Tag Archives: civil rights

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

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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

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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.