Journal of History and Culture Journal of History and Culture

editorial foreword
Festina Lente: With all deliberate haste
A KEL ISMAIL KAHERA
This issue of the Journal of History &Culture marks the tenth year of the Texas Institute for the Preservation
of History & Culture (TIPHC). On May 26, 1999 the 76th Texas Legislature created TIPHC under House Bill 889.
The Legislature recognized the need to enrich and preserve the history of African-Americans in the State of Texas
and beyond, because much of the historical material was rapidly disappearing, and because insufficient numbers
of trained professionals are engaged in research, resource management and preservation. It is fair to say that
the primary mission of TIPHC is to enhance and build its capacity to become the primary repository of African-
American history and culture in Texas; to disseminate knowledge; to promote research and investigation “by any
means necessary.” The Journal of History & Culture concerns itself with our understanding of time, space and
motion as evidenced in a myriad of cultural milieus attendant to the African Americans but primarily reflected in
this group’s relationship to the built environment. Within these cultural environments lies the total pattern of their
development and engenders their capacity to learn, formulate and transmit knowledge to succeeding generations
through the design and use of tools, artifacts and systems of abstract thought. The focus of the Journal of History
& Culture lies not only with the research activities of collecting, displaying and disseminating knowledge of the
history and culture of African Americans, but similar to the learning activities that happens in the design studio or
classrooms, it goes to the other spectrum of pedagogy, which is to confront historical phenomenon and theory as
well in an attempt to deal with how the academy and the world understands and interprets the cultural transition
of African-American and Texans in a given space over time.
Before briefly discussing the essays in this issue, we reiterate two crucial points: first the value of public
education to promote scholarship and to combat the paucity of knowledge available to society; secondly the failure
to act with all deliberate haste could easily provoke disastrous intellectual consequences for future generations. In
the “The Education Debate” Carla Jackson Bell sets the tenor with regards to some of the ideas discussed throughout
many of the schools of architecture today especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities schools of
architecture. She is after all arguing about the value of an architectural education and sadly, the exclusion of women
from the profession—a problem we are still confronted with today, in spite of the widespread appropriation of
techno-science. Above all in the 19th century the individual choice of undereducated blacks, men and women,
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