Center for African & African American Studies

60 years after the Civil Rights Act, ‘the activism continues’

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

60 years after the Civil Rights Act, ‘the activism continues’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/02/2024 - 00:00

Rachel Sauer

��ֱ�� Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964

Over a five-year span between 1865 and 1870, following the end of the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were ratified to end slavery (the 13^th), make formerly enslaved people U.S. citizens (the 14^th) and give all men the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (the 15^th).

In the decades that followed, however, and despite provision that “the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” various states and municipalities passed “Jim Crow” laws, abused poll taxes and literacy tests to limit voting and condoned racially motivated violence to enforce segregation and disenfranchise African Americans.

But on July 2, 1964, in the midst of a civil rights movement that had been growing in voice and numbers for many years, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) into law. This act integrated public schools and facilities; prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion and national origin in public places and in hiring and employment; and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, a ��ֱ�� Boulder assistant professor of African American and U.S. history, notes that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Sixty years later, the Civil Rights Act is still considered a landmark of U.S. legislation, but does it mean today what it did in 1964?

“Similar to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the CRA is something we almost take for granted as something that has existed for a good chunk of most people’s lifetimes,” says Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, an assistant professor of African American and U.S. history in the University of ��ֱ�� Boulder Department of History. “Everything from Brown v. Board on—the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, all these things were leading to this Civil Rights Act.

“I think for civil rights activists, though, it’s a complicated story. A lot of the actual issues that lead to material conditions being different for Black people still have not changed enough. We haven’t closed the racial wealth gap, there’s still structural racism in policing, housing and employment. As violent as the moments at lunch counter sit-ins were, in a way the harder thing is saying, ‘Black people should be able to live in this neighborhood’ or ‘Black and white kids should be going to the same schools’ or ‘Black people are experiencing discrimination at these jobs and people in positions of power are keeping them away.’ People now are being told it’s either unfixable or it’s not a problem, and this is where we’re at 60 years later.”

Protecting civil rights

For almost 100 years following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and despite three constitutional amendments that ostensibly ensured equal rights and legal protections for African Americans, most experienced anything but—and not just in the South, but throughout the United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court even ruled that segregation didn’t violate the 14^th Amendment.

So, it wasn’t just a culmination of big events that occasionally garnered media attention—Ku Klux Klan marches, the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the murder of Emmett Till—but the daily experiences of “redlined” neighborhoods, “sundown” towns, denial of employment, wage inequity, separate entrances and a hundred other inequalities and injustices that germinated the civil rights movement.

Residents of Montgomery, Alabama, walk to work during the 381-day bus boycott that began in December 1955. (Photo: Don Cravens/LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

“One of the things I always show my students about the March on Washington is what people were actually asking for, and that the desire for jobs and equal employment were such a huge part of why the march occurred,” Lawrence-Sanders explains. “We get caught up in MLK’s famous speech about integration, but one of the demands of the march was an end to police brutality and police violence, which is something they wanted in the Civil Rights Act that didn’t make it in there.”

As the civil rights movement increasingly gained footing and voice, federal officials were increasingly called on to respond. In the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Congress established the civil rights division of the Department of Justice as well as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights “to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

When John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he initially postponed supporting anti-discrimination measures, but soon couldn’t ignore the state-sanctioned violence being perpetrated against civil rights activists and protesters throughout the country. In June 1963, Kennedy proposed broad civil rights legislation, noting in his announcement that “this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson continued pursuing civil rights legislation. After a 75-day filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law July 2.

‘The activism continues’

“Now we tend to forget that this was not the end of the movement,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “A lot of further legislation followed. We were still seeing violent desegregation and busing well into the ‘70s.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Housing discrimination, addressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was another big issue—and remains one today, Lawrence-Sanders says. “We still deal with housing segregation and discrimination, and it’s often treated as the exception instead of structural racism, which has become a boogeyman term. The act in ‘68 had provisions about how renting and selling and financing a house can’t be discriminatory based on race or sex, and people violate that constantly. There was an article in The New York Times last month about a woman trying to buy a condo and the seller backed out because she’s Black.

“The frustrating thing about this is that Black people have always suspected that these incidences of racism happen and been called crazy or paranoid, and when these articles appear, Black folks are saying, ‘No, we’ve proven it, not just with the knowledge of how we’ve been treated over time, but it’s finally been exposed by data.’ When I was living in New York City, there were undercover investigations that discovered that taxis don’t stop for Black people, rental apartments don’t rent to Black people at same rate as white people, real estate agents are steering Black people to certain places and steering white people away.”

An important legacy of the CRA is that it established enforcement mechanisms for addressing discrimination, but it stopped short of addressing all the ways structural racism exists in society, Lawrence-Sanders says. It also often gets caught in selective historical memory.

“I think that’s why people tend freeze Martin Luther King in 1963 and the March on Washington,” she says. “Because after the CRA passed, activists were asking for things that went too far for the government. Collectively, we tend to have no use for activists when they demand more and say, ‘That wasn’t enough, we want more, we want to go further.’ The CRA shows what a major legislative change can accomplish, but beyond that, what else happens? The activism continues.”

Top image: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. (Photo: Cecil Stoughton/Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum)

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��ֱ�� Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964.

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And the Motown beat goes on

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:17:23 +0000

And the Motown beat goes on Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/12/2024 - 16:17

Bradley Worrell

Upon the 65^th anniversary of the record label, ��ֱ�� Boulder prof says that from Taylor Swift to K-pop, ‘It’s all Motown; they are not creating anything new’

Shawn O’Neal, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, can’t remember a time growing up in the 1970s and 1980s when Motown music wasn’t playing in his Chicago home.

“My mother was very deep into the traditions of Motown music—and not just the music, but what it represented aesthetically as well, when talking about (Motown founder) Berry Gordy’s vision of Black respectability,” he says. “Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas—those records were always being played in our house or coming out of the radio. So, that was always there.”

It’s hard to quantify the effect Motown—and later musical developments inspired by Motown such as disco and house music—have had on his life, says O’Neal, who teaches classes on hip hop and ethnomusicology (the intersection of music and ethnicity), as well as classes on Africana and African American studies. He is an executive committee member for the ��ֱ�� Boulder Center for African and African American Studies.

Shawn O'Neal, a ��ֱ�� Boulder assistant teaching professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and ethnomusicologist, grew up with Motown music always playing.

“Motown did for me what a lot of other music did for me at the time, which was just opening up that intellectual curiosity in me, if you will,” he says. “Motown had this very unique sound to it than no one else was doing, just that tambourine coinciding with the backbeat and the four-on-the floor sound. Four on the floor represents a 4/4 time signature in music theory.

“And then when I was in middle school and high school, I was reading about Motown, about Detroit and about Black history. All of that led to my dissertation work on Audio Intersectionality, an interdisciplinary social science theory communicated through sound, music and performance,” says O’Neal, who is a renowned DJ and audio producer.

Motown’s impact upon on American culture is hard to understate. Started by Berry Gordy in January 1959 with $800 he borrowed from family members, Motown Records became a powerhouse in music production as well as a cultural touchstone.

The record label would go on to produce a who’s who of influential African American musicians—including Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, and Diana Ross and the Supremes—who would dominate the Billboard charts in the late 1960s. At one time, it was also the biggest Black-owned business in America prior to Gordy selling the record label for $61 million to MCA in 1988.

With Motown recently celebrating its 65th anniversary, ��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine asked O’Neal for his thoughts on how Motown produced so much great music, how some of its artists managed to create socially conscious but still grooving music, what constitutes the “Motown Sound” and Motown’s legacy on modern music across genres. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Motown was based in Detroit, which was not the musical center universe, yet it produced hit after hit in the 1960s and 1970s. To what do you attribute the record label’s success?

O’Neal: Music is always just timing and circumstance, and a little bit of luck. Like, really hitting that pulse at the right moment, and they (Motown) were able to do that. I think Berry Gordy was obviously brilliant with developing this whole package.

The package had a look. For the women (performers) it’s the hairstyles, the makeup, the dresses, the heels, the movements during those songs. All of that was very rehearsed and very packaged in a way that America hadn’t seen before.

The Temptations perform in 1968. (Photo: Motown Records)

Then you have a very dialed-in production team. You got the Funk Brothers. You’ve got Holland-Dozier-Holland turning out those hits. Everything was in-house and so controlled that once you had one hit song you could (repeat) something again that hit that pulse of America.

That crossover appeal was something that hadn’t really happened previously—not on that magnitude. Then you can just keep churning out those songs in that formula.

You got the production team in place. You got the players, you got the bands, the musicians. You’ve got the look. It becomes a movement. To have a prominent movement, any type of social movement, you’ve got the soundtrack, you’ve got the aesthetics, the visual representation and the messaging. It’s just such a complete package. We hadn’t seen that before in music.

Honestly, I feel like Detroit was just where a lot of those people (musicians) were. Sometimes I wonder: Could that (Motown) have happened almost anywhere in this country where you had Black people that were talented and who needed someone who was able to manage things in a particular way bring it all together? Of course, you needed a Berry Gordy, which I don’t know how many of those there are laying around. I mean, the brother knew what he was doing.

He knew what Black people wanted, but he also knew what white people wanted from Black people, which brings up a whole other conversation, because that stuff gets very tricky. There’s definitely a critical analysis on all of that.

Question: Was part of the success of Motown also due to the fact that the people running major record labels at the time were not thinking about producing music that had mass appeal?

O’Neal: Motown absolutely ended up being the model for music that had crossover appeal—for creating music that everyone is going to enjoy regardless of race and ethnicity. That was the original model.

Mary Wilson (left), Diana Ross and Florence Ballard perform as The Supremes. (Photo: Universal/Motown)

And, not to take anything away from Berry Gordy, but part of his success is because a lot of the major record labels at the time in the 1950s and ’60s were not thinking about producing music that appealed to the whole of the country—to Blacks and whites.

This country is built on segregation. So, you have to ask yourself: Why would the white owners of European descent that own these record labels and these radio stations want to appeal to Black people? They weren’t thinking that far ahead.

I think some white Americans were perfectly happy with the (idea of), 'Y’all stay over there and we’re going to stay here. You’ll have your bathroom and your water fountain and your music and we’ve got ours.’

But wait a minute, all of your music—I mean music of white European descent—is founded upon the traditions of African diasporic Black music coming out of slave plantations, coming of spirituals and gospel music, and even more predominantly from the tradition of blues music and jazz.

Question: At some point, some Motown artists wanted to infuse their music with social messages commenting on issues of the day, like Edwin Star’s “War” or “Ball of Confusion” by The Temptations. What was happening at the time to inspire that?

O’Neal: I think music shifts, just like in production and recording techniques, it shifts with people’s desire and ability to experiment. That’s how you get a Motown in the first place.

But then Motown is going through these metamorphoses as society goes through changes as well. In the mid-1960s going into the ’70s, you have all of these social issues the country has been going through. You have the 1967 Detroit Riots. …

The Supremes (in front on stairs), Berry Gordy (center, in overcoat), the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland (right) and others outside the Hitsville Studio in 1965. (Photo: Library of Congress)

After the riots, a lot of those artists had a little wakeup call, if you will. Some of those artists, like Marvin Gaye, were saying, ‘We need to be singing about something else besides doo-wop.’ A lot of those artists began to realize they had a responsibility beyond making music for crossover appeal. I think some of them started thinking about: Is it more important to have hits, or is it more important to communicate something that needs to be communicated, regardless of how people receive it, because everybody’s emotions are their own.

Question: A lot of people talk about the “Motown Sound.” How would you describe it?

