Past Lecture Series in African American Studies

Presenter: Dr. David Roediger
Location: McCool Hall, Rm. 124 (Taylor Auditorium)
Time: 4:00pm

David Roediger is the Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where teaches history and African American Studies. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, and graduated from Northern Illinois University with a B.S. in Education. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Professor Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. His books include Our Own Time, The Wages of Whiteness, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso Press. His other works include Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (California) and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), John Brown (Random House/Modern Library), as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken). He has been active in labor support and anti-racist organizing.

Professor Roediger has won high praise for his writings on race, both from scholars and reviewers. Seth Sandronsky, for example, calls Colored White "a gem." Sandronsky explains: "His special focus is on the causes and consequences of white racial identity under American capitalism. Roediger skillfully uses dialectics, the study of change, to develop, persuasively, the powerful idea of whiteness in the context of white racial domination. For Roediger, American whites have been, and are active agents in accepting and perpetuating racism. They are not just dupes of a power elite who use skin color to divide and conquer America's working class. This is not an academic debating point."

Dr. Roediger does not shun contemporary thinkers in our culture, no matter whether they are on the talk-show circuit, such as Rush Limbaugh, or in politics, as Bill Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani, or even sports, as O.J. Simpson. Professor Roediger insists "that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context." And he uses history to illuminate his argument. His incisive critique on whiteness shows that "white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project."

In sum, Professor Roediger maintains that given the political realities in our country---its distribution of advantages and disabilities, and its unspoken assumptions---the United States is "still a white" nation. Race is decidedly not over, he argues. From his investigation of whiteness and power, it is no wonder that Sandronsky claims, "Roediger is arguably America's top scholar of critical whiteness studies." Other reviewers call him "one of the most important...[intellectuals of race in] the twentieth century.

Presenter: Dr. Darlene Clark Hine
Location: McCool Hall, Rm. 124 (Taylor Auditorium)
Time: 4:00pm

Professor Darlene Clark Hine, a leading historian of the African American experience and a pioneer of African American women's history, is the Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University in Evanston (2004 to the present). She currently serves as Chair of the Department of African American Studies. Hine is past president of the Southern Historical Association (2002-2003), and the Organization of American Historians (2001-2002). She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2006.

Hine received her B.A. degree from Roosevelt University (1968) in Chicago, and earned a Ph.D. degree from Kent State University (1975) at Kent, Ohio. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Hine was John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University (1987-2004). In Spring 1997, Hine served as the Avalon Visiting Distinguished Professor in American History at Northwestern University. She returned to Roosevelt University in fall 1996 as Harold Washington Visiting Professor. Between 1974 and 1986, Professor Hine taught, and served Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in various administrative capacities, including Vice Provost. She began her teaching career in 1972 as coordinator of Black studies at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.

Hine has been influential in shaping the field of African American women's history and the study of the black professional class. She is the author and/or co-editor of over fifteen books. She co-authored with William C. Hine and Stanley Harrold, The African American Odyssey (Prentice Hall, 2007). In collaboration with David Barry Gaspar, Hine co-edited, Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). She co-edited, with Earnestine Jenkins, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men's History and Masculinity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Vol. I, 1999, and Vol. II, 2001); and co-edited with Jacqueline McLeod, Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). She won the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association for the reference volumes co-edited with Elsa Barkley Brown and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993). Hine is editor-in-chief of Black Women in America, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2005). In 1990, her book Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) was named Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights, received the Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing, and was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Hine has received many honors including grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Ford Foundation. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (2003-2004), at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2000-2001) and at the National Humanities Center (1986-1987). She received honorary doctorates from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1998), from Purdue University (2002) and Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York (2002).

Presenter: Dr. Charles M. Payne
Location: McCool Hall, Rm. 124 (Taylor Auditorium)
Time: 6:30pm

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His interests include urban education and school reform, social inequality, social change and modern African American history.

He is the author of Getting What We Ask For: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure In Urban Education (1984) and I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995). The latter has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wisenthal Center and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999) and co-editor of Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850 -1950 (2003).

