Announcing the Fall 2024 Season!

August 09, 2024

Please join us for our fall 2024 season of Conversations in Black Freedom Studies! All the events in the series are free and open to the public. The events will take place on the first Thursday of the month at 6:30 PM and recordings of all our events are available on the Schomburg Center's youtube page. Please note that the panel on October 3rd will be taking place in person at the Schomburg Center, in addition to being live-streamed.

We will begin the season on Thursday, September 5th at 6:30 PM with an online event on the campus as crucible of struggle. University campuses have long been a site of student protest and organizing, a legacy that continues today with the explosion of student encampments for justice in Palestine, against police brutality and state violence, immigrant rights and for free speech. Stefan Bradley and Danica Savonick will discuss their work on Black student movements in Harlem in the 1960s and 1970s, at Columbia University and the City College of New York respectively. They will be joined by Barbara Savage, who will discuss her biography of longtime Howard professor Merze Tate, who traveled from her classrooms to the world to fight injustice.

On October 3rd, Ujju Aggarwal, Say Burgin, Laura Hill, and Shannon King will join us in person at the Schomburg and on live-stream for a conversation about histories of Black freedom struggles in the North. Aggarwal and King will discuss the Black freedom movement in New York, focusing on education and policing respectively, while Burgin examines the white fight for Black power in Detroit, and Hill focuses on the Black freedom struggle in Rochester. Thinking historically across these different urban contexts, we can see how people organized in the Jim Crow North, and what that teaches us about the unfinished business of the Black freedom struggle in New York today.

Our season continues on November 7th with an online event on Black history, anticolonialism, and global revolutions. Paula Marie Seniors will talk about the Monroe Defense Committee and internationalist Black women radicals. Quito Swan will discuss the Black Pacific and anti-colonial politics. Natanya Duncan will discuss her work on women in the Universal Negro Improvement association and the formation of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Monique Bedasse will talk about her work on Rastafarianism in Tanzania during the age of decolonization.

The final event of the fall season will take place online on Thursday, December 5th. We will be joined by four scholars to discuss the rapidly expanding field of Black freedom movement women's biography. Using the lives of notable Black women to shed new light on the 20th century, Noliwe Rooks and Ashley Robertson Preston will discuss their biographies of Mary Mcleod Bethune, Sonya Y. Ramsey will talk about her biography of Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, and Marcia Walker-McWilliams will discuss her book about the Reverend Addie Wyatt.