Announcing the Spring 2025 Season!

December 10, 2024

Please join us for our Spring 2025 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 panels on April 3rd and May 1st will be taking place in person at the Schomburg Center, in addition to being live-streamed.

Our Spring 2025 season begins with an online event on February 6th, First Person: Writing Activist Lives from the Inside. Four life-long activists will discuss their lives in the movement and the process and politics of writing personal histories of Black freedom struggles. Millicent Brown will present on Another Sojourner Looking for Truth, illuminating her long life in the movement beyond her role in the desegregation of schools in South Carolina. Mike Africa Jr. will discuss On A Move: Philadelphia's Notorious Bombing and a Native Son's Lifelong Battle for Justice, a story of ongoing resistance in the face of extreme state violence. David J. Dennis Jr. and David J. Dennis Sr. will share about their intergenerational legacy in the movement from Freedom Summer to the Algebra Project, which they write about in The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride.

The next event in our spring season is an online panel on State Violence: Prisons, Police, Politics, taking place on March 6th. Five renowned scholars will dive into the histories behind the contemporary abolitionist movement. Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, challenges the dominant historiography of the Attica Rebellion, situating it instead within a longer history of revolt within and beyond New York State's prisons and jails. Donna Murch will discuss Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, diving deeply into the Black left politics of the 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of an abolitionist feminist movement. Mary Phillips, author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, will share about the grounded praxis developed by Black Panther Party political prisoner Ericka Huggins to resist state violence inside the belly of the beast. Charles McKinney will discuss the long Black freedom movement and the edited collection he published alongside co-editor Francoise Hamlin, From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

In 1986, at the first big conference of King scholars, Coretta Scott King called for more women scholars the next time a conference was held on her husband's work. Nearly 40 years later, this panel, taking place at the Schomburg Center on April 3rd, answers that call. In this in-person event on Revisiting Martin and Coretta Scott King leading scholars of Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King and the Black freedom movement come together to see both Martin and Coretta Scott King anew. Jeanne Theoharis will discuss her new book King of the North: Martin Luther King's Life of Struggle Outside the South, which details the Kings' experiences coming of age in graduate school in the segregated North and their lifelong challenge to Northern racism, the limits of Northern racism and colonialism at home and abroad. Beverly Guy Sheftall will share new work on Coretta Scott King's support of LGBTQI+ communities, and renowned activist and author Barbara Smith will discuss the Kings in history and memory paying particular attention to the context of the Black feminist movement.

Our season concludes on May 1st with A Century of Preserving Black Freedom: Libraries and Archives in the Tradition of Arturo Schomburg, an in-person event at the Schomburg Center as part of the library's centennial celebrations. Cheryl Knott will discuss Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, a history that informs organizing for accessible, anti-racist, fully-funded libraries today. Laura Helton, author of Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, will present on the role of Black collectors in the making and preserving of history. Vanessa K. Valdés, will discuss the life of one such Black collector and institution-builder, Arturo Schomburg, who she writes about in Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Ethelene Whitmire, author of Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian, will discuss the life of Andrews, a Harlem Renaissance writer and playwright who was also a longtime librarian at the 135th street library, which later became the Schomburg Center.