The Baton Foundation

Walk with Me: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Challenge to America
2021-09-26 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about famed civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Kate Clifford Larson brings a stirring reappraisal of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life and impact on the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Based on her research for her new biography, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (University of Oxford Press, 2021), Larson reveals Hamer’s interior life, shaped and fortified by family and faith, and illuminates the forces that made her an electrifying presence when she walked onto stages across the country during the Modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Fannie Lou Hamer was an extraordinary American activist whose fight for basic human, civil and political rights helped change the course of the movement. A powerful speaker, she riveted audiences with her calls to stand up and fight for equality and justice. Her style of grassroots activism tested the patience of powerful civil rights leaders who found her unworthy of their respect. Her life story reminds us that some trailblazers, especially women leaders, rise up from the most unlikely places and against tremendous odds. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Dr. Kate Clifford Larson is a bestselling author of critically acclaimed biographies including Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero and Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Her latest work, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, tells the remarkable story of one of America’s most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century. Praised for her research and insights as a biographer, Larson digs deep into Hamer’s history, uncovering her family roots, personal life, and reclaims Hamer’s faith as a centerpiece of her survival and appeal. Larson accessed recently opened FBI records, secret Oval Office tapes, new interviews, and more, to reveal never-before seen details about Hamer’s life. An award-winning consultant for feature film scripts, documentaries, museum exhibits, and public history initiatives, Larson is frequently interviewed by national and international media outlets. Dr. Larson is a Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center Visiting Scholar.
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How the Streets Were Made: Housing Segregation and Black Life in America
2021-10-10 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about housing segregation and Black life in the United States. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In How the Streets Were Made: Housing Segregation and Black Life in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Dr. Bailey looks at the creation of “the streets,” not just as physical, racialized spaces produced by segregationist policies, but also as sociocultural entities that have influenced our understanding of Blackness in America for decades. Drawing from various disciplines–media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, How the Streets Were Made engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of the how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of Black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Yelena Bailey, Ph.D. is a writer, researcher, and former professor of English and cultural studies. She enjoys writing about race, power, policy, and culture. She is currently the Director of Education Policy at the State of Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board.
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Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem
2021-10-24 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton and the intersection of race, self-advancement, social justice and capitalism. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
At the turn of the early twentieth century, Harlem—the iconic Black neighborhood—was predominantly white. The Black real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton played a central role in Harlem’s transformation. He founded the Afro-American Realty Company in 1903, vowing to vanquish housing discrimination. Yet this ambitious mission faltered as Payton faced the constraints of white capitalist power structures.
In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), Kevin McGruder explores Payton’s career and its implications for the history of residential segregation. Payton stood up for the right of Black people to live in Harlem in the face of vocal white resistance. Through skillful use of print media, he branded Harlem as a Black community and attracted interest from those interested in racial uplift. Yet while Payton “opened” Harlem streets, his business model depended on continued racial segregation. Like white real estate investors, he benefited from the lack of housing options available to desperate Black tenants by charging higher rents. Payton developed a specialty in renting all-Black buildings, rather than the integrated buildings he had once envisioned, and his personal successes ultimately entrenched Manhattan’s racial boundaries. McGruder highlights what Payton’s story shows about the limits of seeking advancement through enterprise in a capitalist system deeply implicated in racial inequality.
At a time when understanding the roots of residential segregation has become increasingly urgent, this biography sheds new light on the man and the forces that shaped Harlem. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Kevin McGruder is Associate Professor of History at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. He received his B.A. in Economics from Harvard University, a M.B.A. in Real Estate Finance from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Before pursuing doctoral studies, he worked for many years in nonprofit community development. He is author of the 2015 book, Race and Real Estate Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920.
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"Ground Crew" Essay Contest
2021-10-29 23:30 - 2021-10-30 00:00 | GA
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.
The Baton Foundation’s newly created essay contest, Ground Crew: Honoring Unknown Civil Rights Activists, challenges Atlanta youth to research and write about those unknown or lesser-known Black Americans. Now, and 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 blank pages 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 Friday, October 29, 2021, 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 working during 1954-1968 (the year Dr. King was assassinated). The essay must address the person’s life before s/he became socially active, the event(s) that led to the individual’s active participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the specific way(s) in which that person’s work impacted her/his community, region, or nation; and the work in which the person was involved following Dr. King’s death.
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 $250 cash award and a copy of Kate Clifford Larson’s book, Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford University Press, 2021). The winner will also participate as a speaker in a virtual public program with Ms. Larson and Baton Foundation president Anthony Knight on Sunday, December 5, 2021.
The second-place winner will receive $150 cash award and a copy of Kate Clifford Larson’s book, Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford University Press, 2021).
First- and second-place winners will be notified on November 22, 2021.
First- and second-place winners will be announced via email to all entrants by November 29, 2021.

