Nostalgia and reality: Black and Jewish relationships and beyond program set for Thursday
We thank Ira Grupper, a veteran civil rights and labor leader from Louisville, for sending us this. He will be a panelist for the Zoom program.
About this Event
Judaism on Our Own Terms (JOOOT), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), and Jewish Currents present “Nostalgia & Reality: Black & Jewish Relationships in the 1960s and Beyond.”
In this event, we hope to examine relationships among Black and Jewish activists in the Civil Rights Movement, combining insights from the academic world with conversation between two veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Many of us in the Jewish community grew up hearing idealized stories about Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement -- how do these stories compare to a more complicated reality? We hope to examine many less well-known aspects of this history -- including points of solidarity and tension, how these relationships evolved after the 1960s, and contributions of Black Jewish activists. We also hope to understand how these histories resonate with racial justice activism today.
The panel will take place on Thursday, May 6, 7:30-9:00 PM EDT on Zoom. Closed captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided. Tickets are donation optional (we greatly appreciate all levels of donation -- even a few dollars will help us defray costs of Zoom licensing, speaker honoraria, and accessibility needs!)
The speakers are as follows:
Prof. Lewis Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. Prof. Gordon previously taught at Brown University, where he founded the Department of Africana Studies, and Temple University, where he was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. He is the author of many books, most recently Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization, as well as the forthcoming On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race and Fear of Black Consciousness.
Prof. Cheryl Greenberg is the Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity College. In addition to a number of articles and anthology chapters on whiteness, racism, Jews and race, and relationships between African Americans and Jewish Americans, she has written three books, 'Or Does It Explode?' Black Harlem in the Great Depression;Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century; and To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression. She also edited the books A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC and, with SNCC worker Joe Bateman, ‘A Day I Ain’t Never Seen Before’: Marks, Mississippi and the Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press.
Courtland Cox served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the historic March on Washington and helped organize the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Mr. Cox was one of the organizers of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), established in 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama, which only had four registered African American voters despite being 80% Black. The LFCO’s work enabled Black residents to take control of the local government within four years. In the 1970s, Mr. Cox served as Secretary General of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania, as well as on the Board of TransAfrica, which advocated for the end of South African apartheid. In more recent decades, Mr. Cox has served in a variety of local and federal government positions, including being appointed by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce. He currently serves as board chair of the SNCC Legacy Project.
Ira Grupper is a veteran of the civil rights movement in Georgia and Mississippi, and former staffer with SNCC, among other groups. His distinguished 1960s jail record spans both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In addition to later decades of labor union organizing and disability rights advocacy, Mr. Grupper served from 1989-1993 as the National Co-Chair of the New Jewish Agenda, which had fifty chapters in the US and Canada and campaigned for a broad range of progressive issues. More recently, Mr. Grupper served as a Commissioner of the Louisville Metro Human Relations Commission, and received the Louisville Mayor's Lifetime Achievement Award. A retired factory worker, and adjunct faculty member at Bellarmine University, he currently serves on the Greater Louisville Central Labor Council, the KY Alliance against Racist & Political Repression, is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. He speaks to high school classes on the Civil Rights Movement.
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