News

Black Culinary Traditions and Food Justice at Marion Thompson Wright Series
By Carrie Stetler
Feb 22, 2023

At the 43rd Annual Marion Thompson Wright lecture series last week, scholars and activists from Rutgers-Newark and beyond convened to explore links between the food justice movement, which seeks to make nourishment accessible to all, and the cultural legacy of Black culinary traditions.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Senator Cory Booker also addressed the crowd of more than 600 in-person and online viewers, with Booker taping a video message for the series, which was titled , “Greens, Tomatoes: Food Accessibility and Justice in the Black Diaspora.”

Jack Tchen, professor of history and director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, which sponsors the series, opened by describing the abundant wildlife in northern New Jersey before it was colonized and the Leni Lenape were driven away, including oyster beds with shellfish that measured 18 inches.

“It was one of the most biodiverse areas anywhere in the world,’’ he said, drawing a connection between environmental destruction and food scarcity in cities like Newark.

“What does it have to do with what we’re talking about today?” he asked. “Everything. We’re talking about food justice and the simplicity of  food, what happens at the kitchen table…We have enough food to share, why is it not accessible to everyone?”

He added, “There are other questions that aren’t about justice but deliciousness, and what traditions does that come from?”

Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor also emphasized that what we eat, and how we get our food, is a global issue that’s also deeply personal.

“Our discussions today will persistently remind us that food – culture, sovereignty, accessibility, sustainability – is a matter of collective action, an “emancipatory discourse”, as the scholar Bobby Smith frames it,’’ Cantor said. “It is also a matter of personal significance that in many ways, some subtle and some obvious, define our own individual stories and identities, framed against the background of a globalized food system.’’

The featured speakers, all well-known authorities on food traditions of the African diaspora, stressed that the creative genius of Black culinary history is a defining feature of America, especially in the case of New Orleans cuisine, which has been shaped by Black chefs. 

“For more than two centuries, they’ve said the food in New Orleans is the singular achievement of American culinary accomplishment… Africans are largely responsible,’’ said author Lolis Eric Elie, a New Orleans writer and food critic, author of “Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country” and “Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans.”

Legendary culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, author of New York Times bestseller “High on the Hog,” the basis for the acclaimed Netflix series, discussed the connections between African and Carribean food traditions and the recipes of African Americans. She noted that deep frying in oil and recipes made with codfish, okra and red and black beans have their origins in Africa but are common ingredients for Black people everywhere.

Edda L. Fields-Black, a specialist in the trans-national history of African rice farmers and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia low country during the antebellum period, talked about the farming and cultivation techniques that enslaved people brought with them from Africa. These  became the foundation for the lucrative industry of southern rice production, even as so many perished from illness, starvation and abuse, she said.

Psyche Williams-Forson, author of” Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America” and “Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power,” urged an end to stigmatizing Black people and their diets under the guise of wellness and medical advice.

“Food is not killing Black people. Systems are killing Black people, systemic racism. People don’t have houses, don’t have land. Grocery stores aren’t a panacea, but in this day and age, if you don’t have that, that makes it harder,’’ she said.

“It’s not our kitchens that are unhealthy but our souls are weary and tired,’’ she said.

She closed her talk with a piece of advice:  “When you are inclined to worry about us, ask us first what we want, what we know, who we are. Otherwise, you should worry about yourself.’’

At the event, onstage speakers and audience members alike were invited to share a memory about food. 

Baraka told the crowd that his mother, Amina Baraka, made Hoppin’ John, a recipe of rice and black-eyed peas, every New Year’s Day, a tradition among many Black families in the U.S. “Our culture, while it’s deeply African, is incredibly American,’’ he said.

He explained that food scarcity in cities was the result of a long history of policies in America that are intertwined with redlining. 

“When we think of redlining, we always think of housing and property but it also had a lot to do with our access to healthcare, the building of medical centers and the building of supermarkets. They purposely built them further away from our communities, deliberately and intentionally as policy. This is not just accidental or because people want to eat bad,’’ he said

Last year, the mayor announced the creation of the Nourishing Newark Community Grants Program, which provides millions of dollars to community based organizations to combat hunger and food insecurity, an effort that was praised by Cantor.

She also recognized Booker as lead sponsor of  the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which addresses longstanding federal discrimination that caused Black farmers to lose millions of acres of farmland and robbed them and their families of the inter-generational wealth that land represented.

Several speakers at the event paid homage to the late Clement A. Price, a Rutgers-Newark historian and one of the founders of the Marion Thompson Wright lecture series.

As a first-year at Rutgers-Newark, Lacey Hunter, interim associate director of the Price Institute, was in one of his classes.

“He had a unique way of wrestling with questions of the past as if they were still important to our moment,’’ she said. 

Hunter  recalled a lesson learned from Price and how it guides her own work as a professor. 

“Black history is made and lived through our every day lives, in ways that produce culture and community,’’ she said.

Jacqueline Mattis, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, said efforts to reduce food insecurity in the city and on campus, were emblematic of Rutgers-Newark’s mission.

“An education should be responsive to, and responsible for, the space that we are living in,’’ said Mattis. “How do we shift the everyday work of classes and the way what we think about the life of the mind so that students are engaged in meaningful ways in solving real problems?’’

“It means solving problems around food injustice,’’ she said. “We can do that and we are doing that.’’

Several state and national historians and activists were honored at MTW. They include 

Jazmin Puicon, Assistant Director of History/Teacher of Social Studies; Bard HS Early College, Newark, and the Ocean County Historical Society.

The recipients of the Green School Award were Philip's Academy Charter School and Avon Avenue School.

There were also special tributes to Chef Leah Chase, author, chef, TV personality, and co-owner of the historic Dooky Chase Restaurant in New Orleans and Rudy Lombard, New Orleans Civil Rights activist and author of "Creole Feast: Fifteen Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets.’’

Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, Celebrating 42 Years, Remains True to Mission
By Carrie Stetler
Feb 9, 2022

It’s an annual event that’s both “Newark’s greatest civic ritual,’’ as historian Clement R. Price once pronounced, and one of the nation’s most enduring scholarly conferences.

For more than 40 years, the Marion Thompson Wright (MTW) Lecture Series has convened some of America’s greatest public intellectuals and historians —in addition to actresses, artists and jazz musicians — to explore Black history and culture.

The results have been as thoughtful and uncompromising as they are accessible. And that’s exactly what its co-founders Price, Giles Wright, and the MTW Study Club had in mind when they began the series in 1981. “The lectures speak with complexity and clarity to a broad public audience craving this understanding and aspiring to dream and design together,” said Jack Tchen, director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, which hosts the series. “They understood the beauty and resilience of the African American spirit and intelligence. They sought historical insights that cut through the negativity and toxic dominant culture.”

This year is no exception as the MTW event, held at the Newark Museum of Art and online on February 19, focuses on artists who incorporate themes of play, utopia and performance in their work. The line-up includes Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover, Grammy-winning jazz violinist Regina Carter and playwright Dominique Morisseau.

This year, MTW will be part of Black Portraiture[s] conference, an international series that began at Harvard University and travels to a new location each year. At Rutgers-Newark, the three-day conference, titled Black Portraiture[s] VII: Performance and Play, and capped by the MTW dialogues, will also include two exhibitions, SCHEHERAZADE TILLET: BLACK GIRL PLAY, and PICTURING BLACK GIRLHOOD: MOMENTS OF POSSIBILITY, which features more than 80 Black women photographers from ages 8 to 94.

“Every year the theme of MTW is large and inviting enough to contain the multitudes of Blackness,’’ said Salamishah Tillet, director of Express Newark, which organized the exhibitions and MTW event.

“‘Play and Performance’ captures the diversity of African Diasporic cultures, while also acting as a balm as we re-emerge from this pandemic and reimagine justice.’’

The MTW lecture will be open to the public online. Virtual visitors can join by registering through Eventbrite. The event will illuminate the same ideas woven through the exhibitions: the concept of “play,” starting with Black girls, as a way of re-imagining race, gender, history and Black futurity.

Other speakers at the MTW event, which runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., include MacArthur “genius” Deborah Willis, renowned scholar Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, visual artist Bisa Butler, museum director Linda Harrison, and Kamilah Forbes, the executive producer of the Apollo Theater.

The lecture series is named for East Orange native Marion Thompson Wright, who became the first Black historian to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her doctoral thesis, “The Education of the Negro,’’ documented school segregation in New Jersey, despite an 1881 law that outlawed racial discrimination in public schools. Her work helped to provide the NAACP with hard data in its court challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Wright’s namesake lecture series was co-founded by Price and the late Giles R. Wright, who served many years as the inaugural director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission.

Over the years, speakers have included actress Esther Rolle, jazz drummer Max Roach, Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, and historians, intellectuals and leaders such as Arnold Rampersad, Nell Painter and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, U.S. Surgeon General under President Clinton. Themes have included everything from W.E.B. DuBois in Africa, the social life of African American music, beauty and the Black body, health in the Black community and prison and policing.

“The Marion Thompson Wright series is really public scholarship at its best and was conceived as a space in which groundbreaking scholarship in African American Studies and African Diasporic Studies is made readily available and accessible to the citizens of Newark and beyond,’’ said Tillet. “There are few Black history and culture lectures that have such a robust line up of speakers, scholars, and artists and whose themes speak directly to the social justice needs of our moments.”

In Newark, the conference has always held an important place in the civic, cultural and creative life of the city. “It’s been about opening the windows for fresh air to sustain community dialogues, to create a more just and inclusive Newark and Greater Newark,” said Tchen.

Added Tillet, “It is both a cornerstone and celebration, and an annual gathering in which we can learn about Black brilliance in all its manifestations and global histories together.”

