September
19, 2003
Joy
James to Open Weissman Center’s Geographies of Color Series
on September 25
In his 1903 essay
“The Talented Tenth,” published in The Negro Problem,
a collection of articles by African Americans, educator and author
W. E. B. DuBois made an impassioned plea for improved education,
particularly higher education, for African Americans. He argued
that a “Talented Tenth”—college-educated teachers,
ministers, physicians, lawyers, and business people—was
needed to lead the struggle against racism and social injustice.
For DuBois, higher education was essential to cultivating leadership:
“Education must not simply teach work—it must teach
Life,” he wrote. “The Talented Tenth of the Negro
race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture
among their people.”
To commemorate the one-hundreth anniversary of DuBois’s
“Talented Tenth” essay, as well as the fiftieth anniversary
of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court
ruling against racial segregation in public schools, the Weissman
Center for Leadership is presenting the yearlong series Geographies
of Color: Education, Inequality, and Black Leadership in the Twenty-first
Century. The series will reexamine DuBois’s ideas about
black leadership and consider contemporary responses to them.
Although the series won’t be in full swing until the spring
semester, it will begin this month, when Joy James, a professor
of Africana studies at Brown University, presents the keynote
lecture, “Democratic Crises and Radical Intellectuals,”
on Thursday, September 25, at 7 pm in Gamble Auditorium. James
is the author of several books, including Transcending the
Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and Intellectuals (Routledge
1996), and has edited or coedited numerous anthologies, including
Spirit, Space, and Survival: African American Women in (White)
Academe (Routledge, 1993), which won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding
Book on Human Rights Award.
“Professor James is the ideal speaker to give the keynote
lecture of the series,” said Michelle Stephens, assistant
professor of English. “In earlier scholarship James critically
engaged DuBois’s notion of a ‘talented tenth’
from a feminist perspective. In her more recent work on imprisoned
intellectuals, she offers new and disturbing insights on the roles
of prisons and imprisonment more broadly in shaping future generations
of black youth for intellectual leadership. We are really excited
about her visit.” Stephens, along with Lucas Wilson, associate
professor of African American studies and economics, conceived
and developed the series.
In spring, Geographies of Color will present lectures
by Kimberlé Crenshaw, UCLA law professor and author of
Critical Race Theory (New York University Press, 2001),
and Wahneema Lubiano, associate professor of literature at Duke
University and editor of The House That Race Built. In addition,
the centenary of the birth of Nobel peace prize winner Ralph Bunche
will be celebrated with a discussion of William Greaves’s
film Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, for which Greaves
will be present. For more information, consult the Weissman Center’s
Web site at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/programs/wcl/.
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