O’Neal: There is something about the backbeat, about the four on the floor beats—just a four/four, boom, boom, boom, boom that ends up transpiring in a song, because to this day a four-four (beat) is something that everybody can dance to, regardless of whether it’s at 90 BPMs or 140 BPMs. And there is the tambourine sound, which wasn’t on every song, but it was there.

The other thing is there was a simplicity of the sound with the bass and with the arrangements. There was a simplicity of the arrangements, but the melodies were very, very intricate. If you have this simple beat, it gets everybody feeling good and grooving.

What that does, it allows the melody and the harmonics—particularly the vocal melodies—to be very extravagant and to be very experimental.

Question: Motown had a golden period in the 1960s and 1970s and then went into a decline in the 1980s. What do you think were some of the factors that contributed to its decline?

O’Neal: Motown is closely associated with Detroit. And things really shifted in Detroit after the Detroit Riots. How could they not? Things just weren’t the same after that. …

The Temptations (in yellow), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (in red), Stevie Wonder (in gray), Martha and the Vandellas (in pink), the Supremes (in black) and others at the 1965 London, England, launch of the Tamla-Motown label. (Photo: Paul Nixon Collection)

With Gordy’s decision to relocate Motown to Los Angeles, it lost something. It lost that hometown feel. … While I can understand why he did it, with LA becoming the center of entertainment, I think Motown lost something.

Later on, Motown had competition, because the competition could base itself off of what Motown did. Also, the music was changing, moving into disco. Things changed.

Question: Is it possible to quantify Motown’s impact on modern music?

O’Neal: I think the impact is never really going to end. If people are willing to look at the music they are making, they have to pay homage to Motown.

Who is huge now? Taylor Swift? All of these K-pop bands that are just blowing up in Korea? It’s all Motown. They are not creating anything new. They’re adding their piece of the conversation into music history, but that’s Motown music. So, because it keeps being recycled and perpetuated, the quantification of Motown becomes almost impossible to (state), because it’s still going; it doesn’t stop.

Motown is intertwined in everything that goes on in this country, musically. Popular/commercial music is based upon that Motown-pop formula that was created there.

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Upon the 65th anniversary of the record label, ��ֱ�� Boulder prof says that from Taylor Swift to K-pop, ‘It’s all Motown; they are not creating anything new.’

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Luminaries celebrate a more diverse, welcoming campus

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 22:41:02 +0000

Luminaries celebrate a more diverse, welcoming campus Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/02/2024 - 15:41

Clint Talbott

Co-star of The Color Purple joins ��ֱ�� governor, ��ֱ�� president and chancellor, along with a cadre of artists, to celebrate the Center for African and African American Studies and Black History Month

Being Black on campus two decades ago was difficult, but the University of ��ֱ�� Boulder has worked to improve its culture, says Aba Arthur, who costarred in last year’s production of The Color Purple.

Arthur joined a half-dozen luminaries—including ��ֱ�� Gov. Jared Polis, ��ֱ�� President Todd Saliman, ��ֱ�� Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano and Boulder County NAACP President Annett James—to hail CAAAS Day, a ��ֱ�� event recognizing the university’s Center for African and African American Studies.

Because CAAAS Day falls on Feb. 1, the celebrants in the Glenn Miller Ballroom Thursday also marked the beginning of Black History Month.

��ֱ�� Boulder graduate Aba Arthur, who co-starred in The Color Purple and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was a featured speaker at Thursday's CAAAS Day celebration. (Casey Cass/��ֱ�� Boulder)

Arthur, who graduated in 2005 with a bachelor of fine arts in theatre and a minor in political science, took to the stage and reveled in the moment: “Wow, y’all, this is a moment. To walk up and see the words ‘Center for African and African American Studies,’ it’s amazing.”

She acknowledged all the work it took to create the center, noting that “every student wants to be respected and heard … their ancestry respected.”

Acknowledging the difficulties she faced at ��ֱ�� Boulder, she also praised the university, specifically mentioning Bud Coleman, professor of theatre and dance, who helped her get a comprehensive education. “I always credit ��ֱ�� and the Theatre Department for who I am today.”

CAAAS was officially launched on Feb. 1, 2023, and encompasses a research center, an arts program and student-service support. Reiland Rabaka, professor of African, African American and Caribbean Studies and the center’s founder and director, said the center was a “wild dream that we have worked long and hard to turn into a reality.”

He noted the university’s first Black graduates—Charles Durham Campbell in 1912 and Lucile Berkeley Buchanan in 1918—and added, “We are their wildest dreams.”

Tracing the 98-year history of Black History Month, Rabaka said, “Every month is Black History Month in the CAAAS.” He said he had always conceived of the center as a sanctuary, a place where people could come together in compassion to learn from the totality of Black experience.

“Here, we don’t have to make ourselves small. We can be who we are, Black and beautiful,” Rabaka said, crisply enunciating each syllable of “beautiful.”

Quoting Frederick Douglass, Rabaka noted that progress springs from agitation: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.”

Nonetheless, Rabaka praised the powerful people who came to celebrate the center. They returned the compliments.

Shawn O'Neal (left), a ��ֱ�� Boulder assistant teaching professor in Africana studies, and Reiland Rabaka, CAAAS founder and director, at the CAAAS Day celebration Thursday. (Casey Cass/��ֱ�� Boulder)

Polis, who issued the proclamation establishing Feb. 1, 2023, as CAAAS Day, said Coloradans need to strive for equality not just in February, but all year, adding that the center was integral to the effort. “It’s a key part of our work of building a ��ֱ�� for all. … We want to make sure that everyone has a place to succeed in our state.”

Introducing DiStefano, Rabaka called the chancellor a “brother” and “mentor.” DiStefano said the center is achieving its goals to be a place of connection and creative expression.

Saliman, the university president, characterized Rabaka as a force to be reckoned with. “I brag about the CAAAS everywhere I go. It is such an incredible symbol of what ��ֱ�� Boulder commits to.”

Saliman added that the university is not diverse enough but that the center is a key to correcting the imbalance. People need a place where they belong, he said, so that “they don’t just want to come here; they want to stay here.”

