Voices of Crisis Series Sparks Conversations Across the City

The New School’s “Voices of Crisis” exhibition last month revisited a forgotten lecture series held in 1964 in the midst of the civil rights movement.

Social activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins and Ossie Davis spoke at the school the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act for a series of lectures called “The American Race Crisis.” The appearances were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes that were recently unearthed at the school’s archives.

In 2011, Chris Crews, a doctoral candidate at the New School for Social Research, found an old promotional flyer that showed Dr. King speaking at the Tishman Auditorium on 12th Street. He teamed up with Julia Foulkes, an associate professor of history at the New School for Public Engagement, and Mark Larrimore, an assistant professor of religious studies at Lang, to uncover more evidence of Dr. King’s speech. After years of neglect, tapes containing speeches from the events were recovered by the team and digitized offsite with funding from the University Student Senate.

The “Voices of Crisis” series included an audio exhibition of the 1964 speeches as well as musical performances and conversations exploring the impact of prominent civil rights activists on the continued struggle for equality.

Miles Kohrman, a Lang alumnus and former editor-in-chief of the Free Press, developed an interest in the project during his time at The New School and found nine additional tapes from the archives.

“I would just say that it was kind of a snowball effect,” Kohrman said about the birth of the project. “When it came time to plan out my thesis, this seemed like a really obvious story that was relatively untold and had a really great significance to not only The New School’s community but to the city and the nation at large.”

Kohrman started to curate the audio exhibit after Wendy Scheir, the director of The New School’s archives and special collections, approached him to suggest putting together an exhibition in homage to the Race Crisis series.

“We started working on the exhibit and at last year’s commencement, I met the director of the Schomberg Center,” Kohrman said. “I told him about the project and I pitched the idea of doing a co-produced speaker series and I guess you can say the rest figured itself out.”

(X)CLUDED 

As part of the series, the “Voices of Crisis: X(Cluded)” event, held at the Schomburg Center in Harlem on February 20, re-examined Malcolm X’s legacy and the controversy surrounding his civil rights activism. Abiodun Oyewole, the founding member of The Last Poets group, performed “The creator has a master plan,” a song made famous by Leon Thomas.

Malcolm X scholar Zaheer Ali talked about the outspoken activist’s involvement with the Nation of Islam and his work in reshaping the civil rights movement, where his methods sparked some controversy. Ali, who was the former project manager of Columbia’s Malcolm X Project, worked as a researcher for Dr. Manning Marable’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” one of the most comprehensive biographies of the Black Nationalist leader.

Ali explained that Malcolm X was uninvited from “The American Race Crisis” lecture series at The New School after making controversial comments about President Kennedy’s assassination. Today Malcolm X is remembered as a notable human rights activist, although, Ali said, he is often misinterpreted and accused of preaching violence.

“It is really important that we try to read Malcolm more completely,” Ali said. “[It’s important] that we try to contextualize Malcolm more completely, that we characterize Malcolm more accurately, and that we re-center the narrative so people like Malcolm are not marginalized.”

 

The Crisis Continues

The New School’s involvement with influential civil rights activists like Martin Luther King in 1964 sparked a need to continue the conversation on the meaning of justice and equality.

The final installment to the Voice of Crisis exhibition, called “The Crisis Continues,” which was held on February 26 at the University Center Tishman Auditorium, began with a sultry rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” led by New School alumnus Joe Harley. The song, which tries to make sense of the violence and chaos of the 1960s, kicked off a discussion on human rights activism in the twenty-first century between four panelists: the actor, singer and lifelong social activist Harry Belafonte; the filmmaker and journalist Raquel Cepeda, the director of the Dream Defenders, Phillip Agnew, and Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of The Schoenberg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Harry Belafonte reinforced the idea that the fight for justice and equality isn’t over, and led a discussion on what those things mean in today’s society and whether we have achieved them.

“Freedom is best defined by its absence,” said Belafonte, an alumnus of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. “This country was based on the idea that freedom is for some and oppression is for others.”

At 87 years old, Belafonte talked about the many racial struggles he witness in America, which gave the audience a broader perception of the events that led to the civil rights movement. Cepeda and Agnew contributed a fresh outlook to the conversation about America’s view on race and what should be done. The discussion amongst the four panelists was heated, yet thoughtful.

“We are looking at social justice with binary shades of black and white when we really live in shades of gray,” Cepeda said.

Phillip Agnew had a different outlook. As the director of the Dream Defenders, a social justice group, he offered his opinion on what it would take to overcome the same racial issues that have crippled minorities.

“Status, race, and economy are all linked,” Agnew said. “If we want to topple power structures then we need to talk about the economy.”

All four panelists had different responses because of their different life experiences, which led to a layered and complicated conversation that many people seemed eager to watch. You could feel the joy in the audience with every overwhelming burst of clapping and cheering, which often swallowed the sound of the speaker’s voice. The audience was allowed to participate in the dialogue during the question and answer session. Though this was the last night of “The American Race Crisis,” it seemed like the start of a bigger conversation for all of us.

 

By Erika Vaatainen, Raissa Kouegbe, Francia Sandoval and Jametria White.

Additional reporting by Charlotte Woods.