Academics
Admissions & Aid
Student Life
About
Info For
As 2018–19 Visiting Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and Visiting Associate Professor in History, my goals are to strengthen the WGST program’s connections to departments and units across campus; reach out to community-based groups to connect the budding expertise of student-scholars to real world research; and root WGST in local issues that are both timely and deeply historical.
Dr. Robyn C. Spencer with her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
With the collaboration and support of the WGST program staff, I have designed a diverse array of public programming to highlight the often-hidden history of black women in New York. “Challenging Erasures: Reinscribing Black Women’s History in New York” is an interdisciplinary series that engages the campus in the collective examination of race and gender as it intersects around issues of gentrification and displacement; police violence and historical memory; radical grassroots organizing; and artistic production. All events are free and open to the public with RSVP.
My courses will be connected to the Challenging Erasures series as well. Students should look forward to learning outside of the classroom, meeting important figures in history, and hearing lectures from renowned scholars. They will have the opportunity to conduct oral histories, plan events, and share the results of their research in public.
In fall 2018, I am teaching WGST 3228: Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American History and WGST 1001: Introduction to Women’s Studies: Sex, Gender, and Power.
In spring 2019 I will teach WGST 1001 and WGST 3350: Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, which is also cross listed with Political Science.
I look forward to engaging the campus community at Brooklyn College this year.
Dr. Robyn C. Spencer
From Harlem to the Bronx and from Brooklyn to New Rochelle, black women have transformed New York with their fierce artistry, radical politics, commitment to community organizing, and vision of economic justice. Under my leadership as Visiting Endowed Chair in Women and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College (2018–19) the Women’s and Gender Studies Program is spearheading a year of programming, curricular connections, and community collaborations to highlight and recover this important history.
This series is named “Challenging Erasures” to reflect its four aims:
This is my history. I am a product of Brooklyn’s public schools, legendary dance halls, and radical political culture rooted in places like Medgar Evers Community College. My parents came to New York from Guyana in the 1970s, and after a short (and cold) stint in Minneapolis, they landed in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I grew up. Flatbush, with its thriving Caribbean communities, diverse cultures, and fierce aesthetics, will always be home. I return there often for specialty groceries, family visits, cultural events, and most recently, for this one-year position at Brooklyn College. Brooklyn, like many other areas in New York, is undergoing rapid demographic change and increased battles over place and space. I have sought to understand these changes through my scholarship and activism which centers on post-WWII social protest, gender, and black radicalism. The “Challenging Erasures” series uses performance, documentary film, student research, activist voices, international perspectives, and academic expertise to speak back to the changes happening in New York by reinscribing black women’s histories in space, place, and time. I invite you to be a part of this collective examination of the past.
Dr. Robyn C. Spencer will be leading the Robert Viscusi Faculty Reading Group sponsored by Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College in a semester-long discussion of Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Harlem Nocturne.
As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood’s diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America’s promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era.
In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren’t native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Primus performed nightly at the legendary Café Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she débuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies—a first for a female African American author.
A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.
This reading group is limited to Brooklyn College campus affiliates.
Patricia Murphy Robinson (1926–2013) was an anti-imperialist activist and left theoretician who authored seminal essays about black women, working-class politics, and socialism in the 1960s and 1970s. Lupe Family (filmmaker) and Emilia A. Ottoo (creative director) will show excerpts of the documentary in progress, “Pat! A Revolutionary Black Molecule,” and talk about the creative process of using documentary film to recapture the history of radical black women. In conversation with Robyn C. Spencer, who is working on a biography of Patricia Murphy Robinson entitled “Sista Socialist: Patricia Murphy Robinson and Black Left Feminist Intellectual History in New York.”
Lupe Family/S. Lupe Guinier—Lupe Family is a video producer, novelist, playwright, and poet whose work centers on labor, women, and undoing racism. She has facilitated many workshops and, talk backs, including using meditation and yoga to undo racism through reflection at the annual Lehman College Restorative/TRANSFORMATIVE Justice Conference through City University of New York. She has led faith/spiritual-based workshops using walking meditation and conflict resolution and Playback Theater/Theatre of the Oppressed Tools. She co-ordinated for seven years the Harlem Wellness Circle using energy healing and yoga for restoring well-being. For more than five years she went to New York City detention centers to lead incarcerated youth in restorative yoga.
