August Nimtz: Marx, Douglass and the Fight for Racial Equality: a Panel with Kyle Edwards
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 7 p.m.
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106
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Join the East Side Freedom Library with noted University of Minnesota scholar August Nimtz and his coauthor Kyle Edwards as we explore the present-day themes illuminated in their book The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time.
What sort of politics leads to real emancipation? This question led Nimtz and Edwards back to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Their work engages a conversation with two competing political perspectives, liberalism and Marxism, examining the biggest breakthrough for the millennial-old democratic quest after the French Revolution occurred – the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. But it does so with a purpose for today. As CLR James said, “You can study history and understand where we are today and why and where we are going tomorrow.”
August H. Nimtz, Ph.D., is a nationally renowned professor of political science and African American and African studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in Marxism, political economy, politics of race, class & ethnicity, and African politics.
Kyle A. Edwards is a Curriculum Associate at the University of Minnesota. He is a member of AFSCME 3800 and author of “Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune.”
They will be joined by Jack McKivigan and Sidney Carlson White.
Jack McKivigan received his Ph.D. in History from the Ohio State University. He began work at the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University under its founding editor John W. Blassingame in 1979 and took over as the project’s director in 1994. Under his direction the project has published seven volumes with Yale University Press and has only three more to go to finish the most complete scholarly edition of an African American in history. McKivigan is also the author of important books and articles on various elements of radical history including abolitionism, civil rights, and labor history.
Sidney Carlson White is a member of Marxist Unity Group, a caucus of Democratic Socialists of America. He is on the Organizing Committee of the Central Brooklyn Branch of the New York City DSA. He has worked on mayoral and state legislative campaigns in New York, fighting for candidates who will be accountable to the socialist movement that supports them. Outside of his organizing work, his scholarship is in the areas of twentieth and twenty-first century American culture and its intersections with race and empire.
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