UMass Amherst Libraries Host 29th Annual Du Bois Lecture

The UMass Amherst Libraries and the W. E. B. Du Bois Center will host the 29th Annual Du Bois Lecture on September 12, 2024, 6-7:30 p.m. at the Old Chapel at UMass Amherst. The lecture, titled “Did W. E. B. Du Bois’s Rejection of Ida B. Wells Project Trauma and Alienation against Black Rebellion?”, will be given by Dr. Joy James. The lecture will be livestreamed on YouTube, free and open to the public for viewing. The lecture will be followed by a reception for in-person attendees.

In-person attendance at the lecture and reception is free but places are strictly limited. Registration is required to attend; this form will close when event capacity is reached.

This meditation on Black leadership compares and contrasts W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Both historical icons worked to co-found the NAACP as a resistance to anti-Black violence and repression, yet only one leader was pushed out of the NAACP because of their radical resistance to lynching. Transcending the Talented Tenth notes Du Bois’s and Wells’s diverse politics of struggle. As their political heirs, today, we witness the rise of elite Black leadership amid the demise of mass Black Liberation. Du Bois’s repudiated elites (the “talented tenth”) continue to shape the meaning of contemporary “Black Power” by depicting it as largely access to state, corporate, and military-police powers. If trauma, alienation, and purchase crush resistance, could Du Bois’s and Wells’s legacies instruct a talented mass how to emancipate the “talented tenth” from elite capture?

Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, Joy James is a political philosopher who engages with organizers seeking justice and an end to militarism. James is the editor of: The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Imprisoned Intellectuals; Warfare in the American Homeland; Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures. Her books include: Seeking the ‘Beloved Community’; Transcending the Talented Tenth; Resisting State Violence; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; Contextualizing Angela Davis. James writes on the “Captive Maternal” and works with incarcerated and abolitionist intellectuals and writers.