Category Archives: Black Voices Matter

Black Voices Matter, Events

Legacies Of Slavery

Pulitzer prize-winning historian, David Hackett Fischer’s latest book AFRICAN FOUNDERS: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals draws on decades of research, some of it conducted in West Africa.  Fischer shows that African and African Americans were agents of pluralism that drove the development of early America. He shines a light on the little-known history of how enslaved Africans and their descendants created new regional cultures and enlarged American ideas of freedom.

How did slaves help shape the early American republic? Fischer’s work will transform our understanding of the influential role slaves played in America’s origins ranging from their impact on music to linguistics, from farming techniques to ethical principles.

David Hackett Fischer is a University Professor and Warren Professor of History emeritus at Brandeis University. He is the author of numerous books, including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner Washington’s Crossing and Champlain’s Dream. In 2015, he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Recorded May 31, 2022 

CF Legacies Of Slavery
Black Voices Matter, Podcasts, Radio

BLACK HISTORY: ON REWIND 

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To celebrate our newly digitized collection of eminent historical black orators, Cambridge Forum has teamed up with the Lincoln Institute to present a panel discussion featuring distinguished CF speakers Professors Randall Kennedy, Danielle Allen and Cheryl Townsend-Gilkes and Cambridge City Councilor Denise Simmons.

L to R:  Professor Danielle Allen, Mary Stack CF, Professor Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Professor Randall Kennedy, moderator Roberto Mighty

What progress has been made in social justice and equality in America? Who writes American history? What outstanding issues urgently remain to be addressed by Americans?

Black History On Rewind

Recorded 3.21.2022

Black History Rewind 1
Black History Rewind 2

This forum was made possible through partnerships with the Lincoln Institute and the Harvard Square Business Association. 

Cambridge Forum: Black History Retrospective

The digitization project was funded in part through grants from the City of Cambridge and Cambridge Community Foundation.

Cambridge Forum co-sponsors



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Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

Mississippi: Then And Now

Bob Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021), a veteran of the civil rights struggle,  draws an analogy between the early voter registration drives in Mississippi during the 1960’s  and an innovative school curriculum called The Algebra Project.  The vote gave poor people access to political power;  quantitative reasoning, Moses argues,  enables students to have access to today’s economic arrangements. 

For more information on current efforts to develop a national “We the People – Math Literacy for All” Alliance that is calling on the nation for Direct Federal Investment and Involvement in supporting mathematics literacy for all K-12 students, and particularly for students performing in the lowest quartile on state standardized exams, please visithttps://www.mathliteracyforall.org 

Robert Parris Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021) was an American educator and civil rights activist, known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and he was one of the main organizers for the Freedom Summer Project.

Mississippi: Then & Now – Bob Moses 1993

Additional resources:

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

N***er: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. 

Randall Kennedy takes on not just the N-word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture —with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. 

The word, of course, is nigger, and in his lucidly argued book the legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.

Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?

Randall Kennedy is an American law professor at Harvard University where he teaches courses on criminal law, and the regulation of race relations.  He is the author of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002).

Randall Kennedy 2002

Additional resources:

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

Truth And Reconciliation

Without forgiveness, there’s no future.

– Archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu

Desmond Tutu: South Africa anti-apartheid hero dies aged 90

South Africa Cape Town. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of the TRC, during the first hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission(TRC) in Cape Town, 1996.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a world-renowned human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Beginning with his opposition to apartheid in South Africa, he worked tirelessly to spread peace, justice, and democracy and to end racial divisions throughout the world.

In 2009, President Obama awarded Archbishop Tutu the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor—for his significant contributions to the nation and the world. The Archbishop’s great friend Nelson Mandela perfectly sums up his legacy: “sometimes strident, often tender, never afraid and seldom without humor.”

Nobel Peace Prize Archbishop Desmond Tutu denounced the Apartheid regime in South Africa at the United Nations in 1985.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu 1998

Additional resources:

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

Nelson Mandela At Harvard

The greatest single challenge facing our globalized world is to combat and eradicate its disparities. While in all parts of the world progress is being made in entrenching democratic forms of governance, we constantly need to remind ourselves that the freedoms which democracy brings will remain empty shells if they are not accompanied by real and tangible improvements in the material lives of the millions of ordinary citizens of those countries. Where men and women and children go burdened with hunger, suffering from preventable diseases, languishing in ignorance and illiteracy, or finding themselves bereft of decent shelter, talk of democracy and freedom that does not recognize these material aspects can ring hollow and erode confidence exactly in those values we seek to promote. Hence our universal obligation towards the building of a world in which there shall be greater equality amongst nations and amongst citizens of nations.

– Nelson Mandela speaking at Harvard University In September 1998.

Nelson Mandela was a towering figure of the 20th century and president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

Imprisoned from 1964 to 1990, Mandela came to symbolize the struggle for freedom, equality, and justice among his countrymen and around the world. South Africa’s triumph over apartheid, its peaceful transition to democracy in 1994, and the growing pains the nation has felt in the years since are all part of the onetime revolutionary’s narrative.

In 1998, Nelson Mandela received the third honorary degree ever awarded by Harvard outside of a commencement ceremony or a university anniversary. (The first two recipients being George Washington and Winston Churchill.) In his speech, Mandela reflects with wit and humor on the role of intellectuals, and of Harvard in particular, in the democratization of developing nations.

Mandela at Harvard: 1998
Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

I’ll Make Me A World

Filmmaker Sam Pollard is a dedicated chronicler of the Black experience in America, moving freely across film and long-form television as well as narrative and documentary. His films explore complicated American figures and the extended aftershocks of racial inequality.

His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.  For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy.  Eight years later, he returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.  For the series, Mr. Pollard received The George Peabody Award.  Between 1990 and 2000, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee’s films:  Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, Bamboozled. 

I’ll Make Me A World: Sam Pollard 1999

Samuel Pollard is an American film director, editor, producer, and screenwriter. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. Currently he teaches filmmaking at NYU’s Tische School of the Arts.

Film at Lincoln Center: Meet Sam Pollard

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

Epic Journeys Of Freedom

Historian Cassandra Pybus traces the lives and adventures of the runaway slaves who absorbed the dreams of liberty from their masters during the American Revolution and fled to the British to find freedom.

Where did these hopeful and courageous idealists go? And what kind of lives did they make for themselves? 

Cassandra Pybus spoke at Cambridge Forum in 2006 about her groundbreaking research into the history of the American Revolution when thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Her book, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled to make liberty a reality in their own lives.

Epic Journeys Of Freedom: Cassandra Pybus 2006

Cassandra Jean Pybus is an Australian historian and writer. She is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, and has published extensively on Australian and American history.

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

Eyes On The Prize

EYES ON THE PRIZE tells the story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

The documentary film’s first part, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, chronicles the time period between the United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. It consists of six episodes, which premiered on January 21, 1987, and concluded on February 25, 1987. The second part, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985, chronicles the time period between the national emergence of Malcolm X during 1964 to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as the first African-American mayor of Chicago. 

The driving force behind Eyes on the Prize and Blackside, Henry Hampton won numerous awards for this landmark series and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  Speaking in 1987 at Cambridge Forum, Hampton talked about his vision of “the remarkable human drama that was the Civil Rights Movement” through the Eyes on the Prize documentary.

Eyes On The Prize – Henry Hampton

Henry Hampton ( 1940 –1998) was an African-American filmmaker. His production company, Blackside, produced over 80 programs—the most recognizable being the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which won Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards, and was nominated for an Oscar.

Black Voices Matter

Slavery And The Invention Of America

America must adopt a new paradigm that fully embraces all citizens and must include the abolishment of race, which is a social construct created to justify slavery…Slavery lasted for more than 240 years, and it will not be until about 2111 that people of African descent will have been free as long as their ancestors were enslaved. But if faced with courage, it need not be lived again.

― Former Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing

Civil rights activist Byron Rushing traces the theme of colonial domination and slavery in the shaping of America’s history and civilization, beginning with the “founding” of a country that was already known to its original inhabitants, the native Americans.  Political activist and historian Byron Rushing argues that America’s history has always been a creation of the victors in the struggle for land and prosperity. 

Here are seven things you probably didn’t know were connected to slavery

Slavery and the Invention of America
https://twitter.com/ByronRushing/status/1368557212549980160?s=20

Recorded in 2003 at Cambridge Forum

In 1969, Byron Rushing became the Director of the Urban Change Program for the Urban League. Later he worked as the president of Boston’s Museum of African-American History. In 1982, Rushing was elected as a representative of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He was the chief sponsor of a law to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public schools, and has worked to launch community development investment of poor communities of Massachusetts.