Civil Rights Then and Now: Black Power at 50
Recommended for ages 9 and up
All children must be accompanied by an adult.
Free with Museum admission
Join us for a kid-friendly panel conversation on a major moment in the Civil Rights Movement. In June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael first used the term "black power" as a public rallying cry during the March Against Fear. This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day program will give families historical background and tools for understanding both past and present struggles for racial justice. Panelists will include Dennis Parker, Director of the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union; Dr. Donna Murch, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers; and writer, youth theater director, Columbia University professor and activist Jamal Joseph, who joined the Black Panther Party at age 15 in 1968. For the last part of the program, come have light snacks and chat about the Civil Rights Movement of the future with other attendees in the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
Dennis D. Parker is Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Racial Justice Program which advocates for racial justice using litigation, public education, community organizing and legislation primarily in the areas of education, racial profiling and other discrimination in the criminal justice system and economic justice. Prior jobs include Chief of the New York State Attorney General’s Civil Rights Bureau, staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and staff attorney in the Legal Aid Society, Criminal Defense Division in Brooklyn. He publishes and lectures extensively about civil rights and is an adjunct professor at New York Law School. He graduated from Middlebury College and Harvard Law School.
Jamal Joseph was a 15-year-old Bronx honor student, then named Eddie Joseph, when he joined the Black Panthers in 1968. At 16, by then called Jamal, he was in prison with the legendary Panther 21 and would later serve more years at Leavenworth, where he earned two college degrees and found a new calling in prison theater. Now a film professor at Columbia University and former chair of their Graduate Film Program, as well as a recent Academy Award-nominee, he tells the remarkable story of his transformation in Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention. He is the executive artistic director of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem and cofounder and executive artistic director of IMPACT Repertory Theater, which has mentored over one thousand Harlem teens, providing an artistic voice for their lives and a constructive channel for social activism. Read more here: http://www.workman.com/speakers/jamal_joseph/#sthash.NglFCsO4.dpuf
Dr. Donna Murch is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2004. Her teaching and research specialties are historical studies of mass incarceration/war on drugs, Black Power and Civil Rights, California, social movements, and postwar U.S. cities. Dr. Murch and her research were recently featured in award-winning film maker Stanley Nelson’s Black Panther Party documentary, Vanguard of the Revolution. In October 2010, Murch published the award-winning monograph Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. She has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, OAH Magazine of History, Black Scholar, Souls,Perspectives, New Politics, and Jacobin and many other publications. She earned a Ph.D. in History from U.C. Berkeley in 2004. Read more here: http://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/249-murch-donna