Join Dr. Dan Friedman, historian, playwright, and life-long community organizer in this gathering to speak-out loud and proud our communities’ and families’ political histories. Come prepared to share your story, a photo (if you have one), and, if they’re down for it, bring your family along!
Theatre-maker Brian Mullin has received seed funding from Kings College London, along with director Tian Brown-Sampson, to begin developing this transatlantic story into a theatre piece that also explores its resonance to later histories of Black Caribbeans and the British Empire.
In the decade following the collapse of Reconstruction a new movement arose in the South comprising black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers—a Black Populist movement. Organized through the Colored Farmers Alliance, among other black-led labor groups, mutual aid associations, and black churches—and then expressed through the People’s Party, African Americans across the South created an independent political movement of their own which at times connected with an adjacent white Populist movement, and at other times diverged sharply from it. In this lecture we will explore this history. Led by Dr. Omar Ali, dean of Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina Greensboro.
