Save The Date, Feb. 20, 2016:
36th Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series
Issues of policing and incarceration – both locally and nationally - will be in sharp focus as the 36th Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series (MTW) invites a wide-ranging discussion of the historical developments that have brought us to events in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and so many other American towns. The annual Black History Month conference will be held on Saturday, February 20, 2016, beginning at 9:30 a.m. at Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N).
Long Time Here: Prisons and Policing in African-American History will emphasize, as MTW traditionally does, the ways that history helps illuminate our contemporary world. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, cofounder of Critical Resistance, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and professor at the CUNY Graduate Center will give the MTW keynote lecture. Two other lectures will be given by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America; and Heather Ann Thompson, professor at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Finally, MTW will celebrate Newark's 350th anniversary with a panel discussion on the history of police reform in Newark, featuring Newark Mayor Ras Baraka; Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at RU-N and chair of the Newark Celebration 350; Lawrence Hamm, chair of the People’s Organization for Progress; and Deborah Jacobs, former director of the ACLU, New Jersey. The panel will be moderated by Marcia W. Brown, RU-N vice chancellor for external and governmental relations.
Following the conference, MTW attendees are invited to a reception at The Newark Museum that will feature live musical entertainment by The Bradford Hayes Trio.
All events are free and open to the public.
The lecture series was co-founded in 1981 by the late Dr. Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the late Giles R. Wright, New Jersey Historical Commission. Over the past 35 years, the conference has drawn thousands of people to Rutgers University-Newark and has attracted some of the nation’s foremost scholars and humanists who are experts in the field of African and African American history and culture. It has become one of the nation's leading scholarly programs specifically devoted to enhancing the historical literacy of an intercultural community.
The annual conference was named for East Orange native Dr. Marion Thompson Wright, a pioneer in African American historiography and race relations in New Jersey, who was the first professionally trained woman historian in the United States.
The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is presented by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; the Federated Department of History, Rutgers University-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the Department of African American and African Studies. The 2016 conference receives additional support from: Prudential; the New Jersey Historical Commission/Department of State; and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
For additional information about the program, visit the institute’s website at http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu, or contact the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at 973-353-3891.
(Photo: Jacob Lawrence, (1917-2000) © ARS, NY. Another of the social causes of the migrants' leaving was that at times they did not feel safe, or it was not the best thing to be found on the streets late at night. They were arrested on the slightest provocation. 1940-41. Panel 22 from The Migration Series. Tempera on gesso on composition board, 12 x 18" (30.5 x 45.7 cm). Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)
