Our partners' events for Black History Month

As part of planning our Black History Month celebrations, we’ve been working with American colleagues from our Global Academy of Liberal Arts (GALA) network.

GALA is an international community of diverse, innovative, and socially responsible universities and colleges whose aims are to transform lives and to enhance global understanding through interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching and research. There are currently nineteen partners across fourteen countries.

Here are some of the events our partners are running for Black History Month. Keep checking back as we’ll be updating this page regularly.

Geneseo (USA)

• Thursday 1 October - 9-11pm, Nicholas Buccola: 'The Great Debate: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Struggle for the American Soul.'

About the talk: Nicholas Buccola, Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College, will be giving a lecture entitled "The Great Debate: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Struggle for the American Soul." The lecture will be based on his book The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America, about the 1965 Cambridge debate between these two writers. Further information and details.

• Wednesday 14 October - 6pm, Dr A'Bodjedi

About the talk: Dr A'Bodjedi will talk about his role as guide and interpreter for NYETETI (the artist/actor formerly known as Samuel L. Jackson) during his UKEHANO (Welcoming Home Celebration) and UPAPO (Death-Rebirth and Purification Ceremony) among our BENGA people in EBENJE YA BOKUDA BWA NGWALO, IKUMEMBONGO (Cap Esterias, Gabon). Watch the recording.

• Friday 23 October - 9pm, Rochester's Teen Empowerment and the Clarissa Street Reunion Committee will present their documentary, Clarissa Uprooted: Youth and Elders Uncover the Story of Black Rochester (produced by RCTV)

About the event: The short documentary features Teen Empowerment Youth History Ambassadors interviewing elders who lived in the Clarissa Street neighborhood during its heyday as “Rochester’s Broadway” and through its destruction when urban renewal and Route 490 tore through the neighborhood. “Clarissa Street was the foundation of Afro-Rochester,” says Dr. David Anderson, founding member of Blackstorytelling League, and of Akwaaba: the Heritage Associates, which shares African American lore across the United States and Ghana. Clarissa Uprooted depicts the Third Ward as a microcosm of Rochester’s, and many northern US cities’, history – from neighborhood comradery, international jazz music and thriving black-owned businesses, to redlining, urban renewal, and other racist policies. The screening will include a talkback featuring some of the elders who lived this history and the youth who are living with the consequences today, including members of Teen Empowerment's Youth History Ambassadors Project.

Claremont Graduate University (USA)

• Wednesday 28 October - 6-7.30pm, Gloria Willingham-Touré: '"The First, The Only, One of A Few" - A Matter of Black Lives'

About the talk: Dr Gloria Willingham-Touré is a Civil Rights activist and an alum of our GALA partner, Claremont Graduate University, USA. This talk, hosted by CGU and co-sponsored by CGU and Bath Spa University, will examine a lifetime spent in the struggle for Civil Rights and place this historical effort in the context of the current Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and across the world. The discussion will be conducted in front of an international audience of students, scholars and the public on both sides of the Atlantic to place our current historical reckoning in a global context. A Q+A session will follow the talk. Recording will be available soon.

Find out more about Black History Month 2020 at Bath Spa.

In February we'll work alongside our American GALA partners on a Black Futures Month to run alongside their Black History Month... more details to follow!