MLK Jr. Day Speaker: Benjamin Jealous (former NAACP President)

Posted on January 15, 2015 by smithcn1

Welcome, we are happy you are here!

MLK Jr. Day Speaker: Benjamin Jealous

Please join us for a special talk from Former NAACP President Benjamin Jealous! This event is free for all CofC students, faculty, staff, and the general public. The event will be January 15, at 7:00 PM in the Sotille Theater.

Benjamin Jealous has been a leader of successful state and local movements to ban the death penalty, outlaw racial profiling, defend voting rights, secure marriage equality, and free multiple wrongfully incarcerated people. Under his leadership, the NAACP grew to be the largest civil rights organization online and on mobile, experienced its first multi-year membership growth in 20 years, and became the largest community-based nonpartisan voter registration operation in the country. A builder of robust coalitions, Jealous’ leadership at the NAACP included bringing environmentalist organizations into the fight to protect voting rights, and convincing well-known conservatives to join the NAACP in challenging mass incarceration.

Jealous has been named to the 40 under 40 lists of both Forbes and Time magazines. He is #1 on TheRoot.com’s 2013 list of black leaders under 45.

New Orleans Revisited: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory after Katrina (Jan. 22)

Posted on January 8, 2015 by smithcn1

Title: New Orleans Revisited: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory after Katrina

Presented by: Lynell Thomas, UMass-Boston

Date: January 22, 2015

Location: Avery Research Center (125 Bull Street)

Time: 6pm

Overview: By the eve of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, collective dissent over the slow, uneven and inequitable recovery was displaced by a blitz of favorable media coverage that refashioned a tale of national disaster into a fable of American resilience and rebirth. In this presentation, Lynnell Thomas explores how events, such as the election of a white mayor, the New Orleans Saints’ NFL Super Bowl victory, the critical acclaim and local fandom surrounding the launch of the HBO television series Treme, BP’s tourism promotional campaign following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the positive national attention generated by the city’s neoliberal solutions to public education and affordable housing relied on and reclaimed the racialized tourist tropes central to New Orleans’s place identity. The city’s post-Katrina tourism narrative advances an idea of recovery that obscures painful post-Katrina realities. As the script of New Orleans’ recovery is being written, the city is poised to emerge as an international symbol of rebirth, renewal, and racial unity or a harbinger of the systemic social, economic, and ecological disasters that plague all U.S. metropolitan areas. The nation – indeed the world – is watching (and touring) to see which symbol will win out.