CBFS: State Violence Prisons, Police, Politics

ONLINE

In this online panel on “State Violence: Prisons, Police, Politics,” five scholars dive into the histories behind the contemporary abolitionist movement. Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Pr*son Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, challenges the dominant historiography of the Attica Rebellion, situating it instead within a longer history of revolt within and beyond New York State's prisons and jails. Donna Murch will discuss Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives diving deeply into the Black left politics of the 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of an abolitionist feminist movement. Mary Frances Phillips, author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins, will share about the grounded praxis developed by Black Panther Party political prisoner Ericka Huggins to resist state violence inside the belly of the beast. Charles W. McKinney will discuss the long Black freedom movement and the edited collection he published alongside co-editor Françoise N. Hamlin, From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

This event is online only. Please still register for the online event to note your interest in attending: Click here to view the program online at YouTube.com/@TheSchomburgCenter.

PANELISTS

Mary Frances Phillips (BS, Michigan State University; MA, The Ohio State University; Ph.D., Michigan State University, is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on race and gender in post-1945 social movements and the carceral state. Her research areas include the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Feminism, and Black Power Studies.

Dr. Donna Murch is an associate professor of History at Rutgers University in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her interests include the urban history of California and New York; Civil Rights, Black Power and postwar social movements; history of policing and prisons; and the political economy of drugs. Currently, she is researching the postwar history of the Bronx and completing a new book on youth culture and underground economy. She is also the author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, University of North Carolina Press, October 2010.

Françoise N. Hamlin (Ph.D. Yale University, 2004) is an Associate Professor in History and Africana Studies. She earned her Masters from the University of London, and her B.A. from the University of Essex (both in United States Studies). Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War is a co-edited anthology published by the University of Florida Press in 2015. It was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction, and was republished in paperback in 2018. Hamlin's new research focuses on youth, trauma, and activism.

Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His primary research interests include the Civil Rights Movement, and the exploration of local movements in particular. He's fascinated by the various means individuals and organizations utilized in their efforts to create change. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. His next project, tentatively titled The Political Worlds of George Washington Lee: Race, Power, and Politics in Memphis, Tennessee, explores the life and career of George Washington Lee, an African American Republican operative and civil rights activist who lived in Memphis in the middle of the twentieth century. Lee was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and utilized his expansive networks in the African American Civic Universe of Memphis to both build a civil rights movement in the city and combat the rightward drift of the GOP.

Orsanmi Burton social anthropologist working in the United States. His research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression plus explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment. His first book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Pr*son Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, was published in October 2023 by The Universit of California Press.

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected]. 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.

Event Venue

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture - New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, United States