Black Women and the Radical Tradition 2009

A National Conference presented by Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education Saturday March 28, 2009 ALL DAY (come early- seats are limited!) City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street) New York City http://www.blackwomen2009.org On March 28, 2009 the Graduate Center for Worker Education at Brooklyn College will welcome some of the leading activists and scholars to take part in a national conference that will discuss the historical and current accomplishment of black women in the United States. Black women have been leading the struggle for social transformation dating from the American Revolution to the present struggle for the presidency of the United States. This conference will examine the multifaceted leadership contributions of Black women as presented by leading scholars and social activists. The Conference will include a tribute to Charlene Mitchell, the first African-American women to run for president of the United States in 1968. FEATURING * Angela Davis * Manning Marable * Genna Rae McNeil * Leith Mullings * Erik McDuffie * Bill Fletcher, Jr. * Gerald Horne * Frances Fox Piven * Mary Louise Patterson * Carole Boyce Davies * Kimberly Springer Keynote Speakers: * Angela Davis, currently serves as a graduate studies Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality, and for gay rights and prison abolition. She is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally, as well as a founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance. Ms. Davis is known for her notable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. * Genna-Rae McNeil, is a distinguished professor of history at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She is the author of Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Historical Judgments Reconsidered, (co-edited by Michael R. Winston), African Americans and the Living Constitution, (co-edited with John Hope Franklin), and African-Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, (co-edited with V.P. Franklin and Nancy Grant). Dr. McNeil is a specialist in African-American History and U.S. social movements of the 20th century. She is currently researching a project on Joan Little and "The 'Free Joan Little' Movement." * Manning Marable, is one of America's most influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Under Dr. Marable's leadership, the Institute became one of the nation's most prestigious centers of scholarship on the black American experience. * Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a public intellectual, regularly featured on television and radio.. Starting in the labor movement as a rank and file member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, he eventually became the highest ranking African American in the AFL-CIO. He served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of TransAfrica Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing, educating and advocating for policies in favor of the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. After serving that role for four years, he was appointed Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College from 2005 to 2007. Fletcher was formerly the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO. Combining labor and community work, he struggled to desegregate the Boston building trades. A graduate of Harvard University, Fletcher is a prolific author of dozens of articles. He co-authored The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941. * Gerald C. Horne, is a Professor of Communications and African-American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of over twenty books. His recent publications include Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois, Class Struggle in Hollywood: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists, 1930-1950, and From the Barrel of a Gun: The U.S. and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980. Fire This Time was a finalist for the American Sociological Association's Robert Park Award in 1996. His present research projects include: Black Labor at Sea: Ferdinand Smith, from the National Maritime Union to the Communist Party to Jamaica; Race War! White Supremacy Vs. Blacks and Asians in the Japanese Attack on Hong Kong and the British Empire, 1930-1950, Black and Brown: African-Americans and The Mexican Revolution, 1910-20. Professor Horne earned his M.A. and PhD from Columbia University * Leith Mullings, is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center . She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Professor Mullings' research and writing has focused on structures of inequality and resistance to them. Her research began in Africa and she has written about traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial Ghana, as well as about women's roles in Africa. In the U.S. her work has centered on urban communities. Through the lens of feminist and critical race theory, she has analyzed a variety of topics including kinship, representation, gentrification, health disparities and social movements. * Erik McDuffie, is an Assistant Professor in African American Studies and in the Gender and Women's Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Professor McDuffie's research and teaching interests include African American women's activism, black feminism, black radicalism and internationalism, and the making of the African Diaspora. His current book project re-evaluates the histories of the Black Freedom Movement, American radicalism, and U.S. Women's Movement by arguing that the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) helped nurture a radical black feminism and provided a small group of black women radicals with unique opportunities to lead social movements with links to the global stage. His most recent publication appears in Michael Gomez's edited collection Diasporic Africa: A Reader (NYU Press, 2006). * Eileen Boris, is Hull Professor and Chair of Women's Studies and affiliate professor of history, black studies, and law and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is copresident of the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) and president of the board of trustees of The Journal of Women's History; she was co chair of the program committee for the 2005 Thirteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. She is author of Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (1986) and Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (1994), which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History. She is also coeditor of Major Problems in the History of American Workers (2002) and The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues (2007). * Kimberly Springer, is a senior lecturer at Kings College, London. Her current research uses television historiography to examine the role of television producer Norman Lear's 1970s sitcoms in transmitting the ideals of the era's social movements. Her most recent publication, "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality," Yes Means Yes, advocates for both an interrogation of historical stereotypes about