CBFS: Jim Crow North/Black Freedom Struggle Outside the South

IN PERSON

Join us in person at the Schomburg Center and online as scholars Ujju Aggarwal (Unsettling Choice: Race Relations, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education), Say Burgin (Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit), Laura Hill (Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York 1940-1970), and Shannon King (The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia's New York) discuss the 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. 

PANELISTS

Laura Hill | Bloomfield College

Dr. Hill is an associate professor of History at Bloomfield College. She is the author of "We Are Black Folk First: the Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY” and “The Making of Malcolm X" published in The Sixties: A Journal of History Politics and Culture in January 2011. She is also an editor of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America. Dr. Hill also wrote Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY 1940-1970.

Say Burgin | Dickinson College

Say Burgin worked as a community organizer on Pittsburgh’s Northside for two years and is now an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. She received her MA in Race & Resistance in 2009 and PhD in History in 2013, both from the University of Leeds, England. After teaching at the University of Leeds for four years, she has joined the history faculty at Dickinson College. Say has published several articles in the areas of Black Power, gender, race and US social movements and has co-developed a digital humanities project focusing on Rosa Parks’ lifetime of activism (www.rosaparksbiography.org). Her chapter “The Shame of Our Whole Judicial System”: George Crockett Jr., the New Bethel Shoot-In, and the Nation’s Jim Crow Judiciary was published in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North. Her first book, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit, was published by NYU Press this year.

Ujju Aggarwal | The New School for Social Research

Ujju Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning in the Schools of Public Engagement and an affiliate faculty member in Global Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Her research examines questions related to public infrastructures, urban space, racial capitalism, rights, gender, and the state. In addition to her academic training, Ujju also brings a long history of working to build local and national organizations that work for educational justice, immigrants’ rights, and transformative justice as well as projects that focus on the intersection of arts and social justice, popular education, and adult literacy.

Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States, was published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is co-editor of What’s race got to do with it? How current school reform policy maintains racial and economic inequality.

Shannon King | The College of Wooster

Shannon King is Associate Professor of History and director of the Black Studies program at Fairfield University where he teaches courses on the Black Freedom Struggle, Urban and Social History, Gender and Women's History, carceral studies, and racial capitalism. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Reviews in American History; and essays in Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North, and Escape from New York! He is the author of Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era and The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia's New York.

ABOUT CONVERSATIONS IN BLACK FREEDOM STUDIES |

The founding curators of this series, Professorsfaculty_profile.jsp?faculty=510">span> (Brooklyn College/CUNY) andwoodard-komozi.html">span> (Sarah Lawrence College), introduced a new paradigm that challenged the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. Jeanne Theoharis continues in her role and is joined byhistoryspencer.php(Wayne">span>(Wayne State University) ) as co-curator. Komozi Woodard continues to advise the series from an emeritus position. Discussions take place on the first Thursday of each month.

Learn more: www.blackfreedomstudies.org

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FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

ACCESSIBILITY | Live captioning is available for streaming programs. ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing [email protected].

PRESS | Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at [email protected]. Please note that professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies is supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Additional support provided by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation.