Conversations in Black Freedom Studies: Financing Freedom: Black Women and Economic Self-Determination
Location
Join a virtual conversation about financing the Civil Rights Movement and the ways Black women imagined and built strategies for economic security.
ONLINE PROGRAM
Join a virtual conversation with scholars Tanisha C. Ford (Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement), Shennette Garrett-Scott (Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal), and Crystal Marie Moten (Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee). They will discuss the financing of movement work, the ways Black women imagined and built strategies for economic security, and the racialized, gendered workings of finance and the state.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Tanisha C. Ford is an accomplished writer, researcher, and cultural critic—working at the intersection of politics and culture. She has forged an international reputation for her groundbreaking research on the history of Black style/fashion and social movements. Tanisha was honored as one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans. She is currently Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches courses on African American and African diaspora history, biography and memoir, and the geopolitics of fashion. And, she is also a co-founder and the director of TEXTURES, a pop-up material culture lab, studying global Black migration through objects.
Shennette Garrett-Scott is a historian of gender, race, and capitalism. Her award-winning first book Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) is the first full-length history of finance capitalism that centers black women and the banking institutions and networks they built from the eve of the Civil War to the Great Depression.
Crystal Marie Moten specializes in 20th Century United States and Women’s/Gender History with a specialization in African American Women’s History. My research examines Black women’s struggles for economic justice in the 20th century urban north. Formerly a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, she now works as Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago, IL.
ABOUT CONVERSATIONS IN BLACK FREEDOM STUDIES | The founding curators of this series, Professors Jeanne Theoharis (Brooklyn College/CUNY) and Komozi Woodard (Sarah Lawrence College), introduced a new paradigm that challenged the older geography, leadership, ideology, culture and chronology of Civil Rights historiography. Jeanne Theoharis continues in her role and is joined by Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine (Lehman College/CUNY) as co-curator. Komozi Woodard continues to advise the series from an emeritus position. Discussions take place on the first Thursday of each month.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
ACCESSIBILITY | Live captioning is available for streaming programs. ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.
AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING | Programs are photographed and recorded by the Schomburg Center. Attending this event indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any all purposes of the New York Public Library.
PRESS | Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at leahdrayton@nypl.org.Please note that professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies is supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Additional support provided by Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation.