Africana symposium to be held on Friday with panels, workshops

The second annual workshop of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora (RCD) will be a symposium titled “Social Movements and the Black Intellectual Tradition” tomorrow afternoon at Breed Memorial Hall at 51 Winthrop St.

The Africana symposium, which will run from 1:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., is a collaborative effort between the Africana Studies program and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD), according to Kendra Field, assistant professor of history in the Africana Studies department and interim director of Consortium. The Consortium is made up of five departments -- Africana Studies, Colonialism Studies, American Studies, Latino Studies and Asian American Studies -- and is led by a different one of these departments each year. This year, the Consortium is led by the Africana Studies department, which will be the steering committee for tomorrow's symposium. Last year's inaugural Consortium workshop was led by the Colonialism Studies department.

The topic of this year’s symposium is the historical relationship between scholarship and social movements, and the role intellectual work has played in that relationship, Field said.

"It seemed that this was a topic that needed hashing out, which is always in the background or in the periphery of discussions about race and racism in the university context and very much tied to the concerns that students are feeling and expressing," Field told the Daily in an email. "This is also a conversation about what the university is meant for, what it has been and might be used for. We’re putting on the table a set of questions that are too often in the background."

According to Field, approximately 30 students, alumni and faculty will be participating in a "memorial walk" from the Africana Center to Breed Memorial Hall, which will include seven historical sites on campus that are meaningful to the African American alumni, but of which "many of our students and community members may be unaware." The walk is inspired by the work of late Tufts history professor Gerald Gill, who had envisioned a Tufts Black Freedom Trail that "would have blended local Medford and Somerville civil rights landmarks with on-campus spots where important events had occurred along the university’s path to racial equality," according to a 2007 Tufts Daily article.

The trail that will be followed tomorrow was constructed by the symposium's steering committee and Professor of Political Science Pearl Robinson. The walk's featured site will be a tree that was planted in honor of African American alumni who graduated as early as 1909.

Field added that Gill was one of the inspirations for the symposium, since Gill had kept records of the institutional memory of black student life at Tufts from the 1980s up until his death in 2007. Gill had been doing extensive research to prepare an article and exhibit or timeline of the sites on campus that are important to black history, according to Field.

“After [Gill’s] passing, as in most such losses, it seems there wasn’t nearly enough space for a lot of that kind of information to land," Field said. "Pearl Robinson and Jeanne Penvenne [professor of history] have shared with me beautiful bits and pieces of this story from Gill’s time because they overlapped significantly and carried it forward."

Many of the alumni on the racial justice, scholarship and activism panel had Gill as a professor, and the stories they tell about students before them come from Gill, Field said.

"We see this gathering of African-descended students, alums and faculty as an opportunity to come together as a community, to support one another across generations, and to provide perspective on the past, present and future of 'Social Movements and the Black Intellectual Tradition,'" Field said. "In light of the current moment and movement in which our students find themselves ... Pearl Robinson, Katrina Moore [director of the Africana Center], and I, along with the entire Africana Studies steering committee, have been thinking a lot about the tremendous importance of alums, institutional memory, and inter-generational community at such times."

According to Field, the symposium will have three panels: one on racial justice, scholarship and activism after Tufts, one on the impact of social media on social movements and one on black intellectual traditions.

The panel on racial justice, scholarship and activism will consist of six African-American alumni of graduating classes from the 1970s to 2003, Field said.

“[The alumni will] be talking about their time at Tufts from the 1970s onward, for instance, what it was like to be one of only several black students on campus," Field said. "They will also speak about their life paths since Tufts; all of these alums have engaged in either scholarship, activism or [have been] scholar-activists on issues of race and racial justice."

The final event will be the keynote address by Robin D.G. Kelley, the Gary B. Nash professor of American History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), who will be discussing “rhetoric and punditry in relation to actual work which people do,” according to Field.

“Given the social movements our students [are] navigating and building, it seemed to many of us that recent Tufts alums could provide meaningful institutional memory and an important sense of inter-generational community and perspective," she said.

Field explained that organization for the symposium began last spring, when she first had the idea of creating an event involving alumni that would center on theme of intellectual tradition. Another reason for the event was the lack of “institutional memory of African American student life," she said.

Two program associates at the Consortium of Studies in RCD, Andrew Wofford and Phillip Ellison, were also involved in the organization of the event. Wofford said his main role involved researching the history of black students and black institutions at Tufts, inspired by a summer course that he and Ellison took with Field about black people in New England.

“We had the idea for part of the symposium to lay out an exhibit that showed a smattering of the many, many contributions that black students and black faculty have made to Tufts,” Wofford, a junior, said.

Components of this exhibit include images of student activism such as the 1969 labor protest, as well as contemporary issues such as the “Black Lives Matter” movement, according to Wofford.

One story that Wofford worked on in preparation for the symposium was about a 1975 hate crime committed by a group of white fraternity brothers against black students.

Ellison, a senior, added that the symposium's prepared collection goes as far back as 1909.

“The impetus for what we’re working on in terms of the symposium is that as a black student here, you wonder about the experiences of former black students -- who and what they were like, their names and more,” he said.

According to Ellison, there are resources available to investigate this, such as the newspaper clippings in the back of the Africana Center about many of the earlier students.

“We wanted to bring that to light, about the influence that black students had on union practices and labor practices at Tufts after events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King and onward," he said. "There is a tradition and a history here that black students have had, and we wanted to understand its relevance in terms of outside history and how Tufts is a microcosm."

Another component of the symposium is an archival project, which includes the work, writings and photographs of the late Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former middleweight boxer who was falsely accused of murder, according to John Artis, who spent 15 years in prison as a co-defendant in the case. Artis said that Carter spent 20 years in prison before he was found innocent and released, eventually donating a 50-year trail of his life to Tufts.

“It notated [Carter's] thoughts, his interpretations and his views about life in general, and life specifically dealing with all kinds of subject matter, from race to education to beliefs,” Artis said.

Artis decided to visit Tufts for two weeks in order to attend the symposium, and also gave the keynote address for the Nov. 16 Amnesty International discussion of solitary confinement.

“I’m here so that people here can become aware of the uniqueness of [Carter]," he said.

Field explained that Carter's gift came with a mission to make the donated works a sort of “living archive” for the Tufts community. This resulted in the establishment of the Rubin Carter/John Artis Innocence International Project at Tufts, a collaborative effort between Tufts Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) and the CSRD, she said.

“This project is just getting off the ground, so it’s converging with the symposium to gain momentum,” Field said.

Robinson will be speaking at the beginning of the symposium about the history of African American students and student life at Tufts, Field said. She added that the symposium was important to showcase this institutional memory and history, one that often isn't visible.