The Baton Foundation

Celebrating the Season…Honoring Self
2023-12-03 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York)
The Baton Foundation will host a virtual expressive arts workshop to help center us during the holiday season. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Workshop
With the holiday season upon us and a new year just weeks away, this virtual expressive arts workshop will encourage participants to reflect on 2023 and take stock of and nurture self.
Despite the challenges we might face and regardless of the turmoil around us, it is important to focus on our innate strengths and to ground oneself in the knowledge that all is well. Dr. Wendy Phillips will employ guided expressive arts techniques that will aid each participant in her or his journey to self-expression and healing.
Please wear comfortable clothes and bring paper, chalk, crayons, colored pencils, play dough or paints–whatever materials you would like to work with. You will be able to participate with your camera off or on and there is never any pressure on anyone to actively engage with the group. At the end of the session, the group will reflect on what has been expressed, discovered, and experienced.
Should you have questions about the workshop beforehand, you may call Dr. Phillips at 404-798-1061.
About Expressive Arts
The Expressive Arts combine a variety of practices including writing, music, visual arts, drama, and dance to support self-expression, personal growth and healing. In each session, and as one participates, s/he explores a variety of materials and activities. The expressive arts have been defined as supporting a process of self-discovery and self-expression, as a way to connect with one’s creative self, and also as a way to find tranquility and or achieve emotional release.
About the Instructor
Wendy Phillips, Ph.D., LMFT, REAT, REACE is a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, A Registered Expressive arts Consultant Educator, and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who is based in Atlanta. She also teaches in the Psychology and Creativity Studies Programs at Saybrook University.
Register Here for Zoom Workshop

Georgia’s Long Struggle Toward Democracy: The Role of the Press, Then and Now
2023-11-19 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the role of Black press leaders in Georgia’s ongoing struggle for democracy. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Georgia and its capital city, Atlanta, have long played a central role in the U.S. struggle to achieve the democratic ideals set forth in its founding documents. From the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) to the present, a reactionary, anti-democratic, White nationalist press has often worked against these efforts.
Using their book, Journalism and Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2021), as a backdrop, professors D’Weston Haywood and Kathy Roberts Forde will discuss how White press leaders, collaborating with Georgia governors, senators, officials, and business leaders, helped build a violent White supremacist society and political economy that endured for generations after the war. They also will tell the equally compelling story about how Black press leaders fought back–documenting, in real time, what was happening while marshaling a collective Black power to forge a more inclusive and just democracy in the state, the South, and in the nation. Drs. Forde and Haywood will connect this history to the momentous events taking place in Georgia today.
About the Author
D’Weston Haywood is an Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). His work centers on Black protest and cultural politics, and their intersections with the state and public spheres. His award-winning book, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (UNC Press, 2018), explores this. Haywood’s work also includes “Sonic Scholarship.” His projects here include “The [Ferguson] Files: A Sonic Study of Racial Violence in America” (2016), examining a year of racial violence from the killing of Michael Brown to the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church, and “MADE MEN” (2020), examining White Nationalism, White masculinity, and American politics in the Trump era. He is currently working on two book projects, one reconsidering the Cold War and Space Age through Black Nationalism, and another analyzing Black political theory, Hip Hop, and mass incarceration. Originally from North Carolina, Haywood currently lives in Queens, New York.
About the Editor
Kathy Roberts Forde is Professor of Journalism and Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is co-editor and contributing author of the book Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, which received the American Historical Association Palmegiano Book Award, the AEJMC History Division Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association Book Award. A U.S. press historian, Dr. Forde is working on a new book about the role of the White press in racial massacres—instigating, organizing, and covering up racial massacres for generations after the Civil War—and the role of the Black press in exposing these atrocities and attempting to hold those responsible to account. Professor Forde was raised in rural East Tennessee.
Register Here for Zoom Lecture

Afro-Hispanic Painter Juan de Pareja
2023-11-05 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter (April 3 – July 16, 2023). This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Dr. David Pullins, associate curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (pictured above), will talk about the exhibition he recently co-curated at the museum, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter. The research inspired by this groundbreaking exhibit has offered an unprecedented look at the life and artistic achievements of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670). Largely known today as the subject of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s iconic portrait by Diego Velázquez (pictured above), Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez’s studio for more than two decades before becoming an artist in his own right. The exhibition was the first to tell his story and examine the ways in which enslaved artisanal labor and a multiracial society are inextricably linked with the art and material culture of Spain’s so-called Golden Age. The exhibit brought together approximately 40 paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts objects, as well as an array of books and historic documents from The Met’s holdings and other collections in the United States and Europe.
Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met., said, “This exhibition takes us to the very heart of 17th-century Spanish painting to reveal Juan de Pareja’s incredible personal story. By reexamining the narrative around one of the most celebrated works in the history of western portraiture, the presentation challenges us to question existing notions about historical art and objects—and introduces a remarkable artist whose name may be familiar to many but whose work had not been explored in depth.”
About Juan de Pareja
Juan de Pareja was born around 1608 in Antequera, Spain–probably to an enslaved woman of African descent and a white Spaniard. Although no known documents from Pareja’s lifetime speculate on his family origins or skin color, ample evidence from seventeenth-century Spain provides the context of a highly multiracial society in which enslaved labor was widespread. Pareja is first mentioned in Madrid in 1634 as part of the circle of artist Diego Velázquez, who was then establishing himself as the foremost painter at the Spanish court. Between 1649 and 1650, the pair traveled to Italy, where Velázquez painted Pareja’s portrait and signed legal papers releasing him from slavery. Once back in Madrid, Pareja built a successful career as an independent artist.
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King: A Life
2023-10-29 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a conversation with author Jonathan Eig about his new biography of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (Macmillan, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. — and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. Eig casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.
In this landmark biography, Jonathan Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.
About the Speakers
Jonathan Eig is a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including Ali: A Life, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Ken Burns calls him “a master storyteller,” and Eig’s books have been listed among the best of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and Slate. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.
Kiplyn Primus is a journalist, strategic marketing professional, and host of WCLK’s (91.9) The Local Take with Kiplyn Primus—a public affairs show that features discussions about critical issues facing Atlanta and profiles organizations engaged in important work in the station’s constituent communities.
Ms. Primus has had a long career in public and commercial media, including stints with The Atlanta Tribune, Global Atlanta, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her work in strategic marketing focuses on health, finance and the tech industry, including Goldman Sachs and the DeKalb Hospital Authority. In addition, she has written extensively on global and local initiatives for several publications and media outlets. Kiplyn is also a veteran facilitator with the Atlanta-based StoryCorps studio—the largest oral history project in the United States.
Ms. Primus received a BA degree in journalism and English from Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and an MBA in marketing from Clark Atlanta University (Atlanta, GA).
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Howard Thurman’s Atlanta: Nonviolence, Civil Rights, and Mystical Thought
2023-10-22 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a conversation about the role Atlanta played in the life and work of Howard Thurman. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Using Peter Eisenstadt’s book, Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman (University of Virginia Press, 2021), as the backdrop, distinguished Howard Thurman scholars Luther E. Smith, Jr. (Emory Professor Emeritus) and Peter Eisenstadt, will engage each other in a conversation about Howard Thurman’s life and work in Atlanta.
An early pacifist and the first African American to meet Mahatma Gandhi, Reverend Thurman often is overlooked in the pages of history as a foundational proponent of nonviolent direct action. A nationally recognized human rights advocate, Thurman would serve as spiritual advisor to James Farmer and Pauli Murray (founding members of C.O.R.E.), Marian Wright Edelman (Children’s Defense Fund), Reverend Jesse Jackson, Vernon Jordan (National Urban League), Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists.
Integral to Thurman’s development and to the trajectory of his career was the time he spent in Atlanta. From his years as a student at Morehouse College, his return to campus in 1928 for a dual appointment in religion and philosophy at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, and decades of speaking engagements in the city, Atlanta figured prominently in his life. This program is designed to give the speakers great latitude to converse about Thurman’s life in Atlanta, his impact on the city and one of its most influential and beloved native sons.
About the Speakers
Peter Eisenstadt, Ph.D., was Associate Editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project and is an affiliate member of the Clemson University history department. He is author of Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City’s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing.
Luther E. Smith, Jr., Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Church and Community, Candler School of Theology of Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia), at which he served on the faculty for thirty-five years.
While at Emory University, Dr. Smith served as president of the University Senate, president of the University’s Faculty Council, and as Candler’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development. Professor Smith writes and speaks extensively on issues of church and society, congregational renewal, meanings and dynamics of community, interfaith cooperation, Christian spirituality, and the thought of Howard Thurman. He is the author of Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet, Intimacy and Mission: Intentional Community as Crucible for Radical Discipleship, and editor of Howard Thurman: Essential Writings. Dr. Smith is the Senior Advisory Editor for the five-volume papers project The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman (the second largest papers project on an African American). His book, Hope is Here! Spiritual Practices for Justice and Beloved Community, is being published by Westminster John Knox Press and will be released in November 2023.
In recognition of his scholarship, teaching, and community service, Dr. Smith has received numerous awards and professional accolades. He helped to found the International Community School and the Interfaith Children’s Movement, and currently serves as the coordinator for the Pan-Methodist Campaign for Children in Poverty.
Reverend Smith is an ordained minister of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia with his wife Helen. They have four children and five granddaughters.
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Remaking the Republic
2023-09-24 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about Black politics and the creation of American citizenship. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Citizenship in nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was “now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government.”
Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, the author argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates’ lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. Thus, they played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging.
Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (UPenn Press, 2020), chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newspapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
About the Author
Christopher Bonner teaches African American history at the University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Bonner teaches courses covering African American politics and culture, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, the transformations of the United States during the nineteenth century, and race and ethnicity in early America. Originally from Chesapeake, VA, he earned his B.A. from Howard University and Ph.D. from Yale.
Other work by Professor Bonner appears in digital form at Muster, the blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era and at Black Perspectives, the blog for the African American Intellectual History Society.
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
2023-09-10 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved Black woman. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Koritha Mitchell’s edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is no ordinary edition. Besides faithfully reproducing Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 narrative, it adds extensive explanatory footnotes and a thorough introduction. The volume also offers six appendices with historical and cultural documents that help readers appreciate the immensity of Jacobs’ achievement. Mitchell will share what she learned from editing this extraordinary text, the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman.
About the Book
In 1861, Harriet Jacobs became the first formerly enslaved African American woman to publish a book-length account of her life. In crafting her coming-of-age story, she insisted upon biographical accuracy and bold creativity—telling the truth while giving herself and others fictionalized names. She also adapted conventions from two other popular genres: the sentimental novel and the slave narrative. Then, despite facing obstacles not encountered by White women and Black men, she orchestrated the book’s publication and became a traveling bookseller in an effort to inspire passive Americans to support the abolition of slavery.