Emilia A. Ottoo, alias emma lee, is a creative young professional living in New York City. Born in Uganda and raised in Harlem and the outer boroughs, her experiences combine the pressure, diversity, and possibility of urban life, immigrant spirit, and global awareness. She uses these in her transformative outlets of music, creative arts, digital media, sports and wellness, entrepreneurship, cultural exchange, community service, and youth empowerment.
Dr. Robyn C. Spencer is a historian who focuses on black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. In 2018–19 she is Women’s and Gender Studies Visiting Endowed Chair at Brooklyn College. Her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland was published in 2016. She is co-founder of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project and has written widely on gender and Black Power. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History and Souls as well as The Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, Colorlines, and Truthout. She has received awards for her work from the Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Association of Black Women Historians.
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is an associate professor of Africana studies at Brown University, where she specializes in race, gender, and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (fall 2013, Minnesota Press), is an ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities. She currently has three book projects under way: 1) Evictions and Convictions: The Gendered Racial Logic of Black Dispossession in New York City; 2) The Historical Paradox of Citizenship: Black Land Ownership and Loss in the Americas; and 3) Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice.
On October 29, 1984, 60-something-year-old Bronx, New York, resident Eleanor Bumpurs was fatally shot by New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Stephen Sullivan after a botched housing eviction. Bumpurs’ killing, part of what many New York activists viewed as a continuation of police violence against racial and ethnic minorities, sparked local and national outrage, resulting in the pursuit of legal justice for Bumpurs. The Bumpurs killing and the subsequent jury indictment and acquittal of Officer Sullivan are well known to the public. But somewhat loss in the courageous fight for legal justice for the mother of seven and grandmother of 10 was her identity. Buried under a sea of anti-police brutality placards, lost in the chants of “No Justice No Peace,” and visually confined to a somber looking 1981 photograph—that is how many, particularly New Yorkers, remember Bumpurs. This presentation departs from historical, sociological, and legal studies that primarily focus on Bumpurs’ killing and the legal aftermath. Instead, this presentation, using a variety of primary sources including newspapers, photographic images, oral history, legal documents, city records, personal papers, radio interviews, and vital statistics, goes beyond the manner in which Bumpurs died. It reconstructs Bumpurs’ life prior to her death, situating her within early 20th-century Jim Crow North Carolina and post–World War II New York City and offers snapshots of her life. Bumpurs’ pre-shooting life uncovers her hopes, fears, and visions for herself and family, her familial relationships, and her determination to survive in rigidly constructed systems of race, gender, and class oppression.
LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. Her area of expertise is 20th-century United States and African American histories. Harris’ scholarly articles have appeared in The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and SOULS. In 2014, she appeared on TV-One’s nationally syndicated show Celebrity Crime File, a popular investigative series that highlights high-profile criminal cases of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her first monograph, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016, won an Organization of American Historian award for best book in African American women’s history, and the Philip Taft Labor Prize in Labor and Working-Class History. Her current projects explores the socioeconomic, political, and cultural lives of black New Yorkers during the 1980s.
In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air.
However, as Making All Black Lives Matter shows, the movement has roots in prison abolition, anti-police violence, black youth movements, and radical mobilizations across the country dating back for at least a decade. Barbara Ransby interviewed more than a dozen of the principal organizers and activists in the movement and provides a detailed review of its extensive coverage in mainstream and social media. Making All Black Lives Matter offers one of the first overviews of Black Lives Matter and explores the challenges and possible future for this growing and influential movement.
Dr. Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime activist. She is a distinguished professor of African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative. She previously served as director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and interim vice provost for planning and programs (2011–12) at UIC. Ransby is author of the highly acclaimed biography Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. The book received eight national awards and recognitions, including Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council; Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association; Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians; Liberty Legacy Foundation Award (co-winner), Organization of American Historians; James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Honorable Mention, 2004 Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians; Honor Book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Her most recent book is Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale University Press, January 2013). Ransby has also published in numerous scholarly and popular publications and lctures widely. In terms of her activism, Ransby was an initiator of the African American Women in Defense of Ourselves campaign in 1991, a co-convener of The Black Radical Congress in 1998, and a founder of Ella’s Daughters, a network of women working in Ella Baker’s tradition. She has published and lectured widely at conferences, community forums, and on more than 50 college campuses, including the University of Michigan, Stanford, Syracuse University, Cornell, UNC Chapel Hill, Yale, University of Chicago, Harvard, University of Iowa, Williams College, and and UC Santa Cruz. Her articles have appeared in popular as well as scholarly venues, including: The Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, In These Times, and The Progressive. She is a part of the national advisory board of Imagining America and serves on the editorial boards of the London-based journal Race and Class; the Justice, Power and Politics Series at University of North Carolina Press; and the Scholar’s Advisory Committee of Ms. magazine. In summer 2012 she became the second editor-in-chief of SOULS, a critical journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society published quarterly. In 2016, Ransby was elected president of the National Women’s Studies Association.
Paula Marie Seniors is an associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech and the biographer of her family’s legacy in her forthcoming book, Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (1956–1987), University of Georgia Press. Seniors won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, from the Association of Black Women Historians, for Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity and Politics in Black Musical Theater, Ohio State University Press, 2009. She co-edited Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls, Palgrave MacMillan, and wrote “Reconfiguring Black Motherhood: Michelle Obama and the ‘Mom in Charge Trope,’” which appears in the book. She published “Bob Cole’s ‘Colored Man’s Declaration of Independence and Black Broadway: The Case of Cole’ and Johnson’s Shoo Fly Regiment and George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along,” Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, 2018; “Mae Mallory” and “The Monroe Defense Committee,” Black Power Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing, 2018; “Mae Mallory and the Southern Belle Fantasy Trope,” From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help, Palgrave (2014); and “Most Influential Black Artists in Musical Theatre,” Virginia Tech Magazine, January 2016. In addition to her Mae Mallory book, Seniors is working on Michelle Obama’s Silence: Police and State Violence Against African American Girls and Women.
Safiya Ellis Bandele is director emeritus of the Center for Women’s Development at Medgar Evers College (CUNY). During her 34-year tenure at Medgar Evers, she also assisted in developing and taught gender-specific curricula and facilitated “Women’s Empowerment” workshops in community social service organizations, women’s shelters, and prisons. Post-retirement (2011), Bandele performs her multi-media presentation on Ida B. Wells-Barnett: educator, lynching abolitionist, journalist and women’s rights advocate. Using narration, dance/movement, song, and images, Bandele has presented the significance of this “Warrior for Justice” in local and national venues, including a highly acclaimed performance in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the birthplace of Wells. Bandele’s writings on mass incarceration, women’s trauma/redemption, and the efficacy of performance art were published in the online magazine In The Fray, the literary journal And Then, and the print anthology Love Lives Here Too, published by Resilience Media. Reading/performance venues include: SUNY; the National Black Theater (Harlem, New York); Rust College (Mississippi); Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. (Brooklyn, New York), and Hampton Roads (Hampton, Virginia) Her video “Safiya Bandele Mass Incarceration” is on YouTube.
Sarah E. Wright (1928–2009) is well known for her seminal book, This Child’s Gonna Live, a pioneering work of fiction centering around the life of an impoverished black woman in Maryland. Dr. Robyn Spencer will talk briefly about Wright’s internationalist consciousness and anti–Vietnam War organizing in groups such as the Harlem Writers Guild, the Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage, the On Guard Committee for Freedom, and the United Afro-American League in 1960s Harlem.
Students from Spencer’s spring 2019 courses will share their reflections on doing primary source research on Wright’s civil rights and anti–Vietnam War activism and reading her literature and poetry.
In this Research Expo, Brooklyn College students and faculty will report back on their collaboration with the Brooklyn-based organization The United Order of Tents. The Tents is a benevolent organization founded in 1867 by Annetta M. Lane and Harriett R. Taylor, two formerly enslaved black women. It grew as a secret society helmed largely by black churchwomen committed to community betterment. In New York, the Tents were rooted in Bedford Stuyvesant at 87 MacDonough Street, a home whose obvious disrepair, intriguing façade, and long history in rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant interested faculty in the departments of Anthropology and Archaeology, and History, as well as community members.
In 2018 the Friends of the Tents began as a loose association of people interested in learning more about this history and supporting the Tents’ preservation attempts and vision for their historic home. In spring 2019, some of these faculty will explore the potential of student research projects, oral histories, and archaeological excavation around preserving and documenting the history of the Tents in Brooklyn.
