By Special to the AFRO
The interplay between national and global Black liberation movements, past and present, will be explored at this year’s Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series on February 15 at Rutgers-Newark.
Titled “Of No Nation: Black Activism For Transnational Liberation,’’ it will be held in the Paul Robeson Campus Center from from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and feature top scholars discussing the cross-pollination of artistic and political movements worldwide.
“Part of the impetus of the day is to think of this flowering of poetry, organizers and movements that seek equal treatment and collaboration with others around the world,’’ said Lacey Hunter, Associate Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, which hosts the annual series.
The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series (MTW), which began in 1981, is known for bringing scholarship to the people and has always sought to move beyond academia. In Newark, it holds an important place in the civic, cultural and creative life of the city.
The lecture series is named for East Orange native Marion Thompson Wright, who became the first Black historian to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her doctoral thesis, “The Education of the Negro,’’ documented school segregation in New Jersey, despite an 1881 law that outlawed racial discrimination in public schools.
Her work helped provide the NAACP with hard data in its court challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
This year’s series examines how a rising awareness of commonalities among Black culture worldwide, and a shared sense of struggle, gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance in America and parallel movements in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean.
“There’s a push toward embracing African heritage,’’ said Hunter. “These are people who underscore the ways in which we’re connected to one another. In their meetings, they were communicating across continents and gaining an understanding of what it looks like to live in someone else’s country as a Black person in France or Berlin, the South Pacific, of having a shared Colonial history.’’
Black political movements blossomed in the U.S. after World War I and have continued beyond the Civil Rights movement. Often, they began with grassroots activism among the working class, who drew upon others overseas for strategies and support, Hunter said.
“The Civil Rights Movement or Black freedom struggle was local but it had all these international implications. In Africa, Europe, it had an impact on Black communities,’’ Hunter said.
An inspiration for this year’s theme was to serve as a reminder that during times of national and international discord and division, people can and do come together, Hunter explained.
“That’s an important thing for us all to stay focused on. It doesn’t mean we have to turn away from each other. We have been through some dark times, but we can carry on and gather together. When things need to be done, people work hard to make sure they’re done so that the doors are open for everyone to walk through,’’ she said.
Speakers at the event include James P Garrett, a veteran in the world of student organizing and activism, who helped lead the Black Student Movement in California, which resulted in the nation’s first Black Studies program in the late 1960s. He also worked with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality).
Historian Paula Marie Seniors, an associate professor of Ethnic Studies in the Virginia Tech Department of Religion and Culture, is the author of “Mae Malloy, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions,’’ which examines the case of Malloy, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. After she was accused in 1961 of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, Senior’s parents, who were connected to national and international leftist human rights movements, co-founded the committee to defend her.
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researches race, gender and politics in the Americas, in addition to urban geography. She is the author of ”Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil.’’
Quito J. Swan is Professor of Africana Studies and History at The George Washington University, is the author of three books on international Black activism movements, including his latest, “Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice.”
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