WELCOME
9:00 AM
Lewis Gordon, Laura Carnell Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Paul Taylor, Chairperson of Philosophy, Temple University
Philip Alperson, Dean of the College, Temple University
Poem: Don Belton, Temple University “Immemorial”
MARTIN KILSON AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLITICS: AN INTRODUCTION
9:15 AM–10:00 AM
Jane Gordon, Temple University
“Portrait of a Black Scholar”
Anthony Monteiro, Temple University
“Defending Black Civil Society”
POLITICS OF RACE, GENDER, AND CLASS
10:00 AM–12:30 PM
Moderator: Jane Gordon
Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania
“Racial Orders and Black Civil Society”
Hawley G. Fogg-Davis, Temple University
“Black Feminism and Black Civil Society”
Jerry G. Watts, Trinity College
TBA
F. Carl Walton, Lincoln University
“African-American Representation in the United States House of Representatives: An Analysis of the Congressional Black Caucus”
Lunch for presenters: Diamond Club
12:30 PM–1:20 PM
HISTORICAL DIMENSIONS OF BLACK CIVIL LIFE
1:30 PM–3:30 PM
Moderator: Wilbert Jenkins, Temple University
P. Sterling Stuckey, University of California at Riverside
“Slavery and Emancipation: Some Reconsiderations”
Marion Kilson, Salem State College
“Challenge and Celebration: Building Community in Antebellum Black Boston”
URBAN POLITICS, LEGISLATION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
4:00–5:30 PM
Moderator: Terry Rey, Temple University
Elijah Anderson, University of Pennsylvania
“Rittenhouse Square: On the Ethnography of Civility”
Robert Hall, Northeastern University
“E. Franklin Frazier on Black Civil Society and Social Change”
Refreshment break
5:30 PM–6:15 PM
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
6:15 PM–7:30 PM
Moderator: Lewis Gordon
Special introduction: Paul Taylor
Cornel West, Princeton University
“Democracy Matters”
REMARKS
7:30 PM–8:00 PM
Martin Kilson, Harvard University
CONCLUDING REMARKS
8:00 PM–8:15 PM
Anthony Monteiro, Temple University
Closing poem: Don Belton, “Call”
PARTICIPANTS
PHILIP ALPERSON is the Acting-Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He has served as the editor of several books and journals, including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is currently the general editor of Blackwell Publishers’ Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series and serves on the editorial board of the Temple University Press.
ELIJAH ANDERSON is the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert on the sociology of black America, he is the author of the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (1978; 2003) and numerous articles on the black experience. For his ethnographic study Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990), he was honored with the Robert E. Park Award, for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology, of the American Sociological Association.
DON BELTON is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Temple University. His books include Almost Midnight (Beech Tree, 1986) and Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (Beacon, 1996).
HAWLEY FOGG-DAVIS is Professor of Political Science at Temple University. Since 2000, she has been involved in the Brazil-U.S. Ford-funded collaborative research project, “Race and Democracy in the Americas,” which has held conferences in Salvador, Brazil, and Sacramento, as well as joint meetings with the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. In August 2005 she taught a seminar on Race and Political Theory Methodology at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. She has also been the political science field reviewer for the Ford Foundation’s Transitions to College Study, which examines the state of social science research into disadvantaged populations’ education and career paths over the past ten years. She is the author of The Ethics of Transracial Adoption (Cornell UP, 2002), and “Navigating Race in the Market for Reproductive Technologies” (Hastings Center Report). Her current research is on contemporary black feminist theory and its applications..
JANE GORDON teaches in the Department of Political Science at Temple University, where she also is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and editor of “Radical Philosophies of Education,” a special issue of Radical Philosophy Review. She also is co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2005) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2004). Her current work focuses on problems of legitimacy in democratic societies.
LEWIS GORDON is Laura H. Carnell University Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of the Institute for the Study Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several influential books, including Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), which won the 1998 Gustavus Myer Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America, and Existentia Africana. He is also editor and co-editor of several anthologies, including, most recently, A Companion to African-American Studies and Not Only the Master’s Tools. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the South African National Research Fellowship, and has lectured across the globe at many universities and in a variety of public forums.
ROBERT HALL is Associate Professor of African-American Studies and History at Northeastern University. He is editor of Viewpoints on the African-American Past: From the Middle Passage to “Plessy v. Ferguson” (Customs Publishing 1995) and Making a Living: The Work Experience of African Americans in New England (National Foundation for the Humanities, 1995), and co-editor of Holding on to the Land and the Lord: Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure, and Social Policy in the Rural South (University fo Georgia Press, 1982). His accolades include, among many distinguished fellowships, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal in 2000 for his contributions to the founding of African American Studies in the academy.
WILBERT JENKINS is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. A specialist in African-American History, Nineteenth-Century Southern African-American Communities, Civil War and Reconstruction, he is the author of Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Indiana UP, 2004).
MARION KILSON received her Ph. D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 1967 and retired as Dean of the Graduate School at Salem State College in 2001. She is co-curator of The Words of Thunder exhibitions that currently celebrate William Lloyd Garrison’s bicentennial birthday at the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston. Her publications include books and numerous articles on African and African American topics.
MARTIN KILSON is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus at Harvard University. Dr. Kilson received his bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University in 1953 was the valedictorian of his graduating class. From Lincoln, Dr. Kilson went on to earn his master’s degree and Ph.D., respectively, in political science at Harvard University. In 1968, Dr. Kilson, who recently retired, became the first African-American to be granted full tenure at Harvard University. A prolific writer who has authored numerous social and political articles on Black life in scholarly journals, Dr. Kilson has written several books including Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process (1966) and Crisis and Change in the Negro Ghetto (1973).
ANTHONY MONTEIRO is a Distinguished Lecturer in African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University, where he teaches courses on African-American social and political thought. He is well known for his work on W.E.B. Du Bois and the building of political institutions in the Philadelphia black community, especially those in Northern Philadelphia. His many publications include two forthcoming books—one on analytical Marxism and another on the importance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s thought for a philosophy of human science.
TERRY REY is Associate Professor of Religion, Race, and Ethnicity at Temple University. Formerly Associate Professor of African and Caribbean Religions at Florida International University and Professeur de Sociologie des Religions at l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, he is author of Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti and co-editor of Orisha Devotion as World Religion: Globalized Yoruba Religious Culture.
ROGERS SMITH is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and Chairperson of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several influential books, including Civic Ideals, which received six “best book” awards from divisions of the American Political Science Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Social Science History Association, and the Association of American Publishers. It was also a Finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. The Unsteady March received the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.
P. STERLING STUCKEY was a Presidential chair and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Riverside. He has received many prestigious fellowships and awards, including an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and a Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. His Slave Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 1987. His Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History was published by Oxford in 1994. Current projects include, for Oxford, an extended study of slave dance tentatively entitled The Ring Shout: The Role of Dance in the Formation of Culture, an d an extended study, for the Cambridge University Press Literary Series, of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno.
PAUL C. TAYLOR is Chairperson and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. A specialist in aesthetics, philosophy of culture, Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, and pragmatism, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity Press, 2004).
F. CARL WALTON is Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Lincoln University. Walton’s major research focuses on legislative politics and Black political organizations. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the work of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The project provides a thorough analysis of the evolution of the CBC from 1992-2004 through the incorporation of interviews with members of the organization. In addition, he has published a chapter, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference: Beyond the Civil Rights Movement,” in Black Political Organizations in the Post Civil Rights Era (Rutgers, 2002), edited by Ollie Johnson and Karin Stanford.
JERRY G. WATTS is Professor English in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (University of North Carolina Press, 1994) and Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (NYU Press 2001) and editor of The Black Intellectual in Crisis: A Retrospective (Routledge, 1999).
CORNEL WEST, Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University, is one of America’s most influential public intellectuals. He has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and he has received more than twenty honorary doctoral degrees. He is the author of numerous articles and books including The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Wisconsin UP, 1989), The Cornel West Reader (Civitas, 2000), Race Matters (Beacon, 1993), and Democracy Matters (Penguin, 2004).
The Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought is especially grateful to Ms. Linda Jenkins for her special assistance on this event.
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