Reflections on SNCC History: 30 Years of I've Got The Light of Freedom

ONLINE PROGRAM: This virtual event will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Charles M. Payne's groundbreaking history of the Mississippi movement, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Payne will be joined in conversation by SNCC veteran Charlie Cobb, radical teacher Tess Raser, and historians of the Black freedom movement Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Emilye Crosby. 30 years after it was first published, this history remains a critical text for new generations of organizers carrying forward the struggle for freedom and justice.

Teachers can earn 2 CTLE credits.

This event is online only. Please register even for viewing online. The program will be on YouTube.com/TheSchomburgCenter. The actual link to the program is: https://youtube.com/live/8IZksfHPqLA?feature=share

Featuring archival materials from the Center’s world-renowned collections, the Schomburg Curriculum series provides complete lessons to introduce students to Black history, experience, and culture. Devised for middle- and high school students, the lessons may also be adapted by parents and teachers for younger and older audiences.

Access the curriculum guides featuring primary source documents and ready-to-use discussion questions here. More guides and lessons will become available in the coming months.

PANELISTS

Charles Payne, Rutgers University - Newark
Charles M. Payne is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University Newark and the Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research. His research and teaching interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history, particularly the Black Freedom Struggle. His books include So Much Reform, So Little Change, which examines the persistence of failure in urban schools, and a co-edited anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation, which is concerned with education as a tool for liberation from Reconstruction through Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools. He is also the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850 -1950.

Payne has been a member of the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Board of Directors of MDRC, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, and the advisory board for Teachers College Press’ series on social justice. He is a co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involved university faculty in the professional development of public school teachers and also co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which tries to better prepare high school youngsters for college. He is among the founders of the Education for Liberation Network, which encourages the development of educational initiatives that encourage young people to think critically about social issues and understand their own capacity for addressing them. Payne was also founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that tried to interest urban youngsters in technical careers. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the acting executive director of the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Community, an effort, modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, to dramatically improve youth outcomes in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago.

Emilye Crosby, SUNY Geneseo
Emilye Crosby has been a member of the Geneseo faculty since 1995. Prof. Crosby studies and teaches African-American history and the modern Civil Rights Movement. She has received numerous awards for her teaching, scholarship, and service. These include the Chancellor's Award for Teaching, the Harter Mentoring Award, the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, and the President's Award for Research and Creativity. Her first book, A Little Taste of Freedom, won the McLemore Prize and was awarded an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Prize.

Dr. Emilye Crosby has been a member of SUNY Geneseo's History Department since 1995 and was the coordinator of the Black Studies/Africana program from fall 2002 through Spring 2018. She has written A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and edited Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement. Dr. Crosby is also the coordinator of SUNY Geneseo's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration. She teaches a wide range of history, general education, and interdisciplinary courses, with a particular interest in the Civil Rights Movement, African American history, and women's history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries,Ohio State University
Dr. Jeffries is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University. He specializes in 20th century African American history and has an expertise in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York University Press, 2009). Bloody Lowndes tells the remarkable story of the local people and SNCC organizers who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama. He is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach the Civil Rights Movement accurately and effectively.

Charlie Cobb
Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. He is the author of a number of books including This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014). Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Tess Raser
Tess Raser, originally from Chicago, lives in Brooklyn. She has worked in education and community organizing for the past 13+ years and has taught kindergarten, 5th, 6th and 7th grade both in Chicago and in NYC. She currently is the Senior Manager of Academic Interventions and Programs at New Alternatives for Children but hopes to return to the classroom someday. Tess also writes curriculum for several organizations including Everyday Democracy and for Crooked Media's podcast on the history of NYC policing, Empire City. In the past, she has written curriculum on the Black Panther Party for the Huey Newton Foundation. Tess writes curriculum that is project-based and loves creating opportunities for students to be creative and revolutionary in the classroom. She is passionate about teaching movement history and frequently collaborates with SNCC veterans for meaningful classroom experiences. She has brought several SNCC mentor/friends into her classroom. In Chicago, Tess was a member and leader in the abolitionist organization, Assata's Daughters, where she participated in direct action organizing, in leading weekly radical youth programming for Black girls on the South Side of Chicago and in creating meaningful programs like a free Black Women's Library and a Radical Kids Collective, in partnership with youth from Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD). She was a leader in the ByeAnita campaign, which was a successful initiative led by a coalition of Leftist organizations to oust the then states attorney. Most recently, she, like many New Yorkers, knocked on hundreds of doors for Zohran Mamdani.

Tess is currently a Zinn Education Project Prentiss Charney Fellow and is spending two years in SNCC archives to create curriculum for Zinn. Last year, she was awarded The Institute for Common Power’s Truth and Purpose Learning Fellowship, which brought her to Alabama to experience the Civil Rights Movement history directly from Civil Rights heroes, like Bernard Lafayette, Charles Mauldin and Joanne Bland. In addition to movement work, Tess is interested in connecting to the African diaspora and specifically in learning African indigenous knowledge systems, which she first studied in southern Africa as the recipient of the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching. Last year, she returned to South Africa to continue learning Afrocentric approaches to pedagogy and to coach teachers and help develop schoolwide systems at Ubuntu Pathways. This year, Tess facilitated a SNCC study group for other organizers, teachers and social workers, which included one of her favorite books, Charles M. Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom, which she has read at least four times. She writes about Marxism (and other things) on her Substack and volunteers at the Endangered Language Alliance. Tess dreams of an egalitarian and peaceful world free of capitalism, imperialism and Zionism and know that this world is possible through grassroots organizing, thanks to lessons she's learned from SNCC.

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.