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The Center for Black Literature at Medgar
Evers College, CUNY, Presents
SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader
Book Discussion and Reading
Thursday, October 9, 2014; 6: 30 p.m.
Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Founders Auditorium
1650 Bedford Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11225
Schedule of Program
Welcome
Dr. Brenda Greene, Chair of the English Department and Executive Director at The Center for
Black Literature at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York
Importance of the Black Arts Movement
Professor John H. Bracey Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst; Professor Emerita of
English Sonia Sanchez, Temple University; and Professor James Smethurst, University of
Massachusetts Amherst
Discussion of “SOS-Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader”
Selected Readings from “SOS-Calling All Black People”
Question and Answer with Audience Participation
Closing and Book Signing
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About the Program
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts Movement was one of the most significant
cultural movements of American history; it was also the aesthetic counterpart to the
Black Power Movement. “SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement
Reader,” edited by Sonia Sanchez, John H. Bracey Jr., and James Smethurst, is a major
anthology of key readings from the Black Arts Movement. The book covers a wide range
of topics on culture and politics, from the tenets of the Black Panther Party and the
legacy of Malcolm X to the impact of John Coltrane’s jazz and the music of Motown to
the literature and poetry created during the time.
About the Participants
Professor John H. Bracey Jr. has taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of AfroAmerican Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1972. He is now
serving a second stint as department chair, and is codirector of the department’s
Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies. During the 1960s, Professor Bracey
was active in the Civil Rights, Black Liberation, and other radical movements in Chicago.
His publications include several coedited volumes: Black Nationalism in America
(1970); the prize-winning African American Women and the Vote: 1837–1965 (1997);
Strangers and Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks and Jews in the United States
(with Maurianne Adams, 1999); and, African American Mosaic: A Documentary
History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-First Century (with Manisha Sinha, 2004).
Professor Bracey’s scholarship also includes editorial work on the microfilm
series Black Studies Research Sources (LexisNexis), which includes the Papers of the
NAACP, Amiri Baraka, the Revolutionary Action Movement, A. Phillip Randolph, Mary
McLeod Bethune, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and the Papers of
Horace Mann Bond.
Sonia Sanchez is a national and international lecturer on Black culture and literature,
women’s liberation, peace and racial Justice. Sanchez is the author of more than 20
books including We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, Homegirls and Handgrenades,
Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House
Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My
Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010), and I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I
Ain’t and Other Plays (2010). In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar
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and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited the anthology We Be Word
Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans.
In 2011, Sanchez was selected as the first poet laureate of Philadelphia. Mayor
Michael Nutter identified her as “the longtime conscience of the city.” Sanchez has
lectured at more than 500 colleges and universities, and has been awarded countless
awards and honors, including the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and
Handgrenades. She is also the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist.
She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the Laura Carnell
Chair in English at that university.
Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the
Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. She is the recipient of the Harper
Lee Award, 2004, Alabama Distinguished Writer, and the National Visionary Leadership
Award for 2006. She is the recipient of the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational
Award and the 2009 Robert Creeley Award.
James Smethurst is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and
African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (1999), The Black Arts Movement: Literary
Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), and The African American Roots of
Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011). He is also the
coeditor of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature
of the United States (2003), Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction (2006), and
SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014). His scholarly
interests include African-American literature and culture; 20th-century poetry in
English; 19th- and 20th-century American literature; ethnic studies; literary modernism;
film, music and popular culture; literature of industrialization and urbanization; cultural
history; intellectual history; and gender studies. He is currently a Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture Scholar-in-Residence.
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College,
CUNY. “Celebrating 10 Years of Honoring the Literature by
Writers of the African Diaspora.” For more information
about The Center for Black Literature and CBL events and
programs, please visit us online at www.centerforblackliterature.org.
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