The mission of the conference, and the Price Institute, is universal. “We constantly strive to inspire the best in all of us and to celebrate the magnificence and resilience of our beings–mind, body, and soul,’’ said Tchen.

Armed poll watchers: New Jersey’s cautionary tale ahead of the 2020 presidential election | Mark Krasovic | Aug 10, 2020

Price Institute Director Jack Tchen Appointed to NYC Climate Advisory Panel
By Lawrence Lerner
Jul 13, 2020

Rutgers University–Newark Professor Jack Tchen, the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities, and Director of the Price Institute, has been appointed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to a 20-member climate-policy advisory panel that is guiding the city’s preparation and response to global warming.

Tchen will sit on the Fourth New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC4), an independent body created in 2009 that synthesizes scientific information on climate change and advises New York City policymakers on local resiliency and adaptation strategies to protect against rising temperatures, increased flooding and other hazards.

Panel members are selected from a diversity of backgrounds and possess a broad spectrum of disciplinary expertise including climate science, demography, engineering, geography, vulnerability analysis, global change, architecture and urban planning.

Tchen, who taught American and Asian-American History at NYU before arriving at RU-N in 2018, has long been involved in New York City’s civic and cultural life. He’s also been studying environmental issues for several years and is deeply involved in global warming’s impact on the region.

"All the maps and studies indicate that our area, especially New Jersey's low-lying ports and shoreline, is in one of the major hot zones in North America, alongside the Miami and New Orleans regions,” said Tchen. “I'll be the public scholar among scientists, geographers and planners committed to broad public awareness and engagement for the 31 country Metro Region, especially for those communities impacted the hardest."

Also appointed to NPCC4 was Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Robin Leichenko, Chair for the Department of Geography, who was named one of the panel’s five co-chairs.

Tchen, who co-founded New York City’s Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) and served on the City's Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, has over the last several years turned his attention to the environment and the history of the Lenape Indians, whose historical territory included parts of present-day New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The New York–Newark Public History Project, which Tchen started when he became director of the Price Institute, challenges the dominant Eurocentric accounts of the area’s history that sideline the Lenape people and their culture, and he has taken a keen interest in the environmental damage caused by heavy industry in the New Jersey Meadowlands region from the 1950s to 1980s, including the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers.

Because of his myriad interlocking interests, and his long record as a historian and publicly engaged scholar giving voice to marginalized communities and the environment, Rutgers University–Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor believes Tchen is a perfect fit for the panel.

“Jack Tchen brings extraordinary perspectives and credentials to this appointment,” said Cantor. “As a historian who does work on the intersection of the degradation of America’s environment with injustices perpetrated against Native Americans and people of color from the nation’s founding through today, especially in the New York metropolitan area, Jack is exquisitely positioned to help guide the City of New York’s decision making about how to repair both the environment and the relationships that systemic racism has so badly damaged. We’re thrilled that he will also be bringing back his experience in this new role to his leadership of the Price Institute and his publicly engaged scholarship, teaching and mentorship at Rutgers-Newark.”

NPCC4 will produce a series of research reports beginning in late 2021 and is embarking on its work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the interactions between the current health and ongoing climate crises. Tchen has his eye on that nexus, along with the city's five boroughs and the area stretching from New York City to New Jersey. (See inset maps.)

“The Jersey shoreline has been hit hard by worsening storms,” said Tchen. “Less understood is how the larger estuarial region is being impacted with extremes of heat, winds and other converging patterns threatening the entire ecosystem, general well-being and public health.”

The panel also will work with a dedicated team focused on climate science and risk communications within the NYC Mayor’s Office of Resiliency (MOR). MOR and the NPCC4 will collaborate to strengthen the evidence base for climate action, translate data into actionable information, and clearly articulate the present and future risks associated with global warming.

Tchen has great faith in the panel’s work and believes the advisory board and City must be creative about disseminating their findings and action plans.

"The NPCC does impeccable science. But these findings have to get out to the public in a clear and accessible manner to the 20 million very diverse people in the metro region,” said Tchen. “This needs to be in the form of graphics, maps, Youtube, Twitter, comics and accessible, reliable reports made available in many languages that families can share, and it needs to be distributed through the neighborhoods and networks in which regular people circulate and trust.”

In Spring 2020 Tchen began teaching a course at RU-N called “Our Planet Our Crisis: Change, Justice, Urgency” to explore the ongoing history of environmental issues and global warming in Newark and the region, including the city’s Ironbound District, a largely working-class immigrant area that is home to one of the largest garbage incinerators in the state, rampant air pollution and a toxic shoreline filled with PCBs.

Just as activists have rallied the Ironbound community to seek environmental justice, Tchen believes it will take massive grassroots mobilization to deal with climate change.

"When HIV AIDS was still ghettoized as the "gay men's disease" by mainstream society, politicians and policy-makers, the communities hardest impacted had to organize themselves: They formed mutual-aid organizations and came up with harm-reduction strategies,” Tchen said. “I hope we can approach global warming with the same kind of savvy. The impacts of global warming are already evident and palpable. No magic fix is coming. We have to pull together and become the solution."

Inset maps by Scott Bernstein, Peter Haas, and James Debettencourt for the Price Institute. Data from New Jersey Office of the State Climatologist, Rutgers-New Brunswick.

Summer Reading: Over 40 Books on Race, Racism, and the Black American Experience to Read Now, as Recommended by Rutgers-Newark Faculty
By Nora Luongo
Jun 3, 2020

In these socially charged times, one of the most important things in the fight against systemic racism and our own internal biases is education. Faculty at Rutgers University-Newark teach and work at one of the most diverse university in the United States, and their research covers race and bias from across a wide range of disciplines in the arts, humanities, sciences, business and law. We put out a general call asking for book recommendations on the black experience in America, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. Below, our faculty recommend their current and classic favorites and tell us why we should read them now.  

Most Recommended:   

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein  

• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 

• In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming 

• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin 

These books were named multiple times as essential reading. The Color of Law is a “hard-hitting and sobering book [that] traces the role of local, state and federal housing policies in segregating the races in the United States,” says Tom McCabe, who teaches a History of Newark course at RU-N. "If you ever wondered how your neighborhood came to be all-white, all-black-or-brown, or if you ever wondered the same about your schools, read this book," adds Belinda Edmondson, acting chair of African American and African Studies. 

Melissa Valle, an assistant professor in Sociology says From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation “provide[s] much needed structural analyses and context for this latest spate of uprisings around the country. Lamming’s novel, In the Castle of My Skin, is “A powerful story about the relation between the UK and its Caribbean colonies,” says Sadia Abbas, associate professor of English. And finally, Mark Krasovic, says The Fire Next Time, is a classic for reasons including “the stunning beauty of its language in the face of ugliness and its constant reminder of our interconnected fates, whether they ultimately be liberatory or destructive.” 

Full Reading List 

Sadia Abbas, Associate Professor, English 
Research Interests: postcolonial studies, the idea of Europe, religious fundamentalisms, neoliberalism, the rise of the global right  

Recommends: 

• In the Castle of my Skin, George Lamming  

“A powerful story about the relation between the UK and its Caribbean colonies and the ways in which race structures experience in the colony and the colonial center.  Characterized by Lamming's densely suggestive storytelling and analytical style.” 

• Disforming the American Canon: the African-Arabic American Slave Narrative, R.A. Judy   

“Professor Judy is originally from Minneapolis. The book brings together critical theory, the suppressed Muslim history of american slavery, antiblack racism and the philosophical tradition. It's a significant and brilliant contribution to several disciplines and a profound meditation on language, thought and the possibilities of different varieties of signification.” 

• Romance in Marseilles, Claude Mckay 

“A powerful and slily brilliant modernist text about race, poverty and disability.” 

• Black and Blur, Fred Moten    

“The first volume of Moten's trilogy, consent not to be a single being, this book is a collection of brillliant and anarchic, brilliantly anarchic, deeply thoughtful essays aesthetics, politics, life and blackness.” 

Sahar Aziz, Professor, Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar, Rutgers Law School 
Research Interests: Intersections of national security, race, and civil rights; adverse impact of national security laws and policies on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the U.S. 

Recommends:

• Whitewashed: America's Invisible Middle East Minority, John Tehranian 

• White by Law, Ian Haney Lopez  

• Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, Ian Haney Lopez

Gaiutra Bahadur, Assistant Professor, Arts, Culture and Media 
Research interests: global migration, literature, British imperial history and postcolonial studies, race and xenophobia in the United States 

Recommends:   

• We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies and the Art of Survival, Jabari Asim 

“This collection of essays by writer, cultural critic and Emerson College professor Jabari Asim explores our contemporary moment of emergency as an afterlife, marshaling the past to shed light on the present. Asim salvages hope through a focus on black resilience and black survival. The collection was a finalist for PEN's Art of the Essay award last year. Asim has also written children's books about African-American history.”  

• Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, Kelly Lytle Hernandez 

“This is the first and only substantive history of the U.S. Border Patrol, by UCLA African-American Studies professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez, who won a MacArthur Genius Award last year. Just as interrogating the history of policing in the United States is key to understanding black lives and Black Lives Matter, knowing the history of how our borders are policed is key to understanding the lives of immigrants and racialized Others in the United States.” 

• America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, Erika Lee  

“Minneapolis-based author and scholar Erika Lee provides a tragically timely genealogy of hate directed at "aliens" in American society, beginning with Ben Franklin and ending with Trump's travel bans. Lee is director of the Immigration Resource Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her comprehensive narrative shows how a nation of immigrants is, paradoxically, also a nation of xenophobia.” 

Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia, Professor, School of Public Affairs & Administration (SPAA) 
Research Interests: racism, immigration policies, discrimination, integration of minorities 

Recommends: 

• A Short History of Racism, George M. Fredrickson 

“It’s easy to read and provides useful background." 

• Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racism, George Solomos

“Provides theoretical background, comparative perspective.” 

• In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming

“This is a great novel by a major writer.” 

Belinda Edmondson, Professor, English and African American & African Studies, Acting Chair, African American & African Studies 
Research Interests: Caribbean, African and African diaspora literature

Recommends:

• American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, Eduardo Porter 

"It argues that the reason we, the residents of the richest country on earth, find ourselves in a pandemic without enough hospital beds or indeed (for 10 percent of the population) without even healthcare; or with barely enough  unemployment insurance policies to cover the masses of suddenly unemployed people, is because in the United States the white majority would rather shrink the social welfare net than pay into any system that supports "undeserving" people of color."

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein  

"It examines recent US history to argue that the segregation that plagues our cities and contributes to the kind of explosive racial strife we are currently experiencing is the result of decades of consistent anti-integration local, state and federal policies in housing and education. If you ever wondered how your neighborhood came to be all-white, all-black-or-brown, or if you ever wondered the same about your schools, read this book."

• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward Baptist

"This book builds on the argument, first advanced by Trinidadian historian (and eventually prime minister) Eric Williams that slavery and capitalism are intrinsically linked by illustrating how slavery did not simply contribute to but actually provided the foundation for America's present wealth. In so doing it refutes the belief that African Americans are somehow marginal or play a supporting role in the creation of this country's wealth when their ancestors provided the very basis of it."

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander 

"It links the present injustices--the systematic incarceration of mostly African American men, the denial of voting rights to ex-felons who are disproportionately African American--to the nation's shameful "Jim Crow" era of the past century, arguing that the segregation era has never ended, only resulted in (to paraphrase Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man) a more efficient blinding."

• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin 

"A classic." 

Barbara Foley, Distinguished Professor, English
Research Interests: Marxist theory, African-American literature, twentieth-century U.S. literary radicalism

Recommends:

• Langston Hughes' poetry

"My main advice is that what is needed right now, above all, in this era of COVID-19 and BLM, is class-conscious antiracist literature that points to the material interests that most people in the 99% share when it comes to eradicating racism.  Some poems by Langston Hughes in the 1930s are particularly powerful and accessible e.g., "Always the Same"; "Open Letter to the South"; "White Man!"; "Rising Waters" -- and there are plenty more. 

• The Oxygen Man, Steve Yarbrough

"A novel that explores the need for antiracist class consciousness among working-class whites in the South."

• Two short stories: "A Party Down at the Square", Ralph Ellison, and "Like a Winding Sheet", Ann Petry

"These two stories from the 1930s have worked for me time and again in the classroom. This last short story is just wonderul for the way it links the alienation of labor to sexist and racist ideology and practice."

Kent Harber, Professor I, Psychology
Research Interests:  social psychology, interracial feedback, in particular white instructors' feedback to learners of color versus white learners, "positive feedback bias"

Recommends:

• "Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination", Handbook of Social Psychology (4 ed.). 2 (1): 357–411, Susan T. Fiske

“This is a comprehensive review article by one of the premier social psychology researchers of this topic. In it, Fiske distinguishes between the three anti-social tendencies, between motivated prejudice and prejudice that arises from mental short-cuts (automatic processes), and between overt, conscious expressions of prejudice and more subtle, implicit forms of prejudice.”  

• Social stigma: The psychology of marked relationships,  Jones, E.E., Farina, A., Hastorf, A.H., Markus, H., Miller, D.T., & Scott, R.A.  

“This book, although a bit old, provides an excellent review of what it feels like to be stigmatized--as well as why stigmatization happens.  Chapters discuss how stigmas affect the way one is treated, how it restricts relations with others and limits one's own public behaviors, and how it affects one's own sense of self.  This is a text I go back to often.” 

• Conscience and courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, E. Fogelman

“This is a somewhat unconventional choice, but it may be an important part of the total story. Fogelman tries to understand the motives and characters of people who overcame their prejudices and did so at a crucial time under the most trying of circumstances. Knowing how and why prejudices are overcome may provide some markers on our way out of the current difficulties.” 

Mark Krasovic, Associate Professor, History 
Research Interests: US cultural and political history 

Recommends:  

• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin 

“I recommend this for so many reasons, including the stunning beauty of its language in the face of ugliness and its constant reminder of our interconnected fates, whether they ultimately be liberatory or destructive.” 

• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, Barbara Ransby

“Read this for its chronicle of the life of one of our nation’s most remarkable thinkers and organizers, for its detailing of her 'radical democratic vision,' and for its conviction that there is no shortcut around that vision in our search for peace and justice.” 

Laura Lomas, Associate Professor, English 
Research Interests: comparative American studies, Latina/o literature and culture, ethnic and immigrant literature of the United States and the Americas and feminist cultural studies 

Recommends:  

• How we get free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Yamahtta-Taylor, Keeanga  

“This book makes connections between the founding organizations and publications of intersectional black feminism in the 1970s, the radical abolitionism of Harriet Tubman and leaders of the Movement for Black Lives today...  The book recounts how Black queer feminists, survivors of violence, have historically and recently organized themselves to demand freedom. As Yamahtta-Taylor's title suggests, this primer shows how to get free by drawing on lessons from history and responding with alacrity, passion, and creativity to violence and crisis.” 

• Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong  

“Cathy Park Hong recalls the long history of Anti-Asian racism and incarceration in the United States. This precisely written anti-racist manifesto addresses complex feelings of guilt, shame, and rage through readings of the brilliant Afro-Latino standup comic Richard Pryor; meditations on migrating while Asian; and unflinching assessments of quotidian, startlingly normalized racist violence that characterizes the United States from the 1882 race-based Chinese Exclusion Act through the first decades of the twenty-first century.” 

• Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse 

“The first generation of formerly enslaved Hispanic Caribbean migrants arriving in New York and South Florida in the 1870s organized themselves into clubs that gave them a voice in a revolutionary political party, created a self-funded voluntary night school, and created newspapers where they published their opinions and engaged in interpretation, critique and debate.  

Members of this tight-knit Afro-Latinx community eventually founded the Schomburg Collection... at a time of extreme anti-black racial terror and Supreme Court decisions that made racial segregation and exclusion from full citizenship the law of the land. These Afro-Latinx thinkers offer a model for how to get organized to bring about change that is relevant during the economic and policing fallout of the COVID19 global pandemic.” 

Tom McCabe, Adjunct Professor of History 
Research interests: Urban History, History of Newark 

Recommends:  

• Blood Done Sign My Name, Timothy B. Tyson

“Part history, part memoir this page-turner lays bare a 1970s racial murder in North Carolina, and it also eloquently elicits a time and place in America that seems like it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Tyson experienced these events and tries to make sense of them through the lens of the humanist-historian.” 

• No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark, Ron Porambo

“A New Journalism account of the Newark Rebellion of 1967, Ron Porambo’s book is a years-long investigation of institutional racism and corruption that spread from the top of city and state governments to local police forces in the state’s largest city.” 

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein 

“This hard-hitting and sobering book traces the role of local, state and federal housing policies in segregating the races in the United States. Rothstein, who spoke at the HLLC a year or so ago, details how the government and our courts upheld racist policies to maintain the separation of whites and blacks.” 

Norma Riccucci, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor, SPAA 
Research Interests: social equity; cultural diversity in the workplace; civil rights law 

Recommends:  

• Home, Toni Morrison

• Passing, Nella Larsen

• All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou

Luis M. Rivera, Associate Professor, Psychology 
Research Interests: Social Psychology/Role of implicit biases in social inequities. 

Recommends: 

• Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji  

“A deep dive into the origins of implicit bias for all readers by the two researchers who put implicit bias on the map with their ground-breaking work.  A take-home message is that we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, but we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one.” 

• Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Jennifer Eberhardt 

“Dr. Eberhardt makes a connection between implicit bias and system racism.  She exposes racial bias at all levels of society, including law enforcement. And she also offers us tools to address it.” 

Beryl Satter, Professor, History 
Research interests: urban history, African American history, women’s history, cultural and intellectual history 

Recommends:  

• Racecraft:  The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara E. Fields   

“This book makes the critical distinction between race, which is a construct, and racism, which is a real and devastating set of behaviors that create oppression and distort democracy. Progress will not be possible until the nation recognizes and acts upon the fact that racism, not 'race,' is our biggest problem. Racecraft can be read in tandem with Melissa L. Cooper’s brilliant intellectual history Making Gullah:  A History of Sapelo Island, Race, and the American Imagination. Cooper’s book details how white Americans created a 'racial' identity for African Americans from Georgia’s coastal islands, and how black Sapelo Islanders understood their own history and identity as one of struggle against oppression.  It thereby shows the critical distinction between 'making race' and 'fighting racism' in U.S. life.” 

• The Condemnation of Blackness:  Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad  

“Muhammad’s study of Progressive-era Philadelphia shows how easy it was for white “experts” to manipulate seemingly neutral statistics about crime to support their belief that African Americans were inherently criminal.”    

• The Color of Law:  A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein  

“White Americans’ ongoing economic exploitation and cultural denigration of African Americans has been strongly facilitated by residential segregation. Rothstein’s comprehensive study details the multiple ways that U.S. laws at the local, state and federal level have consistently buttressed segregation. He demonstrates how at least some Americans have demonstrated a willingness to live in integrated communities, only to have their efforts thwarted by often obscure forms of institutionally racist laws. Until these laws are exposed and replaced by policies facilitating integration and fairness, segregation and its attendant evils will remain a primary support for the American racism.” 

