Myia Elum

Myia Elum was previously an 1856 Project summer fellow in 2023 in collaboration with the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Summer Research Initiative. Elum examined the post-Civil War growth of Black institutions and economic self-sufficiency through her study of Josiah Adams, a free man who acquired property after the war and established a cemetery on his land for local African Americans. Adams was a free man who worked at the Riversdale Plantation before the Civil War. However, She is is also an artist and educator who creates conscious, lyrically driven Hip-Hop and R\&B music that speaks to the Black lived experience in America. She  graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park in December 2023, where she designed her own interdisciplinary major through the Individual Studies Program titled *Music and Black Rhetoric of America*. This program combined African American Studies, Music, and Communication to explore how African Americans have historically used music as a tool of expression, resistance, and cultural preservation—communicating the social, political, and economic realities of everyday Black life.