Soyica Diggs Colbert - Freedom's Gate

Soyica will be joined in conversation by Mecca Sullivan

To be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE

Before they were household names, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone needed a place to practice and perform. That place was the Village Gate, a New York City nightclub that Art D’Lugoff opened at the dawn of an unprecedented decade in civil rights. In the heart of the West Village, the women of the Gate created something that few could have imagined: a downtown hotspot for Black art, culture, music, and politics.

Freedom’s Gate depicts the groundbreaking artistry and deepening political convictions of the women of the Gate as they developed in the spotlight of art and revolution. From Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddam" and Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Soyica Diggs Colbert brings to life the culture and performances that were the soundtrack to Black freedom struggles in the 1950s and 1960s. Colbert also shows how the women of the Gate raised money and awareness for groups at the vanguard of civil rights, brought the call for African independence home to New York City, and interwove Western and black diasporic influences into American popular performance, with supporting roles from stars and activists such as Harry Belafonte, Stokely Carmichael, and Sidney Poitier.

As the women relied on one another as entertainers, activists, intellectuals, and friends, the Gate became an outpost for freedom struggles outside of Harlem and the American South, a haven that did not abide by the norms of segregation or the expectations of "women’s work," and a world-renowned venue defined by its radical musicians, artists, and budding stars. Freedom’s Gate is a vibrant history of a little-known chapter of the civil rights movement that gave voice and soul to the call for liberation.

Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor at Georgetown University and a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Author of the award-winning Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, she has written for the New York Times and Washington Post. She lives in Washington, DC.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her previous books are the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the 2018 Judith Markowitz Award for LGBTQ Writers from Lambda Literary and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association. In her writing, she explores the links between language, imagination, and bodily life in Black queer and feminist experience. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, BET.com, Black Futures, The Cut, and others. A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and a New York Times Paperback Row selection, her novel Big Girl was named a best books feature by TIME, Essence, People, Vulture, Ms, Goodreads, Booklist, She Reads, The Root, Library Reads, Glamour UK, Vogue France, and other outlets. Sullivan is author of the introduction to Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989, edited by Julie R. Enszer, and several other collected and anthologized works. Her writing has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Millay Arts, the American Association of University Women, the Center for Fiction, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Harlem, NY, she is Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC. 

Event venue & nearby stays

Solid State Books, 600F H Street Northeast, Washington, United States

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