A National Conference presented by Brooklyn College
Graduate Center for Worker Education
March 28, 2009
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)
New York City
 On March 28, 2009 the Graduate Center for Worker
Education at Brooklyn College will welcome some of the
leading activists and scholars to take part in a
national conference that will discuss the historical
and current accomplishment of black women in the United
States.
Black women have been leading the struggle for social
transformation dating from the American Revolution to
the present struggle for the presidency of the United
States. This conference will examine the multifaceted
leadership contributions of Black women as presented by
leading scholars and social activists.
The Conference will include a tribute to Charlene
Mitchell, the first African-American women to run for
president of the United States in 1968.
FEATURING
* Angela Davis
* Manning Marable
* Genna Rae McNeil
* Leith Mullings
* Erik McDuffie
* Bill Fletcher, Jr.
* Gerald Horne
* Frances Fox Piven
* Mary Louise Patterson
* Carole Boyce Davies
* Kimberly Springer
Keynote Speakers:
* Angela Davis, currently serves as a graduate studies
Professor of History of Consciousness at the University
of California and Presidential Chair at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and
gender equality, and for gay rights and prison
abolition. She is a popular public speaker, nationally
and internationally, as well as a founder of the
grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition
organization Critical Resistance. Ms. Davis is known
for her notable contributions to the Civil Rights
Movement, and is currently a member of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
* Genna-Rae McNeil, is a distinguished professor of
history at the University of North Carolina Chapel
Hill. She is the author of Groundwork: Charles Hamilton
Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Historical
Judgments Reconsidered, (co-edited by Michael R.
Winston), African Americans and the Living
Constitution, (co-edited with John Hope Franklin), and
African-Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century:
Studies in Convergence and Conflict, (co-edited with
V.P. Franklin and Nancy Grant). Dr. McNeil is a
specialist in African-American History and U.S. social
movements of the 20th century. She is currently
researching a project on Joan Little and "The 'Free
Joan Little' Movement."
* Manning Marable, is one of America's most influential
and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has
been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science,
History and African-American Studies at Columbia
University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable
was founding director of the Institute for Research in
African-American Studies at Columbia University, from
1993 to 2003. Under Dr. Marable's leadership, the
Institute became one of the nation's most prestigious
centers of scholarship on the black American
experience.
* Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a public intellectual,
regularly featured on television and radio.. Starting
in the labor movement as a rank and file member of the
Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of
America, he eventually became the highest ranking
African American in the AFL-CIO. He served as the
President and Chief Executive Officer of TransAfrica
Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing,
educating and advocating for policies in favor of the
peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
After serving that role for four years, he was
appointed Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor
at Brooklyn College from 2005 to 2007. Fletcher was
formerly the Vice President for International Trade
Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center
of the AFL-CIO. Combining labor and community work, he
struggled to desegregate the Boston building trades. A
graduate of Harvard University, Fletcher is a prolific
author of dozens of articles. He co-authored The
Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of
the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941.
* Gerald C. Horne, is a Professor of Communications and
African-American Studies at the University of Houston
and the author of over twenty books. His recent
publications include Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising
and the 1960s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham
DuBois, Class Struggle in Hollywood: Moguls, Mobsters,
Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists, 1930-1950, and From
the Barrel of a Gun: The U.S. and the War Against
Zimbabwe, 1965-1980. Fire This Time was a finalist for
the American Sociological Association's Robert Park
Award in 1996. His present research projects include:
Black Labor at Sea: Ferdinand Smith, from the National
Maritime Union to the Communist Party to Jamaica; Race
War! White Supremacy Vs. Blacks and Asians in the
Japanese Attack on Hong Kong and the British Empire,
1930-1950, Black and Brown: African-Americans and The
Mexican Revolution, 1910-20. Professor Horne earned his
M.A. and PhD from Columbia University
* Leith Mullings, is a Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology at the City University of New York
Graduate Center . She received her Ph.D. in
Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Professor
Mullings' research and writing has focused on
structures of inequality and resistance to them. Her
research began in Africa and she has written about
traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial
Ghana, as well as about women's roles in Africa. In the
U.S. her work has centered on urban communities.
Through the lens of feminist and critical race theory,
she has analyzed a variety of topics including kinship,
representation, gentrification, health disparities and
social movements.
* Erik McDuffie, is an Assistant Professor in African
American Studies and in the Gender and Women's Studies
Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. Professor McDuffie's research and teaching
interests include African American women's activism,
black feminism, black radicalism and internationalism,
and the making of the African Diaspora. His current
book project re-evaluates the histories of the Black
Freedom Movement, American radicalism, and U.S. Women's
Movement by arguing that the Communist Party, USA
(CPUSA) helped nurture a radical black feminism and
provided a small group of black women radicals with
unique opportunities to lead social movements with
links to the global stage. His most recent publication
appears in Michael Gomez's edited collection Diasporic
Africa: A Reader (NYU Press, 2006).
* Eileen Boris, is Hull Professor and Chair of Women's
Studies and affiliate professor of history, black
studies, and law and society at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. She is copresident of the
Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) and
president of the board of trustees of The Journal of
Women's History; she was co chair of the program
committee for the 2005 Thirteenth Berkshire Conference
on the History of Women. She is author of Art and
Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in
America (1986) and Home to Work: Motherhood and the
Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States
(1994), which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor
History. She is also coeditor of Major Problems in the
History of American Workers (2002) and The Practice of
U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and
Dialogues (2007).
* Kimberly Springer, is a senior lecturer at Kings
College, London. Her current research uses television
historiography to examine the role of television
producer Norman Lear's 1970s sitcoms in transmitting
the ideals of the era's social movements. Her most
recent publication, "Queering Black Female
Heterosexuality," Yes Means Yes, advocates for both an
interrogation of historical stereotypes about black
women's sexuality while highlighting those instances of
unabashed sexual subjectivity. She has published
single-authored and edited volumes on black women's
activism including Living for the Revolution: Black
Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University
Press, 2005) and Still Lifting, Still Climbing:
Contemporary African American Women's Activism, editor
(New York University Press, 1999). Her co-edited volume
Stories of O: the Oprahification of American
Culture(University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming)
critiques "the Oprah Culture Industry," which is the
hegemonic apparatus evolving from the cultural output
of media mogul Oprah Winfrey.
* Frances Fox Piven, is Distinguished Professor of
Political Science at the City University of New York
Graduate Center, she has taught at Boston University,
Columbia University, New York University Law School,
the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the
University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna.
She is past Vice-President of the American Political
Science Association, has served as program co-chair of
the annual political science meetings, and is a past
president of the Society for the Study of Social
Problems. She is currently President of the American
Sociological Association. She is the recipient of
numerous awards, including the President's Award of the
American Public Health Association, and the American
Sociological Association's Career Award for the
Practice of Sociology, as well as their award for the
Public Understanding of Sociology. Her books deal with
the development of the welfare state, political
movements, urban political, and electoral politics.
Among them are Regulating the Poor, Poor People's
Movements(1977); The New Class War (1982); Why
Americans Don't Vote (1988); The Mean Season(1987);
Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (1992); The
Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997); Why
Americans Still Don't Vote (2000); The War at Home
(2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People
Change America (2006).
* Carole Boyce Davis, is Professor of Africana Studies
at Cornell University. She is the author of Black
Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject
(1994) and Left of Karl Marx. Claudia Jones,
Black/Communist/Woman (2007). In addition to numerous
scholarly articles, Boyce-Davies has also published the
following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of
Women in African Literature (1986); Out of the Kumbla.
Caribbean Women and Literature (1990); and a two-volume
collection of critical and creative writing entitled
Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International
Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), and
Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2). She is co-editor
with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of The African
Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities
(Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the
Academy. Currently, Dr. Boyce Davies is writing a
series of personal reflections called Caribbean Spaces.
Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad,
dealing with the issue of transnational
Caribbean/American black identity, and is preparing an
edition of the writings of Claudia Jones entitled
Beyond Containment: Claudia Jones, Activism, Clarity
and Vision.
* Premilla Nadasen, is an associate professor of
history at Queens College (CUNY). Her book, Welfare
Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United
States (Routledge 2005) won the Franklin Prize from the
American Studies Association and outlines the ways in
which African American women on welfare forged a
feminism of their own out of the political and cultural
circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s. A longtime
community activist and scholar, she has written for
Feminist Studies, Ms. Magazine, Working USA, Black
Women, Gender and Families, and the Progressive Media
Project, and has given numerous public talks about
African-American women's history and social policy.
Her article, "Expanding the Boundaries of the Women's
Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare
Rights," (Feminist Studies) won the 2002 Berkshire
Conference Article Prize. She is currently working on a
book-length project on the history of domestic worker
organizing in the United States.
* Ruth Feldstein is an Associate Professor of American
Studies, Department of History at Rutgers University.
She is the author of Motherhood in Black and White:
Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (2000),
and has written articles and reviews for the Journal of
American History, the Journal of Cold War Studies,
Reviews in American History, Not June Cleaver: Women
and Gender in Postwar America, and Race, Nation, and
Empire in American History. Her article, "`I Don't
Trust You Anymore': Nina Simone, African American
Activism, and Culture in the 1960s," was awarded the
Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of
Black Women Historians, for Best Article on Black
Women's History. Her current research focuses on
internationally famous black women entertainers who
participated in the American civil rights movement. Her
book-in-progress, Do What You Gotta Do: Black Women
Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement explores
links between feminism, a global mass culture, black
activism, and anti-colonial internationalism.
* Bettina Aptheker, is Professor of Feminist Studies
and History at the University of California at Santa
Cruz where her "Introduction to Feminisms" course,
which emphasizes the multiplicity of feminism and
women's experiences, is one of the most popular on
campus. She is the author of several books including
Intimate Politics: Autobiography As Witness; The
Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis; and If They
Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (co-authored
with Angela Davis) and Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race,
Sex, and Class in American History.
* Barbara Winslow is a historian who teaches in the
School of Education and for the Women's Studies
Program. Her areas of specialization are in social
studies curriculum development, integrating computer
based multi-media technology into the urban classroom
at both the elementary and secondary school level. She
also specializes in integrating class, race and gender
into the elementary and secondary curriculum. Her
research focuses on the intersection of gender, class,
race and sexuality on women in social protest
movements. Her first book, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual
Politics and Political Activism, (1996) tells the story
of an important suffragette, peace campaigner, anti-
colonialist, anti-fascist, international socialist and
feminist. She is presently writing a history of the
women's liberation movement in Seattle Washington .
Winslow is also researching how class, race and gender
affect pedagogy, in particular with regard to
technology. She is the founder and project Director of
the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women's
Activism 1945 to the Present.
Contact Information
Brooklyn Graduate Center for Worker Education
25 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10004
212.966.4014
Email: info@blackwomen2009.org
workereducation.org <http://workereducation.org/>
Professor Joseph Wilson
Program Director
Annie Jagoo
Executive Assistant
Stacy Warner Maddern
Coordinator Research & Development
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