• Blackout, James Goodman   

“This book examines the famous power outage and subsequent looting that hit New York City in the summer of 1977 through multiple perspectives, but makes the fundamental point that looting and civil unrest is ultimately caused by a maldistribution of power.”  

Salamishah Tillet, Henry Rutgers Professor, African American and African Studies, English, Founding Director of  New Arts Justice; Associate Director of the Price Institute
Research Interests: American Studies, twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, film, popular music, cultural studies, and feminist theory

Recommends:

• In Darkness and Confusion, Ann Petry, a 1947 short story about the Harlem Riot of 1943 which appears in Petry's 1971 collection. 

• The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, Lorraine Hansberry - a book-length brochure by the Civil Rights group, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with text by Lorraine Hansberry. 

• "The Riot" Gwendolyn Brooks - a series of three poems about the Chicago Riots of 1968. 

The three books that I've chosen are lesser-known works by authors renowned for championing racial and gender justice. As importantly, they were written as Ann Petry, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks engaged with the respective social justice movements of their time and how they as black women turned their words into being witnesses to and weapons to injustice. 

David Troutt, Distinguished Professor, Justice John J. Francis Scholar, Rutgers Law School; founding director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME)  
Research Interests: Race, class and legal structure; intellectual property; torts and critical legal theory. 

Recommends:  

• Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell 

• And We Are Not Saved, Derrick Bell 

“I would recommend Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell because it is such an important read of the condition of racism through a legal and political lens but with such narrative creativity. Books like this that are rich and provocative yet nontraditional and accessible invite vigorous discussion. Plus he’s just so smart about so much. And We Are Not Saved is equally good for similar reasons.” 

Melissa Valle, Assistant Professor, Sociology and African American Studies
Research Interests: Racial justice, urban space, culture 

Recommends:  

• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 

• Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, Marc Lamont Hill  

• Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis

“All three books provide much needed structural analyses and context for this latest spate of uprisings around the country. Taylor focuses specifically on the Black Lives Matter movement and the purposes of these kinds of protests. Hill uses high-profile and controversial cases of State violence similar to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (e.g., the police killings of people like Mike Brown, Kathryn Johnston and Freddie Gray, as well as the poisoning of the water in Flint, MI) to demonstrate that such cases are “a symptom of a deeper American problem,” and that at the root of each case “is a more fundamental set of economic conditions, political arrangements, and power relations that transform everyday citizens into casualties of an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable” (p.xxii). Davis provides insights into what a just future could and should look like and the need for a radical re-imagining of the criminal justice system that abolishes prisons.” 

Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Associate Professor, Political Science 
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Catastrophes and Politics, Transatlantic Political Thought   

Recommends:  

• Race Matters, Cornel West 

• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 

• Toward Freedom, Touré F. Reed  

“These books constitute serious scholarship that combines historical sense with uncompromising anti-racism. Each places the question of race in historical, political and ideological contexts in the United States while avoiding the perils of race reductionism or reducing racism to a question of perception or individual prejudice. Required reading to enable effective anti-racism in the context of broad emancipatory politics in the United States.” 

Jerome D. Williams, Distinguished Professor, Marketing, Rutgers Business School; Prudential Chair  
Research Interests: Multicultural marketing and marketplace discrimination 

Recommends: 

• Consumer Equality: Race and the American Marketplace, Geraldine R. Henderson,  Anne-Marie G. Hakstian, and Jerome D. Williams (2016), 

“Typically, when we think of racism, our focus is on major events that generally receive widespread news coverage. However, racism also occurs in everyday, mundane situations such as those that occur in the marketplace. It is in this context that we often see what researchers describe as microaggressions, microassaults, implicit racism, etc. This research-based book provides not only empirical evidence of marketplace discrimination, but it also examines the legal issues and historical contexts of such marketplace phenomena.”

Price Institute Hosts Online Earth Day Summit With Leading Female Activists
By Lawrence Lerner
May 12, 2020

The Price Institute recently hosted an online panel discussion with three female activists from around the country on using the Covid-19 pandemic to reimagine grassroots organizing and chart a new environmental and socioeconomic course domestically and globally. The event, moderated on Facebook Live by Price Institute Director Jack Tchen, was held to commemorate Earth Day 2020.

Tchen, the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities at Rutgers University-Newark ( RU-N), spoke with environmental economist, organizer and activist Winona LaDuke, Program Director of Honor the Earth, based at the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota; activist, writer and community advocate Carol Bebelle, co-founder of New Orleans’ Ashé Cultural Center; and Maria Lopez-Nunez, Director of Environmental Justice and Community Development at Ironbound Community Corporation in Newark. Viewers commented in real time during the event and submitted questions to the panelists during the event.

The discussion spanned the personal, political and communal, using as its starting point writer Arudhati Roy’s conception of the “pandemic as a portal” through which society can walk to rid ourselves of old socioeconomic structures, forge new alliances, and build a better, more sustainable and egalitarian world.

Roy articulated this vision in an article published in early April by the Financial Times, where she said: "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."

Tchen and the panelists echoed the theme throughout. 

"Working a Facebook Live via Zoom had me working like a DJ keeping the conversation with our three great conversationalists going while fielding questions from across the country,” said Tchen. “We're very pleased with the Price Institutes' first online venture and look forward to more. We want to walk thru Arundhati Roy's ‘Pandemic as a Portal’ lightly with ‘right relationships’ being forged." 

The one-and-a-half-hour discussion was wide-ranging, covering topics such as environmental racism and Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on black, brown and Native American communities; the importance of biodiversity and sustainability; and working together across racial, ethnic and cultural divides to build a unified movement to achieve greater environmental, social and economic justice.

LaDuke started out by acknowledging what scientists and satellite imagery have been telling us: that the pandemic has led to sharp reductions in the burning of fossil fuels.

“This moment we’re in now, Mother Earth can breathe. You can see the sun in China, and you can see the stars at night,” said LaDuke. “We have 20 percent less air pollution across the board, and fossil fuel use is way down…. Mother Earth really appreciates taking a breath, and if you take care of your mother, you’re more likely to be healthy yourself.”

Nunez brought that theme closer to home, noting that her neighborhood, Newark’s Ironbound district, is home to a garbage incinerator, a sewage-waste treatment plant, and a waterfront made highly toxic from dumping of dioxin and other contaminates into the Lower Passaic River by plants manufacturing Agent Orange during the 1950s and ’60s, which has resulted in a group of federally declared Superfund cleanup sites in the area.

Later in the conversation, while answering a question from a viewer, Tchen added that just to the north, the New Jersey Meadowlands and Hackensack River have suffered the same fate, because both are tidal rivers that have spread these toxins over a 17-mile stretch. 

“Recently the Trump administration has pulled back on mercury-emissions regulations, and the Hackensack River, adjacent to the Passaic River, is also one of the major sites terribly polluted with mercury poisoning,” said Tchen.

On several occasions during the 90-minute event, the discussion shifted to workers on the frontlines of the pandemic and the need to rethink our ideas about labor. Bebelle said that in order to do that, we need to first look inward.

“Change starts with ourselves…. We have to start there and be open to understanding all the stuff going on around us,” including the value of the work being done by health professionals and all lives being of equal value. “It begins with us working on ourselves to build a stronger ‘we’ consciousness,” Bebelle said.

Nunez remarked that news of Covid-19 horrified her and others in the Ironbound heard because of the aerosol nature of the virus “and because so many of our folks are essential workers and are undocumented and were dropped without any consideration: They don’t qualify for any type of stimulus or programs,” she said. “I’m still getting calls to help people stay in their homes because real-estate speculators prefer an empty building that they can flip for profit to having people sheltered in place.”

She added that many workers who originally thought they were just paying the bills with low-level jobs delivering food, stocking shelves or cleaning hospitals were now thrust onto the frontlines with the current crisis. “All of sudden we now have to value, and should have been valuing all along, these people who have been doing this work but have been largely undervalued and invisible,” said Nunez.

All the panelists agreed that the pandemic created an unprecedented opportunity to organize, reimagine the current socioeconomic order, and push for a more progressive American and global agenda. Bebelle returned to this point several times during the discussion, comparing the present crisis to Hurricane Katrina, which decimated her city, and noting that this is a great time for organizing while the public’s attention is squarely focused on the seismic fallout from Covid-19.

“This is about everything from a livable wage to our educational system, how our health system works, and ways to address mental health issues after this,” said Bebelle. “We’re discovering the fractures inside our societal landscape, and we’ve got to be thinking about now how we get back to where we were but manage to have it be something better and more inclusive.”

She added that activists must work together across divides to make a difference.

"You have different segments—racial, LGBTQ, environmental, and others…. It’s really important that all of us working for progress understand this is about reciprocity, and it’s about being thorough in how we view and see justice…. We have to find ways to show up for each other,” Babelle said.

Agreeing with Bebelle’s point, LaDuke said, “I don’t want to spend my time talking about how we’re all different and whose oppression is the most important. I want to focus on how we solve this. Because in this crisis, people are re-finding their humanity.”

On May 15, The Price Institute will hold a follow-up online event titled, “Staying Alive, But Also Staying Alive: Reflections on How the Pandemic is a Portal,” featuring sociologist Ruha Benjamin, clinician-scientist Monica McLemon, and Nicole Fleetwood, writer, curator and art critic.

40th Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Honors Past, Explores Black Futures
Mar 11, 2020

For its 40th year, the recent Annual Marion Thompson Wright (MTW) Lecture “Black Futures: What Seems to Be, Need Not Be,” honored its long history while looking to multiple futures – of the series, of the field of African American Studies, and of Black America as a social, cultural, and political formation of power – to foreground a tradition of futurism in black intellectual and cultural life, as well as how that tradition and the freedom dreams it has generated have driven movements for change.

