Public lecture by Nathan Connolly – Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
The Civil Property Rights Movement
This talk highlights the persistence of economic arguments within black movements, both from the perspective of the labor-left – the typical protagonists in civil rights “origins” stories – and from the point of view of black entrepreneurs and professionals, who were equally aware of the connection between housing, jobs, and education. For well over a century, stood at the center of the legislative aims of black movements. Property – involving specific law, political, and cultural precedents and meanings – enabled civil rights activists and businesspeople to pursue equality. Assessing movement gains and losses under a property rights movement framework points to limitations inherent within capitalism itself.
Public lecture by Shirley Thompson – Associate Professor of History, University of TX-Austin
Making Black Lives Matter at the Nadir
In recent years, #BlackLivesMatter has taken anti-racist activism back to first principles and launched a movement that has insisted on the bodily integrity of black people and the precious value of their lives. This paper charts attempts to buttress the sanctity of black bodies and value of black life at another historical moment, the early twentieth century South. The political and economic strategies African Americans pursued against their ‘second class citizenship’ reveal the messy underbelly of liberal commitments to the sanctity of private property, including the tenet of bodily inviolability. At once creative and conventional, black-owned life insurance companies stood at the center of the institutional bonds and increasingly dense networks of mutual reliance that sought to shore up self-proprietary claims of black people, individually and communally.
Monday, April 17, 6pm, Wolff Conference Room (6 E 16th St, Room 1103)
