Tufts University professor visits Ohio University to discuss the history of the Obama Era.
Students, faculty and Athens residents filled the Galbreath Chapel to the point where people were sitting on the floor.
The history department’s 38th Annual Costa Lecture featured the speaker, Peniel Joseph, who urged the importance of how learning history can help the public move forward in issues of social unrest.
More than 100 people attended the event ready to discuss society’s issues and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Joseph’s speech was called “Reimaging the Black Power Movement in the Age of Obama and Black Lives Matter.” He alluded to the work that activists are doing to bring attention to these critical issues affecting black people in the United States.
“I think it’s extraordinary. I think they’ve been powerful and that post-Ferguson, young black people, Latinos and whites really had their hearts and minds opened to see issues of racial inequality,” Joseph said. “I think they’ve been bold, they’ve been innovative and they’ve been real leaders and (the) hope for energizing the movement.”
Joseph is a renowned scholar on the history of the Black Power Movement and Civil Rights Movement. He opened his talk by discussing significant events in African-American history while paralleling important incidents to the current Black Lives Matter movement.
“Our young millennials need to understand about racial slavery, we need to understand about anti-colonial and anti-war movements,” Joseph said. “We need to understand about black feminists movements. … That the problem of the United States of America is an oligarchy but it was really practicing institutional racism.”
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="7cf5fd58-5721-11e5-a2d7-3f93c4a561f3"}}
Olivia Wallace, a senior studying visual anthropology and a previous Post photographer, couldn’t get enough of Joseph’s lecture on the importance of learning about the subject history and “valuing the right to protest.”
“I wanted to learn more to keep me on the edge about how I can contribute to political change,” Wallace said. “He talked about how everyone needs to know their history, and I feel like that's something that I’ve talked about with a lot of people and why I am personally in an African American Studies class right now.”
Angelique Redd, a junior studying studio art, thought Joseph’s talk displayed a variety of topics that pertained to the importance of learning different insights in history and politics.
“I really enjoyed him comparing the Civil Rights Movement into the Black Lives Matter movement happening right now,” Redd said. “I also liked that he talked about the intersections of class, race and sexuallity and gender as a part of these movements instead of talking about them as separate entities.”
Closing the lecture, Joseph left the audience with an important lesson on why college students should learn about the history to promote social change.
“You have to have a respect for the struggle to endeavor, to understand the story of that struggle,” he said. “And once you have that story, you’ve got to be active wherever you can.”
@its_candicew