The MTW Lecture is a full-day event featuring several speakers, panels and performers who are experts in African American history and culture. This year’s event included songwriter, producer, and scholar Jason King of New York University; sociologist Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University; and author and filmmaker, Ytasha Womack, an Afrofuturist and Independent Scholar.

This year’s lecture began with welcoming remarks from the Price Institute’s Director, Jack Tchen, followed by a land blessing provided by Chief Vincent Mann, Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, acknowledging that they were the first peoples to live in what is now Newark, NJ.

It was followed by a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by vocalist A-Larenée Davis accompanied by Sterling Overshown on piano.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka continued the theme of weaving past and present by telling the audience that “What you want to build in the future should be informed by the struggles of the present and the history of all those that got you here today.”

Chancellor Nancy Cantor continued the thread by exhorting the academics and students and members of the audience to “use our tools of technology and humanities to shake things up from what they are, to what they should be.”

Ten years ago, the thirtieth anniversary of the series looked back to take stock of its history and that of the field in which it works. For this anniversary, it brought back three of the early MTW Study Club members – Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Larry Greene, and Leonard Muse, who reminisced over their favorite moments of the early days of the series, while looking forward to how the series might more fully and meaningfully participate in bringing about a more just and inclusive future.

The first guest speaker of the day, Ruha Benjamin, author of “The New Jim Code? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology and Society”, spoke about her research on bias inherent in AI and other technologies, giving extensive examples from around the world and in the U.S. “People think technology will either slay us – Hollywood loves that trope – or save us, like those who work in Silicon Valley,” she stated, “but technology is designed by people who embed their values into it.” Benjamin spoke of the dangers of using “social credit” systems like those used in China, and how those systems do more to reinforce the ideology of the dominant group than to bring about any kind of better society. She asked the audience, “how do we deal with technologies that unwittingly encourage racist and discriminatory practices through their algorithms?” Benjamin went on to cite how the tech workers themselves can help fight against these systems and mentioned that workers at places like Amazon and Microsoft successfully organized against the use of their tech for purposes they found morally objectionable. Her final slide was a proposition to everyone in the audience: “If inequity is woven into the very fabric of society then each twist, coil, and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, politics. Its vastness will be its undoing once we accept that we are the pattern makers.”

The afternoon sessions opened with the presentation of the Giles R. Wright Award, given each year and named in honor of the Director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission who passed away in February 2009. Larry Greene of the NJ Historical Commission presented the award this year to the Newark Public Library for an exhibit marking 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment titled: African American Women’s Suffrage Exhibit: Fighting for Power and the Right to Vote.

The day continued with filmmaker and leading expert on Afrofuturism, Ytasha Womack, who spoke about using “Afrofuturism as a Creative Tool for Transformation.” In defining “afrofuturism”, Womack said it is “a way of looking at the future and alternate realities through a black cultural lens.

Womack, who is also a dance therapist, considers her role as a writer and a dancer as intertwined: “It’s storytelling, but also pattern-spotting. It’s creating a space.” She went on to add that while there is intelligence in the mind, there is also “wisdom and intelligence in the body that we must value.”

The final speaker of the day was Jason King, songwriter, producer and scholar at New York University. His talk entitled “A Brief History of Black Musicians Feeling the Future, from Thelonious Monk and Prince to Missy Elliott and Frank Ocean” spoke of the possibilities black music offers for the future through what he called its bent for ‘getting togetherness’ – prioritizing collaborations and dialogue. “Art proffers us the vision for a future we can’t yet imagine,” King said, “Black musicians feel the future.”

When introducing the “Black Futures” guest speakers, the Price Institute’s Associate Director Salamishah Tillet said, “to dream of an ideal world is one thing. To plan, strategize, and execute it as a reality is far more challenging.” Every year, hundreds come together at MTW to do just that.

Video Footage from the 2020 MTW Lectures:

Morning Sessions

Morning Sessions included welcoming remarks, a panel featuring early MTW Study Club members, and speaker Ruha Benjamin

Afternoon Sessions

The afternoon sessions included the presentation of the Giles Award and speakers Ytasha Womack and Jason King

The Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture (MTW) series was co-founded in 1981 by Dr. Price and the late Giles R. Wright, who served many years as the inaugural director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission. Mounted in observance of Black History Month in New Jersey, the MTW Series is one of the nation’s most remarkable and longest running scholarly conference series devoted to the historical literacy of a community. Diverse, civically engaging, and a contribution to life-long learning, the MTW Series has brought to Newark some of the nation’s most significant scholars. They include  former Surgeon General of the United States under President Clinton, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and legal scholar Professor Annette Gordon Reed, Deborah Willis, Sterling Stuckey, Eric Foner, Lonnie Bunch, David Blight, and Nell Painter, among many others. The 30th anniversary conference in 2010, Laboring in the Vineyard: Citizenship and Scholarship, a two-day program, drew over a thousand citizens to the Paul Robeson Campus Center on the Newark Campus.

All photos by Fred Stucker.

The 2020 Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series to Explore Black Futures
Dec 20, 2019

Since 1981, the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series has brought to Newark leading scholars of and figures in African American history to participate in a civic ritual dedicated to the rigorous exploration of the past as a means of bringing about brighter futures. The Series’ fortieth installment, “Black Futures: What Seems to Be, Need Not Be,” will look to multiple futures –of the series itself, the field of African American Studies, and of Black America as a social, cultural, and political formation -to foreground a tradition of futurism in black intellectual and cultural life, as well as how that tradition and the freedom dreams it has generated have driven movements for change. Ten years ago, the thirtieth anniversary of the series looked back to take stock of its history and that of the field in which it works. For this anniversary, it will look forward to how the series might more fully and meaningfully participate in bringing about a more just and inclusive future.

The annual Black History Month conference will be held on Saturday, February 15, 2020, beginning at 9:30 a.m. in the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., on the campus of Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N). The conference is organized annually by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at RU-N.

This year’s keynote speaker will be Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and recently named MacArthur Fellow. In books such as Scenes of Subjection and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman has written brilliantly about how black people, particularly black women and girls, have imagined, negotiated, and invented their own futures in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Professor Hartman’s keynote will be followed by three more lectures, each by a distinguished scholar uniquely engaged with black futurism

Jason King is a songwriter, producer, and scholar, who serves as a founding faculty member of New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In numerous essays and his book, The Michael Jackson Treasures, as well as his work as an avant-garde artist with the band Company Freak, King has emerged as one of the nation’s most perceptive critics and curators of black experimental and popular music.

Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she founded the JUST DATA Lab. In her work there and in writings that include People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013) and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Benjamin critically explores the social dimensions of science and technology, uncovering the complicated relationships between innovation and inequity.

Ytasha Womack is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and dance therapist. Honored among DesignHub’s 40 Under 40 designers for social good and innovation in 2017 and named a “Filmmaker to Watch” by The Chicago Tribune, Womack is a leading expert on AfroFuturism, imagination, and their social functions and applications. Her award-winning book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago Review Press) is the leading primer on the subject.

Following the conference, MTW attendees are invited to a reception in the Engelhard Court of the Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street. The reception will feature food and live musical entertainment by The Bradford Hayes Trio.

All events are free and open to the public.

The MTW lecture series was co-founded in 1981 by the late Dr. Clement A. Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers University, the late Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission and the MTW Study Club. Over the past 39 years, the conference has drawn thousands of people to Rutgers University-Newark and has attracted some of the nation’s foremost scholars, artists, and humanists in the field of African and African American history and culture. It has become one of the nation's leading scholarly programs specifically devoted to enhancing the historical literacy of an intercultural community

The annual conference was named for East Orange native Dr. Marion Thompson Wright, a pioneer in African-American historiography and race relations in New Jersey, a pioneering historian of race and education, and among the earliest professionally trained women historians in the nation. The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is presented by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; the Federated Department of History, Rutgers University-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the Department of African American and African Studies, Rutgers University-Newark. The 2020 conference is made possible by funds and support from: Prudential, the New Jersey Historical Commission/Department of State, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

For additional information about the program, please visit the Price Institute’s Facebook page at facebook.com/PriceInstitute.

Arts Initiative Re-imagines Military Park War Monument With “A Call to Peace” Exhibition
By Lawrence Lerner
Oct 16, 2019

As one of the nation’s oldest public spaces and a central meeting place in Newark, Military Park houses an array of monuments honoring historical figures and events. Rutgers University–Newark’s Salamishah Tillet, Co-Director of the Price Institute and founder of arts-and-activism incubator New Arts Justice Initiative, was quite familiar with the towering bronze statue anchoring the park, having grown up in and around the city.

Depicting 42 figures in the midst of struggle on and off the battlefield and elevated on a large granite base, “Wars of America” is flanked by a triangular field of grass embossed by a Tudor-sword flower bed extending southward toward Raymond Boulevard. Renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who created the piece in 1926, said at the time that the work represents “the American nation at a crisis, answering the call to arms” across the span of its history.

But it wasn’t until many years later that Tillet discovered that Borglum, later known for creating Mount Rushmore, was affiliated with the Klu Klux Klan and espoused the scientific racialism popular during the early 20th century. He also imported part of the granite base for “Wars of America” from Stone Mountain in Georgia, where he was building a Confederate monument.

