Rust College sophomores Quento Annan and Irene Njenga came to the U.S. from Kenya in 2019 mostly unaware of deep social issues of race and racism here in this country. However, within weeks of their arrival in the U.S., Annan and Njenga were not only seeing America through such figures as Ida B. Wells Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, they were also studying closely historic documents related to early education in Tennessee and Mississippi, contexts for the founding of Rust.

Finding themselves in two special sections of first-year writing, both students, a few years older than traditional first-year scholars, embraced the chance to see beyond the present and beyond the surface of Southern culture. Asked about his motivation, Annan stated that the writing class into which he enrolled expanded for himself and for his peers the learning experience he had expected–to include the history of Rust itself.

Demonstrating keen perception relative to this history, Njenga and Annan were selected at the end of their first semester to become interns in the wRIGHTing Reconstruction project, funded by the Council of Independent Colleges. In their second semester, the two students went to work transcribing and digitizing documents held by the College’s Leontyne Price Library Archive and by the Marshall County Museum, a partner in the project.

Organizers of wRIGHTing Reconstruction, English professors Alisea Williams McLeod and Mark Ridge, were very pleased with the interns’ ability to read closely and critically, to give attention to detail, and, most importantly, to pose questions that sometimes they themselves had not thought of. Williams McLeod conceived of the project as a continuation of her use of the topic of slavery and its documentation as content for writing instruction.

In The Blue Circle, the project’s podcast, Annan and Njenga talk about what they learned from their involvement in visiting the era of Rust’s founding. To the project’s gain, the two have continued the work into the current school year.