just exist.
I’m currently president of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) and have been an active member for years. So I've been adamant about making sure BLSA is successful and that students have an opportunity to find space and community at the Law School.
We partner with the Minnesota Association for Black Lawyers and also form relationships between the students here and the other law schools in Minnesota. And we try to make sure all these students are meeting each other, because when you're in the legal market, it's a very, very small space. And when you're a person of color, it's smaller. When you're Black, it's even smaller. If you're a Black woman, it's even smaller. And so those relationships and being able to partner becomes more and more important, to make sure that everyone feels supported and understands that we're a resource for them.

He also helped create the University of Minnesota Black Graduate Collective (BGC).
I created the BGC to find ways to support and enrich Black life—whether that be social, professional, or educational—to make sure that everyone is getting what they need and they don't feel like they're here in isolation.
We have volunteer events, community dinners, happy hours, panel discussions … and also archival tours—trying to connect people to archival materials and resources like the University of Minnesota’s Givens Collection of African American Literature and its curator Davu Seru, to really bring people into that space so they can get an understanding of Black history and Black literary works.
Anderson believes in the power of education as an agent of change.
I've been consistently investing in education. I see it as transformative, because I think that the way in which oppression operates, as well as systemic inequalities, is through not willful ignorance, but accidental ignorance—people not understanding the historical trajectory of certain things.
And so I think there is value in creating a space where we can deal with undercovered sites in history, or to think about commonly discovered sites of history in new and innovative ways. When people learn about these spaces they can kind of take up what they learn and mobilize around concrete forms of change, and hopefully be able to envision new worlds, new realities, or new ways of thinking.
Among those undercovered sites in history, says Anderson, are his research into jazz music and eugenics from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, which has driven his desire to develop an understanding about this period that can help inform our lives today.
With the eugenics movement, all these people were trying to condemn the music as a disabling force. We had a set of ordinances and laws that were passed around governing [jazz], as well as medical practitioners who were saying that people should be sterilized, have lobotomies…. [The message was] jazz music produces disabilities, and everyone who participates in jazz music has a disability. There was a ban on jazz in New Orleans public schools. It's New Orleans!
All this is happening after the abolition of slavery where we have all these people who might have been enslaved or whose parents were enslaved, and they're trying to find ways to exist within this new American society. Everyone's trying to figure out what a world without legal slavery looks like, and for all these musical practitioners, they're trying to find ways to both support their community and support themselves and then provide a space where people can decompress or find enjoyment, or find pleasure, or find whatever it is that they need to keep going in this moment.
Anderson believes that history matters in our present day, and a better understanding of our past can help create a more inclusive present.
If we acknowledge the fact that we have people who are still alive now who experienced things like the Jim Crow era, racial segregation, different mobilizations around feminist rights, gendered rights … then we have to also acknowledge that we don't have a distant history from violence.
And so people may think, “Oh, history is so far back, so what does that mean for now?” But we have to reconcile the fact that people have lived through that history, and we have inherited that history, and so it's not disconnected from the ways in which we live and think about the world right now..
And if you see the world today, and you see intense amounts of suffering … you can't then simultaneously be like, “I'm just not going to care.” And so I try to consider the ways in which I can take up efforts to help remedy some of these situations. And I can't see giving up, because people who came before me didn't stop, right? People in this country, I think, have always been fighting for some form of relief, and so if they can do it, I can do it, because I have more access to resources and things that they didn't have.
Starting points for change
Learn more about the Givens Collection of African American Literature..
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Akeem Anderson is a recipient of the University of Minnesota’s Scholarly Excellence in Equity and Diversity (SEED) Award.