Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
Septima P. Clark Auditorium (Rm 118)
25 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
5:30PM – 7:00 PM(ET)
The Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston has invited Tamara Lanier to deliver a lecture about her enslaved ancesto
Stern Center BallroomThursday, February 16th at 5 pm
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center * Septima Clark Auditorium
25 St. Philip Street, Room 118
origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?
Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
My Soul Is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.
The Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture presents Tara A. Bynum and Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America
Tuesday, February 7th at 7 pm
Avery Research Center * Senator McKinley Washington Auditorium
In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. In her book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker’s pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter.
We’re excited to share with everyone the Fall 2022 AAST Newsletter! Check it out to see what’s happening in the program this semester.
The Commemoration Program on Feb 21 is from
11am to 5pm, see details below:
–Film screenings begin at 11:00 – 3:00
(see flyer for details)
–3:00pm: A Conversation with Mzee
(esteemed & respected Elder) James E. Campbell and Imam Hakim Abdul-Ali.
–4:00pm: Exhibition Opening/Reception “Malcolm X: 50 Years and Counting, The Legacy Continues” featuring materials from the James E. Campbell Collection & from the private collection of Imam Hakim Abdul-Ali.
ALL ACTIVITIES ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
For information call: 843.953.7609 or visit our website: http://avery.cofc.edu
This Friday’s Faculty Lecture, as well as the panel discussion on Freedom Summer on February 26, are great ways to learn more about the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project and the civil rights movement, the subject of next year’s College Reads book, Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson.