black women's sexuality while highlighting those instances of unabashed sexual subjectivity. She has published single-authored and edited volumes on black women's activism including Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women's Activism, editor (New York University Press, 1999). Her co-edited volume Stories of O: the Oprahification of American Culture(University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming) critiques "the Oprah Culture Industry," which is the hegemonic apparatus evolving from the cultural output of media mogul Oprah Winfrey. * Frances Fox Piven, is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, she has taught at Boston University, Columbia University, New York University Law School, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna. She is past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association, has served as program co-chair of the annual political science meetings, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently President of the American Sociological Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the President's Award of the American Public Health Association, and the American Sociological Association's Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, as well as their award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Her books deal with the development of the welfare state, political movements, urban political, and electoral politics. Among them are Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements(1977); The New Class War (1982); Why Americans Don't Vote (1988); The Mean Season(1987); Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (1992); The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997); Why Americans Still Don't Vote (2000); The War at Home (2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006). * Carole Boyce Davis, is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) and Left of Karl Marx. Claudia Jones, Black/Communist/Woman (2007). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce-Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (1986); Out of the Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature (1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), and Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the Academy. Currently, Dr. Boyce Davies is writing a series of personal reflections called Caribbean Spaces. Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad, dealing with the issue of transnational Caribbean/American black identity, and is preparing an edition of the writings of Claudia Jones entitled Beyond Containment: Claudia Jones, Activism, Clarity and Vision. * Premilla Nadasen, is an associate professor of history at Queens College (CUNY). Her book, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005) won the Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and outlines the ways in which African American women on welfare forged a feminism of their own out of the political and cultural circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s. A longtime community activist and scholar, she has written for Feminist Studies, Ms. Magazine, Working USA, Black Women, Gender and Families, and the Progressive Media Project, and has given numerous public talks about African-American women's history and social policy. Her article, "Expanding the Boundaries of the Women's Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights," (Feminist Studies) won the 2002 Berkshire Conference Article Prize. She is currently working on a book-length project on the history of domestic worker organizing in the United States. * Ruth Feldstein is an Associate Professor of American Studies, Department of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (2000), and has written articles and reviews for the Journal of American History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, Reviews in American History, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, and Race, Nation, and Empire in American History. Her article, "`I Don't Trust You Anymore': Nina Simone, African American Activism, and Culture in the 1960s," was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians, for Best Article on Black Women's History. Her current research focuses on internationally famous black women entertainers who participated in the American civil rights movement. Her book-in-progress, Do What You Gotta Do: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement explores links between feminism, a global mass culture, black activism, and anti-colonial internationalism. * Bettina Aptheker, is Professor of Feminist Studies and History at the University of California at Santa Cruz where her "Introduction to Feminisms" course, which emphasizes the multiplicity of feminism and women's experiences, is one of the most popular on campus. She is the author of several books including Intimate Politics: Autobiography As Witness; The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis; and If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (co-authored with Angela Davis) and Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. * Barbara Winslow is a historian who teaches in the School of Education and for the Women's Studies Program. Her areas of specialization are in social studies curriculum development, integrating computer based multi-media technology into the urban classroom at both the elementary and secondary school level. She also specializes in integrating class, race and gender into the elementary and secondary curriculum. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, class, race and sexuality on women in social protest movements. Her first book, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, (1996) tells the story of an important suffragette, peace campaigner, anti- colonialist, anti-fascist, international socialist and feminist. She is presently writing a history of the women's liberation movement in Seattle Washington . Winslow is also researching how class, race and gender affect pedagogy, in particular with regard to technology. She is the founder and project Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women's Activism 1945 to the Present. ---------------------------------------------- Registration Fees Early Registration $50.00 (until March 1, 2009) Students $40.00 $75.00 (After March 2, 2009) $100.00 at the Door To register simply fill out the form: www.blackwomen2009.org/registration.html Within 24 hours you will receive a conformation number that MUST be submitted with your payment. Payment must be in the form of a check or money order made payable to Brooklyn College and mailed to: Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education ATTN: Black Women 2009 25 Broadway, 7th Floor New York, NY 10004 ---------------------------------------------- Contact Information Brooklyn Graduate Center for Worker Education 25 Broadway, 7th Floor New York, NY 10004 212.966.4014 Email: info@blackwomen2009.org workereducation.org Professor Joseph Wilson Program Director Annie Jagoo Executive Assistant Stacy Warner Maddern, Coordinator Research & Development
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