LIVE from NYPL, Outdoor: LIVE at Bryant Park: Jelani Cobb and Trymaine Lee on the Kerner Commission Report
Location
This outdoor event takes place in the Bryant Park Reading Room, located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues (behind the Library), near 42nd Street by the yellow umbrellas. Weather permitting.
A map of the park can be found here. There are accessible park entrances midblock on 40th and 42nd Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. To get this information via phone, please call Bryant Park at: 212-768-4242.
ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.
A 1968 report released by a presidentially appointed commission is a dramatic, shocking, and prescient exploration of systemic racism. “White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” asserted the Kerner Commission. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” In a newly edited and condensed edition of the report, Columbia professor and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb discusses its urgency in 2021 and why its detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing should become regular reading for all Americans.
No registration required. First come, first served. Produced in partnership with the Bryant Park Reading Room.
GET THE BOOK
Books available for sale at the event through Kinokuniya New York
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
A staff writer at The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb is the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations, he lives in New York.
Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist and correspondent for MSNBC, where he covers race, violence, and law enforcement in the United States. He is the host of the “Into America” podcast, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” and has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Philadelphia Tribune.
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