Issues of civil and human rights, housing and gentrification, and health and income inequalities in American cities will be in sharp focus as the 37th annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series (MTW) invites a wide-ranging discussion of the last half-century of black urban history. The annual Black History Month conference will be held on Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017, beginning at 9:30 a.m. in the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., on the campus of Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N). The conference is sponsored by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at RU-N.
City Moves: Black Urban History since 1967 will emphasize, as MTW traditionally does, the ways that history helps illuminate the contemporary world. As Newark marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 rebellion, MTW will explore how far the community has come since that crucial event, over years that many consider the darkest for American cities.
The Clement A. Price Institute brings to Newark four eminent scholars whose pioneering and award-winning work has powerfully shaped America’s understanding of development and life in urban areas over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first is Thomas J. Sugrue, Bancroft Prize-winning author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, and professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. Sugrue will deliver the MTW keynote lecture.
Following the conference, MTW attendees are invited to a reception in the Great Hall at the historic and recently reopened 15 Washington Street. The reception will feature live musical entertainment by The Bradford Hayes Trio.
All events are free and open to the public.
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