Engaging with the latest research on Jacobs’ life and work, this edition helps readers to understand the magnitude of her achievement in writing, publishing, and distributing her life story. However, it also shows how this monumental accomplishment was only the beginning of her contributions, given her advocacy work over the nearly forty years that she lived after its publication. As a survivor of sexual abuse who became an advocate, Jacobs laid a foundation for activist movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. The six appendices featured in this edition, place at readers’ fingertips resources that further illuminate the issues raised by Jacobs’ remarkable life and legacy.
About the Editor
Koritha Mitchell (she/her + Koritha rhymes with Aretha) is an award-winning author, literary historian, cultural critic, and professional development expert. Her research focuses on African America literature as well as violence in United States history and contemporary culture. She examines how texts, both written and performed, help targeted families and communities survive and thrive.
Her first book, Living with Lynching, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in August 2020 and was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine and Black Perspectives. Professor Mitchell edited Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, and Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” published by American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which appeared in Callaloo and identifies similarities between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities.
Currently a professor of English at Ohio State University, Koritha grew up in Sugar Land, Texas (near Houston); earned her BA from Ohio Wesleyan University; and earned her MA and PhD at the University of Maryland-College Park.
In 2011, Koritha founded the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of Black Girls RUN!, a national organization encouraging women to make fitness and healthy living a priority. She stepped down from leadership in 2014 and remains proud that the chapter is still going strong. On Twitter, she’s @ProfKori.
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Red Hot City
2023-08-20 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the policies, politics and economics that led to Atlanta’s racialized gentrification. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Atlanta is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs. As central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification, the suburbs have become more diverse, and many affluent suburbs have tried to push back against this diversity. Red Hot City (University of California Press, 2022), tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them. Repeatedly, policymakers and planners have chosen trajectories that favor redeveloping places that house less affluent families and households of color to remake them for a more affluent, whiter residential base. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Dan Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.
About the Author
Dan Immergluck is a Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). Prior to joining GSU in 2017, he was Professor of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). His research concerns housing, neighborhood change, and real estate markets. Dr. Immergluck is the author of five books and over 120 scholarly articles, book chapters, and research reports. He has consulted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. Professor Immergluck has been cited and quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. He has testified several times before the U.S. Congress and the Federal Reserve Board. Prior to becoming a full time academic, he was a community development practitioner and affordable housing advocate in Chicago for over a decade.
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The Importance of Cultural Heritage Instruction for Black Boys
2023-08-06 15:00 - 16:30
We must impress upon our children that even when troubles rise to seven-point-one on life’s Richter scale, they must be anchored so deeply that, though they sway, they will not topple. ~Mamie Till Mobley
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. ~Frederick Douglass
Cultural Heritage Program Orientation Overview
Initiated in 2016, The Baton Foundation is excited to host the eighth orientation for its signature Cultural Heritage Program. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
August 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and almost seventy years since the horrific torture and killing of Emmet Till. In fact, organizers selected the date on which the March of Washington occurred (August 28, 1963), to honor the memory of young Emmett.
Today, states and school districts around the country are working feverishly to make it impossible for students to learn about history that casts the United States in a bad light–particularly as it relates to Black people. Too often, the story of Black people in the United States is told by others, and for reasons not meant to edify or to inspire, much less to reflect truth. It is important, though, that our children learn the entirety of our history.
The Baton Foundation’s Cultural Heritage Program is designed to give Atlanta-area Black boys (ages 10-17) opportunities to learn about Black history and culture in an intimate, supportive environment. In bi-weekly seminars, students explore various aspects of the Black experience in the United States and around the world. Additionally, they work with Baton Foundation facilitators to explore notions of self-awareness and self-mastery. The program also provides opportunities for students to explore many of Atlanta’s cultural venues and to engage in educational travel to historic and cultural sites.
During the orientation, attendees will learn more about the program and have an opportunity to ask questions of the program’s founder, Baton Foundation board members, and Cultural Heritage Program students.
Register for Zoom Orientation Here
Photo Credit: Adinah Morgan for The Baton Foundation (Cultural Heritage Program students at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, 2019)

Smile For We
2023-06-25 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a conversation about Black men…and their smiles. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
The idea for Smile For We was born in response to recent instances of police brutality against Black men around the country. Often depicted as gang members, deadbeat dads, drug dealers, and societal outcasts, images of smiling Black men are rare.
Author Damon Mosley says, “Every time you turn on the TV, one sees Black men being killed, ridiculed, or stereotyped…in general, the media constantly portrays us as threats—not human beings.” He says the goal of the book “is to keep positive Black men visible and relevant.” Smile For We is a photo book dedicated to changing the way the world sees and treats Black men. Purchase books here.
About the Author
Damon Mosley is a Columbus, Ohio-based writer, producer, and photography buff. He began his writing career by submitting articles to his favorite publications while studying at Columbia University. His first story appeared in SLAM magazine in 1995. He later switched gears to cartoons–authoring a comic strip called Mosley that was picked up for development by Universal Press Syndicate in 2005.
In 2008, Damon self-published the children’s book, I’ve Got to Have Those Shoes!. When he learned about the work of Samaritan’s Feet — a charitable organization based in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Mosley pledged a portion of the proceeds from the book to support their work. He also joined the group when they distributed thousands of pairs of shoes to needy children in Peru.
After years of developing various projects in Hollywood, Damon released Smile For We — a collection of portraits dedicated to changing the stereotypical images of Black men. Currently, Mr. Mosley is writing and producing his first feature film and a TV show based on his life.