Underscoring the center’s focus on the arts, J. Benjamin Burney, a graduate student in interdisciplinary media art practices, performed a spoken word poem. Shawn O’Neal, an assistant teaching professor in Africana studies, and Kalonji Nzinga, assistant professor in the School of Education, performed rap music. Jarrett Rashad, a professional dancer, did a dance performance set to poetry.

Closing the festivities, Rabaka said, “We are fighting for freedom not just for Black people, but for all people. Our destinies are intertwined. … Another way and another world is possible, but only if we work for it.”

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Co-star of The Color Purple joins ��ֱ�� governor, ��ֱ�� president and chancellor, along with a cadre of artists, to celebrate the Center for African and African American Studies and Black History Month.

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Hearing music, finding connection in many rhythms of life

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:19:59 +0000

Hearing music, finding connection in many rhythms of life Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/31/2024 - 12:19

Reiland Rabaka, a ��ֱ�� Boulder professor of ethnic studies, joins The Ampersand to discuss art, activism, the importance of building community and how his first-grade teacher introduced him to W.E.B. Du Bois and changed his life

Listen to The Ampersand

Would there be a Reiland Rabaka without music?

Maybe, but certainly one who is less joyful, less connected, less attuned to the ebbing and flowing of the world and the universe around him.

Of the multitudes he contains, music is his great love, the place he comes home to, the cadence of beating hearts and clapping hands and walking feet.

But musician is just one thing about him. Intellectual, activist, artist, writer and someone almost impossible to stump in a game of “Name the Back-Up Band.”

As a University of ��ֱ�� Boulder professor of ethnic studies and inaugural director of the Center for African and African American Studies, Rabaka exists at the junction of multiple disciplines, identities and interests—the epitome of “ANDing.”

Reiland Rabaka is a University of ��ֱ�� Boulder professor of ethnic studies and inaugural director of the Center for African and African American Studies. Photo by Kylie Clarke.

He recently joined host Erika Randall, associate dean for student success in the College of Arts and Sciences, on "The Ampersand,” the college’s podcast. Randall—who is a dancer, professor, mother, filmmaker and writer—joins guests in exploring stories about “ANDing” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

Their discussion started at church and roamed broadly from there.

Rabaka: My first love is gospel music. So, I grew up as a youth minister of music. My mother is actually a theologian, so my mother is the minister, you know. Everybody kind of knows I'm a PK, which means a preacher's kid. I think they just assume that it's my pops, but it's actually my mom. So, that shapes not only your spirituality, but also a gender consciousness because of the way that women are treated in the church, the way that women are erased. And so, my first love remains Mahalia Jackson, Albertina Walker, Shirley Caesar, Clara Ward. These are the kinds of folks my mother and my grandmother were listening to. James Cleveland, Thomas Dorsey, I could do this all day.

Randall: But to get this litany out…

Rabaka: It's really important to roll-call that. I think that probably unlike a lot of other, you know, African-American musicians, my first musical love was, and remains, gospel music. Every day before I listen to anything secular, I listen to a gospel album. After my prayers and my meditation, I start with the music. So, African-American sacred song is my foundation.

I will be keynoting the National Spirituals Conference this month at the University of Denver, and they know that I have a love affair with, first and foremost, the spiritual. So, what they used to call Negro Spirituals, this is the music, the soundtrack of our enslavement. These are songs of not simply heavenly salvation, but earthly liberation.

For me, there's always been a connection, at least from the African-American church I come out of, there's always been a connection between the social gospel and social justice. There's no way we can talk about spirituality that is removed from the material, the actual physical world that we live in. And so, after gospel, Erika, I grew up so poor that as strict as my mother was, she allowed me to play jazz because when I was nine years old, I got my first $100 bill for playing a jazz gig. I thought it was monopoly money, I didn't know it was real money.

Randall: You hadn't seen $100.

Rabaka: Yeah. And I gave it to my mother. She hugged me. She held me. It was a bittersweet moment because when I look back, and just to be real with you, that's also probably the day my childhood ended. You can't just be a little kid when you’re fixing to help your mama make rent from now on. So, as long as you didn't miss Wednesday night prayer meeting, choir rehearsal and church on Sunday, then you can go and swing.

And I was part of a generation, what they were calling it, was a jazz renaissance going on. You know, with folks like Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, who I went to high school with, by the way, Roy Hargrove. Growing up in Texas…

Randall: Yeah, Texas and jazz. How did that connect?

Rabaka: Well, you know, part of my family being Creole folk from next door in Louisiana, so going back and forth to the jazz and heritage festival. In Texas, hearing gospel, hearing blues just as much as I'm hearing jazz and R&B and funk and soul and hip-hop. And let's not forget the Caribbean-influenced reggae music.

Randall: That was in your house or that was in your head and heart?

Rabaka: That was in my head and heart more. I think that being a kid from the projects and going to all art conservatory schools—I didn't go to regular school, so I never went to a school with a football team or a basketball team or something like that. I went to all art schools and at the time, they would allow one African-American per grade. I literally spent the bulk of my youth training to be a musician. And the way that they trained me, Erika, you've got to be able to play everything.

So, I played klezmer. I played polka. I played country and western. I played Tejano. I played bar mitzvahs. On top of all of the jazz and the gospel and the blues and the soul and the funk, baby, the funk, baby, oh, the funk. You know? For me, it's that versatility, I think that's actually what allowed me to go from the projects to the professor where I'm at.

Randall: That versatility of thinking.

Rabaka: It opens you up.

Randall: Right.

Rabaka: Here's the thing, and I really, really want to stress this and I think maybe this is why somebody like me is able to be on the faculty at the University of ��ֱ�� for nearly 20 years. In the schools that I went to, especially by the time I get to junior high school and high school, there's this weird inversion of the junior high school and high school experience.

So, your popularity isn't based on what kind of car your parents drive or how much money they have in the bank account or how big your house is. It's based on your talent. It's based on your gift.

Guess who was the most popular? I said papa-la.

Reiland Rabaka has researched and written extensively about the confluences of music, civil rights, feminism, art and liberation.

Randall: Boom. Boom.

Rabaka: Kid is cool. I went to high school with Erykah Badu. I graduated from the same high school as Norah Jones.

Randall: Norah Jones went to Interlochen, which was my—that's my home.

Rabaka: You see what I'm saying?

Randall: I feel you.

Rabaka: I went to the same high school as Edie Brickell.

Randall: What?

Rabaka: You see what I'm saying?

Randall: I know. So, there was a lineage. There was an expectation or just a mentoring or it was a pressure in that world if you're coming through, or were you the pressure? Because you came through and set the stage.

Rabaka: When your family's depending on you to eat…I think for a lot of the other kids, this was a hobby. But for me, this was the way that I was going to literally swing myself from the projects into an arts conservatory university, an arts conservatory college, so on and so forth. Got accepted to Cal Arts. Got accepted to most of the… I mean, I don't know what school I did not get accepted to.

Randall: And at the end of the day, because you had all these capacities, did you feel like the pressure is on me to get a job in music or now I've got these opportunities, I need to shift to something more stable, air quotes?

Rabaka: If I can be honest with you, I think because I'm first generation, I think folks were just happy I was going. I did get some of the, "You sure you shouldn't be a business major?"

Randall: Was that mom, or was mom always in your corner?

Rabaka: No, it was more my grandmother. My mother's, in some ways, spiritually speaking, a very free spirit, interfaith, open to a lot of things. And to be honest with you, I'm probably the daughter my mother never had. I'm my mother's middle son. I have an older brother and a younger brother, shout out to Robert and Randy, those are their names.

Randall: The three R's.

Rabaka: Yeah. And they got the more conventional… I mean, both of them are named after their fathers. And my mother just went left field, you know? So, I can rock and roll.

Randall: That's why you're always going left.

Rabaka: You know what I'm saying? Because I'm left-handed and when I found out Jimi Hendrix was left-handed and Barack Obama was left-handed and W.E.B. Du Bois was left-handed.

Reiland Rabaka recently joined host Erika Randall in a wide-ranging conversation for "The Ampersand" podcast. Photo by Kylie Clarke.

Randall: OK. Bookmark on Du Bois. So, we're going to go back to Texas one more time and I want to talk about Mrs. Robinson. Because if you're going to say Du Bois, she was the first person to say that name to you. Can you tell me the story in a way you've never told the story before so you can hear it? Because it's a good story.

Rabaka: You know, I think that being precocious and really, when you when you grow up in the church like I did and you start playing, I mean, I was so young they sat me on phone books. So, in the African-American church, they actually cultivate, quote unquote, giftedness, talented-ness, I'm making up words for you.

Randall: We like that here.

Rabaka: And it's one of those things where there's a unique culture within the African-American church of, they say in terms of our gifts and our talents, and you can see this is what works for me as a as a professor. In African-American church culture, it's the cultivation, it's the nurturing of everybody is gifted. See? God don't play favorites.

But if you don't use it, you lose it if you don't consciously develop it. So, all those hours I'm sitting there practicing, when the other kids had video games. You know, I used to feel tight because they could play Sega and Atari and all the cool games. We didn't have that.

Randall: Commodore 64.

Rabaka: You see? So, we didn't have all of that kind of stuff. I wasn't able to see Jordan do all of those crazy… because the TV wasn't on most of the time. I mean, even if you have a TV, it's got the little antenna, you know, with the clothes hanging off it with the foil on the back of it and everything. But if you don't have your electricity on, if you don't have running water, so on and so forth. I think that a lot of the time where I felt tight, I felt maybe a little economically traumatized, humiliated, demoralized, I was in that practice room.

I was knuckling and brawling, attempting to evolve myself. And the reality of the matter is, I had a multiracial, multicultural group of teachers that nurtured this talent. So, on the one hand, the foundation is the African-American church. However, the church sends us out into the world. As you know, one of my favorite spirituals is called “Go and See the World.” And this is something my grandmother will sing to me, often, she sings it often.

Randall: She's still here to sing to you?

Rabaka: My grandmother—I'm sorry, this makes me emotional—my grandmother turns 96 tomorrow. And my grandmother is one of the great loves of my life. And the others, of course, being my other grandmother and my mama. My grandmother, I think you can do the math, if I'm from Texas, my grandmother's 96, Juneteenth was issued 158 years ago.

My grandmother's grandmother was enslaved. So, it's not a coincidence that I would come out an African-American studies professor, that I speak with love-laced words, that I'm trying to bring some level of human understanding to what's going on. Even the rapport, the bond that we have, that culture, Erika, taught me to also check for your life and your struggles. So, it's not just about me, it’s about you and we.

Randall: That's when you say “ubuntu” [a Zulu word roughly translated to “humanity toward others” or “I am, because you are] in your signature.

Rabaka: There you go. So, I am because we are. And how can you and I rescue and reclaim our humanity together? Instead of avoiding my Africanity, the fact that I’m African-American, what happens if we put that front and center and do it in a way that’s not antagonistic to you? And I acknowledge as I just spoke to you, asking about your mother, asking about your son, and so on. The humanity, the shared humanity that we have, for me, that’s what it means to come out of Texas. I mean, this is the state that Juneteenth is all about.

This is the state where I grew up with nine HB��ֱ��s that I could throw a rock out of my grandmother’s yard and break a window, and I didn’t do that, but this is how close the HB��ֱ�� is. I grew up seeing African-American youth with books and dress smart and the richness of that, and also the fact that I didn’t grow up in an all-black neighborhood. I grew up surrounded by Mexican-Americans. I grew up surrounded by Asian-Americans, some Indigenous folks. Because again, you got New Mexico on one side, Oklahoma, Arkansas. I could just go on and on.

Randall: What corner were you?

Rabaka: Dallas.

Randall: Dallas. OK.

