March 16 | Voting While Black | Darryl Pinckney and Nsé Ufot

Tuesday, March 16 1pm EST Virtual Event Free event. Registration required. Sign up here. The Spring 2021 Black Mobility and Safety in the US Lecture Series continues with the theme of Voting While Black, and we welcome Darryl Pinckney and Nsé Ufot. Darryl Pinckney, a long-time contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), and three works non-fiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002), Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy (2014), and Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019). Blackballed is Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a half of participation by Black people in US electoral politics and outlines the struggle for voting rights from Reconstruction through to the civil rights movement to Obama’s two presidential campaigns and the new edition contains an essay reflecting on last summer’s protests. In several of the essays in Busted in New York, Pinckney witnesses events in the streets, from the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to Black Lives Matter resistance in Ferguson, Missouri five years ago, and explores the shifting consciousness in the history of Black identity. Nsé Ufot is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Georgia Project (NGP) and its affiliate, New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGP AF). Nsé leads both organizations with a data-informed approach and a commitment to developing tools that leverage technology with the goal of making it easier for every voter to engage in every election. Nsé and her team are also developing Georgia’s home-grown talent by training and organizing local activists across the state. She has dedicated her life and career to working on civil, human and workers’ rights issues and leads two organizations whose complementary aim is to strengthen Georgia’s democracy. Under Nsé’s leadership, NGP has registered over 500K eligible Georgians to vote and has no plans of slowing down. Continuing from fall 2020, ACT is co-presenting the series of public guest lectures that coincide with Ekene Ijeoma’s Black Mobility and Safety in the US course. Focusing on the theme of living while Black, this semester’s topics will include: learning, voting, driving, working, and loving while Black. In this seminar and studio, Ijeoma will guide students to listen, learn, reflect and respond to issues around mobility (physical, mental, socio-economical, political, etc) and safety for Black Americans through words, images, and sounds that reference social science and anti-racist research. Weekly meetings will be organized around public lectures from guests ranging from designers and urban planners to activists and social scientists, and private individual presentations for the group. Part of a two-semester course, Black Mobility and Safety in the US is organized into two-week topics around living while Black. The first semester (Fall 2020) will include: birthing, breathing, sleeping, eating, and walking; the second: learning, voting, driving, working, and loving. By the end of each semester, students will have the resources and tools to actively listen and respond critically to issues of Black mobility in the context of their own fields and their purposes. Free event. Registration required. Sign up here.