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Half American
2023-06-04 15:00 - 16:00
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about Black Americans fighting World War II—at home and overseas. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” The bravery and patriotism of Black troops in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. In a time when the questions raised about World War II regarding race and democracy in America remain troublingly relevant and still unanswered, this meticulously researched retelling makes for urgently necessary reading.
About the Author
Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of the new book, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022). He is also the author of four previous books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and several academic journals, and on NPR. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University.
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Expressive Arts Self-Exploration Workshop
2023-05-07 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a virtual expressive arts workshop designed to help attendees explore their inner self. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Workshop
The expressive arts combine a variety of practices including writing, music, visual arts, drama, and dance to support self-expression, personal growth and healing. In each session, and as one participates, s/he explores working with a variety of materials and activities. And, as one completes a session, s/he reflects on what was expressed, discovered, and/or experienced. The expressive arts have been defined as supporting a process of self-discovery and self-expression–as a way to connect with one’s creative self. Expressive arts also can help one find a path to tranquility and/or achieve emotional release.
For this introductory virtual session, please wear comfortable clothes and bring plain white paper, chalk, crayons, colored pencils, play dough or paints—any material with which you would like to work. If preferred, each participant will be able to work with her/his camera turned off. Should you have any questions in advance of the workshop, please feel free to call Dr. Phillips at 404-798-1061.
About the Presenter
Wendy Phillips, Ph.D., LMFT, REAT, REACE is a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, a Registered Expressive arts Consultant Educator, and an Atlanta-based Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Dr. Phillips also teaches in the Psychology and Creativity Studies Programs at Saybrook University (Pasadena, California).
Register Here for Zoom Workshop

Hidden in Plain Sight: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement
2023-03-05 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the important role Black women played in the fight for Black liberation from the era of enslavement to the modern Civil Rights Movement. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
This talk explores why and how Black women involved in Civil Rights activism become “hidden in plain sight” and silenced in dominant U.S. historical narratives and cultural memory. Professor Yates-Richard traces a persistent representational logic that shadows and quiets Black women in Black freedom imaginings from the era of slavery through the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Yates-Richard introduces key Black women Civil Rights organizers and activists, and highlights their contributions to the ongoing struggle for Black liberation.
About the Speaker
Meina Yates-Richard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. She specializes in African American, African diasporic and American literature and culture. Her scholarship explores the connections between representations of slavery, gender, sound, and liberation ideologies in Black Atlantic literary and cultural production and freedom movements. Dr. Yates-Richard was 2018-19 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and was awarded the Norman Foerster Prize for Best Essay published in American Literature in 2016 for “‘WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?’: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature.” Her work appears in the Journal of West Indian Literature, amsj: American Studies, post-45 Contemporaries, Feminist Review, and the edited volume Ralph Ellison in Context. Yates-Richard co-edited with Robin Brooks MELUS Special Issue (vol 46:4), Black Women’s Literature: Violence & the COVID-19 Moment.
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Black Love: A Celebration of the Village that Raises Us
2023-02-19 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about Black love and the village that nurtures and sustains it. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
In recognition of Valentine’s Day, this program will shift the focus away from romantic love to, instead, focus on the love we each need to develop in ways that are emotionally, culturally and socially sound. Using her book, My George, as a springboard, Kathy Butler will give a presentation that celebrates Black love and those who nurture it in us individually and in our communities.
Ms. Butler will relate her personal story and tell why it is important for her to share this experience with others. She also will explore the healing power of “The Village,” and ask those in attendance to reflect on the individuals who raised them and the source(s) of love from which they drew strength. During the program, Ms. Butler will read excerpts from her book.
As a gesture of love from The Baton Foundation, we will make a limited number of Ms. Butler’s book available to attendees.
About the Book
My George: A Love Letter to My Dad, is a tribute to the man who raised the author, a man she affectionately calls George. The book celebrates George and Black fathers and father figures. Within its pages are heartwarming anecdotes detailing how George came into the author’s life and provided unconditional love, a sense of belonging, unwavering support and invaluable life lessons that taught her that Black life mattered before it was a hashtag. Through each story, Ms. Butler shows young people (who may not have biological dads in their lives) that they still can experience the true love of a father. The fact is, she says, that “although we often see ourselves as ‘fatherless children,’ the truth is, many of us have father-figures (stepfathers, godfathers, grandfathers, and mentors) that are parenting us.”
Equally important, the book is a way for our community to ignite a movement to #giveBlackdadstheirflowers and dispel the stereotype that suggests Black men are not active, present and nurturing parental figures.
About the Author
Kathy Butler, CA, is an author, certified child advocate and speaker and the founder of Comfort in The Storm, LLC–an organization created to provide education and awareness about child sex abuse prevention.
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Of Blood and Sweat
2023-02-05 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about how Black women and men helped to build wealth and power in U.S. institutions. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In Of Blood and Sweat (Harper Collins Publishers, 2022), Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets. In his book, Dr. Ford goes back through time to excavate the roots of this struggle, from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America. As he reveals, in tracing the history of almost any major American institution of power and wealth you’ll find it was created by Black Americans–or created to control them.
Painstakingly researched and documented, Of Blood and Sweat is a compelling look at the past that holds broad implications for present-day calls for racial equity, racial justice, and the abolishment of systemic racism, and offers invaluable insight into our understanding of Black history and the story of America.