His most recent books are So Much Reform, So Little Change (in press, Harvard Education Publishing Group) which is concerned with the persistence of failure in urban districts, and an anthology, Teach Freedom: The African American Tradition of Education For Liberation (in press, Teachers College Press), which is concerned with Freedom School-like education. He is the recipient of a Senior Scholar grant from the Spencer Foundation and was a Resident Fellow at the foundation for 2006-7. With the support of the Carnegie Scholar's Program, he is doing a study of how school reform dialogue in other countries compares to the American situation. His work on urban schools is also supported by an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for 2007-8. Fletcher fellowships support work that contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v.Board of Education decision of 1954.

Payne has been a member of the Board of the Chicago Algebra Project, of the Steering Committee for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the Research Advisory Committee for the Chicago Annenberg Project, the editorial boards of Catalyst, the Sociology of Education and Educational Researcher. He currently serves on the Board of MDRC, and the advisory board for Teacher College Press' series on social justice. He is the co-founder of the Duke Curriculum Project, which involves 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 founding director of the Urban Education Project in Orange, New Jersey, a nonprofit community center that broadens educational experiences for urban youngsters. He has taught at Southern University, Williams College, Northwestern University and Duke University. He has won several teaching awards and at Northwestern, he held the Charles Deering McCormick Chair for Teaching Excellence and at Duke, the Sally Dalton Robinson Chair for excellence in teaching and research.

Payne holds a bachelor's degree in Afro-American studies from Syracuse University and a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern.

Presenter: Dr. Molefi Kete Asante
Location: McCool Hall, Rm. 124 (Taylor Auditorium)
Time: 6:30pm

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante
(photo by Chester Higgins)

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante is Professor, Department of African American Studies at Temple University. Asante has published 67 books, among the most recent are Afrocentric Manifesto (2008); The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony (2007); Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait (2006); Spear Masters: An Introduction to African Religion (2006), co-authored with Emeka Nwadiora; Handbook of Black Studies, (2005), co-edited with Maulana Karenga; Encyclopedia of Black Studies, (2004), co-edited with Ama Mazama; Race, Rhetoric, and Identity: The Architecton of Soul (2005); Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation, (2003); Ancient Egyptian Philosophers (2000); Scattered to the Wind, Custom and Culture of Egypt, and 100 Greatest African Americans.

He has recently been recognized as one of the most widely cited scholars. In the 1990s, he was recognized as one of the most influential leaders in American education. Asante completed his M.A. at Pepperdine and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, at the age of 26, and was appointed a full professor at the age of 30 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At Temple University he created the first Ph.D. Program in African American Studies in 1987. He has directed scores of Ph.D. dissertations. He has written more than 300 articles for journals and magazines and is the founder of the theory of Afrocentricity.

Asante was born in Valdosta, Georgia in the United States, of Sudanese and Nigerian heritage, one of sixteen children. He is a poet, dramatist, and a painter. His work on African language, multiculturalism, and human culture and philosophy has been cited by journals such as the Africalogical Perspectives, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Communication, American Scholar, Daedalus, Western Journal of Black Studies, and Africaological Perspectives. The Utne Reader called him one of the "100 Leading Thinkers" in America. Asante has appeared on more than 50 television programs. In 2002 he received the distinguished Douglas Ehninger Award for Rhetorical Scholarship from the National Communication Association. He regularly consults with the African Union. In 2004 he was asked to give one of the keynote addresses at the Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar, Senegal. He was inducted into the Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University in 2004 and is the recipient of more than 100 national and international awards, including three honorary degrees.

Dr. Asante is the founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies (1969) and was the President of the Civil Rights organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee chapter at UCLA in the 1960's. In 1995 he was made a traditional king, Nana Okru Asante Peasah, Kyidomhene of Tafo, Akyem, Ghana. He is in demand as a lecturer, consultant, and workshop leader in Afrocentricity, Africology, African Studies, and contemporary political issues of race, gender, culture, and class.