Date: Thursday, May 6, 2021
Time: 4:00 – 5:30 pm in Eastern Standard Time
Description: Freedom Colonies as AntiRacism.
This conference will present how the different types of “freedom colonies” around the globe’s creation and very existence highlight the role of antiracism created, employed and implemented amongst the most historically targeted, excluded, marginalized and minoritized people in the Western world.
Since the inception of Western colonialism, the targeted peoples escaped the terrorism of Racialized Inheritable Phenotypic One-Drop – Chattel Atlantic Slave Trade Economy (RIPOD-CASTE) slavery, indigenous mass genocides, Jim Crow, Black Codes, and other human rights abuses, creating their own “colonies of freedom” and successfully protecting these “safe spaces.” Palenques in Colombia, quilombos and mocambos in Brazil, maroons throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, the Great Dismal Swamp region of North America and Asia, “freedom countries” like Haiti, and Liberia, and the numerous “freedmen settlements” across the North American continent, as well as such other communities, also exist throughout Africa and Australia. The original safe spaces, and the archetype of #TheResistance, these resistance communities are testimony to the legacy of freedom and liberation colonized peoples have created for themselves since the inception of Western colonialism.
Join us to explore how a deeper understand of the history of race/ism includes the early attempts of resistance communities such as freedom colonies antiracist efforts.
PANELISTS
Dr. Timothy Nelson, who’s multi-faceted work concerns racism, ambition, and the search for opportunity. These themes were revealed in his 2015 Ph.D. dissertation The Significance of the Afro-Frontier. Dr. Nelson was born in South Central LA, raised in Compton, during the early 1990s in the wake of race and class-based conflict with the LAPD. He earned his Ph.D. from (UTEP) the University of Texas at El Paso. He will present “Anti-Racism Postscript: Blackdom and the Afro-Frontier™, on howAnti-Racism scholarship has focused the work of Afro-Frontierism. The Afro-Frontier is a postscript to the Exoduster saga that permeated the post-Civil War era as well as the post-Reconstruction period. His presentation will focus on his newly constructed narrative of Blackdom, New Mexico, with the framework of Anti-Racism as an omni-present element. At the turn of the 20th Century, Blackdom was a real place that went beyond freedom and nurtured Black sovereignty.”
Major Joe Womack, who retired from the United States Marine Corps Reserves and now serves as the Executive Director of Africatown-chess.org, in the historic Africatown Community of Mobile, Alabama. The organization was founded to re-establish the unity in a neighborhood that once thrived as the example of the most loving and family oriented atmosphere in the Deep South. Through projects geared towards beautifying the streets and homes, producing quality produce and living standards, preserving the first public school for African-Americans in the state of Alabama, creating a community of watchmen, and retaining the culture and heritage of a nearly forgotten people – Africatown~C.H.E.S.S. is the leading example of difference makers in the historic Africatown area and ensures that the 160 year old Africatown community is Clean, Healthy, Educated, Safe, & Sustainable.
Moderated by the journal’s Editor-In-Chief, Darold Cuba, MC/MPA ’21 and Center for Public Leadership Fellow, whose Columbia University Oral History MA (OHMA) thesis centered on “the international phenomenon of freedom colonies.” Learn more here, and catch up on an earlier conversation about the intersections of antiracism he gave here.
REGISTER
Free and open to the public. To view this event online, individuals will need to register via Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link for this meeting. The event will be recorded and published here for public viewing