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The Public Square with Dr. Blair LM Kelley

Lecture in recognition of Black History Month

Join us this Black History Month for The Public Square in partnership with the DC Public Library Foundation for an engaging discussion with award-winning historian Professor Blair Kelley.

Professor Kelley will be shedding light on the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears. Spanning two hundred years, this discussion will highlight the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This event is part of "The Public Square" series, aiming to connect leaders and innovators with the public. Through these discussions, we aim to push disciplines forward to a new higher level of equity. So join us for this insightful conversation as we look back on history and forward to a possible future.

This program is brought to you in partnership with the DC Public Library Foundation and the Anacostia Community Museum. 50 copies of Dr. Kelley's book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class will be gifted to audience members while supplies last. Learn more about the author and book below and register to reserve your seat.

For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov. For ASL or tactile interpretation, please allow at least seven (7) days notice.

About the Book

An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning nar rat ive centered on her forebears. Spanning two hundred years—from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic—Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D.

Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian, Kelley works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. Kelley is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history.

Kelley is the author of two books that trace the protests that toppled segregation and the people and movements that challenged the inequities of race and class. The first, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (UNC Press), chronicles the little-known Black men and women who protested the passage of laws segregating trains and streetcars at the turn of the twentieth century. Right to Ride highlights the women and men who led and participated in protests, recounting those thousands of Black southerners who fought valiantly for equal treatment despite the tremendous threat of racial violence. The first book-length treatment of the streetcar boycott movement, Right to Ride was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, and has become canonical for scholars studying the history of segregation, civil rights, and Black women’s history, reviving scholarly interest in the streetcar boycott movement and turn of the century African American activism.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), begins with the question “What does it mean to be Black and working class?” Drawing on family histories and continuing into the archive, Black Folk illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America in the past and present. Connecting the everyday, lived experience of working black people to wider discussions of the American working class, Black Folk argues that the history of the Black working class provide a crucial model of how we should engage a wider swath of Americans citizens in informed citizenship. Black Folk was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation, and the 2022-23 John Hope Franklin/NEH Fellowship by National Humanities Center.

Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; MSNBC’s All In and Melissa Harris Perry Show, and Velshi; NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s The Takeaway, Democracy Now and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine. Highlighted as one of the top-tweeting historians by History News Network, she has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than thirteen years and has over 46,000 followers.

Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History, and graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University.

JENNIFER C. THOMAS

JENNIFER C. THOMAS is an associate professor and journalism sequence coordinator in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at her alma mater, Howard University. She earned a Master of Arts Degree in Journalism from Columbia University. A former Scripps Howard FoundaDon AEJMC Teacher of the Year, she is dedicated to ensuring her students have a successful transiDon from classroom to newsroom. She is an award-winning broadcast journalist with more than 25 years of experience, notably as an ExecuDve Producer with CNN, where she served as the 9am show producer during the September 11 Terror APacks. She is the founder of MediaReady ConsulDng, LLC, which specializes in media relaDons, training, and consulDng. A Fulbright Specialist Scholar, her creative works and published research include the dissection of current practices and pedagogies in journalism, the transition from professional to professor, and the complex facets of women, media, and images.

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