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

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America
2021-11-07 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the struggle Black women and girls faced in Antebellum America to secure their educational rights. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2019), Dr. Kabria Baumgartner explores the lives of Black girls and women who campaigned for their educational rights at a time when Black education was under siege in the nineteenth-century North.
These ambitious, purposeful, and thoughtful Black girls and women not only fought to democratize education by reversing policies of racial exclusion at schools and in the teaching profession, but also they sought to open up educational pathways for themselves and others. In doing so, they transformed public education in the North. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Kabria Baumgartner is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century African American history with a particular focus on women and education. Baumgartner’s first book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America has won four book prizes, including the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association.
Professor Baumgartner has also published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and her op-ed pieces and other popular writing have been featured in The Washington Post and Historic New England Magazine. Dr. Baumgartner is writing her second book on the Black struggle for civil rights in nineteenth-century Boston.
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Satirical Racism: Afro-Brazilian Activism
2021-11-21 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about Afro-Brazilian satirical racism. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
This lecture presents satire, irony, and parody as a means to contest racist structures through media production. Specifically, the lecture will examine the Is That OK With You? YouTube Series, as it presents a break from traditional relationships between humor and race in Brazil by turning attention toward systemic racism. Professor Gillam theorizes “satirical antiracism” as a way to understand how Afro-Brazilians deploy satire to make visible the contradictions and inconsistencies of the racial order. Satirical antiracism is a form of activism that invokes the tension of contradictory subjects, such as humor and racism in communicating its message.
About the Speaker
Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations.
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Ground Crew: Honoring Unknown Civil Rights Activists
2021-12-05 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Atlanta Preservation Center and the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a virtual event to celebrate the winners of the Ground Crew student essay contest. Author Kate Clifford Larson (above right), and Baton Foundation founder and president Anthony Knight will engage the contest winners in conversation. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
Program Narrative
Like Annell Ponder (above left), thousands of Black women, men and children engaged in activities to help secure civil and human rights for Black people in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). In ways both small and grand, they fought, persevered, and endured indignities and physical violence few of us alive today could possibly imagine. And while so-called leaders 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. In the years since the Civil Rights Movement, schools, media, and cultural organizations have lionized the names and works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Congressman John Lewis, and a select few, and rightly so. However, there were multitudes of others.
The Baton Foundation’s newly created essay contest, Ground Crew: Honoring Unknown Civil Rights Activists, challenges Atlanta youth in grade 8-12 to research and write about those unknown or lesser-known Black Americans. Now, and in the 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 blank pages of history. This program celebrates contest winners.
About Kate Clifford Larson
Dr. Kate Clifford Larson (above right) is a bestselling author of critically acclaimed biographies including Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero and Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Her latest work, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, tells the remarkable story of one of America’s most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century. Praised for her research and insights as a biographer, Larson digs deep into Hamer’s history, uncovering her family roots, personal life, and reclaims Hamer’s faith as a centerpiece of her survival and appeal. Larson accessed recently opened FBI records, secret Oval Office tapes, new interviews, and more, to reveal never-before seen details about Hamer’s life. An award-winning consultant for feature film scripts, documentaries, museum exhibits, and public history initiatives, Larson is frequently interviewed by national and international media outlets. Dr. Larson is a Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center Visiting Scholar.
About Anthony Knight
Anthony Knight is the Founder, President & CEO of The Baton Foundation—a Georgia nonprofit organization that serves the emotional, intellectual, and cultural needs of Black boys ages 10-17. Before founding the Foundation, Mr. Knight worked as a museum educator and consultant. Mr. Knight has extensive experience with and interest in Black history and culture, public and living history, informal education, and Black youth. Mr. Knight’s work with The Baton Foundation reflects his ongoing interest in the issues and practices related to the collecting, preservation, and interpretation of information about and material culture from the African Diaspora. Mr. Knight’s undergraduate work was in Spanish and English (Ohio Wesleyan University), and his graduate work was in museum education (The George Washington University). Mr. Knight also holds a degree in Spanish-to-English translation from the Núcleo de Estudios Lingüísticos y Sociales, Caracas, Venezuela.
Photo Credit: Builder Levy, Chrysler Museum of Art
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Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest
2022-01-05 18:00 - 20:00 | Auburn Avenue Research Library, 101 Auburn Avenue NE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, in collaboration with Hosea Helps, A Cappella Books and The Baton Foundation, is honored to host a virtual lecture and on-site lecture and book signing to recognize Hosea L. Williams’ 96th birthday (January 5, 1926). Dr. Rolundus R. Rice will discuss his latest publication, Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest (University of South Carolina Press, 2022). This event is free to the public, but registration is suggested. Masks are required. You may register here.
About the Book
When civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams died in 2000, U.S. Congressman John Lewis said of him, “Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us.”
In this first comprehensive biography of Williams, Dr. Rice demonstrates the truth in Lewis’ words and argues that Williams’ activism in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was of central importance to the success of the larger Civil Rights Movement. Rice traces Williams’ journey as a local activist in Georgia to becoming a national leader and one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s chief lieutenants. He helped plan the Selma-to-Montgomery March and walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday.”
