Events

 

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Panel Discussion

Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth 

UkweliSeptima Clark Auditorium (Room 118)
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center
25 St Philip St, Charleston, SC 29401, 
Tuesday, March 28, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

 

The recently unveiled mural of Septima P. Clark in the Education Center at the College of Charleston will serve as a backdrop for a March 28 conversation on the civil rights icon’s life and legacy. A 7:30 p.m. panel discussion at the center will include five contributors to the book “Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth” and an archivist from the college’s Avery Research Center for African American History andCulture. Ukweli is a collection of essays and poems on the Black experience inAmerica. Georgetown artist Natalie Daise created the 7-foot-high by 30-foot-long mural, “Saint Septima with Carolina Jasmine” in the center’s Septima P. Clark Memorial Auditorium. Unveiled on Feb. 23 in the auditorium’s foyer, the mural features Clark’s portrait in profile and a quote from a 1970 speech: “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than to believe,to inquire rather than to affirm.”

Ukweli, is the Swahili word for truth. The book follows a 2020 poetry-lecture series at McLeod Plantation organized by poet Horace Mungin. He passed away before Ukweli was released inFebruary 2022. The book is a collection of essays and poems from 49 contributors, including Mungin and co-editor Herb Frazier. Ukweli contributors Millicent Brown, LaTisha Vaugh and Karen Meadows will discuss their Ukweli essays and Clark’s legacy.

Brown is co-founder and project director of an oral history initiative to identify the “first children,” like herself, to desegregate previously all-white schools. LaTishais co-founder of E3: Educate, Empower, Elevate LLC, an organization that focuses on equitable outcomes for Black and brown children and families.Meadows, a high school counselor in Guilford County Schools, is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Avery’s archivist Georgette Mayo will join them. Avery holds Clark’s personal papers.

Savannah Frierson, a Ukweli contributor and Avery’s office manager, will moderate the session. She andMarjory Wentworth, also a Ukweli contributor, will open and close the panel with Mungin’s poems from Ukweli. Wentworth teaches at the College ofCharleston.

The event also provides an opportunity to premier a video that honors Mungin’s contributions to poetry and social activism. Charlotte filmmaker Steve Rutherford produced the seven-minute video as a tribute to Mungin, who started writing poetry in the mid-sixties during the genesis of the Black Arts Movement.

In addition to the Septima P. Clark mural, information panels in the Education Center present the periods ofClark’s life. Essays, interviews and a range of primary sources represent the online material the college has posted to tell Clark’s story as an educator and civil rights champion who Martin Luther King Jr. called the mother of the movement.

In addition to the Septima P. Clark mural, information panels in the Education Center present the periods ofClark’s life. Essays, interviews and a range of primary sources represent the online material the college has posted to tell Clark’s story as an educator and civil rights champion who Martin Luther King Jr. called the mother of the movement.

 

Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas

Join the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program in welcoming Kim Hass 

Rita Hollings Science Center, Rm 101
College of Charleston
58 Coming Street, Charleston, SC 29401
Wednesday, April 19th
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM(ET)

 Kim Haas

Kim Haas is Executive Producer, Host and Creator of Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas, a travel show celebrating the African influence in Latin America. She has traveled extensively throughout Latin America. Kim has been active in Afro-Latino issues for more than a decade and is founder of losafrolatinos.com, a blog celebrating Afro Latino culture. Kim speaks fluent Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Spanish. Kim is the owner of Haas Media LLC, a multilingual community outreach, translation services, and communications firm located in the greater New York City area.

 

Conseula Francis
Emerging Scholar Lecture Series

Every academic year, the African American Studies Program invites a junior scholar to share new and exciting research with the campus community. The late Professor Conseula Francis (1973–2016), the former director of the African American Studies Program, established the series to support the work of emerging scholars in the field of African American Studies. As our director, Professor Francis not only advocated for her students, but remained deeply committed to mentoring and supporting junior faculty, and we have named this lecture series in her memory to commemorate her unflagging commitment to our program and the work of junior scholars.
Previous Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lectures:
  • 2020-2021 Dr. Jason E. Shelton
    "The Death of the Black Church"
  • 2019-2020 Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
    "The Issue of Females"
  • 2018-2019 Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey
    "Hip-Hop as Social Justice"
  • 2018-2019 Sami Schalk
    "Black Women's Speculative Fiction and the Deconstruction of Able-Mindedness"
  • 2017-2018 Clifton Granby
    "Resilient Injustices, Unyielding Resolve"
  • 2017-2018 Deirdre Cooper Owens
    "Medical Bondage: How Slavery Advanced American Gynecology"
  • 2016-2017 Vanessa Agard-Jones
    "After the End of the World: A Black Feminist Analytic for the Anthropocene"
  • 2015–2016 Sarah Haley
    The Carceral Life of Gender: Convict Labor, Jim Crow Modernity, and Black Feminist Refusal”
  • 2014–2015 Ibram X. Kendi
    Black Students and Black Studies: A Founding History, 1966–1970”
  • 2013–2014 Jason Shelton
    Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions”

Artist Lecture Series

The Artist Lecture Series celebrates the value of artistic expression by inviting artists of all types to share their art and their insights into how art itself is a form of social discourse. The lectures in this series, then, follow in the spirit of what the novelist Ralph Ellison said of music, namely that “it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are…reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspire.”

  • 2017-2018 Lyle Ashton Harris
  • 2016-2017 Dexter Thomas
  • 2015–2016 Amaud Jamaul Johnson
  • 2014–2015 9th Wonder
  • 2013–2014 Alfred Conteh

African American Studies Film Series

The African American Studies Program sponsors a film series every semester that is open to the public. Each series explores a particular theme such as mass incarceration and cultural connections between African Americans and Asians.

