Discussion | Building a Black Public Square (In Person AND Online)

This program will feature reflections on the urgency of preserving the Black public square from CBFS’s founding directors, Komozi Woodard and Jeanne Theoharis, and the scholar-activist-archivists, Brian Jones and Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine, who were among its earliest supporters. The conversation will be followed by Q&A with the audience.

About the Speakers
Dr. Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, the history of social welfare and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her widely-acclaimed biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, won a 2014 NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians; it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the 25 Best Academic Titles of 2013 by Choice. The critically acclaimed documentary of the same name, executive produced by award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien, is based on Theoharis’ bestselling book. Her recent book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction.

Dr. Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine is Associate Professor of History at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is part of the faculty in the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center and is an affiliate faculty with the American Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Program. She teaches survey and seminar courses on African American Heritage, Civil rights and Black Power, and Black women’s history in the US, and her research centers on social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is the author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, served as one of the co-editors of the Radical Teacher special Issue on “Teaching Black Lives Matter” and co-edited a special issue of Meridians journal titled “Radical Transnationalism: Reimagining Solidarities, Violence, Empires.”

Dr. Komozi Woodard is the Esther Raushenbush Professor of History, Public Policy & Africana Studies at Sarah Lawrence College specializing in African American history, politics, and culture, emphasizing the Black Freedom Movement, women in the Black revolt, US urban and ethnic history, public policy and persistent poverty, oral history, and the experience of anti-colonial movements. He is author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics and reviews, chapters, and essays in journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias. He is editor of, The Black Power Movement, Part I: Amiri Baraka, From Black Arts to Black Radicalism; Freedom North; Groundwork; Want to Start a Revolution?; and Women in the Black Freedom Struggle.

Dr. Brian Jones is an American educator, scholar, activist, and actor. He is the inaugural director of the Center for Educators and Schools of The New York Public Library, and formerly the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where his department hosted Conversations in Black Freedom Studies. Prior to joining the Schomburg’s leadership team he was a Schomburg scholar in residence. He is author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History and has contributed to several books on issues of racism, inequality, and Black education history, most recently to Black Lives Matter At School: An Uprising for Educational Justice. A teacher of elementary grades in the New York City Public Schools for nine years, Jones has been a prominent critic of school privatization. He co-narrated the independent film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, which challenged the ideas of the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman.