The East Side Freedom Library and the St. Paul Recovery Act Reading Group invite you to the next meeting of our monthly reading & discussion group.

Tuesday, November 10, 2020, 6:30pm

You must register here to receive the Zoom link to this meeting.

For nearly a year, our reading & discussion group has met monthly to discuss not only the historical development of institutional racism in the United States, but also the struggles against it.  In recent conversations, we have seen that large-scale Black migration from the South, the employment of African Americans in northern industries such as steel, rubber, and auto production, the Great Depression and the New Deal, all changed the terrain on which African Americans struggled for their rights.  World War II itself brought additional changes, as hundreds of thousands of Black men and women served in the military, worked in war production, and, after the war, manifested an energized commitment to social justice.

What historian Jacquelyn Hall has called “the long civil rights movement” (in a widely cited article we are reading this month) has written many chapters of American history, chapters which offer us insights into values, visions, strategies, and tactics which can serve us as we seek justice today.  The key readings we will consider this month will help us understand how, led by African American veterans and held together by family networks which linked the growing Black communities of the urban North to their relatives and communities of origin in the South, the freedom movement broke fresh ground upon which later iterations of civil rights struggle would stand.

Please join us for what is certain to be a stimulating and inspiring conversation.  We encourage you to prepare by engaging some of the readings, all of which can be accessed through these links:

• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement”
• PBS, World War II and Civil Rights Struggles
• Will Jones, “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington”
• NPR, “Hidden Pattern of Rape Helped Stir the Civil Rights Movement”

Free and open to all

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