Tag Archives: Black Voices Matter

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

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.

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
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