Bartholomew Jones is a wearer of many hats. The co-founder of Memphis’s Cxffeeblack and Anti-Gentrification Cxffee Club is a rapper, community organizer, film maker, clothing and shoe designer, and multi-time Finalist for both the Sprudgie Awards and the Sprudge Design Awards. And to the resume he can now add Guest Lecturer. Jones has joined the Vanderbilt University faculty and will be leading a class on the intersection of coffee, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism.
Jones and Vanderbilt have had a symbiotic relationship for a few years now. In 2024, Vanderbilt helped fun phase two of Cxffee Black’s Barista Exchange Program that brought African coffee professionals to America to hone their craft at Black-owned coffee shops across the Southeast. Meanwhile, Jones’s decolonizing efforts in coffee have been highlighted as part of Vanderbilt’s Coffee Equity Lab, part of the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership (CAL).
Starting for the Spring 2026 semester, Jones joined Vanderbilt as an Entrepreneur in Residence for CAL. In that role, he will be giving guest lectures, the next one titled: God Don’t Make No Junk: Sample The Root Of Coffee Through Hip-Hop And Afrofuturism. The lecture description is as follows: “Black knowledge systems are not lost — they are recoverable, and crucial for the innovation needed to unlock the future the industry is searching for. The connection between the African diaspora and the African continent was never fully severed. It lives in the plant. It lives in the cup. It lives in the name.”
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Per the press release, “Jones is believed to be the first scholar-practitioner in the United States to build a university-level curriculum framing the $500 billion global coffee industry through Black history, Afrofuturism, hip-hop pedagogy, and reparative economic design.”
Open to the public, the lecture will take place Friday, March 27th from 1:25pm to 2:25pm at Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Letters. It will be followed by a reception and installation opening at 2:30pm for Last Coffee Of The Week With Cxffeeblack.
“The future of coffee isn’t being invented. It’s being remembered,” Jones states. “Everything the industry is celebrating as innovation was already being practiced by Black and indigenous peoples long before specialty coffee existed.”
Jones will stay on as Entrepreneur in Residence at least through the end of the semester, May 15th. Jones and Cxffeeblack will also be in attendance at World of Coffee San Diego next month, where along with Awake Labs, they will be making a “major reveal.” More details on that to be release here on Sprudge.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