About the Author
Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of 12 works of fiction and non-fiction. He is also a psychotherapist, mythologist, and sought-after public speaker. Dr. Ford is the recipient of the 2006 Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Award in African American Literature. He has been a featured guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio, and numerous television and radio programs. Clyde lives in Bellingham, Washington.
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What the Children Told Us
2022-11-20 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the lives and work of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark—the originators of the famous “doll test”. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
What the Children Told Us: The Untold Story of the Famous “Doll Test” and the Black Psychologists Who Changed the World (Sourcebooks, 2022) is the story of a young couple, Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Kenneth, a working-class guy from Harlem, and Mamie, a rich young lady from Hot Springs, Arkansas. They met at Howard University, fell in love and, to her parents’ chagrin, married in secret during the Great Depression before finishing their education.
Dr. Kenneth Clark visited rundown and under-resourced segregated schools across America, presenting Black children with two dolls: a white one with hair painted yellow and a brown one with hair painted black. “Give me the doll you like to play with,” he said. “Give me the doll that is a nice doll.” The psychological experiment Dr. Clark developed with his wife, Mamie–designed to measure how segregation affected Black children’s perception of themselves and other Black people, was at once enlightening and horrifying. Repeatedly, the young children–some not yet five years old–selected the white doll as preferable, and the brown doll as “bad.” Some children even denied their race.
What the Children Told Us is the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between two scholars who highlighted the psychological effects of racial segregation. The Clarks’ story is one of courage, love, and an unfailing belief that Black children deserved better than what society was prepared to give them. It is the story of two bright, energetic, ordinary people whose unrelenting activism played a critical role in the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education. The Clarks’ decades of impassioned advocacy, their inspiring marriage, and their enduring work shines a light on the power of passion and unrelenting commitment.
About the Author
Tim Spofford grew up in the all-white mill town of Cohoes, N.Y. hearing stories of Black families run out of his city in the middle of the night. The May 1970 slayings on the Kent and Jackson State campuses amid antiwar unrest were the catalyst for his writing career and his book, Lynch Street, which reconstructs the events leading to the campus slayings of two Black students in Mississippi’s capital city. A writing career focused on racial issues in education followed the completion of his first book. For seven years, Spofford covered educational policymaking for the Albany Times Union in New York’s capital. His beat included the state Education Department, the state Legislature and the 64-campus State University of New York system.
Spofford has taught writing and journalism in schools and colleges and has a Doctor of Arts in English degree from the State University at Albany. He’s published articles in The New York Times, Newsday, Mother Jones, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. He also worked as a copy editor, most recently at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, where he coached young editors. Spofford is an avid hiker, swimmer and landscaper. He lives with his wife, Barbara, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Lee, Massachusetts.
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Choctaw Confederates
2022-11-06 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the nexus of the Choctaw Nation, the Confederacy and enslaved Blacks. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America (CSA), the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces.
In Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Professor Fay Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery. PURCHASE BOOK HERE
About the Author
Fay A. Yarbrough is professor of history at Rice University (Houston, TX) and the author of Race and the Cherokee Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
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"Ground Crew" Essay Contest
2022-10-31 23:30 - 2022-11-01 00:00
CONTEST NARRATIVE
For more than half a century, the Civil Rights Movement has been remembered, in large part, by the narratives schools, media, and cultural institutions have promulgated with regards to the Movement’s icons. Dr. King and Rosa Parks often are at the center of those narratives, and for good reason. The struggle to secure the benefits of full citizenship for Black people in the United States, however, covers many more than just a paltry 14 years (1954-1968), and its foot soldiers number in the hundreds of thousands.
In ways both small and grand, everyday men, women and children began fighting for Black civil and human rights on the shores of Africa. They continued the fight on the ships that carried them to this country and, once here (during and after enslavement), they fought under circumstances few of us alive today could possibly imagine. And while so-called leaders always emerged, those elevated to positions of prominence would not have been able to carry out their work, much less sustain themselves, were it not for the determination, support, and guidance from those in their communities and across the nation.
We will never know all the names of the legions of courageous woman men, and children who fought for justice and equality for Black people in this country. We can, however, try to do so.
Now in its second year, The Baton Foundation’s essay contest, Ground Crew: Honoring Unknown Civil Rights Activists, challenges Atlanta youth to research and write about those unknown or lesser-known Black Americans. In years to come, the students’ essays will help us bring to the fore the names and stories of those whose lives were relegated to the margins of history.
ELIGIBILTY & REQUIREMENTS
Eligibility
The Baton Foundation Ground Crew Essay Contest is open to Atlanta students in grades 8-12. This applies equally to students in public schools, private and/or parochial schools, alternative schools and students who receive instruction at home. All entrants must live in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area (specifically, Clayton, Cobb, Dekalb, Douglas, Gwinnett, Henry, Fayette, & Fulton Counties). Students enrolled in The Baton Foundation’s Cultural Heritage Program and children of Baton Foundation board members may not participate.
Requirements

The deadline to submit essays is Monday, October 31, 2022, at 11:59pm EDT (Late entries will not be accepted).
Submit essays to Anthony Knight (aknight@thebatonfoundation.org).
Typed essays should be a minimum of 700 words, but no more than 1100 words (citations and bibliography are not included in the total word count).
Entrants MUST create original work (without influence from or written by teachers, parents, siblings, mentors, etc.)
Well-known Civil Rights icons are not eligible subjects for essays (i.e., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Congressman John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ambassador Andrew Young, etc.). If in doubt, please contact us.
