Black History Month - audio

Glenn C. Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and professor of economics at Brown University, is a distinguished economist who has contributed to a variety of areas in applied microeconomic theory, including welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. Loury has lectured before academic societies throughout the world and has been a scholar in residence at Oxford University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Stockholm, the Delhi School of Economics, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, among others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Carnegie Scholar. He has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and as vice president of the American Economics Association. In 2000 he presented the DuBois Lectures at Harvard and in 2005 he received the John von Neumann Award. Over 200 of Loury's essays and reviews on racial inequality and social policy have appeared in influential journals in the United States and abroad. He is a frequent commentator on national radio and television, an adviser on social issues to business and political leaders, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Loury holds a BA in mathematics from Northwestern University and a PhD in economics from MIT. His most recent book is Ethnicity, Social Mobility, and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK. Sponsored by the Walter Krause Economics Lectures fund.

Manning Marable is the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History.

Annette Gordon-Reed joined the Harvard faculty in 2010 as a professor of law at Harvard Law School, a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and the recipient of a 2010 MacArthur Fellowship.

Peniel E. Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University, is the author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (2010) and the award-winning Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006) as well as editor of Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (2010) and The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (2006). Joseph is the founder of a growing subfield in American history and Africana studies that he has characterized as “black power studies”—it connects grassroots activism to national struggles for black self-determination and international African independence movements. Joseph, who earned a PhD in American history at Temple University, is a frequent national commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights; during the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, he provided historical commentary for the PBS NewsHour.

This year’s events honoring Black History Month at Reed celebrate music, political activism, and scholarship. The program, which is free and open to the public, opens February 6 and 7 with a master class and performance by award-winning composer and pianist Geri Allen. A second event, February 21, brings internationally known writer, scholar, and activist Angela Davis to campus. The program concludes with a lecture by historian Nell Irvin Painter on February 28.

This year’s events honoring Black History Month at Reed celebrate music, political activism, and scholarship. The program, which is free and open to the public, opens February 6 and 7 with a master class and performance by award-winning composer and pianist Geri Allen. A second event, February 21, brings internationally known writer, scholar, and activist Angela Davis to campus. The program concludes with a lecture by historian Nell Irvin Painter on February 28.

Professor Mary Frances Berry has been a pioneering intellectual, civil servant, and social critic for more than four decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Berry served as assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; she served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1980 to 2004, and was chair for 11 years. A co-founder of the Free South Africa Movement, Berry is the author of seven books, including Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (with co-author John W. Blassingame). She is currently Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harold Ford Jr. served Tennessee in the United States Congress for 10 years. He is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, visiting professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, and vice chairman of Merrill Lynch and Co.

A major leader of the American civil rights movement, Julian Bond has been at the forefront of social change for five decades. While a student at Morehouse College during the early 1960s, Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).