Panels Schomburg

11:15 AM - 12:30 PM  40 YEARS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN PUBLISHING

Moderator: Max Rodriguez (QBR The Black Book Review)
Panelists: W. Paul Coates (Black Classic Press); Kassahun Checole (Africa World Press); Cheryl Willis Hudson and Wade Hudson (Just Us Books); Tony Rose (Amber Books)

Long before the advent and success of contemporary urban-based writers, these publishers nurtured and primed the African American reader to the multi-million dollar market that it is today. They will discuss their histories, their vision for the reader market, and what they must do to thrive within a quickly evolving publishing and generational revolution.

12:45p - 2:00p            JAMES BALDWIN: PERSPECTIVES and LITERARY LEGACY

                                    Moderator: Herb Boyd (Baldwin’s Harlem)
                                    Panelists: Quincy Troupe (Miles and Me), Amiri Baraka (Tales of

                                    the Out and Gone); S. Pearl Sharp (Black Women for Beginners),

                                    Cora Daniels (Ghetto Nation: A Journey into the Land of Bling and

                                    Home of the Shameless)
 
                                    This panel gives understanding and recognition to James Baldwin’s

                                    place within the American literary canon. Quincy Troupe conducted

                                    the last significant interview with Baldwin; Baldwin and Amiri Baraka,

                                    his literary heir, had a mixed and contentious relationship; Pearl

                                    Sharp will discuss Baldwin’s experience in Hollywood; Cora Daniels

                                    will connect Baldwin’s impact on the Hip-Hop generation.

2:15p - 3:15p              BEVERLEY MANLEY: LIFE WITH MICHAEL MANLEY

Interviewer: Cliff Hughes (Commentator, Nationwide Radio, Jamaica, WI) with Beverley Manley (The Manley Memoirs)

As a young girl, starved of her mother's love because she was darker than her siblings, and forced to do housework while her sisters relaxed, Beverley was a modern-day Cinderella. Told incessantly that she was good for nothing, she defied her mother’s prophecy by becoming a household name in local radio, television, and on stage. It was her path at the then Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation that lead her to Michael Manley and to the Jamaica House. Marriage to Michael also leads to her political awakening. Not content with being the docile wife, Beverley assumed an activist role in the governing Peoples National Party (PNP), becoming embroiled in the ideological politics of the 1970s that would eventually lead to her estrangement from Michael, the destruction of their marriage, her flight into the arms of a rival lover and finally to a self-imposed exile in the US, where she took refuge from the ire of the Jamaican elite for daring to walk out on one of their own.

 

3:30p - 4:30p              THE CIVIL RIGHTS AGENDA: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Moderator: Anthony Samad (50 Years After Brown The State of Black Equality in America: African Americans Continuing Pursuit of 14th Amendment Rights)
Panelists: Keli Goff, political commentator, (Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence), Edgar J. Ridley (The Golden Apple: Changing the Structure of Civilization), Kristal Brent Zook (I See Black People: Interviews with African American Owners of Radio and Television)

 4:45p - 6:00p             FROM THE DOOR OF NO RETURN: THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE
                                    ABOLITION OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE TO THE
                                    U.S.  
                                    Moderator: Howard Dodson (Ideology, Identity, and Assumptions)

Panelists: Rosanne Marion Adderley (New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-century Caribbean); Sylviane A. Diouf (Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Last Africans Brought to America); David Eltis (Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database); Thomas Norman DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History)

Although it went unnoticed, the year 2008 marks the bicentennial of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. This American amnesia stands in stark contrast to the yearlong commemorations – costing $40 million—that took place in Great Britain in 2007 to commemorate the bicentennial of the British abolition. This missed opportunity perpetuates the general ignorance about a central aspect of American history. This panel will provide the audience with the latest scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition, including numbers and ethnicities. It will explore the little-known illegal slave trade to the United States that continued for half a century after 1808; the re-Africanization of the Caribbean with the arrival of Africans liberated from the slave ships; and the northern involvement in the trade. This will be an extraordinary opportunity to bring to the public the latest information on and analysis of this fundamental part of U.S. history that still has immense resonance today.

6:15 PM - 7:15PM        NO ROAD BACK: THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
                                     Moderator: Eric Etheridge (Editor, Breach of Peace: Portraits of 
                                     the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders)
                                     Panelists: Robert Singleton (former Freedom Rider, Contributor,
                                     Breach of Peace), Helen Singleton (former Freedom Rider,
                                     Contributor, Breach of Peace), Lewis Zuchman (former Freedom 
                                     Rider, Contributor, Breach of Peace)

 On May 4, 1961, civil rights activists (later called Freedom Riders)  

 began riding buses into the segregated South, testing a 1960 

 Supreme Court decision that held racial segregation illegal in bus 

 and train stations.  The rides -- sponsored and organized by

 nonviolent civil rights groups -- consisted of blacks and whites, men

 and women, young students, and middle-aged activists.  Upon

 arrival in Jackson, the Freedom Riders were arrested and charged

 with “breach of the peace.”  From May through September 1961,

 over 300 Riders were arrested in Jackson. Most embraced a “jail,

 no bail” strategy, overflowing Jackson’s city and county jails. Eric

 Etheridge recovered and restored the Freedom Riders’ mug shots,

 which had recently been made public when the Mississippi State

 Sovereignty Commission released their files.  He spent four years

 locating the Freedom Riders, interviewing them about their

 experiences. He and three former Freedom Riders discuss the

 experience.

Countee Cullen Author Discussions (Fiction)

TMA / Thurgood Marshall Academy Author Discussions (Fiction)