Join Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman, 2022 MacArthur Fellow and Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, for an exciting event on the history of Black political organizing.

How is it possible for history to have sidelined seven full decades of early African American organizing? In this talk, attendees will learn about an ongoing campaign for Black rights which served as the prequel to the NAACP, Civil Rights, and Black Lives Matter movements. From 1830 through the beginning of the new century, free, fugitive, and freed Black Americans held multi-day “Colored Conventions” all across North America. African American leaders not only came together to demand Black freedom, but to advocate for all it entails then as now: educational equity, labor justice, voting, jury, and political rights, as well as freedom from state-sanctioned violence. Why didn’t we know?

Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman will give a public lecture on Monday, November 7 and will speak in two classes as the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

A recent winner of the MacArthur “genius grant” and former Oxy professor, Dr. Foreman is a literary historian, digital humanist, author and professor who holds the Paterno Chair of Liberal Arts and is Professor of English, African American Studies, and History at Penn State University. She is the founding director of Colored Conventions Project, a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life.

The Oxy bookstore has copies of The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson, available for sale. Attendees are invited to stop in and purchase a book in advance or buy one at the lecture. Prof. Foreman will be available to sign books at the end of the evening.

Registration for this lecture is recommended.

Why Didn’t We Know? A Lecture with Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman