Active inside the academy and out, Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; MSNBC’s All In and Melissa Harris Perry Show, and Velshi; NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s The Takeaway, Democracy Now and WUNC’s The State of Things. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Root, The Grio, Ebony, Salon, and Jet Magazine.
Black Folk: The Roots Of The Black Working Class
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Black Folk: The Roots Of The Black Working Class
- Date:
- Saturday, January 6, 2024
- Time:
- 2:00pm - 3:30pm
- Location:
- Main Auditorium
- Location:
- Main Library
- Audience:
- Adult Emerging Adult: 18-24 Year Olds High School Intergenerational Senior Citizen
- Categories:
- Author Visit Humanities
Registration has closed.
EVENT POSTPONED - NEW DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON
THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING!
Join Durham County Library for a special discussion with Dr. Candis Watts Smith and Dr. Blair LM Kelley about her new book Black Folk: The Roots Of The Black Working Class.
Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian, Kelley works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. Kelley is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history.
Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots the Black Working Class (Liveright), begins with the question “What does it mean to be Black and working class?” Drawing on family histories and continuing into the archive, Black Folk illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America in the past and present. Connecting the everyday, lived experience of working black people to wider discussions of the American working class, Black Folk argues that the history of the Black working class provide a crucial model of how we should engage a wider swath of Americans citizens in informed citizenship. Black Folk was awarded a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation, and the 2022-23 John Hope Franklin/NEH Fellowship by National Humanities Center.
Candis Watts Smith is Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her acdemic expertise highlights the role race, racism, and structural inequality play in shaping the American political landscape. Despite spending time thinking about these issues, she’s still upbeat and pretty awesome if I have to say so myself. Anyway, she is the author or co-author of four books and dozens of articles. Candis is a co-host of the Democracy Works podcast, and she has given a TED talk on three myths about racism in America that has been viewed over 2 million times, though she will admit that her mom probably watched it 1.5 million of those times.