CBFS: Educational Injustice & the Struggle for Liberatory Education

VIRTUAL

Don’t miss the final discussion of the season for our Conversations in Black Freedom Studies series. Discover the history of the struggle for liberatory education and the unjust structures it seeks to dismantle. Join the virtual discussion with scholars Leslie M. Alexander (Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History), Zebulon Vance Miletsky (Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle), Keith A. Mayes (The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education), and Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed (New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University).

PANELISTS

Leslie M. Alexander | Rutgers University

Leslie Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. She specializes in early African American and African Diaspora history, focusing on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black culture, political consciousness, and resistance movements.

Dr. Alexander’s newest research project, tentatively titled “How We Got Here: Slavery and the Making of the Modern Police State” analyzes how modern-day systems of policing, surveillance, and punitive control of Black communities are traceable to the 18th and 19th centuries. Supporters of enslavement and slaveholders sought to control a large unfree population who refused to submit to their enslavement. A portion of this research appears in a chapter co-authored with Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

Alexander was one of the editors of the 2022’s Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History. This book of essays draws from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.

The text encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.

She received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky | Stony Brook University

Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. His 2022 book Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle was published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Dr. Miletsky is an historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and Hip-Hop Studies. His research interests include: African-Americans in Boston; Northern freedom movements outside of the South; Mixed race history in the U.S. and passing; and the Afro-Latin diaspora. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays and book chapters and is currently working on an edited volume on new directions in Boston African American History and school desegregation. He is also at work on his second monograph, a history of interracial marriage and racial passing in Boston and in Massachusetts. He holds a Ph.D. in African-American Studies with a concentration in History from theUniversity of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Keith A. Mayes | University of Minnesota

Keith A. Mayes, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of African American & African Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Mayes is an expert on African American history, primarily from the 1960s to present. He has special expertise on social and political movements and current issues of race and perception.

His book, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education, illustrates how special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools.

Mayes is available for media interview on the topics of race in the news, race and perception, Black men, civil rights commemorations, civil rights policies, Black Power Movement (leaders and organizations, e.g., Stokely Carmichael, Black Panther Party), Black History Month, Kwanzaa and other Black holidays, social and racial justice, and policy .

Conor Tomas Reed | Shape of Cities to Come Institute

Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed (all) is a Puerto Rican/Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural/pedagogical movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the Program Director of the Shape of Cities to Come Institute.

Coco’s new book New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions) chronicles the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City, as well as CUNY’s post-9/11 opposition to US imperialism, colonialism, and carcerality. Coco is also developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones) with co-editors Diarenis Calderón Tartabull, Makeba Lavan, Tito Mitjans Alayón, Violeta Orozco Barrera, and Layla Zami. They are the current co-managing editor of LÁPIZ Journal and a contributing editor of Lost & Found:The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Coco has been immersed in almost two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond. Their work can be found in print and online via AK Press, ASAP/Journal, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Distributaries, El Centro Press, The New Inquiry, Verso Books, Viewpoint Magazine, Wendy’s Subway, and elsewhere.

ABOUT CONVERSATIONS IN BLACK FREEDOM STUDIES |

The founding curators of this series, Professors Jeanne Theoharis (Brooklyn College/CUNY) and Komozi Woodard (Sarah Lawrence College), introduced a new paradigm that challenged the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. Jeanne Theoharis continues in her role and is joined by Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine (Wayne State University) ) as co-curator. Komozi Woodard continues to advise the series from an emeritus position. Discussions take place on the first Thursday of each month.

Learn more: http://www.blackfreedomstudies.org

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

ACCESSIBILITY | Live captioning is available for streaming programs. ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.

PRESS | Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at leahdrayton@nypl.org. Please note that professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies is supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Additional support provided by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation.