Three lost narratives in the history of the Black Renaissance were at the Schomburg's popular community education series, "Conversations in Black Freedom Studies." The evening's speakers included Ane Meis Knupfer, Erik Gellman, Yasmin Ramirez, and Deborah Cullen.

More on the context of the conversation below:

One narrative was explored by Professor Anne Meis Knupfer in her book, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism, which introduces a new generation of readers to black women writers and leaders of the 1930s through the 1950s--from Gwendolyn Brooks to Lorraine Hansberry. These women established a movement that fused together culture and politics, and opened the door to an emerging series of works.

While Knupfer explains their cultural and intellectual resonance, fellow author Erik Gellman explains their politics in another narrative within that history, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. The National Negro Congress is a buried chapter in the Civil Rights Movement that was hidden by the FBI when it tried to destroy the Negro Liberation led by Claudia Jones, Vicki Garvin, Paul Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois and W.E.B. Du Bois.

And up until recently, the lost chapter of the alliance between the Young Lords’s Nuyorican Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement was also hidden by Cold War dynamics. But New York curator Yasmin Ramirez, one of the leading experts on this subject, will introduce the story of that complex intersection of Latin American, Latino and African-American artists and writers in New York City during the Bebop Revolution of the 1940s, featuring Elizabeth Catlett and Langston Hughes alongside Diego Rivera and so many others.

Deborah Cullen, PhD, Director & Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, will highlight early confluences of Latin American and black culture in New York prior to World War II. Cullen, who wrote her dissertation on Robert Blackburn (1920-2003), the Jamaican-American master printer raised in the Harlem Renaissance, will also explore in the important, often hidden, role of Caribbean artists in the formation of the New York vanguard.

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