Nov. 12: Waldo Martin - DEEP SOUL

Waldo Martin head shotBernard Moses Memorial Lecture

Sponsored by: Graduate Council and Graduate Division Lecture Series, and Othering & Belonging Institute

Date: November 12, 2019
Time: 4:10 PM
Location: Alumni House, Toll Room — UC Berkeley Campus 

About the Talk

DEEP SOUL: Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles and the Making of the Modern World

Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles transformed both US and World History. These seminal liberation struggles include the important yet relatively unknown series of early twentieth-century southern African American streetcar boycotts as well as the iconic Civil Rights-Black Power Insurgency (1935-75). First, this lecture will examine why and how these foundational freedom struggles proved essential to the making of the modern African American Freedom Movement. Second, this lecture will examine the centrality of the modern African American Freedom Movement to  both the creation of the modern United States and the development of the modern world.

This Moses lecture is part of UC Berkeley’s commemorative events spotlighting African American history after the passage of the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act. To learn more about UC Berkley’s initiative, visit https://400years.berkeley.edu/about.

About the Speaker

Waldo Martin, the Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History & Citizenship, at the University of California, Berkeley, is a prolific writer. He is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (2005), as well as Brown v. Board of Education: A Short History With Documents (1998) and The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1985). He is a coauthor, with Mia Bay and Deborah Gray White, of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, With Documents (2012) and, with Joshua Bloom, of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he coedited Civil Rights in the United States: An Encyclopedia (2000). Aspects of the modern African American freedom struggle and the history of modern social movements unite his current research and writing interests. He is currently completing “A Change is Gonna Come: The Cultural Politics of the Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of Modern America.”