Rabaka: But let me answer about Mrs. Robinson, my first-grade teacher. I was, again, young and precocious, a ball of energy. My mother would always say, “Whatever you give the other kids, you need to give him three times as much.” Mrs. Robinson knew that she could speed-dial my mother. In fact, all she needed to say was, “Don’t make me call your mother” and I would back down.

So, it’s Black History Month, Mrs. Robinson has these little placards, larger than a postcard size, of different Black History Month figures. So, you know, Ella Fitzgerald was on one, let’s see, Billie Holiday, you name it. Jesse Owens, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes…

Randall: Jackie Robinson.

Rabaka: You see what I’m saying?

Randall: Yeah. Yeah.

Rabaka: I thought I should get Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday or Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, I could just do this all day long. And I sit up here, I thought at that time, this is my little first-grade mind so just bear with me, I got a Frenchman Du Bois.

Randall: Du Bois.

Introduced to W.E.B. Du Bois by his first-grade teacher, Reiland Rabaka has subsequently researched and written extensively about him.

Rabaka: Right? Because again, I got some Creole folk right on the other side. And I stormed up to Mrs. Robinson’s desk, you know how kids can be, and I can’t believe it, it’s Black History Month, everybody else got Black people and I got a white man, I got a French man named Du Bois, and everything. And she gave me a good talking-to that changed my life.

And this is the power of teachers. She said, “Reiland, if you spent as much time actually reading as you do sitting up here trying to criticize my teaching and what I’m doing, if you don’t go sit down, I’m going to call your mama, boy.” You know? So, I ran back to my desk, sat down, read the card and everything.

I still had my lips stuck out, but I read the card or whatever. And the more I read, the more fascinated, the more intrigued… It actually said that Du Bois went to an HB��ֱ��, Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee.

So again, my grandmother lives within walking distance of an HB��ֱ��. I’m thinking, “Wow, wait, what’s going on?” Then I come to find out that this person had achieved two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees and the equivalent of two PhDs. One of them, he studied at the University of Berlin.

The fact that he was well-traveled, well-read. When I saw photos of him, he was well-dressed. And then there was a connect from the preachers that I’m seeing in the African-American church to the jazz musicians, Miles Davis got, what, GQ Man of the Year was it 10 times in a row? At least seven times in a row. I mean, this guy was clean.

Randall: Yes.

Rabaka: And so for me, learning about Du Bois and the fact that he connected his intellectual pursuits with his social justice pursuits. You know, he founded sociology in the United States of America, he also founded the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, February the 12^th, 1909. Mrs. Robinson walked me into the library, and she just said, “Hey, if you really want to read something, here's some of his books.” Of course, I couldn't make them through it at the first grade, so once they got the children's-level book about Du Bois’ life, I think I kept that checked out.

Randall: It just said stamp, Reiland.

Rabaka: You know what I'm saying?

Randall: Stamp, Reiland.

Rabaka: And it changed my life, to be perfectly honest with you. So not only was he an intellectual, not only was he an activist with the NAACP work,I find out that he wrote five novels.

Randall: The novels he wrote blew my mind. You introduced that to me. That was a gift from you.

Rabaka: Isn't that incredible?

Randall: Yeah, and in the novels, he's also bringing his story forward.

Rabaka: Historical fiction, sociological fiction. I didn't even know such genres existed.

Randall: And it feels like they really were born of the Black experience.

Rabaka: Absolutely. It’s what we would call Afro Modernism. And I think this would explain my preoccupation with the Harlem Renaissance, and in fact, many people say that Du Bois’1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk was a precursor to what happened 15 years later with the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.

Randall: And when you talk about him being a proto-interdisciplinarian, proto-intersectionalist, and on this podcast, a proto-ANDer, because he is making it up, making it up and transforming through that need not to categorize.

Rabaka: For me, Du Bois is a model, an incessant model because Du Bois was able to be a social scientist, an intellectual, an artist, five novels, nine volumes of poetry, three dozen short stories, two dozen plays, I could go on and on and on, and an activist. So, for me, I mean, maybe those labels fit what I'm up to best—intellectual, artist, activist—maybe those three things, I'm kind of cool with. But I don't want people to silo me off into only one of those.

And I think, Erika, has academia forced folks like you and I to reduce ourselves in order to fit into these little tenure schemes?

Randall: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that is one of the things where this notion of pushing the idea of we are more than just the category we got hired in has felt so critical to me. We have been stuck into a frame.

Rabaka: And they forced you to in order to achieve tenure. Now, the second some folks achieve tenure, they explode.

Randall: Yeah, and then you can kick back. And you're like, “I've always been into this. I was always doing this trouble.” Did you feel a freedom, or did you come in with it?

Rabaka: You know what, I think I'm not a good example, just because African-American studies is always left of field in the American Academy because of how Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal the American Academy can be. So, my field has always been transdisciplinary. By that I mean I'm in a field, I'm in a discipline that transcends and transgresses the borders and boundaries, the very artificial and arbitrary borders and boundaries of academic disciplines.

What if African-American studies is more about the community than it is the campus? What if African-American studies is actually about me literally being a bridge from the community to the campus, from the campus to the community?

Click the button below to hear the entire episode.

Listen to The Ampersand

Photos at the top of the page by Kylie Clarke.

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Soul sisters, funksters and Afro-disco divas: the heroes of an unsung movement

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:02:40 +0000

Soul sisters, funksters and Afro-disco divas: the heroes of an unsung movement Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/15/2023 - 17:02

Maxwell Garby

In his new book lecture Tuesday, ��ֱ�� Boulder researcher Reiland Rabaka focuses on the relationship between the Black Women’s Liberation Movement and its music, heralding pioneers like Aretha Franklin

The beats may have been for dancing and the fashion may have been impeccable, but the soul, funk and disco music that soundtracked the Black Women’s Liberation Movement also had a message—a profound one that has given voice to women whom history often places in the shadows of the movement’s men.

