Announcing the Spring 2027 Conversations in Black Freedom Studies Season!

Please join us for the Spring 2027 season of Conversations in Black Freedom Studies! All the events in the series are free and open to the public and take place on the first Thursday of the month at 6:30 PM. The season opens in person at the Schomburg Center, and the remaining conversations will be held online. Recordings of our events are available on the Schomburg Center’s YouTube page.

February 4, 2027 — Black Power, “60” Years Later and Counting (in person at the Schomburg Center)

The season begins with a conversation on Black Power sixty years on, featuring:

• Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott, Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers
• Karin Stanford and Mark Speltz, Marching West: The Los Angeles Civil Rights Movement in Photographs
• Robert Robertson, Education for the Revolution: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School
• Arun Kundnani, I Rise in Fire: Jamil Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown, and the Long Revolution

March 4, 2027 — Black Women at the Forefront of the Movement (online)

• Barbara Smith, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
• Ann Marie Mingo, Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
• Kali Gross, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times
• Rosemary Hennessy, In the Company of Radical Women Writers

April 1, 2027 — Coretta Scott King at 100 (online)

In the centennial year of Coretta Scott King’s birth, this conversation turns to her life as an activist in her own right, celebrating the publication of I Was Called: The Activist Life of Coretta Scott King by Jeanne Theoharis and Traci Parker. Traci Parker will be joined by Vicki Crawford, Matthew Delmont, and Lerone Martin.

May 6, 2027 — Solidarity in the Black Freedom Struggle (online)

The season concludes with a conversation on solidarity, featuring:

• Anne Garland Mahler, A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-imperialism from the Americas to the Globe
• Jacqueline Lazu, The Young Lords Speak: Building Revolution on the Streets of Chicago
• Tejasvi Nagaraja, Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II
• Ellen McClarney, Black Arts, Black Muslims: Islam in the Black Freedom Struggle

Event pages with registration links, speaker details, and book covers will be added as the season approaches.