Toward a geography of black internationalism: Bayard Rustin, nonviolence and the promise of Africa

This article charts the trip made by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin to West Africa in 1952, and examines the unpublished ‘Africa Program’ which he subsequently presented to leading American pacifists. I situate Rustin’s writings within the burgeoning literature on black internationalism which, despite its clear geographical registers, geographers themselves have as yet made only a modest contribution towards. The article argues that within this literature there remains a tendency to romanticize cross-cultural connections in lieu of critically interrogating their basic, and often competing, claims. I argue that closer attention to the geographies of black internationalism, however, allows us to shape a more diverse and practiced sense of internationalist encounter and exchange. The article reconstructs the multiplicity of Rustin’s black internationalist geographies which drew eclectically from a range of Pan-African, American and pacifist traditions. Though each of these was profoundly racialized, they conceptualized race in distinctive ways and thereby had differing understandings of what constituted the international as a geographical arena. By blending these forms of internationalism Rustin was able to promote a particular model of civil rights which was characteristically internationalist in outlook, nonviolent in principle and institutional in composition; a model which in selective and uneven ways continues to shape our understanding of the period

African Americans, Gentrification, and Neoliberal Urbanization: the Case of Fort Greene, Brooklyn

This article examines the gentrification of Fort Greene, which is located in the western part of black Brooklyn, one of the largest contiguous black urban areas in the USA. Between the late 1960s and 2003, gentrification in Fort Greene followed the patterns discovered by scholars of black neighborhoods; the gentrifying agents were almost exclusively black and gentrification as a process was largely bottom-up because entities interested in the production of space were mostly not involved. Since 2003, this has changed. Whites have been moving to Fort Greene in large numbers and will soon represent the numerical majority. Public and private interventions in and around Fort Greene have created a new top-down version of gentrification, which is facilitating this white influx. Existing black residential and commercial tenants are replaced and displaced in the name of urban economic development

King: I Have a Dream speech

This lecture on Martin Luther King\u27s I Have a Dream speech, delivered at Lawrence University on November 18, 2005, was designed for students and faculty in the college\u27s Freshman Studies program. Freshman Studies, a multidisciplinary introduction to the liberal arts, has been the cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum for over fifty years. The lecturer, Professor Jerald Podair, is Associate Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies. Professor Podair holds the B.A. from New York University, the J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, and the M.A. and Ph.D from Princeton University

King: I Have a Dream speech

This lecture on Martin Luther King\u27s I Have a Dream speech, delivered at Lawrence University on November 26, 2007, was designed for students and faculty in the college\u27s Freshman Studies program. Freshman Studies, a multidisciplinary introduction to the liberal arts, has been the cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum for over fifty years. The lecturer, Professor Jerald Podair, is Associate Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies. Professor Podair holds the B.A. from New York University, the J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, and the M.A. and Ph.D from Princeton University

King: I Have a Dream speech

This lecture on Martin Luther King\u27s I Have a Dream speech, delivered at Lawrence University on November 13, 2006, was designed for students and faculty in the college\u27s Freshman Studies program. Freshman Studies, a multidisciplinary introduction to the liberal arts, has been the cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum for over fifty years. The lecturer, Professor Jerald Podair, is Associate Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies. Professor Podair holds the B.A. from New York University, the J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, and the M.A. and Ph.D from Princeton University

West: Race Matters

This lecture on West, delivered at Lawrence University on January 18th, 2013, was designed for students and faculty in the college’s Freshman Studies program. Freshman Studies, a multidisciplinary introduction to the liberal arts, has been the cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum for over fifty years. Ameya Balsekar is an Assistant Professor of Government, Carla Daughtry is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Jerald Podair is a Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies