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The 41st Annual Marion Thompson Wright

                         Lecture Series 

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 The 41st Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, One Begins Again: Organizing & the Historical Imagination, moderated by Barbara Ransby, was held online on Saturday, February 20, 2021 at 9:30 A.M. EST.

Alicia Garza, Bill Fletcher Jr., and Cara Page, each in important ways, spoke about organizing as a means to healing generations of society-wide injustice.

Each has devoted their lives to the work of organizing, understanding the conditions shaped by the past, and testing what works and what doesn’t.

Each demonstrates how this invested, critical- practical work of understanding deep historical patterns helps us reimagine the present to invest it with the possibilities of change.

Each envisions better, potential Americas, or in the words of Langston Hughes, “The land that never has been yet—And yet must be.”

This forward-moving, liberating historical imagination is an act of aware, purpose-filled, enriched living in the here and now.

This visioning sparks ongoing movement building and the new possibilities for a life- and planet- sustaining near future.

Watch the conference here:

The Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture (MTW) series was co-founded in 1981 by Rutgers University-Newark Professor Clement A. Price and Giles R. Wright of the New Jersey Historical Commission who launched the series with the belief that the rigorous exploration of the past, made accessible to a broad public of learners, would help guide the nation into a brighter future. The conference is named in honor of a native of East Orange. Marion Thompson Wright was arguably the first black female professional historian and a pioneer in Black New Jersey historiography. In her honor, the series brings outstanding thinkers and doers of African and African American life and history. Diverse, civically engaged, and devoted to life-long learners, the MTW Series is one of the nation’s most distinguished and longest running lectures. The Clement A. Price Institute is devoted to building deep historical justice in our region and beyond.

If you would like more information or have questions about the event, please email us at priceinstitute@newark.rutgers.edu

View Information on Past MTW Lectures

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More About the Price Institute

In 1997, the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark was founded with the belief that the arts and humanities in all their creativity and scholarly rigor have a central role to play in the continued revitalization of Greater Newark. The Institute strives, in the finest university tradition, to satisfy a hunger for new ideas and new ways of looking at the city and the world. As part of a vibrant civic ecology, it engages a range of community partners and audiences through public programs whose collective objective is to help make Newark a more livable, interesting, and civically wholesome urban environment. Toward realizing that vision, Institute programs bring together the latest achievements in the arts and humanities with members of the community-at-large including teachers, lawyers, students, corporate executives, medical professionals, parents, caregivers, elected officials, public servants, and life-long learners. The result is a more engaged and empathetic citizenry leveraging knowledge and insights generated by Institute programming to effect change in the community. Over the twenty years of its existence, the Institute has become a national model for how publicly engaged research universities can help cultivate a more livable city, one that thrives on the creative rhythms of the arts and humanities.