The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the important role Black women played in the fight for Black liberation from the era of enslavement to the modern Civil Rights Movement. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.

About the Program

This talk explores why and how Black women involved in Civil Rights activism become “hidden in plain sight” and silenced in dominant U.S. historical narratives and cultural memory. Professor Yates-Richard traces a persistent representational logic that shadows and quiets Black women in Black freedom imaginings from the era of slavery through the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Yates-Richard introduces key Black women Civil Rights organizers and activists, and highlights their contributions to the ongoing struggle for Black liberation.

About the Speaker

Meina Yates-Richard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. She specializes in African American, African diasporic and American literature and culture. Her scholarship explores the connections between representations of slavery, gender, sound, and liberation ideologies in Black Atlantic literary and cultural production and freedom movements. Dr. Yates-Richard was 2018-19 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and was awarded the Norman Foerster Prize for Best Essay published in American Literature in 2016 for “‘WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?’: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature.” Her work appears in the Journal of West Indian Literature, amsj: American Studies, post-45 Contemporaries, Feminist Review, and the edited volume Ralph Ellison in Context. Yates-Richard co-edited with Robin Brooks MELUS Special Issue (vol 46:4), Black Women’s Literature: Violence & the COVID-19 Moment.

Register Here for Zoom Lecture