“BENDING THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE: WHITE SUPREMACY, BLACK NATIONALISM, AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT” will be the subject of guest speaker Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries at the Fourth Annual Fleming-Morrow Distinguished Lecture in African-American History at 5:30 pm, Thursday, February 28 in the Lindsay Young Auditorium on the campus of the University of Tennessee Knoxville. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.
Drawing on the long history of the Black Freedom Struggle, Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries will examine the ways African Americans have exerted the force necessary to make a more just America, a force equal and opposite to that exerted by proponents of white supremacy. He will also explore why Americans embrace the idea of the inevitability of justice despite America’s tortured history of race relations, which points to the exact opposite being true.
Prof. Jeffries was born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Midwood High School in 1990, he headed south, enrolling at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, the nation’s leading institution for educating African American men. At Morehouse, he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and initiated into the Pi Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.
Jeffries graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse with a BA in history in 1994. That same year, he left the New South for the Old, moving to Durham, North Carolina, to attend Duke University, where he earned an MA, and a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history.
While completing his graduate work, he lived periodically in Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement. In 2002, he relocated to Tuscaloosa, where he served as the Bankhead Fellow in the history department at the University of Alabama while teaching American, and African-American history.
After spending time in the “Heart of Dixie,” Jeffries crossed the Ohio River and joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in the history department where he has taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement.
He has received several fellowships in support of his research, including a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He has also regularly shared his expert knowledge of African American history and contemporary black politics with the general public through lectures, teacher workshops, and frequent media appearances.
In 2009, Hasan published his first book, “Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt” (NYU Press). Bloody Lowndes tells the remarkable story of the ordinary people and college age organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of southern black militancy. They achieved this extraordinary feat by creating the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an all-black, independent, political party that was also the original Black Panther Party. Bloody Lowndes has been praised as “the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for,” and as “an invaluable contribution to understanding current and future ‘conversations’ on race and politics.”
His current book project, entitled “Stealing Home: Ebbets Field and Black Working Class Life in Post-Civil Rights New York,” explores the struggle of working-class African Americans to secure and enjoy their freedom rights, from the height of the civil rights era through the present, by examining the experiences of the residents of Ebbets Field Apartments, an expansive, 1,200 unit, affordable housing complex built in 1962 on the site of old Ebbets Field, the former home of Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers.