Category Archives: Black Voices Matter

Black Voices Matter

Beloved Community: African American Women

Civil rights activist and Baptist minister Cheryl Townsend Gilkes reflects on the role of African American women in forging the “beloved community” as envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A photograph of Harriet Tubman currently found at the National Museum of African American Culture and History.

How did the lives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman help to shape our ideas of humanity and advance the struggle to recognize the worth and dignity of all?  How did women carry on that tradition of moral leadership during the civil rights movement?

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is a sociologist whose specialties focus on African American women, religion, social change, and the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois for sociology, African American studies, and religious studies.  She is Professor of African-American Studies and Sociology and director of the African American Studies Program at Colby College.

Recorded in 1997 at Cambridge Forum

Beloved Community: African American Women

Gilkes book of collected essays If It Wasn’t for the Women examine the roles of women in their churches and communities, the implication of those roles for African American culture, and the tensions and stereotypes that shape societal responses to these roles. Gilkes examines the ways black women and their experience shape the culture and reflects on some of the crises and conflicts that attend this experience.

Black Voices Matter, Events, Podcasts

The Life and Times of Madame C.J. Walker

A’Lelia Bundles, Emmy-winning NBC news producer and journalist shares stories from her best-selling book about her great-great grandmother, Madame C.J. Walker, one of the first black women entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

The child of former slaves, Walker rose from uneducated field hand to
internationally successful business woman, political activist and
philanthropist by creating a line of hair products for black women.

What is the legacy of Madame C.J. Walker?

A’Lelia Bundles is at work on her fifth book–The Joy Goddess of Harlem–a biography of her great-grandmother’s international travels, philanthropy, parties and friendships with some of the most famous musicians, writers, and artists of the 1920s. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker was named the 2001 best book on black women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Recorded 2002 at the National History Museum, Lexington, MA

BBC: Madam CJ Walker: ‘An inspiration to us all’

Life & Times of Madame C.J. Walker
Archive, Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics

The Third Chapter

We must develop a compelling vision of later life: one that does not assume a trajectory of decline after fifty, but one that recognizes it as a time of change, grown, and new learning; a time when ‘our courage gives us hope.

==from The Third Chapter

Renowned sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot details a process of creative reinvention in The Third Chapter which redefines our views about the casualties and opportunities of aging. She challenges the still-prevailing and anachronistic images of aging by documenting and revealing how the years between fifty and seventy-five may, in fact, be the most transformative and generative time in our lives, tracing the ways in which wisdom, experience, and new learning inspire individual growth and cultural transformation. 

 How can we all take advantage of this  “Third Chapter” in our lives?  In a person’s life’s, could the years between 50 and 75 be the most transformative and generative?  

Recorded in 2009 at Cambridge Forum

Third Chapter: Sara Lawrence Lightfoot

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is an author, educator, researcher, and public intellectual.  She has pioneered an innovative social science method called “portraiture,” written eleven books, and she is the first African-American woman in Harvard University’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Black Voices Matter

Beloved Community: Cornel West & bell hooks

Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?

Cornel West, Professor of Religion and Afro-American Studies, Harvard University and bell hooks, Professor of English, City University of New York reflect on the Beloved Community.

Author, philosopher and activist Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. He has written 20 books but is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, looks at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

bell hooks is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. Her writing has been focussed on the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books that address race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

Recorded in 1996 at Cambridge Forum

Beloved Community: Cornell West & bell hooks

Black Voices Matter, Events

Beloved Community: Visions for a World Beyond Racism

Black Voices Matter

Colored People

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, discusses his book entitled Colored People,  a memoir which weaves extraordinary personal narrative together with social history of the 1950’s when black culture flourished within the bounds of segregation and racism. 

In his coming-of-age story, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.
 
A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a masterpiece of recollection, a work that deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

Recorded in 1992 at Cambridge Forum

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and journalist, Professor Gates’s most recent books are Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. 

Colored People: Henry Louis Gates
Black Voices Matter

Beloved Law Community: Lani Guinier

Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?

Lani Guinier, voting rights champion and former assistant attorney general nominee, dies at 71 (CNN 1/7/2021)

In Memoriam: Lani Guinier 1950 – 2022 (Harvard Law Today)

Speaking at Cambridge Forum in 1997, Lani Guinier discusses her vision of a beloved community in a law school setting. How should the terms of legal education be re-defined?

Lani Guinier was an important American civil rights theorist. She was a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.   Guinier’s work included professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, and affirmative action.

The Miner’s Canary

Like the canaries that alerted miners to a poisonous atmosphere, issues of race point to underlying problems in society that ultimately affect everyone, not just minorities. Addressing these issues is essential. Ignoring racial differences–race blindness–has failed. In her powerful and challenging book, Lani Guinier proposes a radical new way to confront race in the 21st century.

The Tyranny of the Meritocracy

Standing on the foundations of America’s promise of equal opportunity, universities purport to be engines of social mobility and democracy. But as civil rights advocate Lani Guinier argues, the admissions practices of these institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies.

Recorded in 1997 at Cambridge Forum

Beloved Law Community: Lani Guinier
Black Voices Matter, Podcasts

Beloved Community: Cosmopolitanism

Afro-American scholar and philosopher K. Anthony Appiah considers the idea of a community founded on the principles of inclusion, hope, and mutual respect, a community that transcends the polarizing rhetoric of racism. 

Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?

K. Anthony Appiah is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah currently holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU’s School of Law.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Foreign Affairs review)

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy—as well as the author’s own experience of life on three continents—Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a planet we share with more than six billion strangers.

The Ethics of Identity

Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: they clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do “identities” constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality?

Recorded in 1998 at Cambridge Forum

Beloved Community: Cosmopolitanism
Black Voices Matter

Beloved Community: African American Lives

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, discusses African American Lives at Cambridge Forum in 2005.

Recording the achievements of over 600 individuals, African American Lives is the most comprehensive biography of African Americans both famous and near-forgotten figures of the past 400 years published to date.

 From Esteban, the earliest known African to land on America’s shores, to professional golfer Tiger Woods, the stories of these  men and women illuminate African American history through the immediacy of personal experience.  How do the personal choices and circumstances of a single individual shape the contours of a larger history?  What editorial choices had to be made to illuminate this history?


Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  A prize-winning author and editor, she has devoted her research primarily to the history of African American women.  

Recorded in 2005 at Cambridge Forum

African American Lives
Black Voices Matter

Brown

“I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten. ” 

― Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America.

In his book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and explores issues of race, arguing that America has been brown since its inception, as he himself is. The son of Mexican immigrants, he reflects on what it means to be  Hispanic in America and how Latino immigrants have impacted American culture, changing it from a society that has traditionally seen itself as simply black and white.

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: “Ports have names they call the sea.” Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

Recorded in 2003 at Cambridge Forum

Richard Rodriguez has authored a “trilogy” on American public life and his private life—Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown—concerned, respectively, with class, ethnicity, and race in America. He has also worked as a journalist on television and in print. 

Brown: Richard Rodriquez