The East Side Freedom Library and the St. Paul Recovery Act Reading Group
invite you to the January 2021 gathering of the Reparations Reading Group

The Historical Roots of Racism in Minnesota
A Conversation Featuring Dr. Christopher Lehman
St. Cloud State University Professor and Author of Slavery’s Reach

Register for the Zoom link here

The Reparations Reading Group has been meeting monthly for nearly a year. We have explored the legacies of slavery, the limits of Emancipation and Reconstruction, the institutions of sharecropping, Jim Crow, and convict labor, the impact of the northward migration, the shortcomings of the New Deal, and the rise of the civil rights movement. For the most part, our attention has been on a national scale, and we have yet to look deeply at our own state of Minnesota. This month we begin to take a closer look at the development and impact of institutional racism in the North Star State.

In July, ESFL convened a conversation about “the roots of racism in Minnesota history” with scholars Bill Green, Marty Case, and Chris Lehman, each of whom had written a carefully researched and well-argued book about institutional racism in mid-19th century Minnesota. For this month’s Reparations conversation, we invite you to watch this video of their conversation. We will not watch any of the video when we gather on January 12, so we urge you to watch this beforehand. Bring comments and questions, not only to share with each other, but to direct to Professor Lehman, who will be joining us. This is a great opportunity to ground ourselves as we begin the new year.

Free and open to all

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