Essays must identify an unknown or lesser-known Black Civil Rights activist involved in the movement from 1954-1968. The essay must address the person’s life before s/he became socially active, the event(s) that led to the individual’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the specific way(s) in which that person’s work impacted her/his community, region, or nation; and how the person might address civil and human rights issues today.
Essays about well-known Civil Rights Movement leaders will be disqualified.

Source Materials

Essays must list at least 3 source materials.
All entrants must cite the source materials they use. Please use parenthetical citations (not footnotes) to reference source material.
Bibliographies must be included with each essay. Please use Kate A. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Terms Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

RECOGNITION AND AWARDS

The first-place winner will receive a $300 cash award and a signed copy of Rolundus R. Rice’s book, Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest (The University of South Carolina Press, 2021).
The second-place winner will receive a $200 cash award and a signed copy of Rolundus R. Rice’s book, Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest (The University of South Carolina Press, 2021).
The third-place winner will receive a $100 cash award and a signed copy of Rolundus R. Rice’s book, Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest (The University of South Carolina Press, 2021).
First-, second-, and third-place winners will be notified by November 21, 2022.
All winning essayists will participate in a virtual public awards ceremony with Professor Rice and Baton Foundation president Anthony Knight on Sunday, December 4, 2022.

We respectfully ask that you not call The Baton Foundation for information regarding the status of your essay. Thank you.

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
2022-10-09 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the U.S. are rooted in anti-blackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. Professor Mays explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or to eradicate capitalism and colonialism, he shows how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples’ calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy.
Dr. Mays uses a wide array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity.
About the Author
Kyle T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar of US history, urban studies, race relations, and contemporary popular culture. He is an assistant professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America.
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The Revival of Proslavery Thought in America
2022-09-24 16:00 - 18:00 | Pittsburgh Yards, 352 University Avenue, SW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30310
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the resurgence of proslavery thought in the United States. This program is funded by Atlanta Civic Site – The Annie E. Casey Foundation and is free to the public. Registration is required.
About the Program
In this two-part talk, Paul Finkelman will sketch out the nature of Pro-Slavery thought in the United States from the American Revolutionary War to the Civil War. In part one, based primarily on his book, Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, Second Edition (Bedford/St. Martins, 2020), he will note the many areas of knowledge that defenders of slavery used to justify the institution. These defenses were based on, among other things: Biblical analysis and religion, science and medicine (as they were understood at the time), economics, law, novels and poems, sociology, philosophy, geography, and political theory. Southern defenders of slavery — from Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s to Jefferson Davis in the 1860s — used these areas of knowledge to justify slavery as an institution–particularly the enslavement of Africans and their American-born descendants.
One critical aspect of the intellectual world of the slave South was the suppression of ideas and discussion in universities. Southern universities and colleges did not teach, or even discuss, issues that undermined slavery, and effectively required professors to support slavery in their teaching and in their personal lives. By the eve the Civil War, southern educators were demanding special textbooks that would reflect their support for racism and slavery.
In part two, professor Finkelman will discuss how many of these arguments, theories, and strategies have been resurrected and are being used to defend suppression of speech, a dishonest rewriting of history, and voter suppression. These include state legislatures and governors trying to prevent schools from using such words as “slave” or “gay” in classrooms, and preventing even universities from teaching controversial subjects, such as critical race theory—and states demanding that textbooks reflect the ideology of suppression spreading from Florida to Texas. Finally, Dr. Finkelman will show how the parallels between the 19th and 21st centuries are obvious, and frightening.
About the Speaker
Professor Finkelman received his B.A. in American Studies from Syracuse University and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. Later, he was a Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School. Professor Finkelman has held several endowed chairs as a tenured professor or as a visitor, including the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Saskatchewan, the John Hope Franklin Chair in American Legal History at Duke Law School, and the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor at Albany Law School. In 2017 he held the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa School of Law, in Ottawa, Canada and was also the John E. Murray Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Dr. Finkelman is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books. His most recent book is, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Professor Finkelman has published in a wide variety of areas including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues regarding baseball. He has lectured on slavery, human trafficking, and human rights issues at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen other countries. In 2014, he was ranked the fifth most cited legal historian in American legal scholarship in Brian Leiter’s “Top Ten Law Faculty Scholarly Impact, 2009-2013.”
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Searching for Freedom: The George H. White Story
2022-09-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Pittsburgh Yards, 352 University Avenue, SW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30310
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a film screening and Q & A about Post-Reconstruction Congressman George Henry White. This program is funded by Atlanta Civic Site–The Annie E. Casey Foundation and is free to the public. Registration is required.
About the Program
Farmer and historian Earl L. Ijames will introduce the film George H. White: Searching for Freedom and share a short video about the roles of North Carolina and Georgia in the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. Following the screenings, Ijames will facilitate a Q&A session.
About the Film
The documentary film, George H. White: Searching for Freedom (30 mins.), chronicles the career of post-Reconstruction Congressman George H. White.
Born in 1852 in Bladen County, N.C. to a family of turpentine farmers, George H. White was raised to believe that education was the path to progress. Upon graduating from Howard University in 1877 with a degree in education, White settled in New Bern, N.C. where he became a school principal and studied law. Soon after passing the North Carolina State Bar, he won a seat in the state’s House of Representatives and proposed a bill to make education mandatory for all children. He later served in the North Carolina Senate, where he continued to champion public education, and as solicitor of his judicial district–the only Black solicitor in the United States. White quickly earned a reputation as a gifted attorney and charismatic orator, gaining the support of Black voters in eastern North Carolina.