And while there has been research on the political and literary feminism that has come from the Black Women’s Liberation Movement, scant research has been done on the music related to the core elements of the movement.

In his new book, Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas, Reiland Rabaka, a University of ��ֱ�� Boulder professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for African and African American Studies, seeks to “develop an intersectional musicology: a form of music history, theory, cultural study and criticism that is attentive to the ways race, gender, sexism and class struggles influence the composition, performance, distribution and reception of music,” he explained at a lecture Tuesday.

��ֱ�� Boulder researcher Reiland Rabaka highlights the music of the Black Women's Liberation Movement in his newly published book.

Rabaka said it’s important to move away from the “male-centered interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. It's important to focus on the lives of women, queer and trans people in the Civil Rights Movement as well.”

However, he stressed that it still is important to “learn about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and Stokely Carmichael,” but that there should be a “both/and” narrative instead of “either/or.”

“African American women ended up in the unpleasant position of having to choose between supporting the Black Power Movement—which was now largely defined and dominated by Black men—or supporting the Women's Liberation Movement, which had increasingly come to be defined and dominated by white women,” he said.

“Consequently, a contingent of Black women ultimately decided to create their own, distinct movement that combined the struggle for racial justice with the struggle for gender justice. Many Black women were participants in the aforementioned widely recognized movements as well as their own often unrecognized movement: the Black Women's Liberation Movement.”

He added that it’s important to place Black political feminism in context “because sometimes people think sisters are just talking and not writing and reading and leading on a deeper level. It's important to understand how we would engage songs and albums as sites and sources of epistemology of knowledge.”

In the 1970s, Black musician feminists gave voice to a liberated Black femininity that freed itself from dominant expectations of musical, lyrical and physical practices for Black women, Rabaka said. Through these Black musical feminists’ daring vision of Black womanhood, they explored new possibilities of sound, expression and representation.

“Just as many soul sisters, Black feminist funksters and disco divas’ music has been routinely overlooked in the histories of soul, funk, disco and women's music, so has the link between their music and the Black Women's Liberation Movement to which it directly corresponded and provided a soundtrack for,” he said.

Artists such as Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Donna Summer played a profound role in the Black Women's Liberation Movement, as highlighted in Reiland Rabaka's recent book.

Artists such as Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Donna Summer “challenged long-standing structures and practices of race, gender and class power which traditionally denied Black women access, mobility and freedom,” Rabaka added.

The Queen of Soul gets political

Rabaka cited Aretha Franklin as an example of this musical and political shift. Although she was primarily known for her soul and love songs, Franklin's music took on an increasingly political tone in the 1960s and 1970s, he said.

“Among the soul sisters who challenged male domination and served as mouthpieces for the broadly conceived Black Women's Liberation Movement, she stands out and deserves special attention,” Rabaka said.

“Franklin's pioneering protest music went above and beyond the other mostly male architects of soul music when we consider that her songs became anthems for the Black Women's Liberation Movement as well as the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement.”

The women of funk also gave voice to the shifting political and social climate. Rabaka cited Chaka Khan and Betty Davis in particular, noting they were “innovators within that musical genre who embraced and expanded the funk aesthetic on their own terms and used it to articulate alternatives to musical, racial, gender, sexual and social conventions. Funk has always been more than the music of men like James Brown, Sly Stone and George Clinton.”

Disco, too, gave rise to Afro-disco divas who embodied and gave voice to Black women’s liberation. “The marginalized social statuses of many disco artists and fans contributed to the emergence of a new dynamic on the dance floor,” Rabaka said.

“Disco is a music and culture that frequently centered 1970s social outcasts and allowed them to socialize on their own terms and in their own non-normative ways. It is rife with references to, commentary on and ample critiques of issues revolving around race, gender, class and sexuality, among others.”

He said there is no way to tell the story of disco without highlighting Afro-disco divas, “as their music served as a soundtrack for all those who had grown disillusioned with mainstream American politics, inflation, recession, race relations, patriarchy and heterosexism, among other issues in the mid to late 1970s.”

Rabaka said a passage from Black political feminist Assata Shakur’s autobiography embodied the music and ethos of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Top image: Chaka Khan (photo: Chicago Sun-Times); Aretha Franklin (photo: Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times); Donna Summer (photo: Michael Ochs archives/Getty Images)

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��ֱ�� Boulder race scholar reframes Du Bois’ scholarly legacy

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:05:00 +0000

��ֱ�� Boulder race scholar reframes Du Bois’ scholarly legacy Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/27/2021 - 18:05

Cay Leytham-Powell

New Book on W.E.B Du Bois explores the contribution the scholar had on the origins and evolution of intersectionality

W.E.B. Du Bois is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era—and yet, most of his legacy has been confined to his scholarly work within racial studies. A new book from a ��ֱ�� Boulder professor, though, challenges that narrative, instead reframing Du Bois as a foundational figure in an important modern topic: intersectionality.

Intersectionality is the study of how social groupings like gender, race and class intersect and overlap, especially as they pertain to systems of oppression. This new book, Du Bois: A Critical Introduction, examines William Edward Burghardt (or W.E.B.) Du Bois’ life and legacy and argues that, while not fully formed and a bit disjointed, Du Bois’ work was undeniably foundational for this contemporary concept.

At the top of the page: Civil Rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois (Library of Congress/Flickr). Above: Reiland Rabaka, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the founding director of the Center for African & African American Studies, is the author of Du Bois: A Critical Introduction.

“When taken together and ample attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism and sexism and capitalism and colonialism, Du Bois’ corpus registers as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of what scholars currently call intersectionality,” said Reiland Rabaka, the book’s author.

Rabaka is professor of African, African American and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the founding director of the Center for African & African American Studies at ��ֱ�� Boulder. He is also a research fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Rabaka has published 16 books and more than 75 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, including most recently The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (Routledge, 2020).

We recently asked Rabaka a few questions about his new book:

Question: The summary for your book mentions that you look at Du Bois’ multidimensional legacy. How would you describe that legacy for the everyday reader?