Hosea Williams played the role of enforcer in SCLC, always ready to deploy what he called his “arsenal of agitation.” While his hard-charging tactics may have seemed out of step with the more diplomatic approach of other SCLC leaders, Rice suggests that it was precisely this contrast in styles that made the organization so successful. Rice also follows Williams’ career after King’s assassination, as he moved into local Atlanta politics. While his style made him loved by some and hated by others, readers will come to appreciate the central role Williams played in the most successful nonviolent revolution in American history.
Andrew Young Jr., former SCLC executive director, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta, provides a foreword.
“Hosea Williams is the definitive study of one of America’s most gifted civil rights activists and political mavericks. Rice brilliantly traces the pioneering path of the talented movement strategist and protest provocateur—from his legendary association with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesse Jackson, to his transformative work for the poor, and his sublime agitation as a uniquely styled politician.” — Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America.
About the Author
Rolundus Rice holds a Ph.D. in history from Auburn University. He currently serves as vice president of academic affairs at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
NOTE: Limited free parking is available in the parking lot directly behind the library. All other parking is paid.
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Welcome to the Terror Ship: Slavery and Resistance at Sea
2022-02-06 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the realities of the slave ship — its role in supporting the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and as the incubator of Black resistance and culture. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Drawing on his book, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin Random House, 2007), Professor Marcus Rediker will give a lecture that explores the Middle Passage as an engine of history — in forming the Atlantic plantation system, the world market, global capitalism, and in creating traditions of resistance that would prove crucial to African American culture and politics. The slave ship was a site of violence and horror, but no less a place of astonishing cultural creativity. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Speaker
Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below” have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He is the author of The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007) and The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012), which was the basis for his prize-winning documentary film, Ghosts of Amistad, directed by Tony Buba. He is currently working as guest curator in the JMW Turner Gallery at Tate Britain and writing a book about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America.
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Frederick Douglass and the Emancipatory Power of Science
2022-02-20 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the emancipatory power of science. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Frederick Douglass is remembered as one of the greatest abolitionists and orators in American history. But his immense intellect—especially his deep engagement with science—is far less appreciated. In this lecture, Professor Eric Herschthal discusses the subtle and profound ways Frederick Douglass engaged with scientific knowledge, both critiquing the ways scientists used scientific ideas to oppress racial minorities, while also arguing for science’s radical potential to liberate Black people and create a more just world. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Speaker
Eric Herschthal is a professor of history at the University of Utah, and the author of The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale University Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in leading historical journals and his mainstream outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
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Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo
2022-03-20 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a virtual lecture about the representation of Dominican women. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In her book, Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.
Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today’s young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world. PURCHASE BOOK HERE
About the Author
Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, where she is the Director of the Graduate Program in Anthropology. She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Professor Quinn’s transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender, and sexuality in the African Diaspora. In 2015 she was part of the filmmaking team that produced the documentary film, Cimarrón Spirit, about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities. She is committed to feminist collaboration, and she is a co-founder of the social justice feminist collective South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU). She is passionate about Black art and visual culture. Her work has been published in The Black Scholar, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and Burlington Contemporary. Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo, is her first book.
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Reimagining Liberation: Black Women, Citizenship & the French Empire
2022-04-03 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Fear of Black Consciousness
2022-04-24 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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A House Built by Slaves
2022-05-01 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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The Black Intellectual Tradition
2022-05-15 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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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

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

The Spirit of Soul Food
2022-08-07 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Birth of a White Nation
2022-08-28 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century
2022-09-11 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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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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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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An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
2022-10-09 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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"Ground Crew" Essay Contest
2022-10-31 23:30 - 2022-11-01 00:00 | GA
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.

Choctaw Confederates
2022-11-06 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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What the Children Told Us
2022-11-20 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Of Blood and Sweat
2023-02-05 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Black Love: A Celebration of the Village that Raises Us
2023-02-19 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Hidden in Plain Sight: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement
2023-03-05 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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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Expressive Arts Self-Exploration Workshop
2023-05-07 15:00 - 16:30 | GA
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).
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