FREE & VIRTUAL 41st Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series

Students from Saint Peter’s University are invited to attend the free and virtual 41st Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series presented by Rutgers University-Newark’s The Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience on Saturday, February 20, 2021 beginning at 9:30am. This year’s series theme is “One Begins Again.”

And when the dream was slaughtered…not everything was lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
— James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, 1979

This year’s speakers are Cara Page, co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and former Executive Director of The Audre Lorde Project; Bill Fletcher, Jr., a labor organizer and syndicated columnist, currently a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and Alicia Garza, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, and founder of Black Futures Lab.

The lectures will be moderated by Barbara Ransby, John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture (MTW) series was co-founded in 1981 by Rutgers University-Newark Professor Clement A. Price and Giles R. Wright of the New Jersey Historical Commission who launched the series with the belief that the rigorous exploration of the past, made accessible to a broad public of learners, would help guide the nation into a brighter future. The conference is named in honor of a native of East Orange. Marion Thompson Wright was arguably the first black female professional historian and a pioneer in Black New Jersey historiography. In her honor, the series brings outstanding thinkers and doers of African and African American life and history. Diverse, civically engaged, and devoted to life-long learners, the MTW Series is one of the nation’s most distinguished and longest running lectures. The Clement A. Price Institute is devoted to building deep historical justice in our region and beyond.

For more information about the event, please visit https://sasn.rutgers.edu/41st-annual-marion-thompson-wright-lecture-series. Click here to register. For more information or to ask questions, please email Dr. John Johnson, Jr., at jjohnson5@saintpeters.edu.