Answer: W.E.B. Du Bois was born in 1868 and died in 1963. In essence, his life was bookended by the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. In the period between the aftermath of the Civil War known as the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) and the Civil Rights Movement years (1954-1968), Du Bois altered American history, politics and society by aligning himself with many of the most cutting-edge and controversial causes of his epoch.

Over time Du Bois shifted his political position from social reform to social revolution and desperately searched for bottom-up solutions to social and political problems. In this regard, his intellectual and political evolution holds many lessons we could learn from and use today in our efforts to make sense of our epoch: from the contentious centrality of race, gender and class in U.S. politics to popular revolutions across the Global South (i.e., formerly colonized or “Third World” countries) to recent worker uprisings in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Du Bois began his career a dedicated elitist but, after many missteps, evolved into a committed radical democratic socialist by his later years. He came to understand the carnage of world wars, race riots, lynchings, racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of women, colonialism and imperialism as serious indictments of the triumphalist narratives of spreading democracy that Europe and the United States have propagated for centuries. It was Du Bois’ search for solutions to the problems of racism, sexism, colonialism and capitalism that forced him to gradually move beyond reformism and embrace radicalism, and eventually revolution.

Ultimately, Du Bois’ legacy is his incredible evolution from bourgeois social scientist to revolutionary internationalist. His legacy is also bound up in what his trajectory teaches us about oppressed peoples’ awesome ability to transcend and try new things when deeply committed to transforming themselves and the world.

Q: Why do you think it's important to study Du Bois?

It is important to study Du Bois’ life and work because when it is objectively engaged and fully understood, it provides us with a framework for not only identifying problems but developing viable solutions to them."

A: It is important to study Du Bois’ life and work because when it is objectively engaged and fully understood, it provides us with a framework for not only identifying problems but developing viable solutions to them. Whether we turn to the resurgence of global racism and xenophobia, misogyny and gender injustice, the neocolonial conditions of the wretched of the earth and the Global South, the constantly changing character of capitalism and the misinterpretation of Marxism, or the seemingly never-ending imperialist wars, W.E.B. Du Bois’ discourse offers us both extraordinary insights and cautionary tales.

To access the lessons Du Bois’ legacy may teach us we must ask a set of crucial questions: Why is it imperative for us to know who Du Bois was and what he contributed to contemporary thought? Even more, and methodologically speaking, why is it important to not only know what but how, in his own innovative intellectual history-making manner, Du Bois contributed what he contributed to contemporary thought?

The real answers to these questions do not lay so much in who Du Bois was, but more in the intellectual and political legacy he left behind. Which is to say, the answers lie in the lasting contributions his discourse has historically made and is currently making to our critical comprehension of the ways the social inequalities and injustices of the 19th and 20th centuries have informed and morphed into the social inequalities and injustices of the 21st century.

Q: What got you personally interested in studying Du Bois? Was there something that instigated your interest?

A: I was in junior high school the first time I read, or rather attempted to read, the weighted words of W.E.B. Du Bois. The book was, of course, The Souls of Black Folk. I will never, ever, forget it. It was the cover of the book that drew me to it, that soulfully summoned me in a special, almost alchemic way.

Du Bois: A Critical Introduction focuses on the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois.

I feel sort of embarrassed saying it, but The Souls of Black Folk is the first book with a Black person on the cover that my 12-year-old eyes had ever seen. Sure, my mother read me fiction and poetry by Black writers growing up, and she certainly encouraged me to read books by Black authors, but their pictures weren’t on the covers of their books.

Something happened to me when I saw Du Bois and, as I felt back then and still feel now, he saw me. I stared at him and studied that determined look on his face and the fire in his eyes, and he stared back at me, I imagined, with wild wonder. We went on like this for what seemed like a lifetime, and then at last I opened the book. Along with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Assata: An Autobiography, all of which I read the summer before I began high school, The Souls of Black Folk is a touchstone in my life and has traveled with me from adolescence to adulthood.

Growing up in a poor and extremely poverty-stricken family, and being the son of a Southern Baptist minister, I was immediately taken by the candid discussion of racism and Black spirituality in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois, it seemed to me, was writing about my life just as much as he was writing about his, and he did so in such an extremely eloquent and lyrical manner that I found myself in his words. I too lived behind “the Veil,” and pondered the world beyond it. I was all too familiar with that omnipresent question, which liberal and well-meaning White folk always seemed to ask more with their actions than their words: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Certainly, my life stands as a testament to the fact that Black people at the dawn of the 21st century are still approached more as problems than as persons—that is, human beings with rights to be respected and protected. From my point of view, The Souls of Black Folk is an early articulation of, and clear contribution to, the ideals and ethos of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

When and where I read Du Bois’ blistering criticisms of racial domination and discrimination in The Souls of Black Folk, I found myself thinking, even in junior high, that finally I had found someone who not only lived through the horror and harrowing experience of what it means to be Black in an utterly anti-Black world, but who unequivocally advocated anti-racist resistance in thought and action. He articulated, what appeared to me at 12 or 13 years of age, some special secret truth to which only he and I were privy.

I did not know it then, but what Du Bois shared with me in that initial encounter, in those tattered and repeatedly read pages of The Souls of Black Folk, would alter my intellectual and political life forever.

New Book on W.E.B Du Bois explores the contribution the scholar had on the origins and evolution of intersectionality.

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Center for African & African American Studies

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Soul sisters, funksters and Afro-disco divas: the heroes of an unsung movement

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����ֱ�� Boulder race scholar reframes Du Bois’ scholarly legacy

Question: The summary for your book mentions that you look at Du Bois’ multidimensional legacy. How would you describe that legacy for the everyday reader?

Q: Why do you think it's important to study Du Bois?

Q: What got you personally interested in studying Du Bois? Was there something that instigated your interest?

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��ֱ�� Boulder race scholar reframes Du Bois’ scholarly legacy