In 1896, White was elected to the U.S. Congress. Following the infamous 1898 white supremacist insurrection in Wilmington, N.C., he proposed the nation’s first anti-lynching bill, a version of which was passed in 2022 as the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. White was reelected to a second term but departed in 1901, as a wave of racial terror and Black disenfranchisement swept North Carolina and the south. In his farewell address to Congress, White predicted the “Phoenixlike” return of Black representation in the federal government. Twenty-seven years would pass before another Black would serve in the U.S. Congress.
About the Speaker
Earl L. Ijames is a farmer, historian and Curator, African American History and Agriculture at the North Carolina Museum of History. Ijames also has many years of experience working in the North Carolina Office of Archives and History
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From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century
2022-09-11 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture in which the authors advance a general definition of reparations as a program of acknowledgment, redress, and closure. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for Black Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction (1865-1877) when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction, nor the New Deal, nor the Civil Rights Movement led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average White household holds in wealth the average Black household possesses a mere ten cents.
In From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on Black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. Black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen–slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination–makes a powerful case for Black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century is the recipient of the 2021 Lillian Smith Book Prize, the 2021 Inaugural Book Prize from the Association of African American Life and History, the 2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Non-fiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and the 2021 Best Book Awards (Social Change Category), American Book Fest.
About the Authors
A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council, she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s Black music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes “Black Culture and History Matter” (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding Black cultural institutions. She and William A. Darity, Jr. are the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics and Business, and the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. His most recent book, coauthored with A. Kirsten Mullen, is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.
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Birth of a White Nation
2022-08-28 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the social construction of race through the invention of white people. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and its Relevance Today, Second Edition (New York: Routledge Press, 2021), examines the social construction of race through the invention of white people. Surveying colonial North American law and history, the book interrogates the origins of racial inequality and injustice in American society, and details how the invention still serves to protect the ruling elite today.
This second edition documents the proliferation of ideas imposed and claimed throughout history that have conspired to give content, form, and social meaning to one’s racial classification. Beginning its expanded narrative with the development of diverse Native American societies through contact with European colonizers in the Tidewater region, and progressing to the emigration of Mexicans, Irish, and other “non-whites”, this new edition addresses the ongoing production and reproduction of whiteness as a distinct and dominant social category. It also looks to the future by developing a new, applied framework for countering racial inequality and promoting greater awareness of anti-racist policies and practices.
Birth of a White Nation will be of great interest to students, scholars, and general readers seeking to make sense of the dramatic racial inequities of our time and to forge an antiracist path forward. PURCHASE BOOKS HERE
About the Author
Jacqueline Battalora is an attorney and professor of sociology at Saint Xavier University in Chicago and a former Chicago Police Officer. Battalora is an editor for the Journal of Understanding and Dismantling Privilege.
Professor Battalora completed her law degree and came to Chicago to practice. Her interest in the role of law in creating human difference shaped her graduate work at Northwestern University where she received her Ph.D. She is listed with the National Speakers Association and is represented by SpeakOut. Dr. Battalora’s work has been featured in the documentary films The American L.O.W.S. by Darnley R. Hodge, Jr., and HAPI by Gerard Grant. Her work has also been featured on Public Radio and on dozens of podcasts including the Philippe Matthews Show.
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The Spirit of Soul Food
2022-08-07 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the confluence of the history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to—and marker of—centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?
Christopher Carter’s answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy.
The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized. Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food (University of Illinois Press, November 2021), places today’s Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Reverend Dr. Christopher Carter’s teaching, research, and activist interests are in Black, Womanist, and Environmental ethics, with a particular focus on race, food, and nonhuman animals. He is the co-creator of Racial Resilience, an anti-racism and anti-bias program that utilizes the combined insights of contemplative practices and critical race theories. His academic publications include The Spirit of Soul Food, and “Blood in the Soil: The Racial, Racist, and Religious Dimensions of Environmentalism” in The Bloomsbury Handbook on Religion and Nature (Bloomsbury, 2018).
The passion that informs all his work evolves out of his family’s struggle to loosen the chains of systematic racism – similar to bell hooks, he believes that education is the practice of freedom. He believes that at its broadest level, learning should be transformational: it should transform how the student views herself, her neighbor, and her worldview. Currently, Reverend Carter is an Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of San Diego, a Faith in Food Fellow at Farm Forward, and lead pastor of The Loft in Westwood California.
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AILEY
2022-06-25 13:00 - 15:00 | Auburn Avenue Research Library, 101 Auburn Avenue NE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host an in-person film screening about the life, work and legacy of Alvin Ailey. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Film
Alvin Ailey was a trailblazing pioneer who found salvation through dance. AILEY traces the full contours of this brilliant and enigmatic man whose search for the truth in movement resulted in enduring choreography that centers on the Black American experience with grace, strength, and unparalleled beauty. Told through Ailey’s own words and featuring evocative archival footage and interviews with those who intimately knew him, director Jamila Wignot weaves together a resonant biography of an elusive visionary.
From the Director
“Nothing prepares you for the experience of Ailey—the emotional, spiritual, aural, and visual overwhelm the senses. As a filmmaker, I am drawn to stories about artists like Alvin Ailey—innovators who tenaciously follow their own voice and in so doing redefined their chosen forms. Ailey’s dances—celebrations of African American beauty and history—did more than move bodies; they opened minds. His dances were revolutionary social statements that staked a claim as powerful in his own time as in ours: Black life is central to the American story and deserves a central place in American art and on the world stage. A working-class, gay, Black man, he rose to prominence in a society that made every effort to exclude him. He transformed the world of dance and made space for those of us on the margins—space for Black artists like Rennie Harris and me. I am inspired by subjective documentary portraits like Tom Volf’s Maria by Callas and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, and by the poetic cinematic approaches of films such as Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. My aim was to blend these influences into a sensorial, poetic documentary portrait.” – Jamila Wignot
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NOTE: Limited parking is available directly behind the library.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Neon

Amazing Grace
2022-06-11 13:00 - 15:00 | Auburn Avenue Research Library, 101 Auburn Avenue NE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host an in-person film screening that traces the behind-the-scenes recording of Aretha Franklin’s best-selling album. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Film
Recorded in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, California, Amazing Grace is the live recording of Ms. Franklin’s album of the same name. Using film footage shot by Sydney Pollack and produced by Alan Elliot and Spike Lee, the 2018 documentary features gospel great James Cleveland. Ms. Franklin is accompanied by the Southern California Community Choir under the direction of Alexander Hamilton. Aretha’s father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, also appears in the film.
Originally scheduled to be released in 1972 (along with the double album), technical difficulties synchronizing the audio with the visual print made it impossible. For four decades, the film footage languished in a Warner Bros. vault. When Ms. Franklin died in August 2018, her family arranged to have the film released. Since its worldwide debut, the film has received critical acclaim–reminding us why Aretha Franklin remains the undisputed Queen of Soul.
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NOTE: Limited parking is available directly behind the library.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Neon

The Black Intellectual Tradition
2022-05-15 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the many thought perspectives behind the fight for racial justice as developed by various segments of the Black community. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2021) presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals, performers and protest activists, institutions and organizations, and educators and religious leaders. By including women’s and men’s perspectives from the United States and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.
Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition explores the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.
Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor
PURCHASE BOOKS HERE
About the Speakers
James B. Stewart is a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, and Director of the Black Economic Research Center for the 21st Century. Stewart, a Professor Emeritus at Penn State University, has published fifteen books, including Introduction to African American Studies, Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications, and over eighty articles in Economics and Africana Studies professional journals. He is one of the founders of Stratification Economics, a new Economics subfield that integrates insights from multiple disciplines to produce distinctive analyses of inter-group economic inequality. He is a past President of three national organizations: the National Economic Association (NEA), the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS), and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).
Cornelius L. Bynum is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University. He teaches courses in African American and American history and writes about progressive impulses among African Americans and authentic and independent strains of Black radicalism in the early twentieth century. His first book, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights, is an intellectual history exploring Randolph’s thoughts about social justice and his civil rights activism. And, he has published a co-edited volume title, The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century, that examines the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice that African American artists and intellectuals, performers and protest activists, institutions and organizations, and educators and religious leaders all waged together.
Derrick P. Alridge is a former middle and high school social studies and history teacher. He currently serves as the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and as an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge’s scholarship examines education in the U.S. with foci in African American education and the civil rights movement. His books include The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History; The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (with Cornelius Bynum and James B. Stewart); and Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (with V.P. Franklin and James B. Stewart). Alridge has also published in numerous journals, which include the History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, and The Journal of Negro Education. He currently serves as an associate editor for The Journal of African American History.
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A House Built by Slaves
2022-05-01 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about Black visitors to the Lincoln White House and their impact on him and race relations in the country. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Jonathan White illuminates why Lincoln’s unprecedented welcoming of Black men and women to the White House transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States. From his 1862 meetings with Black Christian ministers, Lincoln began inviting Blacks of every background into his home–from the formerly enslaved from the Deep South to champions of abolitionism such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. More than a good-will gesture, the president conferred with his guests about the essential issues of citizenship and voting rights. Drawing from an array of primary sources, White reveals how Blacks used the White House as a national stage to amplify their calls for equality. Even 155 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s inclusion of Blacks remains a necessary example in a country fraught still with racial divisions. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Speaker
Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (2014). He serves as vice chair of The Lincoln Forum, and sits on the boards of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and the Ford’s Theatre Advisory Council. His most recent books include Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (2017), and “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (2018), which he co-authored with Anna Gibson Holloway. In October 2021 he published To Address You As My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln with UNC Press and My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss with UVA Press. In February 2022, he published A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House.
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Fear of Black Consciousness
2022-04-24 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a virtual lecture about Black consciousness from a leading philosopher. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as “color blind.” As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many, if not for most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement.
Informed by Gordon’s life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish public intellectual, academic, and musician (jazz, blues, rock, reggae, hip hop, etc.). He teaches at UCONN, where he is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department, with affiliations in many academic units, including Caribbean Studies and Jewish Studies. He lectures and is involved in political and artistic projects across the globe and holds appointments in South Africa, Jamaica, India, and France. He is the author of many books for which he has received accolades, which include the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights in North America. His most recent book is Fear of Black Consciousness, which was listed on Literary Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2022. He is this year’s recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.
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Reimagining Liberation: Black Women, Citizenship & the French Empire
2022-04-03 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a virtual lecture about the decisive role Black women played in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. As thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state.
In Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France’s imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by Black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. Her book, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Slavery & Abolition, Eighteenth-Century Studies and The French Review, and her public writings have been featured in Al Jazeera and HuffPost. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. She is also the managing editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and production editor of Women in French Studies.
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