African American Studies Book Discussion Series

The African American Studies Book Discussion Series brings together College of Charleston faculty, staff, and students to have informal discussions about significant texts in the field of African American Studies. We select one book to discuss each semester and provide a limited number of copies of the books to participants.

Previous Book Selections:

  • Fran Ross, Oreo (Spring 2019)
  • Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (Fall 2018)
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Spring 2018)
  • Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy (Fall 2017)
  • Octavia Butler, Kindred (Spring 2017)
  • Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Fall 2016)

African American Studies Teach-Ins

To fulfill the African American Studies Program's commitment to community engagement, the Program periodically organizes teach-ins to raise awareness of pressing contemporary issues and to provide tools for proactively addressing these issues.

Previous Teach-Ins:

Afro-Feminism and Resistance in Brazil

Vilma ReisA sociologist, professor, feminist, and Black women's movement activist. She holds a Master in Social Sciences from the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the Federal University of Bahia - FFCH-UFBH. Ms. Reis is the co-founder of the Mahin Collective Black Women's Organization for Human Rights. She was the General Ombudsman of the Public Defender's Office of Bahia between 2015-2019 and was elected in 2022 as the 3rd alternate Federal Deputy of the State of Bahia for the Worker's Party 

 

Sabbatical Presentation

Black Studies and the Ethics of Historical Privacy

When Archival Silences Are Acts of Refusal

Addlestone Library: Room 227
205 Calhoun Street, Charleston, SC
Thursday, March 23, 2023
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM(ET)

Black Studies scholars often have sought to recover Black voices that have been excluded, marginalized, or erased from mainstream scholarship as a form of reclamation, and as a corrective to research that excludes Black people, and therefore distorts, our understanding of the world in which we live. But what if some of these Black voices don't want to be found? What claims to privacy do the dead have? This talk offers answers to these questions and will be part of a collection of essays Professor Crabtree is writing on ethical praxis and the craft of writing in Black Studies.

 

 

 

Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas

Join the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program in welcoming Kim Hass 

Rita Hollings Science Center, Rm 101
College of Charleston
58 Coming Street, Charleston, SC 29401
Wednesday, April 19th
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM(ET)

 Kim Haas

Kim Haas is Executive Producer, Host and Creator of Afro-Latino Travels with Kim Haas, a travel show celebrating the African influence in Latin America. She has traveled extensively throughout Latin America. Kim has been active in Afro-Latino issues for more than a decade and is founder of losafrolatinos.com, a blog celebrating Afro Latino culture. Kim speaks fluent Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Spanish. Kim is the owner of Haas Media LLC, a multilingual community outreach, translation services, and communications firm located in the greater New York City area.

 

Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture Series

Every academic year, the African American Studies Program invites a junior scholar to share new and exciting research with the campus community. The late Professor Conseula Francis (1973–2016), the former director of the African American Studies Program, established the series to support the work of emerging scholars in the field of African American Studies. As our director, Professor Francis not only advocated for her students, but remained deeply committed to mentoring and supporting junior faculty, and we have named this lecture series in her memory to commemorate her unflagging commitment to our program and the work of junior scholars.
Previous Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lectures:
  • 2020-2021 Dr. Jason E. Shelton
    "The Death of the Black Church"
  • 2019-2020 Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
    "The Issue of Females"
  • 2018-2019 Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey
    "Hip-Hop as Social Justice"
  • 2018-2019 Sami Schalk
    "Black Women's Speculative Fiction and the Deconstruction of Able-Mindedness"
  • 2017-2018 Clifton Granby
    "Resilient Injustices, Unyielding Resolve"
  • 2017-2018 Deirdre Cooper Owens
    "Medical Bondage: How Slavery Advanced American Gynecology"
  • 2016-2017 Vanessa Agard-Jones
    "After the End of the World: A Black Feminist Analytic for the Anthropocene"
  • 2015–2016 Sarah Haley
    The Carceral Life of Gender: Convict Labor, Jim Crow Modernity, and Black Feminist Refusal”
  • 2014–2015 Ibram X. Kendi
    Black Students and Black Studies: A Founding History, 1966–1970”
  • 2013–2014 Jason Shelton
    Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions”

Artist Lecture Series

The Artist Lecture Series celebrates the value of artistic expression by inviting artists of all types to share their art and their insights into how art itself is a form of social discourse. The lectures in this series, then, follow in the spirit of what the novelist Ralph Ellison said of music, namely that “it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are…reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspire.”

  • 2017-2018 Lyle Ashton Harris
  • 2016-2017 Dexter Thomas
  • 2015–2016 Amaud Jamaul Johnson
  • 2014–2015 9th Wonder
  • 2013–2014 Alfred Conteh

African American Studies Film Series

The African American Studies Program sponsors a film series every semester that is open to the public. Each series explores a particular theme such as mass incarceration and cultural connections between African Americans and Asians.

African American Studies Book Discussion Series

The African American Studies Book Discussion Series brings together College of Charleston faculty, staff, and students to have informal discussions about significant texts in the field of African American Studies. We select one book to discuss each semester and provide a limited number of copies of the books to participants.

Previous Book Selections:

  • Fran Ross, Oreo (Spring 2019)
  • Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (Fall 2018)
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Spring 2018)
  • Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy (Fall 2017)
  • Octavia Butler, Kindred (Spring 2017)
  • Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Fall 2016)

African American Studies Teach-Ins

To fulfill the African American Studies Program's commitment to community engagement, the Program periodically organizes teach-ins to raise awareness of pressing contemporary issues and to provide tools for proactively addressing these issues.

Previous Teach-Ins:

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