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This keynote panel will focus on the international scope of the life and legacy of John Hope Franklin, a pioneering scholar of the African diaspora and civil rights leader, who served as chair of Brooklyn College’s History Department in the 1950s.
For more information, e-mail Professor Philip Napoli, chair, History Department.
John Whittington Franklin is managing member of Franklin Global LLC and senior manager emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He has organized a range of conferences on African diasporic topics, and co-edited, with his father, John Hope Franklin, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin.
Nishani Frazier is an associate professor of American studies and history at the University of Kansas. She served formerly as associate curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) and as personal assistant for John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on “One America.” She is the author of Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland, Ohio and the Rise of Black Power Populism (University of Arkansas Press, 2017).
Moderated by history professor Gunja SenGupta, author, most recently, of the Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press).
The Department of History, in collaboration with the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the Department of English, and the Common Reader/1619 Project, presents:
Via YouTube
Grammy Award–nominated conductor and singer Professor Malcolm J. Merriweather will moderate a conversation with composer Laura Karpman. Karpman’s setting of Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Catch the Fire” is an aria responding to the Tulsa Massacre as depicted in episode 9, “Rewind 1921,” of the sci-fi/horror/fantasy sensation Lovecraft Country. The program will be complemented by performances from previous Freedom Concerts and music composed around the time of the Tulsa Massacre. Conversations about the art of film composition and higher education curriculum will be held with Associate Professor Jonathan Zalben, M.F.A. Program in Media Scoring/Sonic Arts, and Associate Professor Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, director, H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music.
For more information, e-mail Professor Gunja SenGupta or Associate Professor Philip Napoli.
John W. Franklin is the son of renowned scholar of African-American history John Hope Franklin. He is the co-editor, with his father, of My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. John W. Franklin served as the cultural historian and senior manager in the Office of External Affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. A former curator at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, he developed programs on Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. He has also organized a range of conferences on African diasporic topics.
Cheryl D. Hicks is an associate professor of Africana studies and history at the University of Delaware. Her research addresses the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the law. She specializes in late 19th and 20th-century African American and American history as well as urban, gender, and civil rights history. Hicks is the author of Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (2010), a book that illuminates the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early 20th-century New York.
Malcolm Merriweather, a composer and baritone, enjoys a versatile career with performances ranging from the songs of Margaret Bonds to gems of the symphonic choral repertoire. He can be heard on the Grammy-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road (NAXOS). He is music director of New York City’s The Dessoff Choirs, known for their performances of great choral works from the pre-Baroque era through the 21st century. He is an associate professor, and director of choral studies and voice department coordinator at Brooklyn College, and the artistic director of Voices of Haiti, a 60-member children’s choir in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Laura Karpman collaborates with the most creative filmmakers of our time, including Misha Green, Steven Spielberg, Alex Gibney, Kasi Lemmons, Rory Kennedy, Sam Pollard, Laura Nix, Eleanor Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sophia Coppola. The five-time Emmy winner’s scores span the HBO hit series Lovecraft Country; 2020 Oscar-nominated Walk Run Cha-Cha; the Discovery Channel docuseries Why We Hate; Miss Virginia; the Netflix romantic comedy Set It Up; Sony’s Paris Can Wait; Lionsgate’s The Cotton Club Encore; Fox Searchlight’s Step and Black Nativity; the drama series Underground; Sony’s L.A.’s Finest; Peabody Award–winning series Craft in America; and Showtime’s Sid & Judy.
Jonathan Zalben has written music for films released by HBO, Lionsgate, Discovery, and Sony Pictures Classics. His film music has also screened Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, and Tribeca film festivals. He scored the feature film Flock of Dudes, which was released by Starz, theatrically, and on VOD. Other scores include the Oscar-nominated Redemption as well the HBO documentary There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane. His music has been heard at Sundance in Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Evan Glodell’s Bellflower, and Hotel 22, a New York Times op-doc.
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, associate professor of musicology, has published articles on women in hip-hop, the 19th-century piano prodigy “Blind Tom” Wiggins, Pauline Oliveros, and other topics in American music. She has presented papers and lecture-recitals at national and international conferences, including national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society. She won the Carolyn Heilbrun Prize for her dissertation on Miriam Gideon’s 1958 opera Fortunato, which was published by A-R Editions (2013). She is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (2016).
The Department of History, in collaboration with the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities; the departments of Africana Studies, Political Science, and Sociology; the Conservatory of Music; and the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, presents
3:40–4:55 p.m. Woody Tanger Auditorium Brooklyn College Library
John W. Franklin serves as the cultural historian and senior manager in the Office of External Affairs at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. A former curator at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, he developed programs on Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. He has also organized a range of conferences on African diasporic topics. He is the co-editor, with his father, John Hope Franklin, of My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin.
Steven Hahn, a professor of history at New York University, is the Pulitzer– and Bancroft Prize–winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. He received the Allan Nevins Prize and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry. His articles have appeared in public forums and scholarly journals like The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The New York Times, as well as the American Historical Review and Past and Present. He is completing a textbook called Contested America: A History of the United States and the People Who Made It and is working on a book tentatively entitled, The Illiberal Tradition in America. Hahn has been actively involved in projects making history and liberal arts education available to a wider public, and is currently teaching in NYU’s Prison Education Program.
5:15–6 p.m. Don Buchwald Theater Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts
The concert will expand on the model by Coretta Scott King, presenting a tapestry of choral music, poetry, and prose that illustrates the struggle of people around the world and promotes religious, social, and political harmony.
