February’s Black History Month calls for a look inside Dr. David Molina’s African American Rhetoric. It offers an understanding of Black political imagination past and present, through the lens of communication, rhetoric, and Dr. Molina’s research background in Black freedom movements in the United States.
Engaging in archival research is an immersive experience, allowing one to reawaken found histories, and is a prominent aspect of COMMRC 1500. African American Rhetoric, an undergraduate communication course, is taught by Dr. David Miguel Molina—rhetorician, professor, and advisor—who holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Public Culture and graduate certificate in Black Studies from Northwestern University.
Dr. Molina’s research centered on the rhetoric of black freedom movements, specifically post 1965 following the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Inspired by key texts like Dr. King’s last published title, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, as well as Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, Dr. Molina’s dissertation examined the uses of coalition in 1930’s-1960’s Chicago. The use of coalition, as Dr. Molina came to find, shifted over the years,
“I got really interested in the question of coalition. My dissertation was focused on how that concept gets taken up in freedom movements, within or connected to the Black freedom movement, and started from an observation that the term wasn't used in the way that it's used now. It’s not until the mid-1960s, where you start seeing people explicitly calling for coalitions, being a coalition, or starting to name their organization's coalitions. That was a story I eventually told.”
While African American Rhetoric follows these broad research themes, the course specially examines the histories of Black Pittsburgh, both regionally and transnationally. Prior to joining the department in 2018, the course had not been offered for some time. Dr. Molina approached it as an examination of rhetoric in Black freedom.
“Archivally we’ve started with the Pittsburgh Courier, Black Pittsburgh newspaper, one of the most important Black newspapers, in the United States. When you go to the archive it seems like you're just asking the question that is in front of you, but that question is always motivated by where you are when you're asking the question.”
For Dr. Molina, “getting lost on purpose” is beneficial for a dive into the archives. Students are eased into the archival research and actively collaborate on research question development and on interrogating connections to current political climates. This exploration invites students to allow the material to invoke questions rather than entering the archive with those preconceived.
While archival research is nothing short of usual in academic spaces, the study of communication offers a distinct examination of African American Rhetoric, as its histories are steeped in mobilization surrounding the long civil rights movement. For Dr. Molina, sharing these stories via communications has a variety of importances.
Dr. Molina explained that his approach to archival work is greatly influenced by Dr. Barbra Biesecker from the University of Georgia. He said, “She argues that the archive is not this neutral repository of facts, but a messy, contingent, uneven, dynamic, collection of traces of past rhetorical situations, and their responses. It's passed, but we're now reading and animating it again. In doing so, we're also taking its language into our own mouth. It's inventing us alongside us, inventing it.”
This form of remembrance is critical for African American and civil rights histories, in times such as these when society is in desperate need of a retelling of their resilience. When asked about the importance of communication in studying African American histories Dr. Molina expanded,
“Are you watching the news? That's the answer. We're not talking about the present in an explicit sense but notice that the attachments that we bring to our archival research are incredibly informed by our current experiences, knowledges, and positionalities. It seems that there is an organizing dimension to historical reasoning, the ability of political momentum to reproduce itself, to be sustainable.”
To commemorate Black History Month is not only to uplift prominent figures, past and present, but to retell profound stories of perseverance, organization, and unity. Dr. Molina and African American Rhetoric aid in this process by creating a space with productive discourse to further these discussions through academia and beyond.
Written by Giulia Siegfried for COMMRC Connect