Barbara Ransby | |
---|---|
Born | May 12, 1957 |
Occupation | Academic |
Spouse | Peter Sporn [1] |
Academic background | |
Education | Columbia University (BA) University of Michigan (MA) University of Michigan (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Chicago |
Barbara Ransby (born May 12,1957) is a writer,historian,professor,and activist. [2] [3] She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, [4] [5] and holds the John D. MacArthur Chair at the University of Illinois Chicago. [6]
Ransby attended Columbia University,where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1984, [7] and completed her master's degree and PhD at the University of Michigan. [3] In 1996,she joined the faculty of University of Illinois Chicago,where she is professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women's Studies,and History at the university. [8] [4] [9] Ransby was elected president of the National Women's Studies Association for a two-year term,which began in November 2016. [10] [11] She is an historian of the Movement for Black Lives. [12]
Ransby's academic work has featured biographies of 20th-century black women activists Ella Baker and Eslanda Robeson. In contemporary politics,she has been executive director of a non-profit organization. [1] Her daughter Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn is as of 2021 a national organizing co-chair of the non-profit youth organization BYP100. [13] [14]
In 1995,Ransby,together with other black feminists including Angela Davis,Evelynn Hammonds and KimberléCrenshaw,formed an alliance called the African American Agenda 2000 to oppose Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March,out of concern that it would further black male sexism. [15]
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation,discrimination,and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s,although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro,North Carolina,and Nashville,Tennessee,the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962,with the support of the Voter Education Project,SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work,the play A Raisin in the Sun,highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes:"What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29,she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award —making her the first African-American dramatist,the fifth woman,and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation,challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South,she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century,including W. E. B. Du Bois,Thurgood Marshall,A. Philip Randolph,and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists,such as Diane Nash,Stokely Carmichael,and Bob Moses,as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Black feminism,also known as Afro-feminism chiefly outside the United States,is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism also acknowledges the additional marginalization faced by black women due to their social identity.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement,a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge,Maryland,on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement,she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge",signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.
The Lillian Smith Book Awards' are an award which honors those authors who,through their outstanding writing about the American South,carry on Lillian Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The award is jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.
The Black Radical Congress (BRC) is an organization founded in 1998 in Chicago. It is a grassroots network of individuals and organizations of African descent focused on advocating for broad progressive social justice,racial equality and economic justice goals within the United States.
Borderline is a 1930 film,written and directed by Kenneth Macpherson and produced by the Pool Group in Territet,Switzerland. The silent film,with English inter-titles,is primarily noted for its handling of the contentious issue of inter-racial relationships,using avant-garde experimental film-making techniques,and is today very much part of the curriculum of the study of modern cinematography.
Paul Leroy Robeson Jr. was an American author,archivist and historian.
Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson was an American anthropologist,author,actress,and civil rights activist. She was the wife and business manager of performer Paul Robeson.
The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,or Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington,was a 1957 demonstration in Washington,D.C.,an early event in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It was the occasion for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Give Us the Ballot speech.
Beth E. Richie is a professor of African American Studies,Sociology,Gender and Women's Studies,and Criminology,Law,and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she currently serves as head of the Criminology,Law,and Justice Department. From 2010 to 2016,Dr. Richie served as the director of the UIC Institute of Research on Race and Public Policy. In 2014,she was named a senior adviser to the National Football League Players Association Commission on domestic violence and sexual assault. Of her most notable awards,Dr. Richie has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute,the Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services,and the Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project. Her work has been supported by multiple foundations including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,the Ford Foundation,the National Institute for Justice,and the National Institute of Corrections.
Sojourners for Truth and Justice was a radical civil rights organization led by African American women from 1951 to 1952. It was led by activists such as Louise Thompson Patterson,Shirley Graham Du Bois and Charlotta Bass.
Thelma Dale Perkins was an African-American activist. Her maternal uncle was Frederick Douglass Patterson. She was also a member of the CPUSA.
Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) is an African American youth organization in the United States. Its activities include community organizing,voter mobilization,and other social justice campaigns focused on black,feminist,and queer issues. The national director is D'Atra "Dee Dee" Jackson.
Crusade for Citizenship was the 1958 voter project organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The goal of the project was to double the number of African-American voters in the southern United States for the 1958 and 1960 elections. It was initially organized by Ella Baker as Associate Director of the SCLC,and Reverend John Tilley as the first Executive Director. While encouraging discussion and actions related to voter registration,it did not meet its goal of creating a mass movement. Southern registrars resisted registering African Americans and many blacks were reluctant or fearful to challenge existing exclusions under Jim Crow society.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic,writer,and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book,Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation.
Sandra Cason Hayden was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation,in 1960 she was an early recruit to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi,Hayden was a strategist and organizer for the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the internal discussion that followed its uncertain outcome,she clashed with the SNCC national executive.
Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer,actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson,whose column,with his photograph,ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was:"Where one is enslaved,all are in chains!" The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." In another characterization,"Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists,most of them Communists,to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication,particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa,Asia,and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid."