Remembering Jeremiah's Contributions

In order for our black studies program to produce really solid projects, we've always depended on this talented and generous band of contributors. Our man, Jeremiah Houk (1981-2010), who passed earlier this summer, was one of our wonderful contributors. We miss him. We'll continue to.

The above photo shows Jeremiah, almost out of view of the camera, as he's looking over one of our Interactive Reading Group displays in the fall of 2009. We had actually opened the exhibit a little earlier because Jeremiah reminded me that several folks would probably be in class during the time that we had initially proposed to start the event. He had gently nudged me to think creatively about timing.

A year ago, Jeremiah had been part of a small team of writers who wrote a weekly race and illustration column for our blog, which focused on analysts of editorial cartoons. Along with our contributors Chris Laird and Kirk Myers, Jeremiah provided write-ups on all these drawings and thus provided the content for a larger exhibit that we eventually produced.

Here's one description he wrote describing the value of reading/viewing editorial cartoons:

Political editorial cartoons provide a quick, often direct approach to getting a point or opinion across. Like they always say, a picture says a thousand words. Instead of reading or listening to a wordy political reporter or journalist, I can focus on a small picture to view the issue from a different standpoint. The quickness of this allows me to view multiple viewpoints in the time it would take me to read one written article. –Jeremiah

So he made all these contributions and attended many of our events. Still, Jeremiah regularly (too often, if you ask me) deflected attention and said that he hadn't done enough for us. Please. I can't imagine what it would have been like to have more folks like him, to have more Jeremiahs. We were so fortunate to have our one.