Tillet and her colleague Paul Farber, co-founder of Monument Lab, an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia, saw an opportunity to challenge Borglum’s “call to arms” with “A Call to Peace,” a six-week exhibition of alternative public installations by local artists in Military Park and Express Newark that answers the question “What is a timely monument for Newark?” Sparking a conversation on public spaces, historical memory, race and other issues, the project, which runs October 3 through November 11 (Veterans Day), includes weekly talks by scholars and activists, along with a research engagement lab in Military Park staffed by artists and educators asking the public to contribute their own monument proposals. The team will collect their responses and add them to an open database, posted on a community board in Express Newark, and shared as a report to the city in 2020.

We sat down with Tillet recently to discuss her ambitious project.

When did you get the idea for “A Call to Peace,” and how did it come into being?
Last fall when I arrived on campus, I was very interested in working with Paul Farber of Monument Lab and curating an inside and outside public art project in the city of Newark. I was one of the early speakers for Monument Lab's first project and was impressed by the thoughtfulness of their approach and timeliness and urgency of their 2017 citywide exhibition in Philadelphia on the eve of the Charlottesville's protest. At the same time, Paul and I both became interested in Gutzon Borglum's "Wars of America" monument in Military Park but in different ways. He was fascinated by its size, its prominence in the park, and Borglum's vexed politics. I was curious about how everyday Newarkers—people who live in the city or commute here—engage the park and whether they knew about the monument's life or Borglum's own past and Ku Klux Klan affiliation. And if they did, what did it mean to them? And if they didn't, what could it mean? Our title is our response to Borglum, whose declared the monument was a "call to arms." Playing off his words, "The Newark Sunday Call," the name of one of our country's earliest independent newspapers born here, and Amiri Baraka's famous line, "a call to black people," we thought a project that imagines 'peace' as a goal and a process would be an homage and would wrestle with these histories converging.

This project is part of the ongoing national conversation around Confederate statues and their place in modern America. Can you explain how it fits into this broader dialogue and where you—and the project—come down on the issue of removing those statues?
I am invigorated by our deep civic engagement with these monuments today. I think it is important to know that many of those confederate monuments were up not in the immediate years after the South lost the war but commissioned and erected in the early 20th century to celebrate Jim Crow or stave off the rise of the Civil Rights movement. So, these debates over the monuments are really cultural and political fault lines about belonging and citizenship. In my book, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination, I argued that our memories of slavery, and by extension the Civil War, are not simply about the past but how we see ourselves in the present and wish to see ourselves in the future. Those confederate monuments are glaring reminders that American democracy was born by denying the majority black people the right to read and write, vote, move freely, earn and be recognized as human. That Borglum used the granite from his own confederate monument in Stone Mountain, Ga., in the base of "Wars of America" is a telling sign of how long the arm of slavery stretched in the North, in Newark, and still shapes how black people and non-black people interact today.

Your project emerges as park organizers are in the process of refurbishing the statue and updating the story told about it, including Borglum. Has New Arts played a role in that, or otherwise engaged the city on this?
Public art at its best comes about through collaboration and community. Our advisory board for this project includes Mayor Ras Baraka and Jessica Sechrist, the director of Military Park, not just because they have been ideal civic partners but because both the Mayor and Military Park are deeply invested in ensuring that people who live in this city feel safe in our parks and public spaces. I hope a "Call to Peace" and dynamic artists —Manuel Acevedo, Chakaia Booker, Sonya Clark and Jamel Shabazz—that we have chosen to respond to the big question, "What is a timely monument for Newark?" is the beginning of a bigger conversation in our city, not just about "Military Park" but our relationship between race, gender and public space in Newark and beyond.  
 
This project is about revisiting history and re-imagining public spaces to be more inclusive. Do you think any of the monument ideas your team is collecting from the public stand a chance of being built and integrated into Military Park?
Hopefully. But I think the very process of having people share their ideas and imagine collaboratively is how public art should be made and, even more importantly, how democracy should live.
 
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.
My pleasure.

“A Call to Peace” includes talks every Thursday at various locations. Most will take place at the corrugated cube housing the project’s research engagement lab, right next to the “Wars of America” statue. In the event of rain, these talks will be held at the NJ Historical Society, on the east side of Military Park at 52 Park Place.

A Call to Peace
Sep 20, 2019

The New Arts Justice Initiative at Rutgers University-Newark presents A Call To Peace, which will be installed in Newark’s Military Park, opening October 3, 2019, and running through Veterans Day on November 11, 2019. Taking place 400 years after the first enslaved Africans arrived on our shores in 1619, the exhibition is partly conceived in response to sculptor Gutzon Borglum's own racially fraught legacy. Famed for Mount Rushmore, Borglum, whose Wars of America monument dominates Military Park, was also affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and used the granite for his massive Confederate Monument in Stone Mountain, Georgia, as the base for his sculpture in Newark. As a result, New Arts Director Salamishah Tillet (Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies) partnered with Monument Lab’s Paul Farber, and invited renowned visual artists Manuel Acevedo, Chakaia Booker, Sonya Clark, and Jamel Shabazz to respond to the prompt, What is a timely monument for Newark?

A Call to Peace invited Acevedo, Booker, Clark, and Shabazz, all artists known for their innovative approaches to art and social justice and/or their relationships with Newark to create temporary monuments that engage the history and present of the park. The artists’ projects will focus on spotlighting underrepresented veterans, engaging the legacies of the confederate statues, and addressing the relationship between public spaces and historical memory.
 
Alongside the artist installations, New Arts and Monument Lab will open a participatory research lab, staffed by local artists and educators, where passersby will be invited to contribute their own speculative monument proposals. The collected responses will be added to an open database, posted on a community board in Express Newark, and shared as a report to the city in 2020. The lab will also host weekly Thursday Talks with critical members of Newark’s community who are actively working on issues of monuments, cultural memory, and historic preservation.
 
New Arts Justice also welcomes Assistant Curator and Program Coordinator Alliyah Allen and Curator of Engagement fayemi shakur (former executive director at City Without Walls). In addition, Laura Troiano, senior administrator at the Price Institute, is directing strategy and operations, and Mark Krasovic, associate director at the Price Institute and associate professor of history, is the public history research partner. Nick Kline, director of Shine Portrait Studio and associate professor of photography and Anthony Alvarez, studio supervisor of Shine Portrait Studio, are also collaborating with New Arts on Shabazz’s Veterans Peace Project. A Call To Peace has been made possible by the generous support of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Chancellor's Office at Rutgers University-Newark, the 2019 Cultural Programming Grant from Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, and the 2018 and 2019 Third Space Grants from Express Newark.

Special thanks to project partners Mayor Ras Baraka and the City of Newark; Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; Rutgers University-Newark Departments of African-American and African Studies and Creative Writing Program; Express Newark; John Cotton Dana Library; Military Park Partnership; Monument Lab; Newark Arts Festival; the Newark Museum; Project for Empty Space; and SHINE Portrait Studio.
 
For more information, visit www.newartsjustice.org, which will be regularly updated through the launch of the exhibition.

Mayor Ras Baraka, City of Newark
Fran Bartkowski, Rutgers-Newark, Chair of the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media
Anonda Bell, Rutgers-Newark, Director and Chief Curator of Paul Robeson Galleries
Tricia Bloom, Curator of American Art at the Newark Museum
Victor Davson, Rutgers-Newark, Co-Director of Express Newark
Anne Englot, Rutgers-Newark, Co-Director of Express Newark
Peter Englot, Rutgers-Newark, Senior Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff
Rebecca Jampol, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Project for Empty Space
Jeremy Johnson, Director, Newark Arts Festival
Mark Krascovic, Rutgers-Newark, Associate Director of the Price Institute
Dominic Kline, Rutgers-Newark, Director of Shine Portrait Studio
Jessica Sechrist, Park Manager, Military Park Partnerships
Jasmine Wahi, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Project for Empty Space

About New Arts Justice
Founded by Professor Salamishah Tillet, New Arts Justice is an incubator within Rutgers University-Newark that is committed to intersectional approaches to art’s relationship to place, social justice, and civic engagement in Newark and beyond. Inspired in name and spirit by the 1968 film “The NEW-ARK,” created by poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka (known at the time as LeRoi Jones) about racial justice education, urban public theater, and political consciousness-raising in Newark, New Arts Justice keeps Newark as an artist-activist city at the core, while carefully considering its position within the university as well. This means, amplifying the work of historically underrepresented and under-resourced artists, activating robust conversations about race, gender, class, sexuality, and national belonging among diverse audiences including those from the local community, university and municipal government, while contributing interpretation/scholarship to surround/undergird work.
 
About Monument Lab
Monument Lab is an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments. Founded in 2012 by Paul Farber and Ken Lum, Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. As a studio and curatorial team, Monument Lab pilots collaborative approaches to unearthing and reinterpreting histories. This includes citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, participatory research initiatives, a National Fellows program, a web bulletin and podcast, and more. Their goal is to critically engage the public art we have inherited to reimagine public spaces through stories of social justice and equity. In doing so, they aim to inform and influence the processes of public art, as well as the permanent collections of cities, museums, libraries, and open data repositories. Since 2012, Monument Lab’s projects have engaged 300,000 people in person, and garnered recognition from Americans for the Arts and the Preservation Alliance. Farber is the curator-in-residence at New Arts Justice.

Rutgers-Newark to Host Its First Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Apr 9, 2019

Rutgers University–Newark will host the Tanner Lectures on Human Values Festival, April 22-27, at various venues on campus and in the city of Newark. Themed “Flowing: Human Migrations and Human Values,” the festival will celebrate, through art and ideas, Rutgers-Newark’s diverse community of students, faculty, and staff whose abundance of migration stories mitigates tribal borders and extols difference. Established in 1978 by American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist, Obert Clark Tanner, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multiversity lecture series in the humanities that encompasses the entire range of ideals pertinent to the human condition. The lectureships are international and intercultural and transcend ethnic, national, religious, and ideological distinctions. In creating the lectureships, Tanner said, "I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind. I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth, but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life." “As a grandchild of the Great Migration and daughter of a Trinidadian immigrant, I grew up at the borders of cultures, identities, and geographies,” says Salamishah Tillet, who is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing and co-chair of the Tanner Lectures Festival. “I believe there are few cities and even fewer campuses that celebrate the power of migrant stories with the ease and enthusiasm that we do here at Rutgers University-Newark. Being able to share narratives and histories so integral to our nation at the Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a great honor and gift to us all.” Consistent with Tanner’s vision, “Flowing: Human Migrations and Human Values” will focus on the human drama of migrations within and to the United States, both historical and contemporary, conveyed through the prism of music, visual arts, and public discourse. The first day, Monday, April 22, will excite the visual and auditory senses with five unique exhibitions at Express Newark.

• “We Played Dances: A Portrait of Louis Armstrong” is a photo exhibition on jazz as a migratory music that features the work of Nick Kline and is curated by Shine Portrait Studio and the Institute of Jazz Studies. It will be displayed through mid-May 2019.
• “Krueger-Scott Oral History Jukebox” is an interactive art installation by New Arts Justice that plays music reflective of Newark’s migrant culture. It also will be displayed through mid-May 2019.
• The music video “For My Immigrants” written by Rutgers-Newark undergraduate, Alexis Torres Machado, and produced by Newest Americans is an anthem for Dreamers who believe they “can move any mountain/any wall can be broken.” It will be featured through April 28, 2019.
• We Came and Stayed is a Newest Americans short documentary about the migration of Coyt Jones (father of poet, activist, Amiri Baraka, and grandfather of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka), who traveled to Newark from South Carolina in 1927. The film, which will be shown through April 28, 2019, explores how the Great Migration transformed a family and a city.
• “Glassbook Project: Provisions” is a short documentary about the multi-series installation that consisted of an audiovisual essay about the process of creating books made of glass. Curated from the work of Kline, Adrienne Wheeler, Samantha J. Boardman, Endless Editions, and GlassRoots, along with audio from Krueger-Scott narrators, the collection explores the effects of the seismic change the Great Migration brought to individuals, their families, the city of Newark, and the country at large. The exhibit will be displayed through April 28, 2019.

Wednesday, April 24, will feature an afternoon student panel discussion, “Student Voices, Migrant Stories,” moderated by Marta Elena Esquilin, associate dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community, at 2:40 p.m. at Express Newark. Later that afternoon, the Rutgers-Newark community and guests will participate in a public conversation, “The South is Everywhere: The African-American Migration Narrative,” between Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin and novelist Ayana Mathis, moderated by Tillet, who also serves as associate director of RU-N's Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. The discussion will be held at Express Newark at 5:20 p.m. Griffin and Mathis will be available afterward to sign their respective books, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1996) and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Vintage, reprint edition 2013) at Rutgers-Newark Barnes & Noble.

Thursday, April 25, the Alexis Morrast Trio will enliven the afternoon with a jazz reception at Clement’s Place at 4 p.m. Thereafter, attendees will traverse to the Great Hall at 15 Washington Street where pioneering and celebrated journalist Isabel Wilkerson, author ofThe Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration(Vintage, reprint edition 2011), will deliver the keynote Tanner Lectures on Human Values entitled, “The Power of a Single Decision.” The evening will culminate with a book-signing by Wilkerson at Rutgers-Newark Barnes & Noble and more music by the Alexis Morrast Trio at Clement’s Place.

On Saturday, April 27, the “I Stood at the Border, Im/migrant Voices and Stories Retold” capstone projects of Rutgers-Newark bachelor of fine arts students will be on exhibition at 2 Gateway Center in Newark at 5 p.m. The capstone projects are examinations of the profound and lasting effects migration has on identity from various perspectives (cultural, generational, religious, geographical, racial, linguistic, etc.) as seen through the lens of communications design.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Natalia Ikheloa at 973-353-2760 or ni57@rutgers.edu. 

Meet Jack Tchen: Telling the Stories of Marginalized Communities
By Lisa Intrabartola
Jan 28, 2019

If there’s one thing Jack Tchen wants his students to take away from this article it’s this:

“I’m an anchor baby.”

“Please, make sure you put that in there,” said Tchen, a world-class scholar, curator, organization-builder and long-time NYU history and urban studies professor who joined Rutgers University-Newark this fall to lead the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience and serve as the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities.

His parents arrived as refugees from China in the early 1950s after the “repeal” of the Chinese Exclusion Law. Still, the United States capped entry of those of Chinese heritage at 105 people per year.

“That law was a part of the longstanding Anglo-American fear of ‘yellow peril,’” he said. “My parents learned of a landmark 1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark that ruled any baby born on U.S. soil was a citizen. So that was me.”

He makes a point of sharing this personal information to show the connection between anti-immigrant and racist sentiments then and now have shaped who are welcomed and who are not welcomed to enter and stay in the United States.

“Birthright citizenship is exactly what Trump is trying to repeal now,” he said. “That attack against the promise of ‘equal justice for all persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment is a critical though often forgotten part of our nation’s civil rights history. I’m part of that history – we all are.”

Tchen’s academic and curatorial pursuits stem, in part, from his experiences growing up a racialized minority in the Midwest – where he was the only non-English speaker in kindergarten – and seeing that pattern of white Protestant’s others in the New York metro region. He’s spent the better part of four decades studying how intersected racial categories morph over time, unearthing and archiving the experiences of various marginalized communities – Asian, black, Italian, Irish, Jewish and indigenous among them – which he says have been glossed over by American history.

At the Price Institute, he established the New York Newark Public History Project to challenge those accounts of history. Among the stories being examined is “The Indian and The Puritan,” a statue created by Mount Rushmore sculptor and known KKK sympathizer Gutzon Borglum in 1916.

"It is so easy to supersede the history of the Lenape people from this region with that of the colonists. With this project, we will replace the myths of our past with the truths of European diseases, violence and claims of colonial property rights – all of this should be basic public knowledge,” he said. “And we’re supporting the newlyformed United Lenape Nations Project to archive and tell their own history and make their own culture.”

At Rutgers-Newark, the chance to work at the most diverse university in the country committed to social justice is what draws him to the Brick City each day.

“That’s why I feel close to the students I work with here at Rutgers-Newark,” he said. “I really identify with them and love researching the past, present and future collaboratively.”

Fun Fact:
“I would love to be a blues harmonica player, but I have no musical talent whatsoever,” Tchen said. “I sing flat, and my ear doesn’t exist for that.”

In 1997, the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark was founded to foster research and programming in the arts and humanities that emphasizes intercultural understanding. The institute hosts annual programs, such as the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, a conference established in 1981 that explores themes related to increasing historical awareness in Greater Newark. The institute is named for the late Clement A. Price, a Rutgers-Newark distinguished professor and Newark city historian committed to social justice and civic engagement in the communities in which he lived and whose teaching and research focused on African-American history and culture, urban and social history, and American race relations.

This profile originally appeared in Rutgers Today.

RU-N Commemorates the 50th Anniversary of Its Campus Dedication
By Lawrence Lerner
Oct 29, 2018

Rutgers University–Newark recently commemorated the 50^th anniversary of its campus dedication with a daylong event featuring a lineup of activities, including a history slideshow, roundtable discussion, performance art, live concert, scavenger hunt, and poetry readings.

The all-day affair celebrated the history of student activism for diversity and social justice that’s been a hallmark of RU-N from the campus’ dedication in October 1968 to the present.

The event kicked off at the Paul Robeson Campus Center’s Essex Room with sculptor Maren Hassinger’s performance-art piece called “Women’s Work,” followed by an hour-long slideshow on the history of RU-N’s modern campus, along with a roundtable discussion on strategies for combining art and activism to advance social justice in Newark today. The latter events played to a packed house of professors and their students, who passionately weighed in on issues of importance to them.

The event continued into the afternoon on Norman Samuels Plaza with a two-and-a-half-hour scavenger hunt touching on RU-N history, along with a concert by singer-songwriter Shilpa Ray, who grew up with immigrant Indian-American parents in New Jersey, moved to New York City in 2002 to pursue music, and has toured and performed with the likes of Patti Smith, Nick Cave and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Capping off the day was an after-party of poetry readings followed by an open-mic session in the Paul Robeson Essex Room.

“It was wonderful to have everyone involved and see them get excited from so many angles,” says Eva Giloi, associate professor of history and Interim Senior Associate Dean of Faculty for the School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, who conceived the event as part of Newark Rhythms, an ambitious three-year research, exhibition and music/visual arts project focused on RU-N’s history and role in the Newark community, which Giloi leads along with a number of other RU-N professors and staff members.

The seeds for Newark Rhythms—and by extension the anniversary commemoration—were planted back in 2016 while Giloi was researching the campus’ midcentury modern architecture and realized there was scant literature on RU-N’s legacy in the community, especially regarding the events leading up to and immediately after the construction of the school’s current campus in the mid-1960s.

As she dug deeper, Giloi discovered the complex history of community displacement of then mostly African-American and Puerto Rican residents that took place to make way for the new campus in the city’s Central Ward, part of that period’s sweeping urban renewal efforts across the country and in Newark, which occurred against the backdrop of the 1967 Newark rebellion, the campus’ dedication in October 1968, and the takeover of RU-N’s Conklin Hall by the Black Organization of Students in 1969.

Video by Isaac Jimenez. Dedication Day footage provided by Arts, Culture and Media students.

Newark Rhythms explores how RU-N developed into a place of inclusion, diversity and opportunity by charting its history from that seminal moment of the campus’ construction and dedication through the present. The 50^th anniversary commemoration was one of several events planned for Newark Rhythm’s three-year cycle.

During the spring semester, there will be performances in commemoration of the 1969 liberation of Conklin Hall, along with several music events, including a jazz concert by Newark native and MacArthur Genius Tyshawn Sorey.

For the recent 50^th anniversary commemoration, Giloi had plenty of production help from various staff and faculty on campus, including Laura Troiano (Price Institute) and Christina Strasburger (History), along with curator Ian Cofre and Professors Mary Rizzo (American Studies) and Mark Krasovic (History). The event was sponsored by the Office of the Chancellors, the School of Arts and Sciences–Newark, the Federated Department of History, the Clement A. Price Institute for Culture, Ethnicity and the Modern Experience, Express Newark, and Newark Rhythms.

View a photo gallery of the day's events

Price Institute Presents "Divine Inspiration: A Symposium with The Nrityagram Dance Ensemble"
Mar 30, 2018

In a one-of-a-kind cultural exchange, the Clement A. Price Institute at Rutgers University-Newark is pleased to present “Divine Inspiration: A Symposium with The Nrityagram Dance Ensemble” on Wednesday, April 25, 7:00 p.m. in the Jim Wise Theater, located on the NJIT campus, Newark.

Nrityagram transports audiences on an exquisite journey to Eastern India, the birthplace of Odissi, one of the world’s oldest classical dance forms. Accompanied by Nrityagram’s live music ensemble, the performers will illustrate the breathtaking beauty of Odissi dance, demonstrating how it reflects the culture of their homeland.  

More than a dance company, Nrityagram was founded in a village devoted to dance. The all-female troupe’s daily life is that of intensive training and meditation. This training results in compelling performances that are at once sensual and lyrical. A unique blend of traditional knowledge with contemporary understanding and application makes the Nrityagram School the only institution of its kind in the world.

Led by Artistic Director Surupa Sen and longtime collaborator and dance partner Bijayini Satpathy, Nrityagram has achieved worldwide critical acclaim. In 2015, the company performed in front of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and in the fall of 2016, the company performed as part of the “Sounds of India” program for Lincoln Center's White Light Festival.  Nrityagram has the unprecedented distinction of making The New York Times’ “Best Dance of the Year” list two consecutive years in a row (2015 and 2016).  New York Times dance critic Alistair McCauley described their performance as “one of the most extraordinary dance events of the year…The only proper response to dancers this amazing is worship.”

Divine Inspiration: A Symposium with Nrityagram Dance Ensemble is presented by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University-Newark in partnership with the Rutgers-NJIT Theater Program. The Symposium is supported in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/ Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and administered by the Essex County Division of Cultural and Historic Affairs; and by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Admission is free.

New Leadership Coming to the Clement A. Price Institute
By Lawrence Lerner
Feb 19, 2018

After an extensive national search, RU-N is happy to announce that it has named not one, but two world-class scholars to lead the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience.

In November 2014, RU-N experienced a profound loss when beloved Professor Clement A. Price died suddenly and unexpectedly. Price was a professor of U.S. History and African American Studies and founded what was then the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience, which became a national model for how public research universities engage the community through arts and humanities programming. 

After Price’s death, RU-N made his legacy permanent by endowing the Institute, renaming it to bear his name, and by creating an endowed chair in Price's name to be filled by the next director. 

John Kuo Wei (Jack) Tchen, who specializes in American and Asian American History at NYU, has been named the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities and will take over as the Institute’s new director. Salamishah Tillet, who teaches English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is a leading thinker on the relationship between art and social justice, will become associate director. 

Both are renowned scholars who have been deeply inspired by Price’s work, connect with his mission, and bring extensive experience in public humanities and arts to the Price Institute. 

“In Jack Tchen and Salamishah Tillet, we have hired two extraordinary scholars and public intellectuals who are at the forefront of public history and the humanities, and, like Clem, are warm, inspiring people who are engaged scholars and citizens,” says Jan Ellen Lewis, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences-Newark. “This is an important first step in building on Clem’s incredible legacy, and I know he would be proud.” 

Tchen, who will lead the Price Institute and be on the faculty of RU-N’s History department, is a teacher, historian, curator, and cultural organizer who works with the fragments of lives and communities "silenced" and "disappeared" from historical narratives and brings them back into public dialogue and presence. He is founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Studies Program and Institute at NYU, and was part of the founding faculty of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis there. He also co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City, where he continues to serve as a senior historian, and has been building research collections of Asians in the Americas for more than three decades.  
 
Tchen was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 2012 received the NYU MLK Jr Humanitarian Award. He is currently co-chairing the effort at the Smithsonian Institution to form an Asian Pacific American Center and served on New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers.   

He is the author of the award-winning books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, 1895-1905.

“I’ve known Clem for 20 years and have a deep respect for his work in New Jersey and nationally,” says Tchen. “So, for me to be the Inaugural Chair and Director of the Institute that bears his name is an incredible honor. Under Chancellor Nancy Cantor, RU-N’s commitment to publicly engaged scholarship is visionary. I look forward to working with the numerous scholars there who are doing groundbreaking work.”  

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar of African American culture whose work is at the intersection of arts and activism. A cultural critic who is a regular contributor to the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, she is currently the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies and a faculty member of the Alice Paul Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a much sought-after commenter on the politics of artistic expression and a leading thinker on the relationship between art and social justice. In 2003, she co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national non-profit that uses art to educate, inspire, and mobilize young people to end violence against girls and women. 

Tillet has appeared on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and TedxWomen, and has written for The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, The Root, and Time. In 2010 she wrote the liner notes for John Legend and The Roots’ three-time Grammy award-winning album, Wake Up!. In 2013 she published Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview for Amazon.  

She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and co-editor of the Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters Special Issue on Ethiopia. She is currently completing a book called In Search of the Color Purple, a memoir about Alice Walker’s novel, along with a book on civil rights icon Nina Simone.  

In addition to serving as an associate director of the Price Institute, she will be the founding director of the Public Arts and Social Justice Initiative at Express Newark, and will also be training a new generation of cultural critics in RU-N’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. 

"As a resident of the city of Newark, and as a student and a scholar of the Black Arts movement, I think that we're in a compelling and exciting time here in the city and at Rutgers-Newark in particular, to do really innovative, creative and progressive work," says Tillet. "I'm honored and humbled to be part of the process and the journey." 

Tchen and Tillet will take over the Price Institute from Interim Director Mark Krasovic, who succeeded Price after his death. Krasovic will stay on as an Associate Director of the Institute and continue teaching as a faculty member of RU-N’s History department, where he specializes in U.S. cultural and urban history. 

“I can’t imagine a better person to lead the Institute than Jack Tchen, who understands Clem’s work and that of the Institute and has been doing similar things in his career, and who will challenge us to do the work in new ways,” says Krasovic. “Salamishah will also be amazing. By bringing her terrific legacy in arts and social justice, she’ll do an incredible job building on the work we’ve done in public arts and taking it in new directions. We are incredibly fortunate to have them join us, and I look forward to the new energy and vision they’ll bring to the Institute.”

MTW Conference Celebrates Powerful Role of Music in Black History
By Mark Krasovic
Feb 2, 2018

Music’s power to forge community, provide refuge in troubled times, and move us toward better futures will be on display as the 38th annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series (MTW) brings together eminent artists and scholars to explore the social life of music in black history. The annual Black History Month conference will be held on Saturday, February 17, 2018, beginning at 9:30 a.m. in the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., on the campus of Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N).  The conference is organized annually by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at RU-N.

At a time when artistic production is so closely interwoven with issues of power, politics, and development, The Space Between the Notes: The Social Life of Music in Black History seeks to draw wisdom from music’s history of helping imagine and create a more inclusive and just city, nation, and world.

This year, the Price Institute brings to Newark renowned musicians and scholars whose pioneering and award-winning work has powerfully shaped America’s understanding of music’s history and its role in contemporary life. The first is Stefon Harris, Grammy-nominated jazz vibraphonist, composer, and educator. Heralded as “one of the most important artists in jazz” by the Los Angeles Times, he is currently the associate dean and director of the Jazz Arts Department at the Manhattan School of Music. Harris will deliver the MTW keynote lecture.

The day’s other speakers and performers will be:

• Farah Jasmine Griffin, Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University, and author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II, among other works;

• Daphne Brooks, Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and author of Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910; Jeff Buckley’s Grace; and the forthcoming Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Archive, the Critic, and Black Feminist Musicking; 

• Alexis Morrast, phenomenal teenage vocalist and songwriter who has performed at NJPAC, the Apollo, the Kennedy Center, and innumerable other venues and clubs and whose first demo disc, Introducing Alexis Morrast, is now available

Following the conference, MTW attendees are invited to a reception in the Engelhard Court of the Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street. The reception will feature food and live musical entertainment by The Bradford Hayes Trio.

           All events are free and open to the public.  

The MTW lecture series was co-founded in 1981 by the late Dr. Clement A. Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the late Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission. Over the past 37 years, the conference has drawn thousands of people to Rutgers University-Newark and has attracted some of the nation’s foremost scholars, artists, and humanists in the field of African and African American history and culture. It has become one of the nation's leading scholarly programs specifically devoted to enhancing the historical literacy of an intercultural community.

The annual conference was named for East Orange native Dr. Marion Thompson Wright, a pioneer in African-American historiography and race relations in New Jersey, a pioneering historian of race and education, and among the earliest professionally trained women historians in the nation.

The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is presented by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; the Federated Department of History, Rutgers University-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the Department of African American and African Studies. The 2018 conference is made possible by funds and support from: Prudential Financial, the New Jersey Historical Commission/Department of State, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.