BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:-//WordPress - MECv6.6.0//EN
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://stonecenter.unc.edu/
X-WR-CALNAME:Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History
X-WR-CALDESC:
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
X-MS-OLK-FORCEINSPECTOROPEN:TRUE
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
UID:MEC-634ee014551f1b99ea8e49a9fc6f8a2d@stonecenter.unc.edu
DTSTART:20231102T173000Z
DTEND:20231102T190000Z
DTSTAMP:20230825T160500Z
CREATED:20230825
LAST-MODIFIED:20230825
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:2
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SUMMARY:Writers Discussion Series with Blair LM Kelley
DESCRIPTION:Title: Black Folk – The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley\nThursday, November 2nd | 5:30PM | Hitchcock Multipurpose Room\nBook Description: There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic “white working class,” a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.\nClick HERE to RSVP ( https://apps2.research.unc.edu/events/index.cfm?event=events.go&key=BC57 )\nSpanning two hundred years-from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic-Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\nTaking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge.\nAs millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.\nAs her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered-to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact.\nThrough affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at times maintain, her family’s status. Yet her family, like so many others, was always animated by a vision of a better future.\nThe church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as Kelley suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be the same today. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.\nAbout the Author: Blair LM Kelley is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South and codirector of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.\n
URL:https://stonecenter.unc.edu/events/writers-discussion-series-black-folk-the-roots-of-the-black-working-class-by-blair-lm-kelley/
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://stonecenter.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Blair_Kelley.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR