Announcing the Spring 2024 Season!

January 12, 2024

We invite everyone to join us for a series of free public programs on histories of Black freedom struggles.

We will begin the season on Thursday, February 1st at 6:30 PM Eastern Time with an online event on the Black Freedom Movement Before Brown. Matthew Delmont will discuss Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, Cookie Woolner will present on “The Famous Lady Lovers:” African American Women and Same-Sex Desire Before Stonewall, Margaret Burnham will share work from By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners, and Dylan Penningroth will be in conversation about Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights.

On Thursday, March 7th at 6:30 we will host a panel on Black Women, Freedom Making, and the Long 1960s in person at the Schomburg Center and over live-stream. Anastasia Curwood, Suzanne Cope, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and Christina Greene will discuss their new books: Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics, Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, and Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment.

We will have an online event on Food, Life, and Leisure on Thursday, April 4th at 6:30 where Blair LM Kelley will discuss Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Theresa Runstedtler will discuss Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA, Bobby J. Smith II will discuss Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and Ava Purkiss will discuss Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America.

Our season concludes with an online panel about Educational Injustice and the Struggle for Liberatory Education with Conor Tomas Reed, Keith Mayes, Leslie Alexander, and Zebulon Vance Miletsky on Thursday, May 2nd at 6:30. They will be presenting on their new books New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People's University, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education, Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History, and Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle.