Events @ TC

Ella Baker received her own political education on the streets of Harlem, but she also became a teacher there. Working in a New Deal Program called the Worker's Education Project, she trained adult students in what can only be called a version of Freire's pedagogy for liberation. There, in classrooms in the Harlem Y and Harlem Public Library, Ella Baker sharpened her own ideas and her approach to popular education. She would pass those lessons on to the young people in the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee three decades later.

Barbara Ransby will talk about Ella Baker's own intellectual development on the streets of Harlem, the cast of characters who were her informal teachers, and how she herself became a Black Freedom Movement.

Barbara Ransby is a Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. She is an historian, writer, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, entitled Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina, 2003). She just completed a political biography of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson (a TC alumna), entitled Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale University Press, 2013). Ransby is also working on a study of African American feminist organizations in the 1970s. She serves on the editorial board of the London-based journal, Race and Class, and a number of non-profit civic and media organizations. Professor Ransby received a BA in History from Columbia University and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Michigan.

This talk will be re-scheduled for the 2013-2014 academic year, TBD.

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